JFK's teen mistress speaks out

She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy’s bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments.

In her explosive new tell-all, “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath,” Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail. The book, out Wednesday was bought by The Post at a Manhattan bookstore.

In the summer of 1962, Alford was a slender, golden-haired 19-year-old debutante whose finishing-school polish and blueblood connections had landed her a job in the White House press office.

Four days into her internship, she was invited by an aide to go for a midday swim in the White House pool, where the handsome, 45-year-old president swam daily to ease chronic back pain. JFK slid into the pool and floated up to her.

“It’s Mimi, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“And you’re in the press office this summer, right?”

“Yes, sir, I am,” she replied.

Lightning had struck. Later that day, Mimi was invited by Dave Powers, the president’s “first friend” and later the longtime curator of the Kennedy Library in Boston, to an after-work party. When she arrived at the White House residence, Powers and two other young female staffers were waiting. Powers poured, and frequently refilled, her glass with daiquiris until the commander-in-chief arrived.

The president invited her for a personal tour. She got up, expecting the rest of the group to follow. They didn’t. He took her to “Mrs. Kennedy’s room.”

“I noticed he was moving closer and closer. I could feel his breath on my neck. He put his hand on my shoulder,” she recounts.

The next thing she knew, he was standing above her, looking directly into her eyes and guiding her to the edge of the bed.

“Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts.

“Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear.

“I finished unbuttoning my shirtdress and let it fall off my shoulders.”

Kennedy pulled down his pants but, with his shirt still on, hovered above her on the bed.

He smelled of his cologne, 4711. He paused when he noticed her resisting.

“Haven’t you done this before?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

So he kept going, this time a little more gently.

“After he finished, he hitched up his pants and smiled at me” and pointed her to the bathroom.

When she was finished, he was outside in the West Sitting Hall, where their evening had begun.

“I was in shock,” she writes. “He, on the other hand, was matter-of-fact, and acted as if what had just occurred was the most natural thing in the world.”

“Would you like something to eat?” he asked. “The kitchen’s right here.”

“No, thank you, Mr. President.”

He called a car to come pick her up and take her home.

On the ride home, it “kept echoing in my head: I’m not a virgin anymore.”

The next week, she was again invited to go swimming.

“He barely acknowledged my arrival, betraying no hint of what had happened between us just a few days before. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him in the eye,” she writes.

Later, he led her into a different bedroom. “This was the beginning of our affair,” she writes.

In a moment of reflection, Alford wonders “if I could have resisted him.

“The fact that I was being desired by the most famous and powerful man in America only amplified my feelings to the point where resistance was out of the question. That’s why I didn’t say no to the president. It’s the best answer I can give.”

She would swim with the president at noon or at the end of the workday, race back to her desk and wait for a call to visit him upstairs.

“The governing factor behind these calls, of course, was the presence — or, more accurately, the absence — of Mrs. Kennedy.”

They never returned to Jackie’s bedroom but stayed in his, which was cluttered with piles of books, magazines and newspapers.

Kennedy could be playful and tried to extract naughty things that she did as a schoolgirl. “What did all you girls do locked up in that boarding school?” he would ask. Ironically, she had attended Miss Porter’s, Jacqueline’s alma mater.

Their sex was “varied and fun.” He could be seductive and playful and sometimes “acted like he had all the time in the world. Other times, he was in no mood to linger.”

They spent an “inordinate amount of time taking baths.” Kennedy changed his shirt six times a day because he hated feeling “sweaty or grimy.”

They lined the bathtub with rubber ducks given to him as a gag gift; they named the ducks after his family members, made up back stories for them and raced them in the tub.

He taught her how to scramble eggs.

He loved popular music, especially Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. They shared a love for the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and would sing along to it together.


Sometimes, she would spend the night with him, and he would outfit her with his own soft-blue cotton nightshirts.

But there was also distance. “There was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never kissed,” she writes. “The wide gulf between us — the age, the power, the experience — guaranteed that our affair wouldn’t evolve into anything more serious.”

