John F. Kennedy is the man whose picturesque presidency launched a thousand coffee-table books. When the late conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr. was asked to explain Kennedy’s enduring appeal, he said, “His sheer beauty.”
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.
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It’s not news that JFK had an, ahem, active personal life. But a certain romance has attached to it. Marilyn Monroe’s famously breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” is redolent of knowing, sophisticated fun, of adults in on a seductive secret.
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.
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.
For Kennedy worshippers, this is outweighed by . . . what? By the fact that he was their first political love. By his martyrdom. And by “his sheer beauty.” MSNBC host and author Chris Matthews, who is all too willing to perform the journalistic and historical equivalent of Mimi Alford’s services, is the perfect archetype of the baby boomer who started out smitten by Kennedy and has never stopped.
He calls his recent hagiography Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero. The search for what it is in JFK’s record that justifies the adulation is just as elusive. Ordinarily liberals wouldn’t be so forgiving of a president who was cautious on civil rights, whose administration surveilled Martin Luther King Jr., who began our involvement in the Vietnam War.
According to Alford, JFK was obsessed with his hair. He let her administer his daily hair treatment, insisting on products only from Frances Fox, and on a brush, not a comb. When they broke up after she got engaged, he gave her gold-and-diamond pins — and a photograph of himself, at the helm of the yacht Manitou. It’s a terrific photo, of a man who was a handsome lie.
I read the article in the NY Post the other day on this very book. It saddened and sickened me to read of the debasing of this 19-year-old virgin by someone I admired in my youth (I was 8 when JFK was elected). There's a big difference between having "flings" with adults and taking advantage of a youthful crush. And then to treat her as a call girl... The Kennedy men (at least Jack and Ted, not sure about Bobby) had absolutely no respect for women.
Robert Kennedy almost certainly shared Marilyn Monroe with his own brother. I wouldn't be surprised if she drugged herself to death in part from how cheap they made her feel.
Because of one family of sleazy p-mps, we now have multiple generations of pathetic American men idolizing sexual deviance.
I'm sure if we hand out more condoms things will be fine though!
I havent read her book and dont intend to. But I do wonder if anywhere in the book this 69 yr old woman asks for forgiveness and seeks redemption? What must her family think? Or are they all just waiting for the money to roll in? There are many of us who did not need to hear stories of his amoral unprincipled behaviour behind closed doors to know he was amoral and unprincipled. His father bought the Presidency, his brother Teddy was a murderer, his dithering and missteps brought on the Berlin wall, he took us to Viet Nam with no clear goals, he condemned millions to live under tyranny while he and his family lived in luxury and smoked Cubans. He was so much worse than a handsome lie -- he was evil and he accomplished evil. Just like BHO.
Why the insistence that there be an altar call moment for the gospel to have been legitimately preached? Would that many more minds were so perfectly in touch with the reality of JFK's character that a book like this wasn't needed.
I, too, don't intend to read this book because I don't hold any illusions about the man or his legacy. But clearly, there are a lot of people who do hold the man in undue high regard. Many (like me) were not alive during his presidency. And many of these people, now approaching middle age, have (unlike you and me) taken in every line about Camelot thrown their way since their earliest 2nd grade lessons in American History, and are reinforcing the same illusions to the next generation.
Chris Matthews himself seems to be shaken by the authenticity of this book. If proven credible over time, Mimi Alford's story might be useful in changing quite a few minds about a major American historical figure, and silencing and shaming those who have made a living by propagating (unwittingly or otherwise) a lie. And if so, it will be precisely because it comes from a less likely source than the conservative media, who would be preaching to the choir with a book like this and achieving nothing with the rest of the crowd.
Unfortunately, hero worship seems to go a long way in determining a lot of people's politics these days. So, if some people's heretofore unquestioning faith in this Democratic hero is shaken a bit, then maybe they'll start questioning other heroes of the movement. Dunno about you, but I see the potential for some good here.
Compared to a "waitress sandwich" with Chris Dodd at La Brasserie, this account seems almost chaste by comparison. And let's face it, JFK might have driven women to drink, but he didn't drive them INTO the drink as his brother did.
