Clinton wasn't the only one with "intern-al" affairs

[normalnoises]

http://boston.com/dailyglobe2/136/nation/A_onetime_intern_to_JFK_says_they_had_an_affair+.shtml

A onetime intern to JFK says they had an affair

By Reuters, 5/16/2003

NEW YORK - A 60-year-old New York woman said yesterday she was the young White House intern reported this week to have had an affair with President Kennedy in the 1960s.

''From June 1962 to November 1963, I was involved in a sexual relationship with President Kennedy,'' Marion ''Mimi'' Fahnestock said in a statement released by the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where she works as an administrator.

''For the last 41 years, it is a subject that I have not discussed,'' she added. ''In view of the recent media coverage, I have now discussed the relationship with my children and my family, and they are completely supportive. I will have no further comment on this subject.''

The affair came to light with the publication this week of a new biography of Kennedy, ''An Unfinished Life,'' by historian Robert Dallek, which asserted that Kennedy had a fling with a young intern.

Dallek's assertion stemmed from newly released pages from a 1964 interview with Barbara Gamarekian, a Kennedy press aide, who recalled that a 19-year-old woman she identified only as Mimi had ''sort of a special relationship with the president.''

According to Gamarekian, Kennedy brought the young intern along on presidential trips.

''She couldn't type,'' Gamarekian said in her interview, conducted for an oral history project for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. ''She could answer the phone and she could handle messages and things, but she was not really a great asset to us.''

Fahnestock's identity was reported yesterday by New York's Daily News. The paper said the woman, known then as Mimi Beardsley, left the White House to return to college in 1963, shortly before Kennedy was assassinated.

This story ran on page A2 of the Boston Globe on 5/16/2003.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.