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Dems Better Put Some Ice on That 'Rape' Talk
Mimi Alford's recent book, Once Upon An Affair, details a few such incidents. No one who has read the book doubts its veracity. Alford's "affair" with John F. Kennedy began when she was a 19-year-old virgin working in the White House. To her great surprise, Alford found herself being given a private tour of the family quarters by a president whom she barely knew.
"He placed both hands on my shoulders and guided me towards the edge of the bed," she writes. "I landed on my elbows, frozen between sitting up and lying on my back. Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts." It goes on from there. The emotionally overwhelmed Alford did not resist, but if this isn't rape, it is something damn close -- a flagrant abuse of power, what the French might call droit de seigneur, the right of the master.
To flaunt his power, Kennedy later had Alford perform oral sex on one of his aides. "It was a pathetic, sordid scene," Alford writes. "He had emotionally abused me and debased Dave [Powers]. For what? To watch me perform for him and to show Dave how much he controlled us?" To her credit, Alford refused to comply the next time the president urged her to do the same for his brother Teddy.
Teddy, of course, had his own sordid history. In his exhaustive 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege, Leo Damore tells what happened the night the married Kennedy took an inebriated young aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, out for some casual sex on a Chappaquiddick beach.
They never got there. Their car went off a bridge. Thinking career first, Kennedy left Mary Jo alive, trapped in the car and gasping for air. He bypassed homes near the bridge, from which he could have called the police, and walked over a mile back to the house where he had been partying.
Once there, he sought out his lawyer friends, Joe Gargan and Paul Markham, to help him work out his alibi. Compromised by a presumed lawyer-client relationship, they had to wait for Kennedy to call for help. Kennedy never did. He may have been hoping that Gargan, the family fixer, would take the rap. Mary Jo, meanwhile, struggled to survive for perhaps an hour, even more.
Afterwards, being a Kennedy, Teddy requested and got all three networks to give him 15 minutes of prime time for an unprecedented bit of public dissembling. "There is no truth whatever to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening"...and he continued lying from there. Droit de seigneur.
Although Ted was never tried for rape, his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was. On Good Friday 1991, Kennedy took Smith and his son Patrick out for a long night of drinking. The young men brought two young women home with them. Hoping perhaps for his share of the action, a drunken Ted Kennedy, nearly 60 now, wandered without any pants on into the room where everyone had gathered. "I got totally weirded out," said one of the women. She got up and told the others, "I'm out of here. I'm leaving." The woman left behind the woman who would accuse Smith of rape. He would be acquitted.
Articles: Dems Better Put Some Ice on That 'Rape' Talk
Mimi Alford's recent book, Once Upon An Affair, details a few such incidents. No one who has read the book doubts its veracity. Alford's "affair" with John F. Kennedy began when she was a 19-year-old virgin working in the White House. To her great surprise, Alford found herself being given a private tour of the family quarters by a president whom she barely knew.
"He placed both hands on my shoulders and guided me towards the edge of the bed," she writes. "I landed on my elbows, frozen between sitting up and lying on my back. Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts." It goes on from there. The emotionally overwhelmed Alford did not resist, but if this isn't rape, it is something damn close -- a flagrant abuse of power, what the French might call droit de seigneur, the right of the master.
To flaunt his power, Kennedy later had Alford perform oral sex on one of his aides. "It was a pathetic, sordid scene," Alford writes. "He had emotionally abused me and debased Dave [Powers]. For what? To watch me perform for him and to show Dave how much he controlled us?" To her credit, Alford refused to comply the next time the president urged her to do the same for his brother Teddy.
Teddy, of course, had his own sordid history. In his exhaustive 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege, Leo Damore tells what happened the night the married Kennedy took an inebriated young aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, out for some casual sex on a Chappaquiddick beach.
They never got there. Their car went off a bridge. Thinking career first, Kennedy left Mary Jo alive, trapped in the car and gasping for air. He bypassed homes near the bridge, from which he could have called the police, and walked over a mile back to the house where he had been partying.
Once there, he sought out his lawyer friends, Joe Gargan and Paul Markham, to help him work out his alibi. Compromised by a presumed lawyer-client relationship, they had to wait for Kennedy to call for help. Kennedy never did. He may have been hoping that Gargan, the family fixer, would take the rap. Mary Jo, meanwhile, struggled to survive for perhaps an hour, even more.
Afterwards, being a Kennedy, Teddy requested and got all three networks to give him 15 minutes of prime time for an unprecedented bit of public dissembling. "There is no truth whatever to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening"...and he continued lying from there. Droit de seigneur.
Although Ted was never tried for rape, his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was. On Good Friday 1991, Kennedy took Smith and his son Patrick out for a long night of drinking. The young men brought two young women home with them. Hoping perhaps for his share of the action, a drunken Ted Kennedy, nearly 60 now, wandered without any pants on into the room where everyone had gathered. "I got totally weirded out," said one of the women. She got up and told the others, "I'm out of here. I'm leaving." The woman left behind the woman who would accuse Smith of rape. He would be acquitted.
Articles: Dems Better Put Some Ice on That 'Rape' Talk