She never once ran into Jackie during these flings and admits to not feeling guilty.

He sometimes invited her aboard the Sequoia, the presidential yacht, for a Potomac cruise.


On a trip to Yosemite National Park, she noticed a pattern, which she called “the Waiting Game.” She was told to stay put in her hotel until the president called for her, which meant sitting around for hours. Often, he would only call her at night

On one excursion, she met Vice President Lyndon Johnson. When she told the president about the introduction, he lost his composure.

“Stay away from him,” he commanded, likely worried that Johnson could use knowledge of the affair against him.

At the end of the summer, she told the president that she had to return to college, at Wheaton, an all-girls school in Massachusetts.

He promised that he would call under the pseudonym “Michael Carter.” And then he played a recording of Nat King Cole’s “Autumn Leaves.” He made her concentrate on the lyrics, “But I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.”

As a parting gift, she gave him a copy of the record and trimmed the cover with leaves she had collected.

“You’re trying to make me cry,” he told her.

“I’m not trying to make you cry, Mr. President,” she said. “I’m trying to make sure you remember me.”

Within a week of her return to college, she got a call from Michael Carter.

He asked her dozens of questions: What courses was she taking? Did she like the teachers? Were the girls interesting? What did she have for dinner? He then invited her to Washington when Jackie was away.

A car service would pick her up and drive her to the airport, where a paid ticket to DC would be waiting for her.

Upon arrival, a chauffeur holding up a sign for Michael Carter would take her to the White House.

On one visit, Kennedy was embroiled in one of the most defining moments of his presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviets were at a nuclear standoff.

Although historians have dissected Kennedy’s actions, none was privy to what he confided to Mimi.

“I’d rather my children red than dead,” he told her.


It was a chilling insight.

When the president wasn’t keeping the world from descending into war, there was plenty of wild partying. One instance was a raucous Hollywood bash at Bing Crosby’s desert ranch.

“I was sitting next to him in the living room when a handful of yellow capsules — most likely amyl nitrate, commonly known as poppers — was offered up by one of the guests. The president asked me if I wanted to try the drug, which stimulated the heart but also purportedly enhanced sex. I said no, but he just went ahead and popped the capsule and held it under my nose.”


He didn’t try it himself.

“This was a new sensation, and it frightened me,” Mimi recalls. “I panicked and ran crying from the room.”

It wasn’t her first glimpse of Kennedy’s dark side.

“He had been guilty of an even more callous and unforgivable episode at the White House” during a noon swim. Powers had rolled up his pants to cool his feet in the water. “The president swam over and whispered in my ear. ‘Mr. Powers looks a little tense,’ he said. ‘Would you take care of it?’

“It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did . . . The president silently watched.”

Alford, then Mimi Beardsley, says that later the president apologized to them both.

Another time, she writes, while back at Wheaton, she thought she was pregnant and told Powers. Obviously, this could explode into scandal. Abortion was illegal in 1962. Powers put her in touch with a woman who had a contact for a doctor. In the end, it was a false alarm.

 

There were tender moments, too.

Kennedy, alone and grieving the death of his infant child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, reached out for his young confidante.

“I had never seen real grief in my relatively short life,” she writes.

While Jackie was still recovering in Cape Cod, Kennedy was back at the White House.

“He invited me upstairs, and we sat outside on the balcony in the soft summer evening air. There was a stack of condolence letters on the floor next to his chair, and he picked each one up and read it aloud to me. Some were from friends and others from strangers, but they were all heartfelt and deeply moving. Occasionally, tears rolling down his cheeks, he would write something on one of the letters, probably notes for a reply. But mostly he just read them and cried. I did, too.”

One of their last times together was at a Boston Democratic fund-raiser. Ted Kennedy, the president’s baby brother, was in the room with them.

“I could see that mischievous look come into his eye. ‘Mimi, why don’t you take care of my baby brother? He could stand a little relaxation.’

