by Unknown
When I’m anxious, I organize. So I spent the weekend doing my laundry, cleaning the kitchen, mopping the floor, cleaning the tub, and restocking the refrigerator. I went shopping for a few items to dress up my tiny, spartan bedroom. I went on several solitary walks through Georgetown, losing myself in its maze of beautiful streets.
My anxiety peaked late Sunday night as I was laying out my wardrobe for work the next day. Standing over the bed, considering my options, it struck me that I had no idea what to expect from this job. I thought I had gone to work at the White House to learn, to see major-league journalists at work. And my first three days in the press office met those expectations. But the events of Thursday night had changed things forever. I was confused. I couldn’t make sense of the place or the people in it or my role there—and for a brief moment on that Sunday night, I decided I didn’t want to go back.
The feeling passed as quickly as it appeared. I reminded myself to be brave, and then crawled into bed.
Week two at the White House began calmly enough. I still hadn’t seen Fiddle or Jill in the office since my encounter with the President, nor had I heard from Dave Powers. I was keeping my head down, going about my duties on Monday morning, when I overheard someone say that the President had returned from Glen Ora, and that Mrs. Kennedy had stayed behind in Virginia. The mere mention of his name jolted me. I sat at my desk, paralyzed, my eyes focused on the phone. What if it rang and it was Dave? How would I deal with that? What would I say?
It’s odd to me now, almost fifty years later, that I felt this way, that I still hadn’t made up my mind about what I’d say if he suggested another afternoon swim or drinks in the residence. Frankly, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I couldn’t settle my mind. I wasn’t revolted or appalled by what had happened, and I wasn’t harmed. I was certainly confused. Probably the most accurate description of my state of mind was fascination. Being singled out by the President made me feel special, which was not a feeling I was accustomed to. A story was unfolding in front of me—with me in a starring role—and I was searching for the answer to the universal question: What happens next?
I prayed that the phone would not ring.
Then the phone rang. It was Dave Powers. “Would you like to come for a lunchtime swim?” he asked.
I believe that all life stories have at least one pivot point, a central, animating event from which other events unfold. If you had asked me to name my pivot point before I started writing this book, I would have answered with the births of my daughters—because those two events brought me so much joy. But I realize now that a pivotal moment isn’t necessarily the most joyful or memorable one; it is often just the moment that reverberates most powerfully.
I realize now that Dave Powers’s call, which lasted all of fifteen seconds, was my personal pivot point—because everything would have been so different if I had simply said no.
But I didn’t say no.
I didn’t know Dave or the President well enough, at that point, to appreciate that I had a choice—that I could turn down the invitation, and all it implied, without repercussion. It wasn’t as if Dave would become petulant or vindictive because an intern said no to an afternoon swim with his boss. I would eventually come to know that President Kennedy wouldn’t have given my absence from the pool that afternoon more than a second’s thought. He might have been momentarily disappointed or puzzled, but then he’d have moved on.
He wouldn’t have punished me for my decision. He was a kind and thoughtful man, beloved by all the people who worked for him. He had true grace when he dealt with people. He would have been incapable of telling Dave Powers to deal with me in some punitive way.* He could be sharp and tough, but he saved such displays of power for people who threatened his presidency or his political agenda, not for people who worked for him. I was no threat to him.
But what’s important is what I believed at the time. I believed if I said no, my dream of a full-time job at the White House would slip away forever. I would never again be invited into the President’s inner circle. I would never again experience the heady feeling of being in the same room with the President.
So even though I cringe now, I understand why that nineteen-year-old girl said yes to Dave Powers’s invitation. She was on her own for the first time in her life, away from parents and siblings, home and school. She was flattered by the repeat invitation. She was determined to have fun, damn the consequences.
That’s why I got up from my desk and walked to the pool.
Fiddle and Jill were already in the water, swimming circles around the President. He was floating on his back, letting the warm water work its magic, and trading jokes with Fiddle and Jill. He barely acknowledged my arrival, betraying no hint of what had happened between us just a few days before. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye. But I was there in a bathing suit at poolside, wasn’t I? What did I think was going to happen? I slid into the pool and floated toward the group. The President now turned in my direction, and seemed genuinely happy to see me, but he stuck to banal small talk. He asked me if I had a nice weekend, if I was enjoying my job, nothing more interesting than that. If he was feeling any remorse or guilt about the last time we were together, he wasn’t showing it.
This, in hindsight, was shrewd behavior—and no doubt instinctual for someone so naturally attuned to other people. He created such a feeling of normalcy at the pool that I gradually began to relax. The President didn’t touch me or treat me differently or do anything improper, which gave me some comfort. Maybe our previous encounter had been a onetime occurrence and wouldn’t happen again. I’m not sure why I believed this, because I’m not sure I can say that I didn’t want it to happen again. The truth is, I was deluding myself, behaving like a girl who protests at a boy’s advances but complains even more loudly when he stops. So when, later that afternoon, Dave called again and asked me to come up to the residence after work, I accepted. I also assumed that Fiddle and Jill would be there.
