'I turned down JFK but still had his son'

John F. Kennedy. Photo / Supplied

John F. Kennedy fathered a child while recuperating from a war injury and later offered to marry the boy's mother, she has said.

In the latest claim to emerge about the former United States President's energetic love life, Lisa Lanett, an Austrian-born American, said she had a two-year affair with Kennedy after they met in Phoenix, Arizona, during World War II.

Now 87, she told the Austrian newspaper Kurier that Kennedy, then a young, single US Navy officer, had offered to marry her when she became pregnant with their son Tony. She said she turned him down. However, she claimed that he paid for her son's education at Peekshill Military Academy, a private school outside New York, until the President's assassination in 1963.

Tony Bohler, the alleged son, is now 63 and a retired art dealer who lives in California. Divorced and with two sons, 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."

His mother reportedly comes from an illegitimate branch of the Habsburg family - her father was the unlawful half-brother of Karl I, the last Austrian emperor.

She had been on holiday in Rome when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938. The family decided not to return and moved to America instead. 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. The couple fell in love and he took her for romantic trips around the country, Lanett claimed.

It was not clear whether the child was conceived in her family's motel but she said: "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. 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.

Kennedy is not known to have lived for long in Phoenix and may have stayed in the city for a few weeks during his recuperation.

Lanett 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.

Last year, Jack Worthington, a Canadian-based US investment banker, contacted Vanity Fair magazine to say that he was the assassinated President's son and wanted help in getting samples of Kennedy DNA to test his claim.

His family released a statement describing his claims as "false and fabricated".

- INDEPENDENT