Ex-Intern Admits Affair With JFK
A 60-year-old grandmother admits she had an affair with President John F. Kennedy when she was a a 19-year-old White House intern four decades ago.
"From June 1962 to November 1963, I was involved in a sexual relationship with President Kennedy," Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock said in a statement given to reporters outside her Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.
"For the past 41 years, it is a subject that I have not discussed. In view of the recent media coverage, I have now discussed the relationship with my children and my family, and they are completely supportive."
She asked the media to respect her privacy and the privacy of her family, and said, "I will have no further comment on this subject, period."
The admission comes after a new biography alleged an affair between the president and an unidentified intern. Robert Dallek, author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963," learned of the affair from a White House aide whose oral history was recently unsealed.
Fahnestock, now an administrator at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, worked at the White House for two summers and stayed into the fall of 1963. She returned to college just weeks before Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
"I was 19 years old, a very young, very naive, very innocent young girl," Fahnestock told the Daily News.
"The gift for me is that this allowed me to tell my two married daughters a secret that I've been holding for 41 years," she told the newspaper. "It's a huge relief."
Fahnestock has two married daughters and four grandchildren. Her husband, Anthony Fahnestock, died in 1993.
Kennedy is known to have had numerous extramarital liaisons, but this is the first report of an affair with an intern.
Author Dallek visited CBS News' The Early Show Wednesday to discuss his findings.
"When Kennedy had all these affairs, these trysts, the press didn't pay attention, or they knew about it, but they didn't report on it," said Dallek.
"As Kennedy himself once said, 'It's not news until it appears on the front page of the New York Times.' And it wasn't going to get there."
Dallek reports the recollections of Barbara Gamarekian, a former White House aide, about the president's affair with a college student who worked in the press office despite a lack of clerical skills. She said the beautiful unpaid employee was only used for Kennedy's sexual gratification.
Gamarekian had asked that the 17 pages in her oral history dealing with the intern be kept secret for a decade, then later asked the Kennedy Library in Boston, where her account is archived, to keep it sealed.
Dallek discovered the blacked-out pages while researching his book and persuaded her to disclose the information.