That's why Kennedy's appeal endures: because, at least, he wasn't Teddy.
Having been born after "Camelot" I never understood the Kenndys' appeal. I've always thought the Kennedy cult for modern day (read baby boomer) liberals to be superficial and based more on looks than actual acheivement or policy agreement (could you imagine Obama blockading anything much less the socialist paradise of Cuba).
I have always thought that JFK was what I saw him as in 1960 as a 13 year old kid. That he was a sham and not nearly the demigod fools like Chrissy Matthews think he was. The worship of him is beyond my comprehension. He was the epitome of a spoiled person who had a rich daddy to get him off the hook on anything and everything he did.
Another irony about his legacy is that he's not quite the liberal icon the left makes him out to be. Compared to LBJ, he was very conservative. He was cautious on Civil Rights and stood up to USSR. He also once walked out of a meeting with a group of senators who were trashing Joe McCarthy in the 1950s by saying "How dare you make fun of a true American patriot?"
I have always been amused by these polls that show JFK as in the top 5 of 'greatest presidents'. When you ask people who admire him what he accomplished as President you usually get a 'deer caught in the headlights' look. Most historians agree that his greatest accomplishments were the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty and a tax cut. However, that would hardly qualify as a metric for 'greatness'. I suspect that the real basis for so much adulation is based more on a manufactured image by the MSM than one of substance. He was a 'pretty boy' who knew how to look good and manipulate the press. That probably should be what people mention when they rate him for 'greatness'.
I'm one of the few defenders of Richard Nixon. Weirdly, in my case facts don't matter.
People attack Nixon. I then mention how Nixon had the US resupply Israel in 1973 and saved it from destruction by the Arab nations. Nixon went to the grave as an anti-semite. Nixon's DoD salvaged the dreadful tank situation the USA found itself in after the cancellation of the MBT XM-70 program. Thousands of M-48 tanks were rebuilt to M-48A5 (M-60A1 standard) under Nixon's DoD leadership.
However, the biggest item Nixon did was salvage the mess in Vietnam. Nixon made friends with China and in 1973 completely reversed the strategic situation in SE Asia. In 1972 it was the west vs. most of the world. In 1973 it was the USA and China against Soviet Russia. Reagan may have defeated the communists but it was Nixon who built the foundation.
It's quite Amazing to think of but when China's revolution against "The Gang of 4" in 1976 that who would have thought that China would be more free towards business now in 2011 than the USA.
One of the most weird thing in history was Mao respected and admired Nixon. As corny as Star Trek was there was supreme logic in Spock's statement "Only Nixon could have gone to China."
History will treat Nixon better over the years. History will reveal that Kennedy had a cult. The worst thing about a cult is their followers. They refuse to see the light.
In 75 years after Kennedy his history will be very tarnished. The truth will eventually come out that Nixon was not as bad as the press made him out to be.
Richard Nixon outlived his wife and was at her death bed. Former President Nixon was really touched at her funeral.
That was when I realized that all the leftist lies about Nixon cheating on his wife were really sleazy. Nixon was one of the most loyal men to his wife ever.
The press treated Nixon terrible. They lie to keep people like Kennedy, Obama, Clinton, and Carter in power.
But I'm a minority in this Nation. I think Nixon was a good president and the nation really screwed up back in 1960.
I had a conversation with a (very) liberal co-worker of mine about the 1960 campaign. I made the comment that JFK won thanks to the Chicago dead people vote. Her retort was that was ok because Nixon was cheating in southern Illinois.
My response was "So you're saying Kennedy deserved to be elected because he was MORE corrupt than Nixon?"
The reason Kennedy is considered so great is quite simple: he died. That means that Kennedy's admirers don't have to concern themselves with what he DID in office, but can instead focus on what he WOULD HAVE DONE if he'd only lived--which coincidently enough, always seems to be exactly what the person in question wanted done.
"JFK" the might-have-been would have pulled us out of Vietnam, been the driving force behind comprehensive civil rights legislation, and probably personally built the rocket that got us to the moon. The fact that the actual Jack Kennedy was a committed cold warrior and was generally in favor of civil rights but didn't consider them a priority became irrelevant the second he died.
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