Imagine what it would feel like to be a nineteen-year-old summer intern in the White House press office in 1962 hand selected for an affair by President John F. Kennedy himself. Mimi Alford, née Beardsley, now sixty-nine and a retired church administrator, doesn’t have to imagine. Kennedy began an affair with the then-naïve Alford that would last nearly eighteen months, until his tragic death in November 1963.

In her memoir “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath,” out earlier this year, Alford reveals details of her relationship with one of the most powerful men in the world after having kept it a virtual secret for forty-one years. “I am Mimi Alford, and I do not regret what I did. I was young and I was swept away, and I cannot change that fact,” she states in the first chapter.

She writes about how she was first “outed” by Robert Dallek in his 2003 biography “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963” as a “‘tall, slender, beautiful’ nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern . . .” in a paragraph revealing JFK’s myriad affairs. The Daily News, unable to let this mystery intern go unnamed, investigated further until cornering Alford into confessing the truth.

Along with the reveal of her affair came other truths; like how confusing it was for Alford to confide in her first husband about her relationship with Kennedy only to have him essentially pretend it hadn’t happened. She writes about “an emptiness inside [her] that [she] didn’t know how to fill” until she was able to come clean with her story. In “Once Upon a Secret,” Alford finds solace in her newfound freedom, allowing her to take readers through some of her most fascinating stories of the “White House days,” but also to honestly reflect on many of the imprudent choices she made as a vulnerable young woman. Prepare to be pulled into this story after listening to the excerpt below.