She was the one woman who could connect the President of the United States to the mob, and for decades she carried the secret alone. When Judith Exner finally spoke, the world learned that her bed had been shared by a crooner, two mafia bosses, and John F. Kennedy. But her most shocking confession involved a third man, and his identity became the biggest bombshell of all.
Born in January 1934 in New Jersey, Judith was one of seven children. Her family moved to Southern California while she was still young, settling in the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her father, a successful architect, had begun receiving increasingly lucrative contracts from West Coast developers, and the move promised both money and status. Among her childhood neighbors was comedian Bob Hope, who became a close family friend.
It was the Palisades that gave young Judith her first foothold among the rich and powerful. Her sister Jacqueline, two years older, was equally dazzled by the superstars surrounding them. She pursued a Hollywood career under the screen name Susan Morrow, making her big-screen debut in 1951. Judith reaped the benefits of her sister’s fame, building strong ties within the acting community and becoming a well-known presence at Hollywood parties.
After earning her high school diploma, she put her striking looks to use as a model, making herself even more desirable within the inner circles of the famous. With beauty came notable lovers. In 1952, at the age of eighteen, she married actor William Campbell, who was twenty-nine. They stayed together for six years before divorcing in 1958.
Judith chose to keep William’s last name, and for the next few decades the world would know her as Judith Campbell. One evening in 1959, she was at Puccini’s restaurant in Los Angeles, a regular haunt for entertainment’s biggest names, when she caught the attention of Frank Sinatra. The two began a brief romantic liaison, but she would gain far more from that encounter than a fling with the crooner. February 7, 1960, proved one of the most fateful days of her life.
Sinatra introduced her to a popular young senator, John F. Kennedy. In memoirs released more than two decades later, Judith made a claim that shocked the nation. She said she engaged in a clandestine, extramarital relationship with President John F.
Kennedy for nearly two years. The affair began shortly after they met in 1960, while Kennedy was still a senator but deep into his ultimately successful presidential campaign. Judith said she had numerous liaisons with him on the campaign trail, and they didn’t stop after election day. She claimed the affair continued long after his swearing-in, and that she would even meet him in the White House for romantic encounters.
Documents later backed up part of her story. White House records showed she definitely visited him there. Judith also claimed to have knowledge of other affairs Kennedy had, portraying him as a prolific womanizer. In one account, she said JFK hired prostitutes and brought them to the White House swimming pool.
She wasn’t pulling these claims out of thin air. We may never know exactly how much of her account was factual, but it’s undeniable that she had at least some kind of relationship with the president. White House phone logs, visitor records, and a trove of other documents prove they spoke on the phone and met in person on numerous occasions. Naturally, the Kennedy camp didn’t take kindly to her claims.
After her memoirs were released, Judith was viciously and publicly attacked by the late president’s staff and supporters. Many of the people closest to JFK vehemently denied her story, including the very man she claimed had introduced her to the president. Frank Sinatra dismissed the socialite’s account entirely, calling it an attempt to garner attention and book sales. He summed it up with a cutting phrase: “Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.
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But one simple fact refuted Sinatra’s claim that Judith was lying for no good reason. A few years before her memoir was published, her name had come up in the FBI’s investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963. When the report was released to the public, it exposed her name to the nation. The report revealed far more about Judith and Kennedy’s relationship than had previously been known, and it added an entirely new element to the story: the mafia.
It appeared there was some kind of connection between the president, his mistress, and the mob, and that forced Judith to tell that side of her story as well. Incredibly, her memoirs confessed that at around the same time as her affair with JFK, she had been the mistress of not one but two mafia leaders: Sam Giancana and John Rosselli, both very high up in the mob. Perhaps the biggest bombshell, the element that grabbed the most public attention, was her claim that she acted as a channel of information between the mafia and the president. Many had already suspected JFK of having mob ties, and this controversial claim sent shock waves through the country.
With the increasing public attention, Judith’s life became difficult. The press and the FBI hounded her for more information. It was perhaps for this reason that when she gave birth to an illegitimate child, she gave it up for adoption. They would reconnect later in life.
In the meantime, Judith found love. In 1975, she met golfer Dan Exner. When they married, Judith Campbell became Judith Exner, the name she would keep for the rest of her life. Under that very name, the government subpoenaed her to speak before the Church Committee, which was investigating CIA activities in the 1960s.
