When he wrote them, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (nicknamed JFK) was a senator from Massachusetts, a position he held from 1952 to 1960, before becoming president.
Now, more than 55 years later since his assassination in Dallas (1963),
his fame as a seducer continues to arouse interest
with the auction of love letters sent to Gunilla Von Post, a Swedish aristocrat with whom he had a little-known affair.
According to the RR Auction auction house, he wrote the letters
between 1955 and 1956,
when he was still married to Jacqueline Bouvier, who would later become known as Jackie Kennedy.
Kennedy and Von Post met in the summer of 1953 at a film festival on the French Riviera, when he was 36 and she was 21. According to Von Post in the autobiographical book
Love, Jack
, published in 1997, they both met by chance and the meeting would change their lives.
A few weeks later, on September 12 of that year, Kennedy married Bouvier.
[
License plates of the car in which JFK was traveling when he was assassinated were auctioned
]
In one of the letters, dated 1955, Kennedy begins with:
"Dear Gunilla, I must tell you that you looked good and happy in the photograph you sent me on the regatta
."
He describes his plans to travel to Europe after the suspension of sessions in Congress in August, tells her that he will be in Sweden, and asks for the address of the place where he knows she will stay, in the southern city of Bastad.
The two
spent almost a week together "consummating their relationship
, in Sweden, in August 1955," according to the auction house, based on Von Post's book.
It was a passion that, at least she, remembered for a long time.
According to Von Post, Kennedy was making great efforts to separate from his wife, return to the aristocrat, and bring her to the United States.
The other letter, dating from 1956, is tinged with heartbroken romanticism.
"I was planning to come back next summer ... and now this happens. In any case, let me know what you are going to do. If you don't get married come, I'd like to see you.
I had a wonderful time with you last summer. It's a memory full of light in my life
, you are wonderful and I miss you ”, Kennedy writes and complements with“
I am anxious to see you
”.
AP
"This is the only letter from Kennedy that we have offered that
openly shows affection to another woman while he was married
," the auction house said in a statement.
The lovers saw each other only once more.
It was a chance meeting at a gala at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in 1958, when the Swedish aristocrat was expecting her first child.
Von Post died in 2011 in Florida.
With information from AP and El País.