that Smith - between interviews of Barbara
Streisand and Julia Roberts - has been digging through the newly
declassified record and will now set us straight.

But her only source is Exner. And, like Kelley, Smith seems to
avoid asking the tough questions, probably because these two have
been pals since 1977. At one point she calls her a "real star."

None of the inconsistencies or absurdities I have noted get into
the article. In fact, Smith adds more of her own. As with
Demaris, one of her aims is to make Exner a victim of the press
so that she can imply that the "liberal media" is "protecting"
the Kennedys. As demonstrated above, this is preposterous. Exner
was a media creation used by that press to pummel the Kennedys
who the Times and Post - and their ally the CIA - never liked. To
camouflage this, Smith claims that after her book came out, the
Exners "fled" to California. Yet, according to Demaris, Exner and
her husband were already in California when he met them to start
work on the book. Smith can actually write the Orwellian
statement that Safire - author of no less than five pro-Exner
columns - "derided" Exner's story. Again, contradicting her book,
Exner now says she never went to bed with Giancana. In fact, in
the Vanity Fair version, the whole scene where he proposes to her
is different from the book. In the revisionist go round the
suggestion is that good Italian Catholics, even though they may
be murdering