JFK - In early February of 1960, during his campaign for the presidency, then Senator John F. Kennedy visited the Sans Hotel in Las Vegas for a meeting with Frank Sinatra. According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh's book, The Dark Side of Camelot. At the hotel, Sinatra introduced Kennedy to a 20-some woman named Judith Campbell, and the two began an affair that lasted from 1960 until well into Kennedy's presidency, during which they stayed in frequent contact, but met up only sporadically. Years after Kennedy's death, during the Church Committee hearings about the CIA's abuses of power, a congressional report on the CIA assassination program mentioned that quote, "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 Rouselli and Sam Gianana and saw them often during the same period. The press soon identified the president's friend mentioned in this report as Judith Campbell, also known as Judith Exner. And it turned out that during Campbell's affair with Kennedy, she had simultaneously been dating the Chicago based mobster Sam Gianana. At some point, the FBI had bugged Cample's phone ostensibly to get information on Gianana, and in the process, they ended up recording her calls with Kennedy as well, the contents of which quickly made their way to the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. This information showed up in a congressional report on CIA assassinations because at that time in the early60s the CIA had been actively cooperating with elements of the American mafia and plans to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Gian Kana was one of the central figures in this conspiracy. At the same time JFK's brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was pursuing Gian Kana for prosecution on organized crime charges. The FBI director Jed Garhoover would broach this topic with JFK in a way that Kennedy interpreted as an implicit threat of blackmail. According to Judith Campbell, as reported in Anthony Summers's book, Official and Confidential, Jack Kennedy called me that afternoon after he spoke to Hoover. He told me to go to my mother's house and call him from there. When I did, he said the phone in my apartment wasn't safe. He was furious. You could feel his anger. He said that at their meeting, Hoover had more or less tried to intimidate him with the information he had. He'd made it clear that he knew about my relationship with Jack, even that I'd been to the White House, that I was a friend of Sam and Johnny Rosselli, and that Jack knew Sam, too. Jack knew exactly what Hoover was doing. Knowing that Jack wanted him out of office, he was in a way ensuring his job by letting Jack know he had this leverage over him. A similar allegation showed up in the 1999 book, Bound by Honor, the autobiography of the mobster and scion of the Banano crime family, Bill Banano. According to Banano, his organization had received word from Lewis Rosensteel, the millionaire liquor tycoon, that Hoover had successfully blackmailed Kennedy into reappointing him FBI director. According to Banana's book, Hoover had blackmailed JFK into reappointing him as director of the FBI after Bobby Kennedy had threatened to remove him when he reached mandatory retirement age. Rosensteel confirmed what later was a rumor in the tabloids that Hoover went to Kennedy and told him he would expose his affair with Judith Campbell if he was not allowed to continue in office. Rosensteel said that Hoover presented Kennedy with wiretaps and other evidence that he was prepared to make public if he didn't go along. Kennedy went along. Now, it's worth noting that Bill Vano was a repeat felon with convictions for mail fraud, extortion, conspiracy, and defrauding senior citizens, and that his autobiography, Bound by Honor, was savaged by critics upon its release for claiming, among other things, that the shot that killed JFK, had actually been fired by mobster Johnny Roselli while hiding in a storm drain beneath Di Plaza. So his accounting of events probably shouldn't be taken at face value. Nevertheless, it is true that at that time Hoover was subject to laws that made his retirement by age 65 mandatory, and Hoover was born on January 1, 1895, making him 66 years old when JFK assumed the presidency. Judith Campbell, on the other hand, was one of the few people on earth who JFK might have actually told about Hoover's blackmail, lending a much higher degree of credibility to her testimony. Kennedy ended up seeking an age limit exemption to reappoint Hoover as FBI director. despite clear indications that he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had intended to replace him. So, whatever pressure Hoover exerted on JFK appears to have worked. But this wasn't the only extortionate demand that seems to have resulted from Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell. By August of 1962, the FBI had been surveilling Campbell's apartment for some time, watching her 24 hours a day, supposedly to gather information on her other boyfriend, the mobster Sam Gianana. According to ABC News, those FBI agents witnessed an incident that may very well have been related to corporate espionage for blackmail material on JFK over a military contract worth $6.5 billion, that's almost $70 billion in 2025 money.
News segmant: ''So, did President Kennedy's involvement with Judith Campbell make him vulnerable to blackmail? This FBI document discovered during our reporting raises that question. Two FBI agents tell of watching a break-in at Campbell's Los Angeles apartment while she was out. The agents did nothing to stop it, but they did trace the intruder's car. It belonged to a man named IB Hail. Hail was the former FBI agent who was now a security chief for one of the nation's largest defense contractors, the General Dynamics Corporation. And 3 months after this break-in, General Dynamics was awarded the largest defense contract in American history to build the TFX fighter. But General Dynamics had not been the Pentagon's choice. The decision by the Kennedy administration to give General Dynamics the contract was so unexpected and so controversial that the Senate launched an investigation. But Jed Garoover never told the Senate committee about the break-in at Judith Campbell's and the possibility that information obtained in her apartment was used to blackmail the president. The committee was still conducting hearings when the president went to Dallas in November 1963.''
