Do you think Clinton or Kennedy had the most interns??
The Associated Press
Friday, May 16, 2003; 3:33 PM
NEW YORK - The author who revealed former President John F. Kennedy's affair with a 19-year-old intern said Friday that the media's interest in the liaison underscores an extraordinary change in American culture.
"In the 1960s, John Kennedy was not going to be found out," author Robert Dallek said Friday on ABC's "Good Morning America."
"Lots of journalists, reporters, knew about the womanizing, and if they didn't they had strong suspicions, but they weren't going to publish it in their newspapers. It just was not part of the culture of the times," Dallek said. "Now, of course, it's so different."
Kennedy is known to have had numerous extramarital liaisons, but "An Unfinished Life," Dallek's biography published this week, contains the first report of an affair with an intern.
Dallek said he learned of the affair from a 1964 oral history interview with White House aide Barbara Gamarekian, whose account was sealed until recently. Gamarekian recalled only the intern's first name, Mimi.
On Thursday the Daily News reported that Marion "Mimi" Fahnestock, a 60-year-old church administrator, was the woman behind the name.
Fahnestock declined to discuss her relationship with Kennedy, but she handed out a brief statement Thursday to journalists waiting outside her Upper East Side apartment building.
"From June 1962 to November 1963, I was involved in a sexual relationship with President Kennedy," the statement said. "For the last 41 years, it is a subject I have not discussed."
Fahnestock - whose maiden name was Beardsley - was awarded a White House internship in 1962, a year after she caught the president's eye during a trip to Washington to interview first lady Jacqueline Kennedy for her school newspaper. She attended Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn., Jacqueline Kennedy's alma mater.
The affair lasted for 17 months, ending two months after Fahnestock became engaged to investment banker Anthony Fahnestock, and just weeks before Kennedy was assassinated.
She and Anthony Fahnestock married in January 1964 and later divorced. He died in 1993. She now works as an administrator at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
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