JFK and the 19-year old virgin

A note on JFK's alleged affair with the virginal nineteen-year-old intern, as reported in her own memoir, "Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath" by Mimi Alford ...

This should not have surprised me or anyone else. It's not the first time the subject has come up, but it had previously been mentioned only en passant because JFK was fuckin' so many women that each individual one usually became just part of a long laundry list. For example, page 476 of Robert Dallek's "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963" makes a list of several women, including two secretaries called Fiddle and Faddle, and

"A tall, slender beautiful nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern who worked in the press office during two summers. (She 'had no skills' a member of the press staff recalled. 'She couldn't type.')"

I find all this fascinating, but I don't mean to condemn. I'm not really in a position to. When I lived in Hungary in 1993, I had an affair with a nineteen-year-old college student who in many ways was the love of my life, and whose inevitable loss, while accepted then and now with stoic resignation, still fills me with some regret. I was 44 at the time. JFK had just turned 45 when he seduced Mimi Alford, so the age difference is almost exactly parallel and kinda prevents me from taking some artificial moral high ground. Of course, I was in love, was monogamous, and probably would have married her if there had been some way to make it work, but all of that just seems like rationalization when I try to see it objectively.