Kennedy's Love Letters to Another Woman Up for Sale

Then-senator had relationship with Swedish aristocrat in the 1950s
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted May 6, 2021 4:45 PM CDT
Kennedy's Love Letters to Another Woman Up for Sale
This photo shows an envelope that John F. Kennedy addressed to a Swedish paramour a few years after he married Jacqueline Bouvier, according to Boston-based RR Auction.   (Nikki Brickett/ RR Auction via AP)

Love letters written by Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy to Gunilla von Post, a Swedish aristocrat he had an affair with in the 1950s, are going up for auction. RR Auction in Boston expects the collection of one full letter and two partial ones to bring more than $30,000, CNN reports. The letters were in the possession of von Post when she died in 2011. The two met in Cannes weeks before Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier married in 1953, when he was serving in the Senate. In 1955, von Post and Kennedy spent a week together in Sweden, according to the auction house, and he wanted to return. "I am anxious to see you. Is it not strange after all these months?" he wrote in one of the letters, per the Hill. "Perhaps at first it shall be a little difficult as we shall be strangers—but not strangers—and I am sure it will all work and I shall think that though it is a long way to Gunilla—it is worth it."

In 1956, Kennedy mentioned her upcoming marriage to a landowner. "I must say I was sad to learn that, after all, you are not coming to the US and you are marrying a farmer," he wrote, adding: "If you don't marry come over as I should like to see you. I had a wonderful time last summer with you. It is a bright memory of my life—you are wonderful and I miss you." The auction house said they met one more time, at a gala in 1958. Both were with their spouses, and von Post was pregnant. In 2015, the letters sold for $15,000 at another auction house. RR Auction sold a love letter from Kennedy to another woman in 2016. It was dated October 1963 and was never sent. Kennedy was killed the next month. Von Post wrote a book about her relationship with Kennedy, Love, Jack, in 1997. (Jackie Kennedy's letters to another man in the 1960s also were auctioned.)

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