The media circus began all over again, and her testimony received widespread coverage. The specific investigation for which Judith was called to testify involved CIA-led attempts on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Besides questioning Judith, the committee also grilled her former mafioso lover, John Rosselli, who claimed a close friend of President Kennedy had also been close to the mob. That close friend was, of course, Judith.
Though she wasn’t named in the committee’s report, the Washington Post learned the truth and leaked her name. Having the mob believe you were testifying against them was not exactly desirable, so Judith hastily called a press conference where she denied any knowledge of mafia involvement with the president. If she was lying, she had good reason. Those claims would later contradict things she said, but that didn’t necessarily mean her story was dishonest or fabricated.
Because of the mob’s involvement, she likely lied to protect herself and her family. Journalists who later investigated Judith’s claims found themselves impressed with the meticulous records she kept. The socialite claimed she feared for her life after her breakups with Kennedy and Sam Giancana, and she began archiving everything. She kept those records hidden under her bed and a pistol under her pillow, but her story would eventually spin out of control.
In 1988, she gave an astonishing interview to People magazine, where she spilled the entire story. After revealing that she had indeed lied to the Church Committee for fear of mafia retaliation, she claimed she set up a meeting between Kennedy and Giancana during the 1960 presidential election. It was a scandalous revelation, and she clearly no longer feared the mob, because the revelations kept coming. Following that first meeting, the young socialite served as the go-between for the president and the mafia for eighteen months.
She carried envelopes between the two parties, often across the country, and claimed she arranged around ten meetings between Kennedy and the mob. Later, she revealed more about the nature of those presidential-mob meetings, claiming they concerned a clandestine plot to eliminate Fidel Castro. To hear Judith tell it, “The mob seemed to act like President Kennedy’s personal fixers. ” Included in many of the envelopes from Kennedy that Judith delivered, according to her, was cold, hard cash.
If she was to be believed, JFK was paying the mafia for favors. Incredibly, Judith claimed the campaign hired the mob to help Kennedy get elected. Supposedly, one mafia boss even bragged that Kennedy wouldn’t have been president if not for his connections. JFK was apparently playing with fire, and it may have led to his downfall.
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. One conspiracy theory claims the mob was responsible, alleging that the relationship between Kennedy and the mafia soured and they reversed their election deal. Judith’s already worsening personal struggles took another significant hit in 1988 when she and her husband Dan Exner separated. Little is known about the details of their marriage or its dissolution, but they never reconciled, and Judith never had another public relationship.
In 1997, Judith gave yet another interview, this time to Vanity Fair, where she made further claims about her affair with President Kennedy. One of the more shocking statements was that after her final encounter with JFK in 1962, she terminated a pregnancy shortly afterward. Her fresh claims also expanded on her previous role as courier of payments from the president to the mob. This time she implicated other parties, claiming she carried payoffs from California defense contractors to both the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy. These were shocking revelations of Kennedy corruption, and the rebukes came swiftly. Judith’s later accounts came under heavy attack. Unlike her previous claims, these had little documented evidence.
They ran counter to what was widely known about Kennedy and his staff. However shady some of the truth may have been, these new claims depended on Judith’s word alone, and there was reason to believe she had become an unreliable witness. FBI reports, Secret Service logs, White House phone logs, and staff documentation supported her earlier claims about her interactions with Kennedy and the mob. The claims she made in Vanity Fair had no such paper trail.
What’s more, by then Judith had gone a little off the deep end, personally speaking. Since the 1960s, she had struggled with a history of depression, instability, and paranoia. By the time of her 1997 interview, her physical health had taken a turn for the worse, and she was in the midst of treatment for breast cancer. Critics cited this as yet another reason her account was unreliable.
It is of course possible that this was used to discredit her by forces far more powerful than she, but it’s hard to deny that her later claims are not as provable as her earlier stories. Having spent most of her life as a model and socialite, Judith’s professional identity was, on the surface at least, somewhat shallow. Later in life, however, she found a fulfilling creative outlet. She purchased a home in Newport Beach and became a painter.
After her diagnosis with breast cancer, her condition deteriorated rapidly. On September 24, 1999, the troubled socialite succumbed to her illness at the age of just sixty-five. To her credit, she seemed to come to terms with her life by the end. In her final interview, Judith struck a defiant tone, vigorously defending the choices she had made.
She expressed only one regret, and it was about how difficult her life had become after decades of media, mob, and political hounding. She summed up her actions honestly. “The worst thing I did was fall in love with a married man.
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To her great misfortune, Judith was simply one more historical victim of the hubris of powerful men.