Jackie Kennedy's Love Letters to JFK's Friend Head to Auction

This 'level of intimacy' is rare, says Bonhams rep
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 9, 2017 4:03 AM CST
Updated Feb 9, 2017 7:00 AM CST
Jackie Kennedy's Love Letters to JFK's Friend Head to Auction
David Ormsby Gore is seen between John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy in this Nov. 13, 1963 file photo.   (AP Photo)

Jacqueline Kennedy and David Ormsby Gore met frequently during John F. Kennedy's presidency, even taking shared vacations with their spouses. But by 1967, both were widowed and bonding over their shared loneliness. A year later, their relationship had turned romantic, at least on one side. Ormsby Gore—a close friend of JFK and a former British ambassador to the US—proposed marriage to Jacqueline, who declined and wed Aristotle Onassis instead, reports the New York Times. "If ever I can find some healing and some comfort—it has to be with somebody who is not part of all my world of past and pain," she wrote in one of 19 letters to Ormsby Gore to be sold at auction by Bonhams in London next month. "I can find that now—if the world will let us."

In a draft letter, Ormsby Gore described how his "pathetic plans" for the pair had been dashed. "As for your photograph I weep when I look at it," he wrote. After marrying Onassis, Jacqueline replied, "We have known so much & shared & lost so much together. I hope that bond of love and pain will never be cut." A rep for Bonhams says it's rare to find items with "this quantity of insight into Jackie’s personal life and that level of intimacy." The letters, along with Ormsby Gore's White House pass from the day after JFK's assassination, are among several family heirlooms that will be sold to pay for the upkeep of the Ormsby Gore family's historic home in Wales, reports the Telegraph. The auction is set for March 29. (JFK wrote his own love letters.)

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