By the second paragraph, the memoir’s major weakness begins to surface. Alford says that she had “an intimate, prolonged relationship’’ with Kennedy. What she goes on to detail, displaying a stunning lack of self-awareness, is little more than booty calls arranged by White House aide Dave Powers.
The affair starts just four days after she arrives in Washington, she writes, an innocent debutante and graduate of all-female Miss Porter’s School, which the young Jacqueline Bouvier had also attended.
Early in the day she receives a surprising invitation for a swim with the president and a couple of other staffers. Later Kennedy would ask: “Would you like a tour of the residence, Mimi?’’ Throughout the affair, she continued to call him “Mr. President.’’
Alford stresses how naive she was about boys and sex; she hadn’t even had “the Conversation’’ with her mother or older sister. In 1962, women who had premarital sex - especially with a married man - were “sluts’’ or worse. It would be decades before “sexual harassment’’ became a household term.
The imbalance of power between the middle-aged president and a teenage girl was enormous, and I sympathize with the 19-year-old Mimi. But she is 69 now, a grandmother. Does she have anything of consequence to say besides “I slept with JFK’’?
I admit, I came to this book with a bias: Can no one keep a secret anymore? Even for her own good? According to Alford, she wrote it to rid herself of the emotional weight of it all. But that rings a bit false, as she had already been “outed,’’ as she puts it, when the affair was revealed in the New York Daily News in 2003.
In the first chapter, she writes: “I do not want the public face of this story - the one where I will be remembered solely as a presidential plaything - to define me.’’
But that is precisely what her book does. Alford offers little insight into the affair and its aftermath. At the end, she says she wants to talk to that 19-year-old woman “but I’m not sure I have anything profound to say or even if she would listen to me.’’
