The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years
Judith Campbell Exner, who died in 1999 at age 65, claimed that she had a two-year affair with President John F. Kennedy. Her autobiography (My Story) also claimed she had a platonic relationship with Sam Giancana and served as a courier delivering documents between JFK and the mafia. The grey area of fact versus fiction overlaps and sorting out the truth still stirs up controversy.
Frederick Turner has imagined a story of intrigue and mystery based on the known history about her relationship with two of the most powerful men of the time. His narrator is a seasoned journalist, a writer worn thin by his years of covering the news, who stumbles upon diaries written by Exner. His life takes on new purpose when his discovery inspires his story. He comes to believe Exner was not just Kennedy’s mistress and bad girl; rather, she was an idealist and believed in the American dogma of the time, thinking she was promoting the common good and blinded by the Kennedy aura. The sense of doom is evident from the beginning, as Turner uncovers her tragic decline from the moment she met Kennedy. She was tossed aside by the men she loved and hounded by J. Edgar Hoover’s men.
Entries in the diary are the author’s fabrications, based on Exner’s published autobiography. Readers will be familiar with historical events of the time, Fidel Castro’s threat, the Bay of Pigs, the Nixon/Kennedy debates and JFK’s election and assassination, but myths, coverup and espionage cloud the history, still. Cleverly written, this story is fun to read but lacks substance, as it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. We may never find the truth about Judith Campbell Exner and her complicated role in American politics, but readers should enjoy the possibilities presented in Turner’s imagination.
