Once Upon a Secret- My Affair & President John F Kennedy & Its Aftermath by Mimi Alford

Author:Mimi Alford
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-17T09:08:21+00:00

Chapter Ten

“I met someone,” I told the President in the winter of 1963. I said it in a teasing way but also with a note of pride, as I rarely had anything substantive to report about my social life when he asked. And he always asked. “I went to Williams College on a blind date.”

“Williams!” he exclaimed. “How could you?”

“Not everyone goes to Harvard, Mr. President.”

During this particular conversation—the President had called me at Wheaton—he pressed me for details, but after just one date I was short on specifics. All I could say was that my date was “really nice.” The President continued to feign shock. “Ah, Mimi,” he said, “you’re not going to leave me, are you?”

“Of course not,” I assured him, and it was true. The thought of extricating myself from the President had never occurred to me. But it would in time.

The young man in question was Tony Fahnestock, a senior at Williams. Only later would he tell me that his invitation to join him at the college’s Winter Carnival had been a shameless ploy. He wasn’t interested in me; he was keen on meeting my beautiful blonde classmates, Wendy Taylor and Kirk Dyett.

I’d seen Tony once before, from a distance, when I was sixteen and working as a mother’s helper in the summer of 1959. We were at the Seabright Beach Club in New Jersey, and he was sitting with a group of eighteen-year-old boys and girls under a green-and-white striped umbrella while I was keeping my little charges from drowning in the baby pool. A two-year age difference is an enormous gap when you’re a teenager. I remember watching Tony’s group lounging about and laughing, envying their cool sophistication, and wondering if I could ever be like them. So I was surprised when he called me, out of the blue, at Wheaton; he wasn’t someone I ever thought I’d run into again.

The first thing I noticed when he picked me up at the bus station in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were his dark, crescent-shaped brown eyes. They gave him an endearing, sleepy look. He was two inches taller than I, which was a relief for someone my height. He wasn’t brash and loud and overconfident, and he didn’t talk about himself excessively. He was quiet and serious, and I liked that immediately.

Tony was busy taking special State Department exams for most of the weekend; he was considering joining the CIA. Our date was basically the Saturday-night dance, where I had to coax Tony out on the dance floor. We surprised each other by hitting it off from the beginning, to the point that Tony soon forgot all about my beautiful classmates and began to focus only on me. I knew that something special was happening when he insisted on driving me all the way back to Wheaton on Sunday, nearly a three-hour ride in weekend traffic, instead of sending me off at the Pittsfield bus station.

That was the sum total of my knowledge of Tony when I told President Kennedy that I had “met someone.

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