JFK letter to mistress up for auction

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Published Jun 3, 2016

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London - A letter in which President John F Kennedy begs for an assignation with his mistress is being put up for auction.

Signed simply “J”, the four-page handwritten note asks painter Mary Pinchot Meyer to “leave suburbia for once” and “come and see me.”

During their intense two-year affair, Kennedy would regularly meet Meyer in Washington without First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s knowledge.

In the note, written a month before he was assassinated in 1963, the president asks Mrs Meyer to visit him on a trip away from the US capital and made it clear how keen he was to see her.

“Why don’t you leave suburbia for once – come and see me – either here – or at the Cape [the Kennedy estate in Cape Cod, Massachusetts] next week or in Boston the 19th,” wrote Kennedy in scrawled script. “I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it – on the other hand you may not – and I will love it,” he added.

The letter to Meyer, a family friend and wife of a CIA agent, is understood to have been written in October 1963, a month before Kennedy was murdered in Dallas aged 46.

It is being sold at auction in the United States on June 16 and is expected to attract bids of up to £25 000 (about R520 000).

According to Boston-based RR Auction, the note was never sent but kept by Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln.

Kennedy and Meyer first met as teenagers at a dance while he was attending boarding school at Choat Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, and she at Brearley in Manhattan.

They rekindled their friendship when Kennedy moved into the White House in 1960, and Meyer’s ex-husband Cord, who divorced her in 1958, won a top job at the CIA.Meyer and Mrs Kennedy also became close, and would often be seen out together after the Kennedys bought the house next door to Meyer in Georgetown, Washington DC.

The affair was said to have begun in 1961, and continued until he was assassinated. She reportedly kept a diary of their time together.

In a tragic twist, Meyer was also shot dead aged 44 less than a year after Kennedy, in October 1964. The man charged with the crime, Ray Crump, was acquitted by a jury in 1965 and the murder weapon was never found.

Also included in the auction is a 1943 letter Kennedy received from Inga Arvad, a Danish journalist who was suspected of being a Nazi spy. The pair had had a brief romantic relationship the year before.

Calling him “dear Jack”, she wrote: “You do know – or don’t you – that you are the person in this world I would rather see than anybody – or is that a little too much of an admission?”

At the time Arvad was being monitored by the FBI due to her past relationship with Adolf Hitler, who had personally invited her to the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Daily Mail

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