Yes, Mr. President

Alford as a young woman.

Exactly how would a 19-year-old young woman - girl, in actual fact, a teenager - react when she realizes that the most powerful man on the face of the Globe is personally interested in her? It's rather predictable, is it not? A man of great personal charm and charisma, not to speak of authority, displays an interest in a young woman, and acts on that interest because he wishes to, and because he can.

He obviously spares little-to-no-thought about how this will impact her life. Nor does he consider the morality of what he does. He feels, in fact, entitled to behave as he wishes, with whomever he wishes. Her well-being and her feelings have little to do with his decision to act on an impulse. It is only his own physical satisfaction that he is engrossed in.

And since he comes from a family tradition of womanizing, he has no concerns about his wife or his children. The fact that the young woman is of an age that she could be his daughter seems of little concern to him, as well. Her youth and freshness are what appeals to him, her innocence and her apparent lack of guile or sophistication.

And so, Mimi Alford, as a newly-minted intern at the White House of John F. Kennedy in 1962, was guided through a pantomime she was unaware of. She was invited to swim with the White House staff so the president could gauge how she appeared in a swim suit, then she was invited to have a few drinks, and then the president gave her a personal tour of the White House.

And in Jackie Kennedy's powder-blue bedroom, he introduced her to sex. "I have never felt that it was rape. I was willing. Even though I was surprised and it was not something I had planned, I was clueless. I thought I was going on a tour of the residence, and I'd had two daiquiris. Now I can look back and see that I was being orchestrated into that [situation], but I still don't see it as rape."

Mimi Alford has written a memoir, titled Once Upon a Secret. It was not her intention to reveal all, unprovoked. In fact, a researcher into the Kennedy papers came across unclassified documents including an interview with a press aide that named Ms. Alford. "It was a shock at first; it took me back to when I used to feel like I needed to hide", she explained when she was exposed.

"But there was no point in denying it and saying, 'It wasn't me'". So, instead she began to write about what she had experienced, putting down her memories, and her younger daughter, reading them, encouraged her mother to have them published. "In all my memories, except for those few dark ones, he was mostly boyish with me and sometimes shy", she explained.

"It was not like a romantic love affair, or what I would imagine now as romance. It was like a play date." What it was, in actual fact, was the ultimate authority figure exploiting his power over someone who should have been protected from his advances. The man had ample opportunities, which he took, of playing the lover to a wide range of women, from celebrities to his own wife.

His appetite was wider than his view of ethical behaviour. Whatever else he was, he was also a molesting predator of the first order.

The Associated Press In this Feb. 10, 2012 photo, Mimi Alford, author of "Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath," poses for a photograph in New York.