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Four decades on, JFK's bedpost gets another notch

Damian Corless on the latest revelations

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Saturday May 30 2009

It was the high summer of '63. With the applause for his Ich bin ein Berliner speech still ringing in his ears, President John F Kennedy touched down in Ireland to a rapture worthy of the Second Coming. He addressed the Oireachtas, received the Freedom of Limerick and Galway, and supped tea with his Wexford cousins.

In the middle of this whirlwind, a phone call came through from a teenage girl in America. JFK dropped everything and took the call. The girl was phoning from the White House and she was mad. She was working as an intern and she wanted a day off, but her boss wouldn't play ball. The President barked down the phone that heads would roll if the office junior didn't get her way.

The girl was Mimi Beardsley, a beautiful young student who worked in the press office despite a lack of clerical skills. A 2003 JFK biography exposed an affair between the President and a student less than half his age, without naming her. But when a newspaper tracked her down, Mimi Beardsley Alford, as she'd become, broke silence on a secret she had kept for 40 years, saying: "I was a very young, very naïve, very innocent girl."

Now 66, Beardsley has received an advance of $1m from Random House to tell her story of the pool parties, the high jinks and the stolen moments with the planet's most powerful man. In the 2003 book, Kennedy aide Barbara Gamarekian recalled one incident where JFK attempted to smuggle Beardsley out of his quarters in Nassau. It didn't go to plan and she had to hide in a car "for several days". She added that other "cute, young, attractive" interns also had "a special relationship" with JFK.

JFK was living proof that power is an aphrodisiac. When Kennedy entered the White House in 1960, one of his top aides privately quipped: "This administration is going to do for sex what the last one did for golf." The aide could hardly have predicted that 46 years after JFK's killing, the notches on his bedpost would continue to mount, both factual and fictional.

Earlier this year, author Jed Mercurio published a novel entitled American Adulterer, which he wrote to disprove the assertion of JFK loyalist Arthur Schlesinger that not even half the stories of the president's love life could be true.

While Mercurio was dealing mostly in fiction, another real fling came to light with the revelation that Hjordis Niven, the Swedish wife of movie star David Niven, had submitted to JFK's request for "a quickie" on a 1963 White House visit. The President's charms were magnified by her desire to punish her husband for his infidelities. Her act of revenge backfired when the encounter left her with a sexually transmitted infection. Kennedy suffered from urethritic infections from 1940, which have been put down to his college career as a sexual predator.

Dubbed "Washington's Gay Young Bachelor" by the press when he entered the House of Representatives, he squired a dazzling succession of debutantes and Hollywood starlets.

As President, he graduated to stars, with Marilyn Monroe his most famous lover.

Speculation persists that Angie Dickinson was another to fall under his spell after they were introduced by Frank Sinatra. The actress has neither confirmed nor denied the rumours.

It was Sinatra who introduced JFK to the woman who would become the No 1 mistress of his presidency. Like Mimi Beardsley, Judith Exner kept her affair with Kennedy a secret for years after his death, only to spill the beans in a book after she had been outed. In Exner's case, the outing came in 1975 when an investigative committee identified her as a key link between JFK and Mafia boss Sam Giancana. When JFK ended the affair in 1962 under pressure from the FBI, Exner switched her affections to the mobster.

Three years before her death, Exner claimed she'd aborted JFK's baby and had couriered bribes from arms contractors to White House top brass, including Bobby Kennedy. She also revealed that Jackie Kennedy knew of her affair with JFK, on one occasion handing her husband Exner's pink panties which she'd found in her pillow case with the words: "These are not my size."

While a survey of scholars ranked JFK as the United States' eighth best President, polls of the American public repeatedly place him first or second. Death and the passing of decades has not dimmed his sex appeal.