Eideard

He does the tears as well as anyone in Congress

Christian von Boetticher, 40, the successful state legislator at the top of the Christian Democratic Union’s ticket in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, resigned as head of the party there during a tearful news conference on Sunday. He admitted to the affair with a 16-year-old girl, which was legal under German law, and to making a misjudgment, but insisted that he had nothing to be ashamed of because it was “a very unusual love.”

It is also an unusual scandal — not only because of the girl’s age, which was at the border of permissible and punishable, but also because of the role played by the social networking site.

In some ways, the fact of her youth was less strange to conservative voters and colleagues “than that a grown man with more important things to do would spend so much time playing around on this network with nothing better to do than trade messages with a young girl,” said Rudolf Kötter, director of the Center for Advanced Ethics and Science Communications at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Long before news of the affair became public, colleagues expressed concerns that Mr. Boetticher dallied on the site too much, sharing information about his social life in status updates the party might have preferred remained private.

He posted about polo parties and expensive bottles of Brunello di Montalcino wine he had just opened. Der Spiegel magazine reported that he had skipped a political discussion to watch a lunar eclipse, then posted about it on his wall…

According to Mr. Boetticher, the girl’s parents as well as his friends knew about the relationship. The girl, now 17, who has not been named, defended her former lover in newspaper interviews…But she probably also embarrassed him as she described the hundreds of Facebook and text messages he sent her before that first meeting, not to mention the fact that they spent two straight days in the Steigenberger Hotel in Düsseldorf, having sex the first time they met face to face…

In the Berliner Zeitung, the columnist Jutta Kramm expressed surprise that Mr. Boetticher thought it necessary to step down over the affair, which she described as a very American phenomenon. American morals are often viewed with indulgent condescension here in Germany, where nude sunbathing and explicit sexual scenes on public television are widely considered normal.

“Extramarital affairs, illegitimate children, first and second wives or husbands, libidinous escapades or particular sexual preferences indeed may provide fodder for rumors and offer excellent material for gossip and scandal but they have almost never been a reason to resign,” Ms. Kramm wrote.

Perhaps Christian conservatives in Germany are making ready to imitate their distant cousins in the United States. Would you be surprised if our conservatives’ holier-than-thou hypocrisy became an export commodity?

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.