The House of Kennedy(24)
Even more mesmerizing to Jack? Judith Exner herself.
*
Sinatra is holding court at his usual table at the Sands Lounge in Las Vegas, in February 1960. Among the entourage reveling in the success of yet another sold out Rat Pack show is the twenty-five-year-old Exner, who listens attentively to Sinatra—whom she’d briefly dated in 1959—until she notices two new faces around the table. She doesn’t know that Jack Kennedy and his brother Ted are in politics until Sinatra introduces Jack as Senator Kennedy.
Nominally, Jack and Ted—now twenty-eight and his brother’s campaign manager for the western states—are collecting advice from Hollywood influencers. Jack’s poll numbers have been flagging in California, and the Democratic National Committee’s nomination convention is set for July in Los Angeles. The Hollywood publicist Jim Mahoney, who represents Sinatra and Lawford, remembers strategizing, “Do a ‘Youth for Kennedy’ operation…Get the veterans behind him. He’s got to do something here in California or he’s in big trouble.”
What the senator does do is ask Judith Cambell Exner to a poolside lunch. They talk for hours, Jack’s trademark sense of humor revealing itself in his reaction to Exner’s confession that his younger brother Ted had made a failed pass at her the night before. “That little rascal. You’ll have to excuse his youthful exuberance,” he laughs.
“[Jack] seemed anxious to get together again. I was elated, almost giddy,” Exner later tells People magazine.
A month of daily phone calls—“Jack was the world’s greatest listener,” Exner writes in her 1977 autobiography, My Story—culminates in a passionate meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York, the night before the March 8, 1960, New Hampshire primary. “It was amazing to me that he could be so relaxed on the eve of the first primary of his presidential campaign but unbelievably, he didn’t mention New Hampshire once during our entire night together. The next morning, he sent me a dozen roses with a card that said, ‘Thinking of you…J.’”
Jack’s not the only one thinking of Exner. In April, Sinatra also introduces her to his good friend “Sam Flood,” an alias of Sam Giancana’s. Incredibly, Exner begins carrying on two simultaneous affairs, one with a presidential hopeful, and one with the “Chicago Godfather.”
She also starts carrying currency—hard cash and secret information—between her two lovers. “I feel like I was set up to be the courier,” she explains to People magazine. “I was a perfect choice because I could come and go without notice, and if noticed, no one would have believed it anyway.”
One such operation involves a plan to quash the mounting threat in West Virginia from rival Democratic candidate Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who has been benefitting from growing voter concern over Kennedy’s Catholic faith.
“I think he [Giancana] can help me with the campaign,” Jack tells Exner, and puts her on a train to Chicago with a shadowy “protector” who may have been a Chicago political operative, as well as a satchel full of cash—enough to secure a meeting at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach on April 12.
The gangster, the senator, and Exner—and likely the new mink coat she paid for with the two thousand dollars in cash Jack gave her before the train trip—are all present at the Miami Beach meeting, though she acknowledges, “The plans had all been made without me, way ahead of time.”
A key part of those plans is to capitalize on a unique West Virginia campaign law that favors well-financed field operations. Paying staffers and voters money to cast their ballots is allowed, and the Kennedy dollars are flowing.
On May 10, Jack wins over 60 percent of the vote, forcing Humphrey out of the race.
Reporters laugh along with him as Jack jokes, “I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy; Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”
That many of them probably know the truth in that statement is moot.
In July, Jack accepts the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and addresses a rapt audience at the national convention in Los Angeles, stating that he sees the country’s future “on the edge of the New Frontier—of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—a frontier of unfilled hopes and threats.”
Unknown. Unfilled. Perils. Threats. How closely the dark elements of Jack’s predictions would parallel his own last days.
Sinatra watches the nomination alongside Jack’s father, Joe; Jack’s brother Bobby; and Jack’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford—the Rat Pack now the “Jack Pack”—and considers himself one of them, stating, “We’re on our way to the White House.” He’s right.
On November 8, voters tip the popular vote to Jack by the narrowest of percentages, 49.7 to 49.5 percent—a 118,550-vote margin out of 69 million votes cast. In the Electoral College, he wins 303 to 219.
That fall of 1960, Rose Kennedy writes in her diary, “I doubt [Joe Sr.] will ever get credit for the constant, unremitting labor he has devoted to making his son President.”
But it’s the mobster Giancana who takes credit, boasting to Exner, “Your boyfriend wouldn’t be president if it wasn’t for me.”
Chapter 16