ONCE UPON A SECRET: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath releases today and is stirring a lot of intrigue due to its scandalous subject matter. It is a searingly honest and insightful coming of age story by a woman, Mimi Alford, whose affair with President John F. Kennedy when she was an intern at the White House altered the course of her life.
TUNE IN TONIGHT: Mimi Alford will be interviewed by Meredith Vieira tonight at 9 pm/8c on NBC during the Rock Center with Brian Williams program. Take a sneak peak here.
More on the book:
In the summer of 1962, when Mimi Alford was nineteen years old and a college freshman, she took a summer job as an intern in the press office at The White House. During that summer and for more than a year thereafter she had an intimate relationship with President John F. Kennedy. Alford kept the secret for forty years, until historian Robert Dallek learned of the relationship and mentioned it in passing in An Unfinished Life, his 2003 book about Kennedy. The press jumped on the story and Mimi’s world was suddenly turned upside down.
But, Once Upon a Secret goes well beyond Mimi’s account of her relationship with John F. Kennedy. It is the story of a sheltered young woman from a privileged background pulled into a relationship she could never ever have imagined; and the story of an elegant adult who finally came to terms with the choices she made as a young girl that reverberated for forty years.