...but obviously won't be.
Rich Lowry writes:
Mimi Alford’s account of life at the White House as a 19-year-old intern who caught the president’s eye is a vividly personal portrayal of the ugliness behind the alluring images. Alford’s belated tell-all, Once Upon a Secret, should be assigned in women’s-studies classes as an illustration of the power imbalances in employer-employee sexual liaisons, especially those involving commanders-in-chief and their interns.
And:
The reality wasn’t as magical. Within her first week as an intern, JFK’s friend and procurer Dave Powers invited her to a midday swim with the president and some of the gals from the secretarial pool. At the end of the day, the rising sophomore at Massachusetts’ Wheaton College was invited to a get-together in the family residence. She was plied with daiquiris, then the president peeled her away from the group with an invitation to a private tour of the residence.
Alford lost her virginity on the fashionably elegant Mrs. Kennedy’s bed. “I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love,” Alford writes. “But I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual, either.”
That double negative captures the entire relationship, if that’s not too glorified a word. Alford says she was thrilled by JFK’s attentions; it made her feel “special.” He was playful and gentle with her, supposedly called her at school, and opened up a world of power and glamour unimaginable to the average college senior, let alone a sophomore.
Ultimately, though, she was a plaything at the sultan’s court. He never kissed her. Once, as she was smuggled along on a trip with JFK, Dave Powers made her sit on the floor of his car to hide from the White House staff — unsuccessfully. During a White House swim, she says, JFK commanded her to perform oral sex on Powers, and, to her humiliation, she complied. Later, he prodded her to do the same for his “baby brother,” Teddy.
There was no chivalry at Camelot.
And, then, there is this conclusion:
No one can confirm what happened in JFK’s pool so many decades later. But as The New Republic’s Timothy Noah notes, “The likelihood that Alford is making this story up is extremely remote.” Alford didn’t write her book until she was outed by a JFK biographer and an enterprising journalist. If the broad outlines of her book accord with what we already knew about JFK, the details suggest he wasn’t just a standard-issue womanizer but a loathsome creep.
If there was a similar story about Eisenhower or Nixon acting this way it would be front page news, but there won't be any such stories.
On the other hand, is anyone really surprised that JFK, like the man to whom he was such a hero, Bill Clinton, turn out to be loathsome pimps?
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