President Kennedy once confided to Harold Macmillan, of all people, that if he did not have a woman every three days he would experience a terrible headache.
One of these volunteers, Judith Campbell Exner (who happened to be having a simultaneous affair with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana), grumbled about his lack of romance in a kiss-and-tell memoir: “I was to learn in my relationship with Jack that his attitude was that he was there to be serviced ... I think he had been spoiled by women.”
Another of his girlfriends told his biographer, Robert Dallek, that for JFK, “Sex was something to have done, not to be doing. He wasn’t in it for the cuddling.”
In the diaries of Kenneth Tynan, there is a fascinating passage showing Kennedy’s amazingly rapid turnover. The great Marlene Dietrich tells Tynan that in the autumn of 1962, when she was appearing in a cabaret in Washington, she received a summons to have drinks at the White House at 6pm on a Saturday.
Dietrich arrived, and was shown to the president’s private quarters. She and Kennedy had a glass of wine together and then, at 6.30pm, Marlene told him she had to attend a function that Jewish war veterans were holding in her honour in half an hour.
JFK looked straight in her eyes and said: “That doesn’t give us much time, does it?” She looked straight back and said: “No, Jack, I guess it doesn’t.”
Kennedy then led her through a corridor into the presidential bedroom. Apparently, “it was all over sweetly and very soon”. By 6.50pm, the President was fast asleep. Not knowing the way out, Marlene shook him, saying, “Jack – wake up! 2 000 Jews are waiting! Get me out of here!”
He escorted Marlene to the lift, and told the operator to get her to her destination. It was clear to her that this was a routine event.
A few months before Marlene’s speedy tryst, a 19-year-old schoolgirl called Mimi arrived at the White House as an intern, ready for holiday work in the press office. She was a virgin; her entire sexual experience amounted to a single kiss at a party.
Mimi had been introduced to the president a year before when she visited the White House to write a piece for her school newspaper.
Creepily, she had been shown around the White House by two other graduates of Miss Porter’s, nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle, both of whom, it was to emerge, were mistresses of the president.
A year later, the call came offering Mimi an internship. On her fourth day at work, a friendly fellow called Dave Powers, billed as the president’s “special assistant”, asked her if she’d like to swim in the White House pool. Later, Powers invited her to join them for cocktails in the president’s family quarters; Jackie Kennedy was away with the children at their country retreat.
The president asked her if she would like a tour of the residence. Mimi was excited. She knew Mrs Kennedy had undertaken an extensive redecoration programme, and, furthermore, “I had been interested in design since the moment I was given my dollhouse at 13.”
“This is Mrs Kennedy’s bedroom,” said the president, looking out of the window at the sunset. “Beautiful light, isn’t it?”
Mimi felt his breath on her neck. He placed his hands on her shoulders and led her to the edge of the bed. “Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts. Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear. I couldn’t believe what was happening. But more I couldn’t believe what I did next.
“I finished unbuttoning my shirtdress and let if fall off my shoulders. He pulled down his pants and then he was above me.”
She now thinks that, short of screaming, there was nothing she could have done to prevent him. On the other hand, “I felt for the first time the thrill of being desired”, and for this reason, she insists it was not rape.
Before long, they got into a routine: a swim at noon, a call from Dave Powers in the evening, then a bath together. All the time, this 19-year-old girl felt special.
“I never made the logical leap that if he behaved this way with me, he was probably doing the same with others.”
Come September, she was back at school, where she would regularly be summoned from her dormitory to take a telephone call from “Michael Carter”, the name Kennedy gave himself.
She would then be driven by taxi to New York’s LaGuardia airport, where she would pick up a prepaid ticket to Washington. There, a driver would be holding a sign saying “Michael Carter”.
Her 50-year-old memories of Kennedy are largely affectionate.
“He was a kind and thoughtful man ... He had true grace when he dealt with people,” she writes. Many readers may feel that her conclusions are at odds with his seedy behaviour.
One day, he says Dave Powers “looks a little tense” and tells her to “take care” of him. She knows what he means, and does it, while the president looks on. “It was a pathetic, sordid scene, and is very hard for me to think about today.”
Later, JFK wants her to do the same for his youngest brother Teddy, but she refuses. At another point, JFK asks her if she wants to try some capsules – probably amyl nitrate – and, when she says that she doesn’t, he simply pops the capsule open and holds it under her nose, causing her heart to race. “I panicked and ran crying from the room.”
Two months after Kennedy’s assassination, Mimi was married to a young man who, revolted by her confession of her affair with JFK, made her promise to tell no one about it. The news only broke 10 years ago, when she was unwittingly exposed by someone who worked alongside her in the White House.
Much of her memoir is about living with her secret – she didn’t tell her parents, or her children – and how it soured her first marriage.
Was Kennedy worse than other presidents? Well his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, was possibly the most forceful adulterer of them all.
His biographer reveals that he once walked into a female aide’s bedroom in his nightshirt in the middle of the night. “Move over, this is your president,” he said, commandingly. - Cape Argus
*Once Upon a Secret by Mimi Alford is published by Hutchinson