It's notable that this break-in was apparently masterminded by a former FBI agent. Where would this guy, supposedly outside of the FBI and working security for a military contractor, have received enough inside information to identify JFK's secret mistress's apartment and know about the potential blackmail material contained within it? Was Hoover slipping this information to contacts outside of the government? Or had Kennedy's affair become an open secret in the intelligence world? Predictably, this wouldn't be the last time that JFK's womanizing left him open to blackmail. In the summer of 1960, Kennedy was heading to the Democratic National Convention as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and was expected to announce his selection for vice president at the convention. It was widely understood by JFK's aids and campaign employees that Kennedy intended to offer the vice president position to Steuart Simington, a Democratic senator from Missouri. But on the eve of the convention, something changed. According to Kennedy's aid, Hyman Rascin, as reported in the dark side of Camelot, Stuart Simington was always at the top of Kennedy's short list of running mates. That list was precipitously and totally discarded when Kennedy met early on the morning after his nomination with Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rabburn, the speaker of the house. At the meeting, Kennedy was made an offer he could not refuse. In other words, Raskin assumed Johnson blackmailed his way into the vice presidency. Rascin couldn't learn which aspect of the Kennedy history was cited by Johnson and Rabburn in making their threats, but he had no doubt that their morning meeting with Johnson disrupted months of careful planning and put the Kennedy campaign staff in an uproar. Johnson was not being given the slightest bit of consideration for the vice presidency by any of the Kennedys. The front runner in all previous discussions inside the campaign, Raskin knew, was the attractive Simington, who had served as Secretary of the Air Force during the Truman presidency. On the stuff I saw, Raskin told Hersh in an interview, "It was always Simington who was going to be the vice president." The Kennedy family had approved Simington, but after a mysterious private meeting with the then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rurn on the eve of the Democratic convention, to the amazement of his staff, Kennedy reversed course and decided to nominate Lyndon Johnson as vice president. It was obvious that something extraordinary had taken place, Raskin wrote. During my entire association with the Kennedys, I could not recall any situation where a decision of major significance had been reversed in such a short period of time. Bob Kennedy had always been involved in every major decision. Why not this one? I pondered. Kennedy said to Raskin, "You know, we had never considered Lyndon, but I was left with no choice. He and Sam Rurn made it damn clear to me that Lyndon had to be the candidate. Those bastards were trying to frame me. They threatened me with problems, and I don't need more problems. I'm going to have enough problems with Nixon." This same narrative was reiterated even more forcefully by Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy's personal secretary during this period in interviews for the book Official and Confidential. Lincoln was convinced that Jay Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson had conspired. Hoover was known to be personally close to Johnson. They lived on the same street in Northwest Washington and had for years provided Johnson with information about Kennedy's private life. Lincoln was quoted as saying that Johnson had been using all the information Hoover could find on Kennedy during the campaign, even before the convention, and Hoover was in on the pressure on Kennedy at the convention about womanizing and things in Jon's father, Joe Kennedy's background, and anything he could dig up. Johnson was using that as clout. Kennedy was angry because they had boxed him into a corner, he was absolutely boxed in. In a later interview for the dark side of Camelot, Lincoln told of finding JFK and his brother Robert deep in conversation early on the morning before announcing his vice presidential nomination. I went in and listened. They were very upset and trying to figure out how they could get around it, but they didn't know how they could do it. She didn't hear any mention then of a specific threat from Johnson, Lincoln said. But she added, Jack knew that Hoover and LBJ would just fill the air with womanizing. Now, Lyndon Johnson was notoriously corrupt during his political career. He first won his Senate seat through blatant election fraud and later became one of the most powerful senators in US history, partially through bribery of his fellow legislators. As detailed in Robert Ko's biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, LBJ was not above buying votes, and developed an entire patronage infrastructure in Washington to funnel money from Texas oilmen to other politicians in exchange for political favors. So, the prospect of Johnson using blackmail against JFK was totally within the realm of possibility. Whatever tactic Lyndon Johnson had used to pressure Kennedy, it was powerful enough to force a change of heart on perhaps the most consequential decision of his entire campaign a mere 24 hours before that decision was to be made. Kennedy would go on to defeat Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election and Johnson would assume the vice presidency, a role that lasted for just 2 years until Johnson himself became president when JFK was assassinated.
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By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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