Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek Read Free Book Online Page B

father. As the mother of nine children, including a disabled daughter who followed Jack’s birth by only a little more than a year, Rose struggled to attend to her two oldest sons. Busy building his fortune and compelled by business demands to travel widely, Joe was more a family patriarch than a hands-on father closely interacting with his children.
    Kennedy’s affinity for womanizing found an extended outlet in an eighteen-month affair with a young White House intern beginning in the summer of 1962. The publication in 2012 of Once Upon a Secret , a recounting by Mimi Beardsley Alford of her relationship with Kennedy, when she was just nineteen and twenty, provides the most revealing details ever into his sexual escapades. A companion on summer trips with him and on occasional weekends at the White House when Jackie was away, Mimi offered him a reliable retreat from the demands of his duties.
    His time with Mimi also appealed to his attraction to risk-taking. Unprotected sex once led to an unrealized scare of pregnancy. Not to mention that Mimi’s nights at the White House and presence on trips suddenly made her visible to White House insiders and journalists, which created risks that could have politically touched off a ruinous scandal. Given the assumptions of the time that the mainstream press would not write about a president’s sex life, Kennedy was confident that he could avoid any public attack on his character. But he could not be sure. And he was mindful that as president he could be more than embarrassed by accusations of philandering. He either knew or at least understood James Monroe’s observation that “national honor is the national property of the highest value” and that every president is the temporary custodian of that property.
    Alford remembers Kennedy’s affair with her as “a reckless desire for sex.” But, according to her account, something else was at work: Their relationship wasn’t “romantic. It was sexual, it was intimate, it was passionate. But there was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never once kissed. . . . In fact I don’t remember the President ever kissing me—not hello, not goodbye, not even during sex.” Her function, as she recalls, was to provide “good company . . . because he hated to be alone but also because he found a change of pace in someone like me—young full of energy, willing to play along with whatever he wanted.”
    And what he wanted occasionally was to give expression to “his demons and . . . his more sinister side.” During a visit with him to Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, California, where a raucous Hollywood party was in full swing, Alford refused to try a “popper,” an amyl nitrate capsule that “purportedly enhanced sex.” Unwilling to take no for an answer, Kennedy “popped the capsule and held it under my nose.” She “panicked and ran crying from the room” when the drug caused her heart to race and hands to tremble. Sometime after, Kennedy was “guilty of an even more callous and unforgivable episode at the White House pool,” involving long-time aide Dave Powers: He challenged Mimi “to give Powers oral sex” while he watched. Although she was “deeply embarrassed afterward” and Kennedy apologized to both her and Powers, it did not stop him from asking her at a later date to do the same thing with his younger brother Ted Kennedy. She angrily rejected the suggestion. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she told him. “Absolutely not.”
    What Alford didn’t quite understand was how dependent Kennedy had become on her and how these callous actions expressed the anger he fixed on her as the object of his dependence. In some unspecified way, she filled a vacuum in his need for mothering, affection, and attention as well as for a release from presidential obligations. “He always asked . . . about her social life.” When she told him that she had begun dating someone she thought