But the sitting room was empty when Dave escorted me upstairs. The same pitcher of daiquiris was on the coffee table, right next to the same platter of cheese puffs, and a few minutes later, the President arrived. He and Dave joked back and forth while I held on to my hope that more company was coming.
When Dave stood up to leave, I panicked and stood up to leave with him, but the President intervened.
“Stay for supper, Mimi,” the President said. “The kitchen staff always leaves food in the icebox.”
I froze.
“And have another daiquiri,” he said.
Soon he was leading me into a bedroom he hadn’t shown me before. It turned out to be his. “Would you like to take a bath?” he asked, showing me into the bathroom. “You can close the door.” I was in such a state of nerves that a nice warm bath actually sounded relaxing. “I’ll meet you in my bedroom,” he said, and left me alone.
This was the beginning of our affair.
Although the President maintained a crowded, highly choreographed schedule, he had to carve out time to tend to his ailing back at least once a day. This forced him to become a creature of habit. The midday swim in the overheated pool was an inviolable part of his routine, and so it became part of my routine as well. I would swim with the President at noon or near the end of the workday, race back to my desk, and then wait for a call to come upstairs in the evening. The governing factor behind these calls, of course, was the presence—or, more accurately, the absence—of Mrs. Kennedy in the White House.
In late June 1962, after the President and First Lady returned from a state visit to Mexico—we all called him “El P” for a week after the Mexican citizens had cheered him as “El Presidente”—Mrs. Kennedy departed on a long trip, first to Hyannis Port with the children, then to Italy for most of August. Alone in the White House for much of that summer, the President called for me at least once, and often twice, a week.
After that first night, we never went back to Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom. We stayed i
n his, which wasn’t as pretty but had a lovely antique four-poster bed with a patterned blue canopy and a seating area with two blue chairs in front of a working fireplace. There were piles of books, newspapers, and magazines scattered about.
As we spent more and more time together, the absurdity of our relationship, and my self-consciousness, gradually began to wear off. The President was particularly deft at defusing any awkwardness about the gross imbalance in our relative status by openly referring to the fact that I was a student—and having some fun with it.
“What did all you girls do locked up in that boarding school?” he often asked.
Of course he was looking for a scandalous answer, but really there wasn’t one.
“Nothing,” I’d reply, and mean it.
This was an answer he refused to accept. Part of him seemed to be still an adolescent teenager at Choate, and it may have been that I reminded him of a much simpler, easygoing time in his life. He always seemed quite boyish and relaxed when we were together. As time went by, he was also more attentive, more gentlemanly than he had been in our first encounter. There was nothing abrupt in his manner anymore. As our relationship continued through the summer, sometimes he would be seductive. Sometimes he was playful.
Sometimes he acted as if he had all the time in the world. Other times, he was in no mood to linger. Our sexual relationship was varied and fun.
President Kennedy was a sensualist. We spent an inordinate amount of time taking baths during our evenings together. He changed his shirts as often as six times a day, as he hated feeling sweaty or grimy. In that first summer, we turned the elegant bathroom off his bedroom—with its thick white towels, luxurious soaps, and fluffy white robes, embossed with the presidential seal—into our own mini-spa. The only discordant note were the rubber ducks, which appeared later that fall, around the time when Vaughn Meader’s comedy album The First Family was the number-one-selling record in the country.*
Evidently, after Meader in one skit had the President listing which toys are Caroline’s or John’s and then insisting, “The rubber duck is mine!” a friend sent him a team of yellow rubber ducks, which he immediately installed as permanent fixtures along the rim of his bathtub. And every time he saw the ducks, it kick-started a playful side of him. That was part of his charm: He was a serious, sophisticated man with extraordinary responsibilities and yet he was willing to be completely silly, to play along with a joke at his expense. It was an irresistible quality. We named the ducks after his family members, made up stories about them, and often set them racing from one end of the tub to other.
Forty-five years later, after my secret was out, I described these rubber ducks to a friend. “You didn’t have an affair with the President,” she concluded. “You had a play-date.”
After our baths, we’d have a light meal—usually cold chicken, shrimp cocktail, or roast-beef sandwiches, whatever the staff had stocked in the kitchen refrigerator or left out on a wheeled-in serving table. I can’t recall one time when the President and I sat down to a hot meal in the residence; for obvious reasons, he would ask the staff to provide food and drinks for him and then give them the night off. Evidently, he felt he could trust his private life with Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell and his valet George Thomas, all three of whom appeared to have total, all-hours access to the residence. The Secret Service agents tended to remain downstairs, rarely venturing to the second floor.
We had the full run of the second floor to ourselves, but we rarely ventured beyond his room and the kitchen. He taught me how to scramble eggs the way he liked them, slowly stirring them in the top of a double boiler.
At some point in the evening, he would put a record on the turntable that was built into the wall of the passageway that connected his room to Mrs.
