“Sorry, Ted, but I’ve — er — got a headache”

That JFK was an unrepentant philandering horndog hardly comes as a revelation to anyone except for those who persist in believing in the Camelot twaddle.

He came by it quite naturally, since paterfamilias Joe was a swine of the highest order. The old bootlegging millionaire aside from screwing anybody and everybody he could, was a right-wing Nazi symp whom FDR booted out of the country and made ambassador to Britain so he could rub old Joe’s Paddy nose in a job that called for him to make nice with the loathed Brits.

And now there is Mimi Alford. Ms. Alford, 68, in case you’ve been asleep, is the former White House intern who ‘did’ the president. I mean, really, who didn’t? But that is not my point here. My point is, why the revelation? What is the reason for the Alford revelations?

At the very least such a book is cheesy and unkind. For another, the martyred president’s daughter is still very much alive, so some of this shit Ms. Alford reveals has to be a little vomit-inducing, even if Carolyn was aware that ‘stuff’ went on at dear old Dad’s behest when it came to panty removal.

According to the story she first spent time with the president at the White House pool. He later plied her with booze on that day and then took her to Jackie’s powder-blue bedroom where they had sex. She was all of 19 at the time, by the way. She refuses to see that first encounter as rape, though with the alcohol involvement, as many hapless of college lads have found out, a charge of ‘statutory’ would certainly stand up in court. But then again, that was the Kennedy family up to their shenanigans. Just ask the Kopechne family about that sort of thing.

Anyway, later JFK implored her to indulge a friend in Bill Clinton’s preferred sexual pastime while he watched. Then at a party at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs he gave her Amyl Nitrate and also asked her to ‘do’ li’l brother Ted. She refused. She doesn’t clarify why.

And so it went on right up until the time of the assassination with her continuing as No. 1 twinkie right up to that moment. In the later months she was actually engaged to be married.

In an interview following publication of her book, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, she was asked if perhaps she was little more than the president’s call-girl. Ms. Alford explains it away thusly: “I didn’t believe that then, no. I didn’t even know what a call-girl was. Was I taken advantage of? Looking back I can see that it was not a place for a 19-year-old to be (you think?) I don’t like to use the word abuse, but the experience had a traumatic effect on me.”

All I am left to wonder is what on earth would be her motivation in writing such a memoir so many years after Kennedy’s death? No doubt the Kennedys have enemies enough that will revel in the crap she offers them. But, as I suggested earlier, none of this stuff is new. Despite his good points as president, and there were many, he was hardly a pinnacle of moral rectitude. We all have known that for a long time.

And why would Ms. Alford chosen to have painted herself in such a slutty light?

And muckraking is muckraking no matter how much you disguise your motivation and protest your altruism and naivete. I don’t think it will be on my ‘must read’ list.