As a West Coast party girl in the early 1960s, blue-eyed raven-haired Judith Immoor Campbell was known to swing in high places. Mobster John Roselli squired her to Miami, Palm Springs and other expensive watering holes. She was frequently with Roselli's friend and boss, Chicago Mafia Don Sam ("Momo") Giancana. By her own description, she had a "close personal" relationship with an even more powerful figure: John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the U.S. "To me he was Jack Kennedy," she said last week. "He wasn't the President."
Roselli, on the other hand, was very well aware that Kennedy was the President, and may even have been proud of his indirect connection with the White House. TIME has learned that a federal listening device once recorded him telling Mob associates openly about his moll and her trysts with the President.
CIA Contract. Kennedy broke off with her in 1962, and his close associates soon forgot about her; after all, she was only one of many pretty women who drifted into the President's orbit (see following story). Recently, however, details of the affair became known publicly, and last week Judith Campbell, now Mrs. Daniel Exner, 41, and something of a look-alike for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, ended her discreet silence. At a press conference in San Diego, she admitted that the President had once shared her affections with two mobsters. But she declined comment when bluntly asked whether she and Kennedy had ever had sexual relations.
What flushed Mrs. Exner into public view was the Senate Intelligence Committee. As part of its CIA probe, the committee investigated Roselli's and Giancana's other federal connection: their contract with the CIA to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. The
Senators wanted to know whether Kennedy could have learned about the plot from Judy.
Before Giancana could be questioned, he was murdered in his Oak Park, Ill., home on orders from the Mafia high command; for one thing, the bosses thought that he had been telling a grand jury about gangland activities (TIME, June 30). But committee members interrogated Roselli, who now spends most of his time fighting the Government's efforts to deport him, and committee lawyers questioned Mrs. Exner. They turned up no evidence to contradict her claim that she had never known about the plot to kill Castro. Nor were they able to challenge her statement that she had never told Kennedy about her mobster friends.
Persuaded that the affair was irrelevant to their investigation, the committee voted unanimously to describe her in their report only as a "close friend" of Kennedy's, not even disclosing her sex. Some committee staffers considered this a whitewash, however, and leaked the story to several newspapers. But it did not become a national scandal until last week, when New York Times Columnist William Safire accused the committee of a "cover-up." Committee Chairman Frank Church called the charge "preposterous." Said he: "We had no evidence to suggest that she was a conduit of any kind. We had no evidence that she was used to get a hold on the President. Had we such evidence, we certainly would have included it." John Tower of Texas, the committee's vice chairman and its senior Republican, backed Church fully.