Illicit sexual activity did not arrive at the White House in Washington when Donald Trump became president.
He’s just the latest adulterer to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Bill Clinton’s infidelities and sexual escapades are well-documented, including the oral sex that left a splatter of his semen on 19-year-old Monica Lewinsky’s dress.
He wasn’t the first president to bed a teenage intern in the White House.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy found a teenaged Wheaton College student he met so infatuating he arranged her to get an unasked-for internship at the White House during his presidency and took her virginity on the bed used by first lady Jackie.
Mimi Beardsley Alford detailed how Kennedy also pushed her to perform oral sex on a White House aide so he could watch and then suggested she do the same for younger brother Ted Kennedy because “he needed cheering up.”
Alford said she did go down on presidential aide Dave Powers as he watched but refused to do the same on Ted.
Kennedy moved fast on Alford. Just a few days after she arrived at the White House as a 19-year-old intern, he invited the beautiful girl for a swim and then took her to the first lady’s bedroom.
“I wouldn’t describe what happened that night as making love, but I wouldn’t call it nonconsensual either,” she later wrote in her book: “Once Upon a Secret: My affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath.”
Their 18-month relationship ended when Kennedy died n 1963
“I’m not going to say he loved me, but I think he did like me a lot,” she recalls.
Revealing the relationship did not bring hasty denials but confirmations from others.
Robert Dallek’s acclaimed Kennedy Biography “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, describes “a tall, slender, beautiful nineteen-year-old college sophomore” who was often with him
Barbara Gamarekian, former press side to Kenndey, says Alford “has a sort of a special relationship with the president…the sort of thing that legitimate newspaper people don’t write about and don’t even make any implications about.:
Alford kept quiet about her relationship with Kennedy for 40 years but went public after reporters tracked her down in 2003. Dallek says Alford’s admissions about her affair with is “entirely credible” and calls the incident with Powers “disgusting” but believable.
He said he wrote about Alford in his book as a reference to the changing social mores of the country. When Kennedy was president, reporters in Washington knew about his adultery and other sexual antics but never wrote about it.
Kennedy’s libido may have been unreported at the time, but it was the topic of much discussion at parties in Washington during his presidency.
His affair with Marilyn Monroe is now well known. Lesser known was his on-again-off-again affair with an artist, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who later died from a gunshot attack in Georgetown in a crime that remains unsolved.
Kennedy also had the hots for Meyer’s sister, Antoinette “Tony” Meyer, then married to Newsweek Washington reporter Ben Bradlee, who would later become editor of the Washington Post.
On May 29, 1963, Kennedy had about two dozen guests aboard the presidential Yacht Sequoia for his 46th birthday and spent most of the evening “pursuing” Tony Bradlee. The guests included actors David Niven and Peter Lawford, married to Kennedy’s sister Pat.
Tony Bradlee remembered that evening all too well.
“I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass,” Tony Bradlee later recounted. “It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered. I said, ‘That’s it, so long.’ I was running like mad.”
“I guess I was pretty surprised, but I was kind of flattered, and appalled, too.”
Appalling, perhaps, but not surprising.
__________________________________________________________
Copyright © 2019 Capitol Hill Blue