Intern 'Mimi' comes forward to press about her affair with JFK

THE White House intern who had a two-year affair with President John F. Kennedy has ended four decades of silence to admit: "I was the ‘Mimi’."

For several days now, America has been obsessed by reports that the youngest president in US history had enjoyed a secret romance with a mysterious 19-year-old intern, known as "Mimi".

The long-forgotten affair was revealed in a sealed 17-page 1964 interview with 77-year-old former White House press aide Barbara Gamarekian, which she agreed to disclose to historian Robert Dallek as research for his ongoing President Kennedy biography An Unfinished Life.

Speaking about his forthcoming book, Mr Dallek started a media scramble by telling NBC news about a young intern who was hired despite having no clerical skills. "Apparently," he said, "her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK".

The comment spurred a massive response, with newspapers and television channels full of experts and pundits making cynical comparisons between the assassinated Kennedy and the recent President Bill Clinton.

Media outlets across the country were racing each other to find Mimi, with teams of reporters delving into the history of all the interns who worked at the White House during Kennedy’s presidency.

But then Marion Fahnestock, an administrator at Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, ended the chase by contacting the New York Daily News and quietly telling a stunned reporter: "I am the Mimi. It’s all true."

Referring to reports of secret trysts with the playboy President, she said: "I was 19 years old. It was 1962, 1963."

Marion, now a 60-year-old grandmother, said it was a huge weight off her shoulders to be able finally to reveal her scandalous secret.

"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."

Tall and slim with short blonde hair, Marion refused to discuss Kennedy’s notorious womanising, saying simply: "I think the world knows what he was like."

The former Marion Beardsley was a senior at Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut when she went to the White House in 1961 to interview Jacqueline Kennedy.

Editor of the school paper, she had been granted an interview because the First Lady graduated from the same school, but Mimi never got to meet her. Instead, she captured the attention of the world’s most powerful man.

In 1962, Mimi was awarded a prestigious internship at the White House, even though she lacked the most basic clerical skills. "I was 19 years old, a very young, very naive, very innocent young girl," said Marion, who now lives alone in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The striking teenager was invited to White House pool parties with a handful of other young women, and flown on Air Force jets to secret liaisons with President Kennedy at resorts and summit meetings.

Marion declined to discuss the affair, but said: "All of these things are true. Remember, I was 19 years old. It was my first job."

Mimi worked two summers at the White House before returning to college in the autumn of 1963, just a few weeks before President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas on 22 November.

The next year she married, having two daughters before divorcing her husband, Anthony Fahnestock, but she never told her family about her scandalous past. "I kept it a secret," she said simply. "I didn’t have a story to tell."

Whenever Jacqueline Kennedy was out of town, he was known for entertaining pretty girlfriends, including mob moll Judith Exner, who claimed to have had an abortion arranged by Mafia boss Sam Giancana after the President got her pregnant.