Chapter 10

Exner: "Distortions and Inconsistencies" Only?

Judith Campbell Exner was not the "party girl" she had been more than thirty-five years earlier but she was still the hottest number in Hersh's book.

She is his proof, his sole proof, of a close relationship between the President and Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. She is, in fact, Hersh's only "proof" of this and so much more that a cub reporter would have been fired from the Podunk Press if he had turned it in.

Exner is Hersh's claimed proof that the President, as the candidate, bought the election with money she claims she carried for him, personally, and gave personally to the Mafia don with whom she also slept.

Exner is Hersh's only claimed "proof" that the President paid the Giancana for the Mafia's unsuccessful supposed effort to assassinate Castro for the CIA. In the first plot the CIA set $150 thousand aside for that but the dons resolutely refused to take it. Giancana was not even in the second plot, kicked out of it by the CIA.

She is also Hersh's only proof, if the word can be used for anything she says that Kennedy and Giancana met from one corner of the country to the other, the President arranging their meetings through her without anyone ever seeing them together — when Giancana was under FBI surveillance and the President was always guarded by the Secret Service.

She was, according to Hersh, the President's courier, the only one he could trust to handle payoffs of a quarter of a million dollars, a much greater sum then than it is now.

She was then only in her 20's and Kennedy had known her only briefly and in sex only but she is, in the Hersh book, the only one of all those he knew he could trust for such missions when, obviously, he trusted less those who were close to him and he'd known for all his political life if not longer.

If these and other claims did not qualify Exner to be Hersh's most trusted source of what he got from her and from her alone, then his admission that she was a perjurer did qualify her.

Of course, Hersh's word was not that she was a "perjurer." But that is precisely what he says, means, and what she was, according to Hersh himself, in her testimony before the Senate's Church committee. Hersh does fall a little short of treating her as though she were Mother Theresa reincarnated and once in a while, albeit much less often that is called for in honest writing, he does acknowledge that she contradicted herself.

To put it mildly!

Garry Wills, in his New York Review article, draws on Alice in Wonderland and its thinking, of nine impossible things before breakfast. It happens that, important as she is in Hersh's book and in the phony case he concocts against the President, she is in nine breakdowns in his index (page 483). As Hersh presents and quotes her in his book, Exner is more than nine impossible things, whether or not before breakfast.

What is most impossible of all is that, experienced reporter that he is, Hersh used Exner at all, other than as part of his sex story, which in and of itself is not new at all.

People did not talk much about it when Kennedy was President but it was not secret and it was talked about. As Hugh Sidey, experienced Washington correspondent and a Hersh source, wrote for Time's November 17 issue, he recalled that when

Milton Berle's wife arrived in Washington from Hollywood [she] asked what in the world was going on in the White House, :If all the women who claim to have slept with Kennedy are telling the truth, he would not have strength enough to lift a teacup, let alone deal with Khrushchev."

(Hersh did interview Sidey for the book in which he has Sidey on a dozen pages. After the book appeared Sidey referred to Hersh and what he did as "evil")

The name of Exner's father appears in the book one time: "Her father, Frederick Immoor (right), was an architect and an expert in hospital design" (page 296).

At the same point Hersh writes, and this is all he writes about it, "At sixteen, her schooling ended."

"There was money" in the family, Hersh also says at this point. The family house had four stories, twenty-four rooms, and it had a view of the ocean.

Hersh's chapter titled simply "Judy" (pages 294-325) begins its third paragraph with:

Campbell burst onto the national scene when the Church Committee, in its November 1975 report on CIA assassination attempts, discreetly noted that it had received evidence that "a close friend of President Kennedy had frequent contact with the President from the end of 1960 through mid-1962. FBI reports and testimony indicate that the President's friend was also a close friend of John Rosselli and Sam Giancana and saw them often during this same period."

Hersh then writes:

. . . Exner told the Committee that her relationship with President Kennedy was only personal and that she had no knowledge of any relationship between Kennedy and Giancana.

Exner made the same denials in a December 1975 news conference in San Diego. She accused the press of "wild-eyed speculation" in suggesting that she was a go-between for the president and Giancana and was having simultaneous affairs with the two men. Two years later Exner published a memoir, My Story, written with Ovid Demaris, that listed the times and places of her many rendezvous with Kennedy. In a series of interviews for this book, Exner acknowledged that she did not tell the truth to the Church Committee or at her news conference about her service as a conduit between the president and the mob leader, Sam Giancana . . . (page 295).

