John F Kennedy Took Her Virginity

During the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where the U.S. and USSR had a nuclear stand-off, he reportedly told her that: 'I’d rather my children red than dead.'

And Alford, then Mimi Beardsley, also tells of how she erroneously believed at one point she was pregnant with JFK's child, and another moment of when her lover reached out to her following the death of his infant son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy.

She wrote: 'I had never seen real grief in my relatively short life. He invited me upstairs, and we sat outside on the balcony in the soft summer evening air. There was a stack of condolence letters on the floor next to his chair, and he picked each one up and read it aloud to me... Occasionally, tears rolling down his cheeks, he would write something on one of the letters, probably notes for a reply. But mostly he just read them and cried. I did, too.'

Alford said she saw President Kennedy for the final time at The Carlyle hotel in Manhattan on November 15, 1963, just a week before his assassination in Dallas. At this point she was due to be married to her college sweetheart, Tony Fahnestock.

'He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, "I wish you were coming with me to Texas." And then he added, "I'll call you when I get back." I was overcome with sudden sadness. "Remember, Mr President, I’m getting married."

'"I know that," he said, and shrugged. 'But I’ll call you anyway.'"