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she replied firmly. “Absolutely not, Mr. President.”

About to be married to her college sweetheart, Tony Fahnestock, she met Kennedy for the last time at The Carlyle hotel in Manhattan on Nov. 15, 1963, just seven days before his assassination in Dallas.

“He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, ‘I wish you were coming with me to Texas.’ And then he added, ‘I’ll call you when I get back.’ I was overcome with sudden sadness. ‘Remember, Mr. President, I’m getting married.’

“ ‘I know that,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘But I’ll call you anyway.’ ”

Sounds like a nice chap that JFK

 

Check Medro posting an article about a Catholic that only accuses him of adultery.

Progress made Medro

Good to see.

 

Are you going to post the whole book Meds?

 

What is this meant to achieve?



Let me guess, Meds, you'd prefer a good Quaker president <nixonmuir>

 

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He was the President ffs, he could have done better than that

 

Its an interesting article I read. The guy was a crook, it has been well noted.
I don't think I'm telling anyone anything new here.

 

1) Catholic subject matter - check
2) said Catholic looks bad - check

Oh Medro!

 

No, you're not - but in the long, dubious history of American presidents, there have been worse than "he pumped a teenager"

You must admit, he was better than Nixon and Ford was better than both of them but the Americans didn't buy into his pacifism.

 

But she blew.

 

Don't forget that JFK was an IRISH American Catholic lads.

 

And yet another hook for Medro "Its an interesting article I read" Pendes!

 

28th generation?

 

Yes.

 

Good enough for Paddy Pendes.


Of all the presidents of America to pick, though, **** sake

 

It's enough for Medro!

 

Keep it going Medro.......................I...III................ooooh........ahhhhhhhh.......yeah........................more,............more......................ooooh..............thar she blows....................

 

He wasn't just pumping one teenager though was he.

Fifty years since he was elected US president, there is still an aura around John F Kennedy's White House, yet arguably the dirtier side of modern politics has its roots in his rise to power.

Get the picture right, and your history will take care of itself. Jack Kennedy always got the picture right. Even now, it is hardly possible to glimpse the gleaming white smile, the sunlit hair and the perfect First Family without a lump in the throat.

JFK became the icon of democratic optimism, the man who inspired half the world. Cut down in his prime, he never grew old enough to betray, disillusion or bore his legion of admirers.

Who is President Josiah Bartlett of The West Wing but the liberal fantasy of a mature Kennedy - pin-sharp, hard as nails and bright with idealism?

So it comes as a shock to properly study Kennedy the campaigner. The story of how a rich, preppy party boy from Massachusetts managed to raise a roar for underdog America loud enough to carry him to the White House is gripping. But uplifting it certainly isn't.

Yes, it's a tale of soaring and risk-taking rhetoric, partly fashioned by the late lamented Ted Sorensen, and of a candidate with remarkable energy.

It is also, however, a tale of big money, smears, bribes, wire-pulling and bottomless cynicism. If you are asking what has gone so wrong with modern politics, Kennedy's 1960 election campaign is a good place to start.

And in that campaign, West Virginia, the impoverished and sidelined state where Kennedy polished off his main Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey, is better still.

West Virginia is still the wooded, hilly, coal-mining-ravaged place of small towns, military volunteers and neighbourliness it was when the rivals clashed there.

On the one side came Kennedy with his private plane, a present from Daddy, and huge amounts of money for campaign commercials.

He came with promises about more money for the state but above all he was selling an image - the naval war hero, the glamorous wife, the kids, the homespun family with their little sailing boats.

Earlier politicians have had a "back-story" - log-cabins, Welsh cottages, you name it - but Kennedy was the first to sell his lifestyle.

Kennedy's father Joe, the former (and unfriendly) ambassador to Britain, had made his fortune in steel, movies, whisky, stocks and property.

