Mimi Alford

Marion Fay "Mimi" Alford (née Beardsley; born May 7, 1943) is an American woman who had an affair with President John F. Kennedy while she served as an intern in the White House press office between 1962 and 1963.

Despite the affair's consuming influence over her life at the time, Alford managed to keep the illicit trysts a secret for 40 years, until clues were leaked in 2003. Alford published her own book about the affair, Once Upon a Secret, in 2011.

In Beardsley's first year at Wheaton College, the White House offered her an open position as a summer intern in the White House press office; she accepted and began her internship in 1962. She was asked back for the following summer and visited the White House in between.

Later life Several hours after Kennedy was assassinated, Beardsley broke down and confessed the affair to her fiancé Tony Fahnestock. Although he was deeply hurt and angry, they married on schedule, in January 1964. The marriage produced two daughters and ended in divorce in 1990. Fahnestock died of cancer three years after the divorce, at age 52. Beardsley returned to college and graduated in 1994. She married Richard Alford, a sports marketing executive with IMG, in 2005. Alford is a grandmother and a retired New York City church administrator.

Revelation of affair In 2002, while historian Robert Dallek was researching his biography An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963, he came across a 1964 interview with Kennedy press aide Barbara Gamarekian in the JFK Presidential Library. The interview was one of scores collected by the Library as part of their oral history program, that described, in a roundabout way, Kennedy's dalliances with an intern named Mimi who "couldn't type" (page 24 of interview), who "had no skills" (page 24 of interview), "who obviously couldn't perform any function at all" (page 25 of interview) and others who worked in the press office, but "obviously she did have sort of a special relationship with the President. I don't know quite what it was" (page 17 of interview).

At Gamarekian's request in 1964, this part of her interview was permanently sealed, but Dallek persuaded her to unseal it so that he might include in his biography a mention of a "tall, slender, beautiful" intern among Kennedy's White House diversions, in the context of his argument that Kennedy was undistracted from duty by health troubles or women. The unsealed section was leaked by a JFK Library archivist on April 24, 2003, six days before Dallek's publication date.

Reporters hastened to identify the intern and on May 13 the New York Daily News ran a front-page teaser headline, "Fun and Games with Mimi in the White House", for its exposé, "JFK had a Monica". Alford confirmed the affair in a statement, but made no further comment at that time.

Later when Once Upon a Secret was published, Alford wrote that not only had she stumbled upon Gamarekian's oral interview at the JFK Presidential Library, but also Christine Camp's oral interview, and in particular one made on November 24, 1969, which referred to Alford without naming her, but some terms were strikingly similar to Gamarekian's:

Once Upon a Secret After the intrusive press attention of 2003, Alford felt she should try to take control of the story of her own life, and she began to write with her husband's encouragement. an imprint of Penguin Random House Group, and marketed as "a woman's coming-of-age story".

Once Upon a Secret spent several weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, the NPR Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list, and the Los Angeles Times Best Seller list.

In an interview with Ann Curry on February 9, 2012, Alford stated that at the time she did not feel guilty about the fact that the President was married, although in hindsight, "I feel guilty about not having felt guilty about Mrs. Kennedy."

In a subsequent interview with People magazine she stated, "if I was 19...I would do it again—it's hard to say I wouldn't."