FurtherMore: Dirty Business

Beyond November 22, 1963

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he left behind, as the title of the biography by Robert Dallek put it, “An Unfinished Life.” His death would have a profound effect, though, on how his friends, family, lovers and enemies finished theirs.

Sam Giancana Giancana, facing considerable scrutiny from the F.B.I. even after the death of John Kennedy, fled to Mexico, where he lived extravagantly for 10 years until the Mexican government sent him back to the U.S. It was not long after his return, on June 19, 1975, that Giancana was shot in the back of the head while frying Italian sausage and peppers in his home. After the first bullet knocked him down, he was shot six more times in the face. Giancana’s murder was never solved, but conspiracy theorists suggest that the C.I.A. was behind it, a theory supported by the fact that Giancana was scheduled to testify about his relationship to the C.I.A when he was murdered.
Judith Exner Exner’s affair with John Kennedy remained secret until 1975, when it came out during the Church Committee’s investigation into the connection between the mafia and the U.S. government. She then wrote My Story, which chronicled in detail her relationships with Kennedy and Giancana. Exner originally said that her relationship to both men was purely personal, but in 1988, her story changed, Exner claiming she had indeed brought messages back and forth between the mafia don and the president. In 1997, she added to her story once again, declaring that she had actually seen the stacks of cash she was carrying from Kennedy to Giancana, and that she had been told this was for the mafia’s assistance in the elimination of Castro. While Exner’s book is largely supported by the record, her later claims are far more controversial, including her very last revelation: that she had become pregnant by President Kennedy and Giancana arranged for the abortion. Judith Exner died of breast cancer on September 24, 1999.
Frank Sinatra Sinatra mourned the assassination of John F. Kennedy in isolation for three days, then continued the successful recording career that would ultimately span seven decades. His politics were less consistent: in 1972, he supported the re-election of Richard Nixon, the very man Sinatra helped John Kennedy defeat in 1960. In the 1980s, Sinatra would once again become a favored friend of the White House during Ronald Reagan’s administration. When Sinatra died of a heart attack on May 14, 1998, President Clinton said, “I had the opportunity after I became president to get to know him a little, to have dinner with him, to appreciate on a personal level what hundreds of millions of people around the world appreciated from afar.”
Joseph P. Kennedy Joseph Kennedy’s life was one of unlikely success, but his final years were marked by tragedy. He suffered a stroke in 1961, losing the power of speech and all movement on the right side of his body, but he survived to see the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy. Ted Kennedy’s car accident at Chappaquiddick, which resulted in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne and likely ruined Ted’s chances for the presidency, occurred four months before Joseph Kennedy’s death on November 18, 1969. At the time of his passing, The New York Times estimated the value of Kennedy’s estate at half a billion dollars.

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