As Hersh knew and did not say, Exner's lying to the Committee under oath was perjury.

(Exner had the right writer for getting assassination myths started and popularized. When Demaris used an FBI symbol informer, Ed Becker, as a source he launched the myth that Louisiana leader Carlos Marcello was behind the JFK assassination.)

Hersh soon acknowledges what to most responsible writers intending responsible writing would have disqualified Exner as a source:

My Story contained many distortions and inconsistencies, especially about her relationship with Giancana . . . (page 295).

She is nonetheless Hersh's only source on almost all he says about Giancana and the President and the CIA's Mafia plot to get Castro killed.

Then Hersh gets into what he makes much out of by ignoring what show it to mean nothing at all, as we come to:

In August 1962, with the FBI watching, Judith Campbell Exner's apartment in Los Angeles was broken into by two brothers whose get-away car was rented by their father — the chief of security of the General Dynamics Corporation, one of America's largest defense contractors. Three months later, General Dynamics — everyone's second choice — was awarded a $65 billion contract for the experimental TFX jet fighter. The controversial award, for what was then the largest U.S. military aircraft contract in history was investigated for months by a Senate committee, which failed to find collusion between General Dynamics and any senior official in the government. But the committee was not told what the FBI knew. The Senate shut down its investigation after Jack Kennedy's assassination, and billions of the American taxpayer dollars were spent on a navy version of the aircraft that became renowned as a failure (pages 295-6).

By ignoring what he should not have ignored, what simple honesty should have told him not to ignore, Hersh makes a big thing of this, adding to it. He saves that for later in the chapter, sort of building up to it. He leads into it, with no source other than Exner, saying that she was also the conduit for bribes to the President

Exner was referring, perhaps to another facet or her relationship with Kennedy, one that she discussed with great reluctance in our interviews: in 1962 she had begun serving as a conduit for payoffs to the president from a group of California businessmen interested in obtaining defense contracts (page 315).

After saying that she had some contracts with officials in the Pentagon:

Eventually, Exner told me, "what was going on was there were payoffs. I took payoffs" from the California businessmen to Kennedy in the White House. "I didn't want to go to Jack" with the payoff money, she told me "I asked Jack about it and he thought it was a good idea." She recalled three contract proposals for which she took payoffs into the White House. "One envelope was for an unmanned vehicle on land," Exner said. "It was one of the first of its kind — unmanned robotics." She remembered, she said, that the vehicle was "massive. The size of a tank." The second project, she said, involved a new procedure for desalinization, an area that was being heavily researched by the government in the early 1960s. The final contract proposal dealt with avionics for a fighter plane. Asked who initiated the process of sending payoffs to the president, Exner told me, "It came from both sides. I know everybody was working together. I saw when there were transfers of cash. They were all in it." She personally delivered the money, Exner told me, along with envelopes containing technical data, to Kennedy.

Exner said she had never before discussed her role in bringing bribes to the president because she had no receipts for the money or other evidence, and she was convinced no one would believe her account — just as few initially believed her testimony in 1975 about Kennedy's ties through her to Sam Giancana (pages 315-6).

All of this and more like it with her under the most intensive FBI surveillance. And with Kennedy, supposedly, in the Hersh version, worried about what Hoover could do to him:

Asked if Kennedy had perhaps been frightened of Hoover's knowledge, Exner told me, "I really don't think so, because Jack didn't alter his behavior one iota" (page 316).

What Hersh has been building up to comes next:

The affair with Exner posed a much broader danger: to the well-being of the nations's security. The Kennedy-Exner relationship apparently became known in the late summer of 1962 to the General Dynamics Corporation, one of two defense firms intensely competing for the right to manufacture a new generation of air force and navy combat plane known as the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental). General Dynamics may have used that knowledge to win the contract and force the government to spend billions of dollars to build a navy version of TFX that many in the military knew would not work.

