The Sheppard auction house, in Ireland, will put up for sale on June 10 letters written by Jacqueline Kennedy to an Irish priest in which she reveals secrets about her marital relationship with United States President John F. Kennedy.
The letters, one of the few epistolary documents of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (1929-1994), are the fruit of fourteen years of correspondence between the former first lady of the United States and Joseph Leonard, a Catholic priest at All Hallows College, in Drumcondra (Dublin).
The letters, discovered in Durrow (central Ireland), will go on sale for a price between 550,000 dollars (401,000 euros) and 1.65 million dollars (1.20 million euros).
The letters were exchanged between 1950 and 1964 before the young American married JFK, then a rising figure in politics, and also after his assassination in Dallas in 1963.
"He loves hunting and gets bored with conquest"
In her early texts, Jackie says that she was in love with the "son of the ambassador of England", but she expresses her concern that she could become like her father, John Vernou Bouvier, with a reputation as a womanizer. "He's like my father in a way -- he loves to hunt and gets bored with conquest -- and once he's married, he needs to prove he's still attractive, so he flirts with other women and offends you. I saw this almost kill Mom," explains Jackie, who came to the White House as first lady in 1961.
A 23-year-old Jackie, who had already started a relationship with Kennedy, confesses that the world of politics, to which she would belong after her marriage, "can be very glamorous from the outside, but if you're in it and you're alone It can be hell." However, a year after their wedding on September 12, 1953, Jacqueline commented that she loved being married much more than she first thought and that her husband had given her "incredible insights into politics, which actually They are a breed apart."
Consumed by ambition
Outside the doors, the relationship between the Kennedy couple was idyllic, but it was quite tumultuous, also during his time in the White House, especially due to the president's continuous infidelities. Jacqueline confessed to the priest how Kennedy was consumed by ambition, "like Macbeth", King of Scotland between 1040 and 1057, whose story of betrayal and excessive ambition inspired the well-known tragedy of Shakespeare.
After the assassination of the first Catholic president of the United States, on November 22, 1963, Jackie had a crisis of faith, as he points out in another of the letters: "I have to think that there is a God or I have no hope of finding Jack." again," Kennedy's widow wrote, adding: "God will have something to explain to me if I ever see him."
The Sheppard house considers these documents as part of the "autobiography" of Kennedy's deceased wife, who in 1968 remarried the Greek millionaire Aristoteles Onassis.
