Intern confesses to JFK affair after 40 years

By DAVID USBORNE

She is a church administrator and a grandmother of four, but Marion Fahnestock is a woman with a most astonishing past.

She was an intern in the White House of John F. Kennedy, and like Monica Lewinsky so many years later, she learned more about pleasing a President than taking dictation.

Fahnestock, who is now 60, stood before reporters yesterday and coyly acknowledged the truth of a scoop splashed across the pages of the Daily News tabloid newspaper in New York. Over two summers, in 1962 and 1963, she and JFK had a sexual relationship.

"I think the world knows what he was like," she said with a hint of embarrassment.

The revelation has thrown the mind of every American forward almost four decades to the scandal that enveloped President Bill Clinton when his sexual liaisons - including tales of stains on a dress - were exposed to a shocked country in 1998.

Breaking the JFK story in several instalments this week, the Daily News initially drew the information from a new biography of Kennedy by highly regarded historian Robert Dallek. His book, An Unfinished Life, went on sale in the United States on Tuesday.

A giant tome of 700 pages, the biography devotes only a few lines to the affair with the intern and does not identify her. But in an exclusive report, the Daily News unveiled Ms Fahnestock, who was then Mimi Beardsley.

Now an administrator at Manhattan's 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church, she freely told the newspaper that she was indeed the former intern.

"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 said.

"It's a huge relief. It's all true. I was 19 years old. It was 1962, '63, and it's the truth."

One of her oldest friends shrugged off the affair.

"Good for her," said Joan (Bitsy) Tatnall, 59. "She was a young girl, he's a glamorous guy ... I think it was an adventure."

Facing the glare of a New York media frenzy, Fahnestock strode out of her upper East Side apartment building yesterday morning and handed out copies of her remarks before hopping into a taxi.

She was a stunning prep school senior when she met the handsome President during a White House visit in 1961.

That autumn, she went off to Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, as planned. But things quickly changed when the White House called to offer her a summer internship in the press office.

Jaws dropped as Mimi frolicked with JFK at pool parties. She even flew on Air Force jets to accompany him on overseas trips to resorts and summit meetings.

In December 1962, weeks after Kennedy had stared down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis, she was flown to Nassau in the Bahamas, where Kennedy was meeting British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan.

The affair stretched through the next summer, and Mimi Beardsley was rewarded with a staff job. By then, she was dating Anthony Fahnestock, a graduate of preppie Williams College who had enlisted in the Army. The couple announced their engagement after Labour Day.

Still, she maintained her special link to JFK. A couple of days after the President delivered his speech at the Berlin Wall, Mimi called him directly to complain about being left behind in Washington. A furious Kennedy nearly fired her employer.

"Apparently her only real skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on these trips, and maybe at the White House," Dallek noted this week.

The scholarly author appears embarrassed by the sudden furore. He found out about Fahnestock after researching an interview given by former White House press aide Barbara Gamarekian in 1964 for an oral history of JFK's presidency for the Kennedy Library.

Gamarekian had asked that the 17 pages alluding to the affair with Fahnestock be sealed. But she agreed to a request from Dallek that they be unsealed for use in his book.

- INDEPENDENT