Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy

Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath by Mimi Alford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I kind of liked this more than I thought I would. It wasn't ground breaking, I had already watched her interview with Meredith Viera so nothing was too surprising in the book. She was a woman with a secret that she kept after it was demanded by her then fiance.

Times were different then. You held things in, you didn't dredge up bad emotions. She explained that keeping the secret from the beginning is what ultimately killed her marriage. Keeping it confined from the beginning meant they could never communicate well about anything. Kind of good learning lesson for marriage in general I think. If you keep things from each other in the beginning, it's only going to snowball from there on.

I don't think this was at all a smear campaign. I think it's a woman who was seduced into a sexual relationship by the most powerful man in the United States...and only at 19. You can't blame her, she was young, naive, sheltered. If anything, I learned JFK was more of a tramp than I had ever known of before. I think Jacqueline Kennedy knew but tolerated all of his partners. Gross. Again, those were the times. I've heard that she may have been doing her own business on the side too. Who knows. I sure don't.

I think Mimi Alford wrote this book to let it all out. I think the money was secondary to the therapeutic benefit for her. If this were 1950, she wouldn't have done this. But everyone these days has a story and hungry publishers want to make money off of them. Why not write about it?

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