J. Edgar Hoover's lunch in March 1962 with Jack Kennedy had not left the FBI director reassured enough to stop the Los Angeles field office from continuing its round-the-clock surveillance of Exner's apartment from a nearby undercover observation post. Hoover's hunch paid off in an unexpected way late on August 7, 1962 when the FBI's William Carter watched as two young men climbed onto a balcony at Exner's apartment on Fontaine Avenue, in west Los Angeles; one man watched as the other slid open a glass door and entered. After fifteen minutes or so — more than enough time to sort through records or install a wiretap — the pair fled. Carter and his colleagues had been patiently watching the apartment since Exner had moved there in early March, before the Hoover meeting with Kennedy and had not seen any disturbances. "We were absolutely stunned," Carter told me. But his supervisors decided not to report the illegal entry to the Los Angeles Police Department as would have been routine procedure when FBI agents observed illegal behavior. To be collegial in this instance, Carter was told, "would have jeopardized our operation."

Carter's role in the Exner break-in ended at that point. His supervisors did not tell him that within three days they tracked the break-in team to a getaway car rented by a former FBI special agent named I. B. Hale, of Fort Worth, Texas. The two men who entered Exner's apartment were identified by the FBI as Hale's twin sons, Bobby and Billy twenty-one years old. I. B. Hale, who died in 1971, was in charge of security for General Dynamics.

At the time of the break-in, the company's chances of winning the immensely lucrative TFX contract were precarious, as the men running General Dynamics were only too aware. To improve the company's odds, nothing could be ruled out in the summer of 1962, including the utilization of a high-priced former FBI agent who might be in a position to accumulate information on the Kennedy administration. The Hale family's criminal entry into Judith Campbell Exner's apartment, which has never been reported before, raises an obvious question: Was Jack Kennedy blackmailed by a desperate corporation?

General Dynamics was in bad shape in 1962. The company had lost more than $400 million in the previous two years, and the $6.5 billion TFX contract was essential for its survival. The prospects were not favorable. Its main competitor, the Boeing aircraft company of Seattle, was without question the favorite of the military men who ran the air force and navy." . . .

The bidding process was complicated by Defense Secretary MacNamara's insistence for economic reasons, that the new fighter have "commonality" — that is, be capable of simultaneously meeting the needs of both the air force and the navy. The navy bitterly resisted his approach,, . . .

Thus, the Pentagon and the military committees in the Congress were flabbergasted in November 1962 when McNamara chose General Dynamics . . . (pages 316-7).

Writing it like he is writing a mystery story and skipping around in doing that Hersh resumes this story after a few more pages:

The uncensored FBI reports and cables on the August break-in at Exner's Los Angeles apartment, made available for this book under the Freedom of Information Act, were urgently forwarded, in code, to J. Edgar Hoover. An FBI summary from the Los Angeles bureau, dated August 17, 1962, told Hoover something he already knew, even if some of his California agents didn't realize it. The summary described Exner as being in contact with Giancana and Rosselli and Evelyn Lincoln. It also told Hoover something he didn't know: the Hale family and General Dynamics were linked to the break-in. "A man answering the description of the individual who entered [Exner's] apartment was observed leaving the area in an automobile registered to former Special Agent I. B. Hale who resides in Fort Worth, Texas," the summary said. "Our Dallas office has advised that . . . Hale is employed by General Dynamics . . . in charge of security." The summary noted that the crime its agents witnesses "is not being disseminated to the Los Angeles Police Department at this time."

One FBI cable to Hoover, dated August 14 and marked "urgent," summarized I. B. Hale's association with the FBI and depicted him as "cooperative" in the past with Dallas agents. Hale, a prewar football star at Texas Christian University was described as "well known in Fort Worth and . . . Active in many community affairs. It is the opinion of [the FBI bureau in] Dallas [that] any additional inquiry" by the FBI into the Los Angeles break-in "would come to Hale's attention. It is also the opinion of Dallas that Hale would be completely cooperative in any interview. However, in view of the sensitive nature of Los Angeles investigation, no additional action [is] being taken by Dallas." In other words, the FBI bureau in Los Angeles was more interested in keeping up its surveillance on Judith Exner's apartment than in prosecuting a crime or trying to find out what I. B. Hale and his sons were doing there.

