| Judith (Judy) Campbell Exner |
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In due time her married lover became President of the United States, and Exner became a regular visitor at the White House. “It gave me the strangest feeling to be standing there in the arms of the man I knew as John, but the whole world recognized as the 35th President of the United States,” she wrote. “Then he kissed me and I forgot about the monuments and the parks. I think I was caught up a little with the intrigue of it. The sneaking around, a mild form of cloak-and-dagger, the anticipation, and ‘Boy, we didn’t get caught.’”
But the President was not an ideal lover. JFK, troubled by back pain, would habitually flop face up into bed, resplendent, and wait for Exner’s origenital embrace. “The feeling that I was there to service him really began to trouble me,” she wrote. Yet this niggardly role did not quell her ardor. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had Exner tailed, not for any valid law enforcement purpose, but rather to be able to blackmail JFK, just as Hoover had blackmailed every previous President. Even his interference and warning to JFK to terminate the romance before the mob connection became public, did not suffice to cool the fire. The affair ended “not because of any outside force, but because of natural attrition. The spectre of the White House killed the romance.” This was hardly the end for the President’s “poon days,” as he unromantically termed them. Yet for Exner the loss of the world’s most powerful man hardly seemed a setback. Giancana continued to be a friend and then became her lover. Eddie Fisher was another dalliance, Tony Bennett, too, and there were many others. The woman was attracted to alpha males exclusively. Fisher said in his recent memoirs that she may have been the one woman he slept with who was more attractive than his former wife Elizabeth Taylor. Exner’s allure for men of power must have included the fact that she knew not to be jealous. She didn’t care that they had wives or other lovers. But they had to treat her like a lady. When JFK suggested that she engage in a threesome she froze him out. When he gave her a mink, she almost swooned. “There is nothing like clothing to lift a woman’s spirits,” she wrote. “I was so confused about love.”
In the early 70s Exner, née Imoor, married golf pro Dan Exner. She did not seek publicity, but having been thrust into the limelight by the Church Committee hearings, she wrote her memoirs. Judy was pursued for years by the press and the FBI, but kept her silence for as long as was humanly possible only writing her book after being compelled to give her testimony and her relationship with the president had become widely known. In later years Exner gave conflicting interviews, denied then confirmed her role as go-between, further inflaming conspiracy fans. In one interview she claimed that she had become pregnant by JFK and had the child aborted. By the end it was hard to know what to believe, except that Judith Exner tasted of the forbidden Kennedy fruit, and like so many others, got burned. Judith Exner died of cancer on September 25, 1999. |
She knew how to ask for a favour, too. When she was late for a plane after a date at the White House, the plane got called back from the runway to the gate to pick her up. When the comedian