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part from his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who predicted in the 1920s that film would equal the telephone as a new industry. Recognizing the power of movies to create illusion and fantasy, the elder Kennedy had bought a production company called Film-Booking Office, and for two years he made movies. Then, through a series of complicated transactions and mergers, he had become part of RKO, one of the biggest Hollywood studios. During this time, he began an affair with Gloria Swanson, the glamorous actress. He took her on family vacations with his wife, and introduced her to his children.

Beginning as far back as 1945, Jack Kennedy spent as much free time as possible in Hollywood, romancing movie stars like Gene Tierney. Once his sister, Patricia, married Peter Lawford in 1954 and bought Louis B. Mayer’s house in Santa Monica, Jack had a real base of operations in southern California. He used it frequently and in time began to socialize with the Rat Pack at Puccini’s, the Beverly Hills restaurant that Frank and Peter owned with Hank Sanicola and Mickey Rudin.

Through Peter, whom Frank now called “brother-in-Lawford,” Kennedy became a close friend of Sinatra, who introduced the young senator to many women. FBI files contain information regarding some of the women that the two men enjoyed in Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and New York City. The files also mention that Kennedy and Sinatra were “said” to be the subjects of “affidavits from two mulatto prostitutes in New York” in possession of Confidential magazine, which ceased publication in 1958. The Justice Department files also state: “It is a known fact that the Sands Hotel is owned by hoodlums, and that while the Senator, Sinatra and Lawford were there, show girls from all over the town were running in and out of the Senator’s suite.”

“I’m not going to talk about Jack and his broads … because I just can’t,” said Peter Lawford in 1983, “and … well … I’m not proud of this … but … all I will say is that I was Frank’s pimp and Frank was Jack’s. It sounds terrible now, but then it was really a lot of fun.”

Among the women Frank introduced to Jack Kennedy was a striking twenty-five-year-old brunette named Judith Campbell (later Judith Campbell Exner), with whom Sinatra had had a brief affair, which ended when she refused to participate in his sexual parties, telling him that his tastes were “too kinky” for her. “You’re so square,” Frank had said after he brought a black girl to bed with him and Judith. “Get with it. Swing a little.”

Frank introduced her to Jack Kennedy in Las Vegas and provided his own suite for the room service lunch the two shared on February 8, 1960, a lunch that launched a two-year affair that would include twice-a-day phone calls, a four-day stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, and romantic interludes in Palm Beach, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Jack Kennedy’s home in Georgetown while Jackie was away. They met twenty times for intimate lunches in the White House in 1961, and telephone records show that Judith called him seventy times.

Knowing that Judith Campbell had started an intimate relationship with Kennedy, Frank introduced her to his other good friend, Sam Giancana. He told her: “Wake up and realize what you’ve got in the palm of your hand.” Both men enjoyed a simultaneous intimacy with the young woman, who unintentionally but inexorably brought the underworld into a relationship with the White House.

“Jack knew all about Sam and me, and we used to discuss him,” said Judith Campbell Exner in 1983. “He was angry about my seeing him. He had all the normal reactions that would take place between two people that cared for each other. Yes, he was jealous.”

Extolling “that old Jack magic,” Frank worked closely with Ambassador Kennedy throughout Jack Kennedy’s presidential campaign, especially in New Jersey, which was a key state, and where Sinatra’s mother’s connection with Mayor John V. Kenny of Jersey City proved beneficial.

Not everyone in the Kennedy camp was pleased with Frank’s involvement. “We wouldn’t let him campaign openly in the primaries,”