JFK memoir: The seamy side of Camelot

last updated 8 January 2015

Everyone knows that John F. Kennedy was a “compulsive, even pathological adulterer,” said Timothy Noah in The New Republic. But Mimi Alford’s new memoir of her affair with JFK, Once Upon a Secret, reveals our former president as an amoral creep who not only preyed on women, but subjected them to “extreme humiliation.” On her fourth day as a White House intern, the 19-year-old Social Register ingenue was singled out for leering attention by JFK, who led her upstairs to his wife’s bedroom and casually deflowered her. Kennedy then began a year-and-a-half-long affair with the dazzled and conflicted young woman, during which he coerced her into performing oral sex on an assistant while he watched—and later asked her to service his younger brother Ted. Such “monstrous cruelty” requires “further reassessment of a president we already knew to be morally compromised.”

The myth of Camelot could not be “any more tarnished than it has been,” said Liz Smith in the Chicago Tribune. We already knew, for example, that JFK, as president, had an affair with a Mafia mistress named Judith Exner, and made her pregnant—and then let mob boss Sam Giancana pay for the abortion. Sorry, Mimi, but no one really cares about yet another mistress. JFK’s presidency should be assessed in its totality, said Robert Dallek in TheDailyBeast.com. Yes, he was a serial adulterer, but Kennedy performed brilliantly during the Cuban missile crisis, forcing the Soviet Union to back down, while saving the world from nuclear war. It’s for that accomplishment, not his trysts, that he’ll be remembered.

Ah, the Camelot myth dies hard, doesn’t it? said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. But the still-adored Kennedy wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr., began the Vietnam War, and treated a college intern like a cheap prostitute, smuggling her like luggage on his trips abroad. Some would argue that a politician’s sex life is irrelevant, said Ana Veciana-Suarez in The Miami Herald. But “honesty and decency are not traits you turn on and off like a light.” In the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, with the fate of the world in the balance, JFK was negotiating with Nikita Khrushchev, while rushing back and forth to the White House bedroom where Alford served his needs. That’s not only disgusting, it “shows a disregard for the country he vowed to serve.”