In a shocking new tell-all book, a former White House intern has come forward to reveal the sordid details of her 18-month affair with President John F. Kennedy.
Mimi Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother, shares her story in “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath.”
It all began in the summer of 1962 when 19-year-old Mimi, then Mimi Beardsley, started an internship at the White House press office.
Just four days into the job, she was invited for a midday swim in the White House pool by the president’s close friend and aide, Dave Powers.
Little did she know this would lead to a secret liaison with the most powerful man in the world.
After being plied with daiquiris at an after-work gathering, the handsome 45-year-old president offered to give the star-struck teen a private tour of the residence.
He led her to the First Lady’s bedroom, where he proceeded to take her virginity.
“Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts,” Mimi recounts in the memoir.
“Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear.”
This was just the beginning of a year-and-a-half long affair filled with clandestine encounters and trips accompanying the president.
Mimi would be summoned to the White House pool for lunchtime swims and romps in Kennedy’s bedroom whenever Jackie was away.
Their intimate encounters were “varied and fun” but also marked by an emotional distance, according to Mimi.
“He could be seductive and playful,” she writes, but “there was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never kissed.”
The president pulled strings to have his teenage paramour travel with him on official trips, even in the midst of critical events like the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
As the world stood on the brink of nuclear war, Mimi recalls Kennedy confiding to her, “I’d rather my children red than dead.”
But Mimi also witnessed a darker side of Camelot.
At a celebrity party in Palm Springs, she was pressured by JFK into trying amyl nitrate “poppers” despite her protests.
Even more shockingly, during a White House pool encounter, the president dared her to perform oral sex on Dave Powers while he watched.
“I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did,” Mimi admits.
When their affair inevitably ended, it was on an unfinished note.
Meeting in New York a week before that fateful November day in Dallas, Kennedy told Mimi longingly, “I wish you were coming with me to Texas,” adding, “I’ll call you when I get back,” despite her impending marriage to her college sweetheart. That call would never come.
Now breaking a 50-year silence, Mimi Alford’s memoir offers an unprecedented peek into President Kennedy’s reckless and compulsive philandering behind closed White House doors.
Her detailed account, equal parts nostalgic and disillusioned, provides a fascinating glimpse into the shrouded personal life of an iconic leader, shattering the Camelot myth and exposing the human flaws behind JFK’s presidential façade.
