Update: The letter has been sold for $88,970, according to RR Auction.
Just a month before his death, President John F. Kennedy tried to sweet-talk painter Mary Pinchot Meyer into a date. He wrote her a love letter, but never sent it.
Now the letter looks for a new domicile. Boston-based RR Auction will put the letter up for auction on June 16.
Written on White House notepaper, the letter lacks both addressee and a date, but according to RR Auction, Kennedy wrote it in October 1963. He was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
The letter reads:
Why don’t you leave suburbia for once—come and see me—either here—or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th. I know it is unwise, irrational, and that you may hate it—on the other hand you may not—and I will love it. You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years—you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes.
Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln identified Meyer as the the intended recipient.
The auction firm expects to get at least $30,000 for the “exceedingly rare Kennedy letter boasting revelatory content on his personal life during the presidency.”
“It’s something you wouldn’t expect to see from a president,” said Robert Livingston, an executive vice president at RR Auction, according to The New York Times.
It may be less of a surprise in the case of John F. Kennedy, who was posthumously a target of multiple allegations about his private life, including a story claiming he and Meyer had an affair.
Meyer was shot dead on a towpath in Georgetown less than a year after Kennedy’s assassination. Her murder was never solved after the man charged with killing her, Ray Crump, was found not guilty.
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