John F Kennedy's love letters go on sale

Kiss and tell

But until now, the 78-year-old von Post had kept under cover the passionate written evidence of her affair with the man who would become US president. Now the assassinated president’s affectionate declarations of love in letters and telegrams are available to buyers in an online auction at legendaryauctions.com. The starting bid of $25,000 jumped to $42,500 the same day the auction opened on Wednesday.

Gunilla von Post, the daughter of an upstanding Swedish family, waited until the death of Kennedy’s widow Jackie in 1994, to reveal all in her confessional book, “Love, Jack,” published in 1997. Thirteen years later, she is offering through the Chicago-based auction house 11 hand-written letters and one telegram detailing how the playful 36-year-old US senator becomes more and more smitten with the 21-year-old blonde Swedish bombshell.

They met in August 1953 on the French Riviera, a month before Kennedy’s wedding. They danced and shared a farewell kiss, von Post says in her book. All the while her heart went “boom boom boom boom”, she once told ABC News.

The young senator was similarly infatuated, and could not get her out of his mind. He tracked down her address and sent her a letter in March 1954, followed by another in June suggesting a possible meeting. “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks ­with you as crew. What do you think? Best, Jack,” he wrote.

Finally, in August 1955, two years after their first enchanted Riviera meeting, the pair spent a week together on a Swedish beach. Later in the month, they tried to meet again in Europe, but he writes his lover to say he had just gotten word “that my wife and sister are coming here. It will be complicated.”

After returning from Europe to Washington, Kennedy insists that Gunilla move to be near him, promises he will find her a job as a model and indicates he will discuss a divorce from Jackie with his father.