Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Report: JFK's 'Love Child'

From Tom Leonard at Britain's Telegraph:
In the latest claim to emerge about the former US president's energetic love life, Lisa Lanett, an Austrian-born American, said she had a two-year affair with John F. Kennedy after they met in Phoenix, Arizona, during the Second World War.
Now 87, she told the Austrian newspaper Kurier that Kennedy, then a young and single US navy officer and long before he earned his reputation as a notorious womaniser, had offered to marry her when she became pregnant with their son, Tony, but she had turned him down.
He did, however, pay for the boy's education at Peekshill Military Academy, a private school outside New York, until the president's assassination in 1963, she said.
Tony Bohler, the alleged son, is now 63 and a retired art dealer living in California. Divorced and with two sons of his own, he told the newspaper he could never work out why he did not look like the Mexican-born man who his mother told him was his father.
"My mother always told me her former husband, Juan, was my father. I'd always had my doubts because he, being a Mexican, looked very Mexican." . . .

After a brief marriage to a Mexican, she moved to Phoenix where her mother ran a motel called the Monterey Lodge.
Kennedy moved to the city in 1943 while recuperating from back surgery after he was injured when his torpedo boat was rammed by a Japanese cruiser.
They fell in love and he took her for romantic trysts around America, she claimed.
"We went to Miami and New York, and spent a weekend in Cuba. In the spring of 1945, I realised that I was pregnant. I told John and he offered to marry me," she said.
"But I had a wonderful life to that point which I didn't want to give up. Marriage was out of the question for me."
She said that Kennedy continued to see his secret family "now and then" even after he embarked on a political career.
Mrs Lanett, who admitted that she had no way of proving her claims, said her son was adopted by his grandmother, Charlotte Bohler.
She provided no explanation as to why she had waited so long before coming forward with her claims. A DNA test could prove the truth of her assertion if compared to a sample provided by Caroline Kennedy, the late president's daughter.

No comments: