A book I won't read--Mimi's tale of a handsome lie

"Mimi 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. . .

. . . 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.” "

He never kissed her she says, but required her to perform oral sex on Powers (it was his job to find her an abortion doctor if needed) while he watched and asked for baby brother Teddy.

A handsome lie

Washington Post comments

Rock Center interview

I'm just so very sorry that I ever wept tears over that man in 1963.