(2 of 2)
Church argued that the committee was only trying to avoid needlessly blackening Kennedy's reputation. For similar reasons, ex-Kennedy staffers either claimed to have no recollection of
Judith Campbell or insisted that she had never been involved with the President. His former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, recalled Judy as a campaign volunteer who later "became quite a pest." Said Mrs. Lincoln: "She'd call and call and call, [but] as far as I know he never did talk to her when he was President."
Intimate Lunches. Provoked, Mrs. Exner called a press conference to set the record straight. Said she: "Statements to the effect that I was a 'campaign worker for Kennedy' are entirely contrived. My relationship with Jack Kennedy was of a close personal nature and did not involve conspiratorial shenanigans of any kind." She said she met Kennedy in Las Vegas in 1960 at a party given by "a friend." The friend was Singer Frank Sinatra; one former Kennedy aide understood that Sinatra and J.F.K.'s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, owned a piece of a nightclub where Judy once worked as a hostess. A month after she met the President, Sinatra brought her together with Giancana, who later introduced her to Roselli. Both gangsters knew of her affair with Kennedy, but she insisted that neither of them tried to encourage or make use of it.
By her account, she visited Kennedy at the White House more than 20 times, usually for intimate lunches. The Senate committee learned that on one occasion, while she was staying with Roselli and Giancana at Miami Beach's Fontainebleau Hotel, she made a side trip to Palm Beach to spend time there with Kennedy. Judy claimed that she received countless telephone calls from him, and she seemed to dial his number quite often as well. White House logs show that during a 54-week period in 1961 and early 1962, she telephoned Kennedy 70 times from her home in Los Angeles, Oak Park and other spots.
Last Call. She declined to talk about her own background—how she was raised in Los Angeles as one of five children (two brothers, two sisters) of an architect; how she was married at 18 to a movie actor named William Campbell; or how, after her divorce about four years later, she managed to support a plush life-style that included a Los Angeles-area apartment and a Malibu beach house ("I was always financially able to take care of myself). Eight months ago, she married a San Diego golf pro and now lives in a mobile home.
The end of her friendship with Kennedy apparently came when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose sleuths learned of the affair during their investigation of Giancana and Roselli, had lunch with Kennedy at the White House on March 22, 1962. No one knows what the two discussed during the time that they were alone. But Hoover had made a point of being briefed beforehand about Judith Campbell's disconcerting friendships with both gangsters and a President. And according to White House logs, the last known telephone call between J.F.K. and Judy came only a few hours after the luncheon.