“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen
A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison.
Mark Allen, a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election.
All this is in A Dangerous Beauty, a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand. Frank Sinatra introduced Exner to both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana — JFK at the Sands in February 1960, Giancana at the Fontainebleau a few weeks later. Nobody disputes Exner’s familiarity with either man. It’s the envelopes that historians have spent fifty years trying to decipher. Especially given all the conspiracy theories about the interconnectedness of the Kennedys, the mob, the CIA, Castro and Dallas.
The twist in A Dangerous Beauty is not what we expect from a book about JFK’s tangled relations with a beautiful young woman. If Exner was telling the truth, Allen and Aurand argue, then the Kennedys knew exactly what the CIA was doing to Castro, because they themselves were running the operation. Which destroys the premise underneath every rogue-agency theory of Dallas. So Allen and Aurand are anti-conspiracy theorists. The CIA, they suggest, probably wasn’t behind the 1963 assassination.
Allen is agnostic on who shot the president. What he wants to demolish is the idea that JFK was betrayed and even murdered by his own government. A conspiracy theory that, he warns, is being peddled today by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Mark Allen is a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney and a longtime student of the Kennedy presidency. He came to the subject through the JFK assassination and interviewed Judith Exner in the last years of her life, after Anthony Summers made the introduction. He lives in Sarasota, Florida. Tricia Aurand is a writer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. A Dangerous Beauty is published by Post Hill Press, with a foreword by Patt Morrison.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:32 — How Mark Allen found Judith Exner
06:06 — The Church Committee, and why she held back
08:32 — What does “go-between” actually mean?
12:20 — Where was Bobby? Operation Mongoose
14:39 — The consensus that you cannot believe her
15:30 — Why this damages the rogue-CIA theory
17:11 — Hoover, the wiretap and years of harassment
21:33 — Twenty-six, and the danger he put her in
25:30 — The Sands, the Fontainebleau and Sinatra
28:41 — Agnostic on Dallas
33:10 — Seymour Hersh got there in 1997
37:04 — Shouted down because she was a woman
39:23 — RFK Jr., and what over-adulation produced
41:29 — Closing