The New York Times deeply loves the Kennedy family. Media critics of a certain age recall how the Times sent a reporter in 1991 to peek in the windows of a woman accusing William Kennedy Smith of raping her. Fox Butterfield demeaned the accuser for having “a little wild streak” and reported she had poor high-school grades and 17 traffic tickets.
It was in that defend-the-reckless-Kennedy spirit that Times book critic Janet Maslin slammed Mimi Alford’s new memoir on Thursday. The 19-year-old with a wild streak had dared to write about it 50 years later. Don’t buy this book, Maslin insists, there’s no news in it, and besides, Alford looks like a complete sleaze in it:
There is much to tsk-tsk about in Ms. Alford’s account of her wide-eyed innocence and the president’s particular brand of cruelty toward her. But there’s not a lot of news, so the fuss should soon die down. When it does, “Once Upon a Secret” can be better appreciated for what it really is: the strangest memoir about secrets and lies since “The Politician,” by Andrew Young, exposed the delusional arrogance behind John Edwards’s presidential campaign. Like Mr. Young, Ms. Alford seems to have little idea how badly her stories reflect on herself.
It’s certainly fair to question Alford’s lack of morality when she was 19, cavorting with a married man, especially a president. It’s as unthinking as Monica Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Cliton. But to Maslin, Alford is the most dreadful of liars and cheaters. This is a verdict she doesn’t pass on to JFK – or his large crowd of media enablers and myth-makers over the decades:
Ms. Alford’s account of her own mental processes is remarkable for what it misses. She did not think of confiding in anyone. She did not think this was an extramarital affair. (“I was merely occupying the president’s time when his wife was away.”) She did not think it interesting that, while his favorite song was “I Believe in You,” that paean to self-confidence from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” her teenage taste ran to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” And she didn’t find it degrading to be put on the plane with the luggage when the president traveled.
What she especially didn’t think about was the steep price she would pay for her actions. Sure, she began to notice that other White House staffers resented her. And she realized that, as a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts being whisked off to Washington for weekends during the school year, she didn’t have a life of her own. But Ms. Alford was so bewitched that she continued to think of honesty “as a defining aspect of my personality, a core value,” even as she learned how to lie to everyone she knew.
Maslin bends only very briefly to acknowledge that Alford’s stories display a "vile" JFK, but she insists Alford didn’t and doesn’t really object. It’s a very abrupt “yes, but” burp, and then back to whacking Alford:
“Once Upon a Secret” includes a couple of truly vile episodes in which the president humiliated Mimi by telling her to service other men sexually. But the first part of the book mostly presents her as a willing, star-struck participant who appealed to the president’s snobbery. “He just couldn’t resist a girl with a little bit of Social Register in her background,” she writes.
Maslin concluded by mocking the smallness of Alford’s little life, that anyone would care to spend money and turn pages listening to this historical footnote talk about eventually having a successful marriage after her first one never recovered from her intern misbehavior.
What now? Serenity of course. Ms. Alford claims to be completely purged of guilt, grief and baggage by the cleansing process of acknowledging past mistakes. And she describes a happy new marriage, albeit in the strangest terms. (“What could be better, I thought, than a man whose enthusiasm for Brussels sprouts matched mine?”) She describes working for a church without being religious. She writes about weekly budget-balancing with her husband as if it were more fun than lolling around in the president’s bathtub. And, most astoundingly, she ends the book with an inspirational account of how she and her husband visited the Kennedys’ graves at Arlington National Cemetery.
Thinking of the president lying beside the first lady did make her feel “like an intruder,” she admits. So the etiquette lessons of her cotillion days at least taught her something. But she also mouths the words “Thank you” at the gravesite, because she believes President Kennedy gave her a terrible secret that became a great blessing that became a miraculous redeeming force, a gift that now warrants public celebrating. It took an awful lot of Brussels sprouts to give her the clean conscience she boasts today.
Maslin really should have just written a brief book review that said: "Oh, just shut up, Mimi Alford, shut up!" She and the Times want to preserve the flea-bitten Camelot myth, that somehow the Kennedy gravesite at Arlington is a sacred place holding a very special man. Alford shouldn't dare to approach it. She no doubt meant she shouldn't approach Mrs. Kennedy's gravesite. In her high dudegeon, Maslin doesn't stop to think -- as with most shameless Kennedy mythmakers -- that by her logic., perhaps Mr. Kennedy doesn't deserve to be next to Mrs. Kennedy at this site.
One certainly cannot say Maslin approached this review in any way with a feminist mentality. It's not a "blame the victim" attack, since the "victim" in this book insists she consented to everything "vile" in her story. But imagine the New York Times slamming an Anita Hill like this. In fact, you can't.
