FRESH out of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., a well-brought-up young woman named Mimi Beardsley (now Alford) went to work, in 1962, as an intern in President Kennedy’s press office.

Thanks to Ms. Alford’s memoir — which was released last week and well publicized — everyone now knows that, on the fourth day of her internship, after a trusted aide and go-between, David Powers, plied the 19-year-old intern with daiquiris, the president gave her a private tour of the White House residence and then took her virginity on the first lady’s bed. (Mrs. Kennedy, conveniently, was away.) They embarked on an affair that lasted 18 months, until Nov. 15, 1963, when she met the president at the Carlyle in Manhattan, two months before her marriage. He gave her a gift she used to buy a tasteful gray suit from Bloomingdale’s as a wedding present. The following Friday, he was assassinated in Dallas. Ms. Alford never made her full story public until last week, when her book came out.

I could not rest until I met this woman.

My motives were twofold. The first was that I suspected that, in a parallel universe, my mother, who is Ms. Alford’s age and, like her, was the editor of her high school paper, could have been the star-struck young girl in the Pappagallo flats and madras dress who succumbed to the wiles of the handsome commander in chief. In 1960, when he came to Springfield, Ill., on his election tour, my mother sneaked into his hotel. He shook her hand and said, “Young lady, I believe I’ve seen you here in Springfield last year.” She was mesmerized. (My mother, who looked like Jackie Kennedy and who has been married to my father for 46 years, said of Ms. Alford, “I’m just mad it wasn’t me!”) The second reason: I was curious about the self-effacing woman who describes herself, as she did in her book, as a “footnote to a footnote in the story of America’s 35th president.”

Would she turn out to be enigmatic, standoffish or inscrutable, or an Audrey Hepburn who’d found her way to Breakfast at Camelot? Not at all.