JFK note suggesting secret date goes on auction

LONDON: A letter in which US president John F Kennedy begs for an assignation with his mistress is being put up for auction.

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

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

In the note, written a month before his assassination in 1963, the president asked Meyer to visit him on a trip from the US capital and said 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.”

The letter to Meyer, a family friend and wife of a CIA agent, is understood to have been written in October 1963.

It is being sold at auction in the US on June 16 and is expected to attract bids of up to R56 200. Boston-based RR Auction said the note was not sent but kept by Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln.

Kennedy and Meyer first met as teenagers at a dance while he was at 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 Jackie 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 twist, Meyer was also shot dead at 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. – Daily Mail

JFK and Mary Meyer