William Carter, in his interview for this book, said he and his FBI colleagues assumed at the time that the entry into Exner's apartment was "to install a bug" or a wiretap. According to available documents no one in the FBI even considered alerting Exner to the break-in. If a bug was installed, the FBI did nothing to prevent I. B. Hale and his superiors at General Dynamics from eavesdropping on Exner. A warning to Exner also might have prevented the FBI from continuing its own electronic surveillance of her apartment.

The trail ended in Fort Worth three decades ago. During the five years of research for this book, I tried unsuccessfully to find out how General Dynamics learned of Judith Exner's ties to Jack Kennedy (pages 320-1).

(Although Hersh is critical of the FBI, for not reporting crimes, he casts himself in a criminal role, of accessory after the fact, in not reporting these crimes himself.)

For Hersh's purposes the trail did end where he says it did but for other purposes it did not, as we see.

Earlier, Hersh did admit that there were "distortions and inconsistencies" in what Exner said (page 295). He does not resort to plain English and say she is a liar, as she very obviously is. He has a footnote on those "inconsistencies" on page 298-9:

In My Story, Exner gave a different account, indicating that she knew about Kennedy's aspirations before she met him. She described a December 1959 dinner in Palm Springs with Sinatra and Peter and Pat Lawford at which Pat Lawford analyzed her brother's chances in the coming primaries. "This was the first time I remember the name Jack Kennedy coming up in the conversation," Exner wrote. In interviews for this book, Exner acknowledged that many of the specific incidents and dates in the memoir are not correct. Some details were deliberately fudged, she said, out of fear; other mistakes were the inevitable result of collaboration. The book was written by Demaris, she said, who relied solely on her memory and her recollection. When she first met jack in Las Vegas in early 1960, she said, "I knew him as Pat's brother rather than as a senator."

This note is because Hersh decided to face some of the less significant problems created by Exner's different versions of the same thing, the same events. Some of what he says is true. Some need not be, as in mistakes attributed to the collaborator. They will not be in the finished product if they are corrected as they should be. In its way this note is another of Hersh's admissions that he knew Exner was a liar.

He gets to that without saying it when he has a footnote quoting her about Giancana and her relations with that Mafia don:

. . . Perhaps he always looked like a hoodlum to the police or to the public at large. All I can say is that he was different when he was with me . . . That, I know, was terribly naive," Exner wrote. "There are times when I wonder who or what I was in those days" She and Giancana were not sexually involved at the time, Exner wrote: "It was almost a year and a half before we became intimate (page 304).

Hersh's note reads, "But see below, page 323."

Hersh is careful not to date what he admits is an Exner lie, although he avoids using that word.

At the point quoted above Hersh is writing about the campaign, about before Kennedy was even elected President, when Hersh goes for Exner's story that Kennedy gave her large sums, like a quarter of a million dollars to take to Giancana.

The election was in November 1960. Hersh's quoted writing is of before then.

But on page 329 to which he could not avoid referring, his account there relates to "the late summer of 1962, when she says she and Kennedy had agreed to break if off. Hersh has quoted her as saying what he admits is a new addition to her story, one that dates to 1996:

. . . Jack Kennedy made her pregnant on their last visit. It was that pregnancy, she now says, that drove her into the arms of Sam Giancana.

Exner, in her interview for this book, said that she and Kennedy agreed in late summer 1962, after she told him about the pregnancy, that she could not keep the baby "In our next conversation," Exner said, "he asked, 'Would Sam help us?' I spoke to Sam and he said yes. Sam was angry at Jack, but it took the two of us for me to be in that position." In Sam's eyes Exner insisted, "he was helping me. You know, a lot of people can say, 'Oh boy this is just something else he [Giancana] could hold over Jack's head.' I don't care what they say I know what he did for me." She wasn't angry at Kennedy she said. "I was heartbroken."

It was at this point, Exner told me, that she became intimate with Sam Giancana. He had responded to news of her pregnancy by asking her to marry him. "I told him, 'Sam you don't want to marry me.' I know he was in love with Phyllis [McGuire]. And he just said, "You deserve to be asked.' It was the one time with Sam and it was an emotional response to his loving-kindness and caring for what I was going through. But I would hardly say that that was having a simultaneous affair with two men."

