Droit de seigneur?

Shall we all take a peak down the front of Mimi Alford's shirt? She has invited us all to do just that, so here goes:

Uncertain and all of 19, tall and striking Marion “Mimi” Beardsley rode the train from Trenton, N.J.., down to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1962 to intern at the White House. The Wheaton College undergraduate was puzzled as to why she’d been chosen for the internship—she hadn’t applied. Beardsley had, however, written an article for her all-girls boarding school, Miss Porter’s School, about one of its most famous alumnae, the first lady. A trip to the White House had led to a chance meeting with the president. And a year later, there she was, on her way to one of the cushiest posts available to a young woman whose parents frequently consulted the Social Register.

I am reminded of a bit of dialogue from The Wings of the Dove.

Merton Densher: "I hope you don't allude to events at all calamitous."
Maud Lowder: "No—only horrid and vulgar."

Let's think the back story through here.

JFK sees a hot girl visiting the White House and says to his minions, "Get her for me." And they make it happen. David Francis Powers was "Special Assistant" to President Kennedy or, to put it in plain English, the president's pimp. Let me expand a bit so there is no mistake about the significance of being a pimp: David Francis Powers was a pimp, as in a morally worthless slimeball who exploits women sexually for personal profit. And he did well out of the deal—he later became curator of Kennedy's library and museum. I don't there is any other pimp in the 20th century who did quite so well.

And John F Kennedy was a John. I know, we're not supposed to be shocked anymore; we're supposed to be terribly blasé about it all. But get past the simple fact that a guy who was a moral icon to many did this thing and think about the way it happened. Think of Jimmy Swaggart who had to sneak away from everyone he knew and find a hooker and go to some seedy motel for his cheap thrills. Got that? Now compare that to a president asking his own staff to bend the rules so he can have some hot teen action ("barely legal" as they say in porn) and them all just lining up and saying "how high should we jump sir?"

And think how the press hunted Swaggart down and revealed all while same press not only kept JFK's secret, they kept on keeping it for a full forty years after his death.

And what about her side of the story? First of all, for those of you who don't follow these things, Miss Porter's School is as elite as elite prep schools get. You cannot get any further inside than that. So she's asked to be the president's high-class call girl and she goes with it. And yes there was quid pro quo: she cannot have been under any illusions about why she got an internship without even having to apply for it. Okay, we should cut her some slack: she's an impressionable teenager and he is the president but one would think that if an education at Miss Porter's was going to prepare her for anything, it should have prepared her not to be a call girl. Having grown up knowing girls who went to prep schools much lower in status than Miss Porter's, I think I can safely say that my expectations of what one gets from that sort of education are realistic enough that I can confidently say that is not setting the moral bar too high.

I'm sure she tells the story in such a way as to minimize her own moral agency. The question is whether we should believe her. I'm sure she didn't saunter up and offer to show him her thong and not just because thongs weren't around yet. But that makes it worse because there was a whole thicket of expected social behaviours that stood between JFK and what was inside her panties. He didn't get there without some help from her.

UPDATE: This detail from a New York Post story adds a significant detail:

She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

Smitten!

That, no doubt, explains this:

... during a noon swim. Powers had rolled up his pants to cool his feet in the water. “The president swam over and whispered in my ear. ‘Mr. Powers looks a little tense,’ he said. ‘Would you take care of it?’

“It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did . . . The president silently watched.”

That's pretty advanced behaviour for 1962, even for a graduate of Miss Porter's. I suspect many hookers of the time would have charged extra for such a thing. And I can't help but think that if Mimi was really ashamed of something that no one else could possibly know about (Powers and Kennedy both being long dead) she wouldn't have brought it up.