Kennedy’s. He loved popular music, and his taste tended toward anything by Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra. It wasn’t music that I could relate to. I preferred pop tunes about lovesick girls, like Little Peggy March’s “I Will Follow Him” and the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” About the only place where our musical tastes overlapped was with “I Believe in You” from the Frank Loesser musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The President would pull out the LP of the original cast recording and set the needle on the big tune from act two of the hit show.* Something about Robert Morse crooning the lyrics—“You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth”—seemed to light up some pleasure center deep inside his brain. He liked the song so much I made a point of learning the lyrics so I could sing along.
Sometimes, if it got too late, I would sleep over with the President, which seems incomprehensible to me now, given the level of media scrutiny. But at the time, it seemed perfectly natural.
“Do what you want,” the President would say to me. “You can go home or you can stay.”
On the nights I stayed over, he’d lend me one of his soft blue cotton nightshirts to wear. In the morning I might wake up to the President having breakfast in bed, while reading the many newspapers he had delivered to the residence daily. Then he’d take a bath, where he shaved to save time, get dressed, and head off to the Oval Office between nine and nine-thirty.
I never felt I had to sneak out of the residence in the early hours before the staff arrived. On the contrary, I felt comfortable lingering there with or without the President. The Secret Service agents knew I’d spent the night with the President. Mr. Thomas always greeted me kindly but was too discreet and loyal to ever hint—through a word or a knowing glance—that he disapproved of my presence. I usually went home to change my clothes before coming back to work, but sometimes I just took the elevator downstairs, walked along the portico, past the swimming pool and the Cabinet Room, and into the press office. I was so pleased with myself at being chosen by the President that I didn’t feel self-conscious at all about wearing the same clothes two days in a row. If my office mates noticed, I didn’t care. I felt invulnerable, as if I were cloaked with the President’s power.
During that first summer with the President, I developed what I believed was a close friendship with Dave Powers. It was impossible not to like Dave. He had an Irishman’s easy way with conversation, combined with the discretion of a priest. I felt that Dave had an avuncular interest in taking care of me and making sure I didn’t get hurt. I realize now that he was creating a smoke screen like a skilled political operative. Dave wasn’t taking care of me. He was taking care of the President. I’ve often wondered how Dave, given my youth and the fact that he had two daughters of his own, rationalized his role as a go-between.
The two of us spent a lot of time together in the residence, drinking daiquiris and waiting for the President, but I don’t recall him ever once bringing his children up. Doing so would have meant jolting me out of my feelings of being cared for, of belonging. His job was to accompany me upstairs, stay with me for a few minutes, and leave. I often took a long bath and waited for the President in one of the bathrobes.
On occasion, Dave would come back later in the evening, have a drink, and regale us with stories and political gossip. The two men enjoyed each other’s company immensely—and sometimes their attention would turn to me. For example, neither Dave nor the President could believe I wasn’t the object of universal pursuit by boys my age.
I finally dealt with their incredulity, which was no doubt exaggerated for my benefit, by telling them about Jimmy Robbins, a student at the University of Pennsylvania whom I had dated briefly during my freshman year at Wheaton.
Date was too strong a word for what we did. Our “romance” consisted of one weekend at Penn, a visit to my home in New Jersey, and a weekend at his parents’ house in Bedford, New York, where, it quickly became clear, he much preferred playing golf all day to being with me. As I sat around waiting for Jimmy on Sunday afternoon, his brother took pity and treated me to lunch. But I didn’t tell the President and Dave all that; I let the possibility that Jimmy and I were still an item linger in the ai
r.
They both pounced on it, especially the fact that Jimmy was attending the University of Pennsylvania. It inspired a running joke whenever I was around the two of them. “Dave, make sure the Secret Service knows that if a guy shows up to take a tour in a UPenn sweatshirt, to tell him the White House is closed.” Or: “You know that guy in the UPenn sweatshirt, Mr. President? We arrested him today.”
They were mocking me in the most gentle way, and I glowed because of their attention.
Of course, I wasn’t aware at the time that I wasn’t unique, that there were other women in the President’s life. I never made the logical leap that if he behaved this way with me, he was probably doing the same with others. I would read later that Dave Powers cautioned many presidential lovers to remain silent because such clandestine behavior might become an issue of “national security,” but he never mentioned such a thing to me. He didn’t have to. If I’d spoken to anyone about our relationship, I figured, I would be revealing my own questionable behavior as well as betraying the President.
I’m hardly the first person to write about the incredible pass the media gave the President when it came to his private life—it’s almost unfathomable, given the climate today, when even the most private moments in our public figures’ lives are held up for our scrutiny. A big reason, beyond it just simply being a different, more discreet era, was that the media—not all of them, but most of them—worshipped President Kennedy. There were some halfhearted inquiries about the President’s indiscretions along the way, though I don’t know whether they were about me or the others. Thirty years later, in an interview with the Washingtonian magazine, Pierre Salinger would recall how easily he dispatched one such caller.
“I gave him a 1960s answer, not a 1990s answer,” Pierre said. “ ‘Look, he’s the president of the United States. He’s got to work 14 to 16 hours a day. He’s got to run foreign and domestic policy. If he’s got time for mistresses after all that, what the hell difference does it make?’ The reporter laughed and walked out.