She was the intern whose secret was kept for 40 years and he was the president who didn’t confine his affairs to a side room off the Oval Office.

But now Mimi Beardsley Alford, a retired New York church administrator, who as a teenager had an 18-month sexual relationship with President John F Kennedy, has finally decided to tell the story of those White House days and the impact the revelation of the affair four decades later has had on her life.

The relationship was exposed in 2003 in a biography of Kennedy that included a reference to JFK’s involvement with a Mimi Beardsley. She had not even told her parents or children of the affair. A New York newspaper found that Beardsley Alford had married, changed her name, divorced and was working for a Presbyterian church.

After the revelations Beardsley Alford said no more than to confirm that she was “involved in a sexual relationship” with the president from June 1962. But her agent, Mark Reiter, told the New York Times that she is now writing her own account of the relationship, in a book called Once Upon a Secret, to be published by Random House.

“As she thought about it, she said: ‘This is a story that I’d like to take control of, rather than have somebody else tell my side of it,'” he said.

Reiter said Beardsley Alford would not be serving up salacious details of the affair.

“She’s just not that type of person where she’s going to spill her guts about intimate stuff for the whole country to see,” he said. “The story has three acts to it: before the White House, during the White House, and then the really powerful part is what happens afterwards. What’s the impact on your family life, your marriage, knowing that this happened to you in your early life and you have chosen to keep it a secret?”

RTFA. Chuckles. An understanding of a different time.

Even though the prurient minds of professional moralists would have exploded across the landscape, the point is made that serious journalists didn’t consider bedroom stories worth reporting about in comparison to the end-of-the-world politics in play at the time.