JFK Affair by Jessica Hopper

Former White House intern Mimi Alford reveals details of Kennedy affair.

Mimi Alford is speaking publicly for the first time about the secret she’s held for half a century. Alford claims that she had an 18-month-long affair with President John F. Kennedy when she was a White House intern.

“I think when you keep a secret and when you keep silent about something, you do it because you think it’s keeping you safe, but in fact, it’s deadly,” Alford told Meredith Vieira in an exclusive interview scheduled to air Wednesday on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.

In 1962, a 19-year-old Alford spent her summer in Washington, D.C., interning in the White House press office. She had just finished her freshman year at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Four days into her internship, Alford claims that JFK aide, David Powers, invited her to go swimming in the White House pool. Alford was surprised when the 45-year-old president joined her and two others in the pool.

“It really didn’t seem unnatural, just because everybody was friendly and I went back to work afterwards,” Alford said. “No one said anything.”

Later that day, she says she received another call to visit the private floors of the White House. The naïve teenager didn’t question the president’s intentions when he asked to take her on a tour of the White House.

“The president came over to me and asked me if I’d like to take a tour of the second floor of the White House and see some of the rooms that had been redecorated. The last room that we went into was the bedroom and we walked into the bedroom and it was a beautiful room…I learned later that it was Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom,” Alford said.

Alford says that she lost her virginity to the president in the first lady’s bedroom. In her soon to be released memoir, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath, Alford described her first sexual encounter with the president writing that, “I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love, but I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual either.”

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