“You’re not going to put the genie back in the bottle anymore,” said Dallek. Which is why he found Newt Gingrich’s attack on CNN’s John King for asking about alleged affairs so fascinating - and probably unwise. Journalists knew about Kennedy’s adultery but never wrote a thing 35 years later, no detail of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky went unreported. the sort of thing that legitimate newspaper people don’t write about or don’t even make any implications about.” Alford kept the affair a secret, but confirmed it in 2003 after reporters tracked her down.ĭallek, who has not read Alford’s book yet, finds her “entirely credible” and the Powers incident “disgusting.” The value of her book is not in the dirty details, he said, but in balancing the historical perception of JFK, who’s become some kind of “rock star, a mythological figure - he’s no longer a real person.”ĭallek told us he originally wrote about Mimi - though in a mere 38 words - because he was interested in the changing social mores of the country. Mimi, she said, had a “sort of a special relationship with the president. Kennedy, 1917–1963.” More details about the intern came via an oral history by Barbara Gamarekian, a former press aide to Kennedy.
In 2003, Dallek included a passing reference to a “tall, slender, beautiful nineteen-year-old college sophomore” in his acclaimed biography, “An Unfinished Life: John F. Unlike many of JFK’s rumored encounters, this one has grounding in historic records. “I’m not going to say he loved me, but I think he did like me a lot.”Īs in most books involving private affairs with public officials, most of the principals in the book are dead. Alford tells NBC she should have felt guilty, but didn’t because she was swept up in the Kennedy aura. More graphic stuff: Drugs with the president, and the sex act she was urged to perform on presidential aide Dave Powers as JFK watched.
“I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love, but I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual either,” she wrote. Within days of her arrival, the beautiful young blonde was invited to join the president for an afternoon swim - and later that day, lost her virginity to him in the first lady’s bedroom, according to excerpts published in the New York Post, which snagged an early copy.
(** Updated Wednesday: JFK mistress Mimi Alford on secret trips, Ted Kennedy, Cuban Missile Crisis - and why she did it)Īlford, then 19, had just completed her first year at Wheaton College when she started a job in the White House press office in the summer of 1962.
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