Exner's most recent account of her faithfulness to Jack Kennedy conflicts with the chronology in My Story. She may have indeed been faithful to Jack Kennedy for much of their time together, as she has steadfastly insisted, or she may have been making love to both men at the same time. The issue of when she became intimate with Sam Giancana, however important to Exner today, does not affect the importance of her story (page 323).

How could that alleged pregnancy have been from "their last visit" when they discussed her getting an abortion she says that Kennedy had to resort to Giancana for that "in our next conversation," and Hersh does not say that was a phone conversation? Nor does he recall how intensively her phone was tapped, as he wrote earlier in this chapter, by at least the FBI, as quoted above and as on page 310.

Hersh is careful to misstate the importance of the "inconsistency" he admits in Exner's story. It is not that her untruthfulness "does not affect the importance of her story," which without this additional lie has no credibility anyway. It is that any lying, any "mistake" does "affect the importance of her story," whether it can be believed.

If it can be believed that Kennedy made Exner pregnant a year and a half after he was President, it cannot be believed that for her to get an abortion he had to ask Giancana, had to, as Exner admits, give the Mafia leader who his brother, the attorney general, was trying to put in jail, "something else he could not hold over Jack's head."

This is a touching portrait of the tough mafioso, of his being in close contact with Exner for at least two years without their having any sexual relations; of his offering to marry her to give the President's baby a father; and of her declining that generous offer because "I know you are in love with Phyllis" of the McGuire sisters. Hersh, writing about her "faithfulness to Jack Kennedy," then records her respect for Giancana's faithfulness to Phyllis McGuire: "It was at this point, Exner told me, that she became intimate with Giancana."

Hersh does admit that Exner may have been lying in claiming to have been faithful to Kennedy, but her being a liar does not diminish the use he can make of her lies, so he uses them.

At the point, where Hersh refers in that note to the contradictory story by Exner we have just examined. He has been writing about Exner's claim to have been the courier she says Kennedy used in taking large sums of money and documents to Giancana. Those documents would certainly have helped Giancana in any prosecution of Giancana, as the President's brother, the attorney general, was working on.

But then in the Hersh-bought story they were not very careful anyway. The story is that Exner carried a quarter of a million dollars at a time in a satchel and that Giancana met her at the railroad station and in public to take the satchel from her (page 305).

She told Hersh that, Hersh's word, "Once in Chicago, with Sam she had no qualms about serving as a message carrier when Kennedy and Giancana agreed on the time and place for their secret meetings" which on that occasion may have been in Florida, with Kennedy insisting on her being present (305).

In the Hersh account Exner has no job but ample money. She had apartments, on both coasts, and stayed in expensive hotels, did all that traveling, too, and Hersh did not find it necessary to explain where she got all the money she lived on so expensively.

She lived in Los Angeles but had a New York apartment, and it also allegedly served as a place for Kennedy-Giancana meetings. All of this with at least the FBI keeping its eye on her:

In early August of 1960, a few weeks after his triumph at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Kennedy asked Exner to help him move a second satchel of money for Giancana. Exner had sublet an apartment in New York, and Kennedy was in and out of the city. On one visit, she said, he left the satchel, explaining that "this is for the campaign." Giancana stopped by later to pick it up. Exner said she asked no questions of either Kennedy or Giancana: "I have never been one to question people," she told me. "It has a great deal to do with my upbringing. I was taught that people will volunteer what they want you to know. And that it's very rude for you to pry." A few days later — as the Eisenhower administration was gearing up its assassination planning for Castro — Exner set up a meeting at her apartment for Kennedy and Giancana. "I went to the bedroom, into my bedroom," she told me, "and waited until they finished talking" (page 306).

Apparently forgetting that he has emphasized how carefully the FBI had her under surveillance and that her phone was tapped, at least by it, as was Giancana's, Hersh then writes:

Exner told me some of the techniques she used to arrange contacts between Kennedy and Giancana. "As a rule I would just call Sam," she said. "I learned to almost speak in a kind of code. I would usually say, 'Have him call the girl from the West.' And if something happened in Florida, it was 'Can you meet him in the South? Sam always knew that 'him' was Jack. I really came very adept. I think that I was having a little bit of fun with this also. It was intriguing to have a conversation with someone and as far as anyone else was concerned, you didn't say anything, but you had just arranged a meeting between Sam Giancana and Jack Kennedy" (page 306).