With an obsession about building his family into a great political dynasty, he had squared many of the key newspaper owners for his son, who in turn was a master at flattering their reporters.

He was ruthless and properly understood the rising power of the advertising companies - the world of Mad Men taking shape at the time.

As JFK later said, his father wanted to know the size of the eventual majority because "there was no way he was paying for a landslide".

Smear campaign

The Kennedy machine, an awesomely well organised instrument, had some obvious problems. Joe Kennedy was rumoured to have been a bootlegger, had been brought back to the US in 1940 having announced that "in Britain, democracy is finished", and was a close ally of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Above all, he was a Roman Catholic at a time of fierce anti-Catholic prejudice, including in the overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia. Yet the Kennedys knew that if they could beat Humphrey and win there, they could win anywhere.

Against them, Hubert Humphrey had a classic old-fashioned campaign. He had been too ill to fight in the war. His finances were meagre.

His wife was homely and old-fashioned. He had no private plane, but a bus - with a broken heater - instead.

He was one of the most intelligent, compassionate and literate politicians in modern American history, who had taken on Communists, organised crime and racialism when these were very dangerous fights to pick, and who understood middle America far better than Kennedy. But he was about to be crushed.

The Kennedy team dealt with their Catholic problem above all by smearing Humphrey as a draft-dodger. They saturated the state with advertising, money and helpers.

By the end, a stunned Humphrey, who had compared his fight to that of a corner store against a supermarket chain, was reduced to using the few hundred dollars he and his wife had saved for their daughter's education to pay for a final campaign ad.

Having smeared Humphrey and trashed his reputation, the Kennedys washed their hands and denied it all.

Well, you may say, that's politics. Kennedy went on, after all, to see off the grandees of the Democratic Party - Adlai Stevenson and the rising Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson (who became his running mate) at the Democratic convention in LA.

Then he narrowly beat Richard Nixon after those famous televised debates when Nixon's heavier growth of beard, badly chosen suit and tendency to sweat persuaded viewers Kennedy was the better man.

When I met some of those involved, including Kennedy's TV adviser in 1960, I came away freshly awestruck by his presentational audacity.

For instance, in that first debate, Kennedy politely excused himself for a "comfort break" a minute before the two men were live on air. He did not come back.

As the studio manager was counting down the final seconds to going live, everyone - Nixon included - was aghast. Just as the count ended, there was Kennedy, smiling at the podium. "Psyching" an opponent doesn't get smarter than that.

And yet&#8230; Kennedy beat Nixon not simply with his ads, his sound bites, his jingles, the carefully posed photographs and the downright lies he told about his health. He beat Nixon by not standing for anything beyond rousing banalities.

On the "missile gap" with the Russians, Kennedy knowingly hyped the danger. Nixon, as vice-president, knew the real facts but also for reasons of national security, could not reveal them. (And Kennedy probably knew that, too.)

On the other great issue - civil rights - the Kennedy team sent one message to black audiences and another to middle America.

Did it matter? I came away thinking the mix of big money, smearing, a feel-good blur where policy should have been, and the selling of the candidate like soap flakes, added up to a fairly shameful record.

Even then, he barely won. The younger Nixon, who was liberal on race and more economically mainstream than he became, could well have made a good earlier president.

In office Kennedy made some terrible overseas blunders (though kept his nerve over the Cuban missile crisis) and was slow on domestic policy, particularly civil rights. Had he lived longer, I think he would have had a lower presidential reputation.

The 1960 campaign is not the story I had expected. It's a far more interesting one. It has been obliterated by those images of the handsome young father and husband, then the young king cut down in his prime.

But today we live in a world that has become profoundly cynical about politics. I think we owe it to ourselves to look past those images and ask: aren't there better ways of doing democracy than Kennedy's?

 

And all of them had mistresses releasing books today?

The guy was a crook and I am simply posting an extract about him, though there has been many stories about the darkside of his life.

 

You should post a bit every day like they do in the newspapers Medro. That way we will have something not to read every day.