‘Once Upon a Secret,’ a steamy memoir detailing Mimi Alford’s 18-month affair with President John F. Kennedy, hits store shelves on Wednesday. In the book, subtitled ‘My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath,’ Alford claims she was a virgin when she started the affair as a 19-year-old White House intern. She last saw the president the week before he was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
According to excerpts published in the New York Post, the now 68-year-old grandmother described how the 45-year-old president met her in the White House swimming pool. Alford, who was Mimi Beardsley when the affair took place, has said she wrote the memoir to give her side of the story after she was romantically linked with the assassinated president in several presidential biographies. Alford wrote that she met Kennedy just four days into her internship, and that he invited her the following day on a personal tour of the White House residence that included first lady Jackie Kennedy’s bedroom. In the tell-all memoir, Alford recounts the president’s tears after the death of his newborn son, and recalls that he confided to her, while embroiled in the drama of the Cuban missile crisis that “I’d rather my children red, than dead.” Kennedy’s womanising has long been a matter for biographers, though it was little known to the public at the time.