Quite a "code" that was. Nobody could figure that out especially not with taps on the Exner and Giancana phones!

To appreciate fully what we next quote from this prize-winning investigative reporter's care in being certain that he reports only what is credible, after reading it we consult what Hersh says on the next page:

Sometime just before the inauguration, Exner, told me, Kennedy asked her "to take some information to Sam. We had a conversation much like the conversation regarding the money. He explained to me what it was about and he wanted me to be able to say no if I wasn't comfortable doing it." What the documents in the envelope were about, she told me, was getting rid of Castro. "I knew what they [the documents] dealt with. I knew they dealt with the 'elimination' of Castro and that Sam and Johnny [Rosselli] had been hired by the CIA. That's what Jack explained to me in the very beginning.

"I have to emphasize," Exner told me, "That he didn't say anything about assassination. I use that word now because I know more about it now than I did then. I was aware of 'elimination which in my mind just meant removing him from office. Had I realized it was assassination, I'd have been much more frightened."

Over the next year, as the Kennedy brothers settled in at the White House, Exner made ten or more trips to Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli with envelopes from Jack Kennedy. "I wasn't thinking it's high level government activity," Exner said. "I was doing something for someone I loved dearly. It was as if my husband had asked me to do something for him, to carry some papers — if I had a lawyer for a husband and he wanted me to take some papers to a client, I never had the sense of just how serious all of it was, I was far too wrapped up in the fact that he trusted me. It just didn't register (page 307)

(All those alleged "envelopes" and "trips made over the next year" when that CIA/Mafia plot was not his Kennedy had been President for only three months before that plot was exposed by Balletti's arrest!)

Exner explains, if that is an appropriate word, that she knew the documents she says Kennedy sent to Giancana through her had to do with getting rid of Castro but that she did not know then that they dealt with assassinating him. However, it seems to be a reasonably safe assumption that if the President were dealing with Giancana to get Castro assassinated, he knew what was in those documents Exner says he sent to Giancana by her, a claim that Hersh credits, without any question. Hersh also, if there was a scintilla of truth in this, knew that the President knew those documents related to the assassination of Castro, which means the assassination of a head of state, and that, had it gotten to be known, would have created an international scandal without precedent. Knowing this, Hersh writes on the next page, "The envelopes were not always sealed, but she never went through the documents, she told me" (page 308).

And what was unsealed related to the assassination of a head of state — by a head of state — by the President of the United States!

Or so Hersh says.

There was, however, some visible official interest in Exner and in her association with Giancana that could relate to this, given the intensity of the FBI's surveillances of both Exner and Giancana. Exner resented this official interest a she says was reflected by a visit to her apartment by an agent of the FBI and one from the Internal Revenue Service. One of them referred to this top Mafia figure as "not the kind of man a nice girl should be running around with." That, say Exner, was "treating" her with "disrespect." Hersh does emphasize the "intense FBI surveillance":

Throughout her years with Jack Kennedy, Exner was under intense FBI surveillance. In her account, she learned of the federal scrutiny on November 4, 1960, four days before the presidential election, when two agents, from the FBI and Internal Revenue Service, came to her apartment in Los Angeles and interrogated her about Sam Giancana. "It was terrible," she said in an interview for this book. "They treated me with such disrespect. I gladly let them come into my home. And the way they were acting, I finally just told them to leave." In her memoir, she told how the agents had described Giancana to her in vivid terms and said, "He's not the kind of man a nice girl should be running around with." Had the FBI approached her earlier, Exner wrote, "the idea of associating with an underworld boss might have frightened me. But now that I knew Sam . . . I wouldn't have told them anything about Sam if my life depended on it . . . I kept thinking, 'So this is how they treat innocent people.' I thought of myself as innocent, which I suppose was open to debate." From then on, Exner wrote, she was aware of a steadily increasing FBI presence. "The FBI not only questioned all my friends, but I they questioned anyone who had the misfortune of riding in an elevator with me. And they were such hypocrites. "One of Johnny Rosselli's girlfriends responded to a question about her by telling the agent, "I know she came back from the White House. Why don't you go ask the President? The agent said nothing.

