College to receive windfall from Kennedy letter sale

A COLLEGE in Dublin stands to gain over £800,000 from the sale of private correspondence from the late Jacqueline Kennedy to an Irish priest, writes James Macintyre.

The cache of letters from the widow of the assassinated US President to Fr Joseph Leonard was discovered at All Hallows College, the Vincentian-run ­institution in Dublin, after staff attended an evaluation event hosted by Sheppard’s Irish Auction House in Durrow, County Laois, in February.

College staff brought to the auction house a rare medieval book from the college library and showed it to a local expert, Owen Felix O’Neill, who happened to be present. They invited Mr O’Neill to visit their library and there he discovered Mrs Kennedy’s letters and postcards. They were then passed to the auctioneers, who will oversee the sale in June and estimate that it will raise up to €1 million. All Hallows College refused to comment on the sale. Philip Sheppard of the auction house said: “We never disclose who a vendor or purchaser is as a matter of policy. They were consigned to us by a private source.”

But The Irish Times reported Mr O’Neill as having said: “the college desperately needs money.”

Mrs Kennedy, then Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, met Fr Joseph on a visit to Dublin in 1950. The pair  corresponded regularly until the priest’s death in 1964.

In one letter dated January 1964, only two months after President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Mrs Kennedy wrote of struggling with her Catholic faith. “I am so bitter against God,” she wrote, adding that “only he and you and I know that” but she later wrote that the priest had helped revive her faith.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, is currently the United States ambassador to Japan. When asked about the sale of the letters, a spokesman at the embassy said: “We don’t have any comment on that.”