She was a political intern who kept her affair with the US president a secret for 40 years. Now, Mimi Beardsley Alford, who as a teenager had an 18-month sexual relationship with president John F. Kennedy, has finally decided to tell the story of those White House days.
The relationship was exposed in 2003 in a biography of Kennedy that included a reference to his involvement with Mimi Beardsley.
She had not even told her parents or children of the affair. A New York newspaper found that she had married, changed her surname to Fahnestock, divorced and was working as an administrator for a Presbyterian church.
After the revelations, Beardsley Alford said no more than to confirm that she was “involved in a sexual relationship” with the president from June 1962.
But her agent, Mark Reiter, told the New York Times that she was now writing her own account of the relationship, in a book called Once Upon a Secret, to be published by Random House.
“As she thought about it, she said: ‘This is a story that I’d like to take control of, rather than have somebody else tell my side of it,’” he said.
Reiter said Beardsley Alford would not be serving up salacious details of the affair.
“She’s just not that type of person where she’s going to spill her guts about intimate stuff for the whole country to see,” he said.
“The story has three acts to it: before the White House, during the White House and then the really powerful part is what happens afterwards. What’s the impact on your family life, your marriage, knowing that this happened to you in your early life and you have chosen to keep it a secret?”
The affair was revealed in An Unfinished Life: John F Kennedy 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek, based on an oral account of the period recorded in the 1960s with Barbara Gamarekian, who was deputy to Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger.
Gamarekian describes a White House in which young women, working in the press office in particular, were considered fair game by the president and some of his senior aides.
She recalls an incident in which the president attempted to smuggle Beardsley Alford out of his quarters during a visit to Nassau when she was spotted hiding in a car by Salinger and another official.
“They walked over and looked in the car and here on the floor was Mimi! She was sitting on the floor so she wouldn’t be seen by anyone. She’d been there, apparently, for several days.”
On a separate occasion, Gamarekian was astonished to discover that Beardsley Alford had telephoned the president from the White House while he was on a trip to Ireland to complain that she was not being allowed a day off.
The president threatened to sack whoever had upset her.
“To be able to place a call through the White House switchboard to Ireland and get through directly to the president to make her complaint was a little unusual. It isn’t that easy, normally, to get the president on the phone,” Gamarekian said.
Kennedy was helped by an acquiescent press.
“A lot of the press corps thought that this was going to blow up eventually. This is the sort of thing that legitimate newspaper people don’t write about, or don’t even make any implications about. It was kind of a big joke. Everyone knew about it and there were a lot of sly remarks made,” she said.
Gamarekian said other “cute, young, attractive” interns also had a “special relationship” with the president.
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