The President wasn't much help. After the first FBI visit in the fall of 1960, Exner told me, "I, of course, called Jack right away. He always had the same pat answer for me. He'd always say 'Don't worry about them.' Even after they were harassing me so terribly, following me everywhere, questioning all my friends, he would always say, 'You have nothing to be afraid of. You've never done anything wrong in your life. You know Sam works for us'" (page 310).

Hersh had no comment on the President allegedly telling Exner that this top Mafia don

"works for us" while Hersh also knew that the President's brother, who was attorney general, was trying so hard to put Giancana away, in jail. Hersh also knew and has made a different reference to some of the records establishing that Robert Kennedy was put out when he learned that the CIA had these Mafia types working for it. So as Hersh has it, Giancana was working for the President, not the CIA, while the President's brother was trying to lose the key to the jail with Giancana inside it. Hersh does, however, have a word or two to say about that "disrespect":

The FBI's view of Exner was more than a little disrespectful. She was invariably described in FBI reports, made available to her under the Freedom of Information Act, as a "very good looking blonde girl" who was "a friend of Rosselli and Giancana." One retired FBI agent, in a 1997 interview for this book, said that he and his colleagues considered Exner to be "a high-class whore" who was doing business with both mobsters. The former agent William R. Carter, now a private investigator in Oklahoma City worked undercover investigating Rosselli and Exner in Los Angeles. Exner was identified as a Giancana-Rosselli girl in early 1960, Carter told me. He and his colleagues "definitely thought she was selling her favors. We believed she was bedding both of them. Someone obviously was giving her big money." (Carter offered no proof for his assertion, and Exner's FBI file released in its entirety under thee Freedom of Information Act, contains no evidence linking Exner to prostitution, despite years of surveillance.) Giancana and Rosselli were both considered "bad news," Carter added. Giancana was "a degenerate, as bad as they came," and Rosselli was believed to be responsible for "as many as thirteen murders" (pages 310-1).

Hersh does say, among other things, that "Exner's FBI file" was "released in its entirety under the Freedom of Information Act." That means there should have been in it what Hersh makes no reference to.

(He does say, however, that "The break-in at Exner's apartment was never investigated by the FBI" (page 321). He refers to the break-in of her Los Angeles apartment by the Hale brothers whose father had been an FBI agent and who was then Chief of Security for General Dynamics.)

Given the nature of the Church Committee's investigation, in which Exner was a witness, what Hersh refers to as her "lies" constitutes perjury, as good a reason as Hersh has for crediting what she told him:

The Committee accepted at face value Exner's lies about not knowing of the plotting against Castro and not serving as a conduit between Giancana and the president.

Hersh has referred to Hoover having had lunch with the President on March 22, the year not given here by Hersh (page 313). But on page 317 Hersh says it was 1962. Hersh uses this lunch as a basis for being critical of that committee:

The committee's failure to closely quiz Exner on the Kennedy-Hoover lunch and its aftermath was its biggest mistake. The only account of the lunch is Exner's as told to her by an angry Jack Kennedy. He telephoned Exner after the meeting. "I called him back," Exner told me, "and he said, 'Go to your mother's and call me.'" Exner did and Kennedy warned her that her home phone was not safe from an FBI wiretap. "He said he'd just had this meeting with Hoover and Hoover told Jack," Exner said, "that he knew, first of all, about Jack's relationship with me. And he also knew that I was carrying documents regarding the Castro assassination plot to Sam Giancana and John Rosselli for Jack. And he knew that they worked for the CIA." Hoover certainly knew that Giancana and Rosselli were working for the CIA — and thus for the White House — in their assassination efforts, and he, of course, knew of Exner's relationship with Kennedy (page 314)

Hersh does not say that Exner was included in or was present at the Kennedy/Hoover lunch and he just said that she lied to the Committee. Apparently her qualifications for giving the testimony Hersh wanted her to give was having no knowledge of her own of it and being a certified liar.

So certified by Hersh himself.

That he could safely certify her a liar was, it appears, all the qualification Hersh required to use Exner as an unquestionable source and mostly as his only source for what he attributes to her.

Having repeated most of what Hersh has in his "Judy" chapter we now examine some of what he did use and did attribute to her — and it should be emphasized — most of the time to her alone.

For most of this he had no other claimed source at all, and there are the most substantial questions about some of his claimed sources.