Gunilla von Post and JFK

[John Simkin]

Obituary from the Daily Telegraph:

She was not the first — or indeed the last — to fall for the charms of a man notorious for his sketchy grasp of the obligations of matrimony. What was notable about Kennedy’s relationship with Miss von Post, however, was that it began a few weeks before his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier and continued when his wedding vows were still fresh upon his lips.

In her memoir, written in the breathless style of a Mills and Boon romance, Gunilla von Post recalled that Kennedy met her by chance while visiting the French Riviera in August 1953. He was a charming, boyish-looking 36-year-old senator from Massachusetts. She was 21, the beautiful blonde daughter of a Swedish aristocrat, who had been sent to the Cote d’Azur for a month to improve her French language skills.

They spent an evening together — dinner, dancing and a moonlit walk to the shore of the Mediterranean: “He turned and kissed me tenderly and my breath was taken away. The brightness of the moon and stars made his eyes appear bluer than the ocean beneath us. He broke the silence by saying softly: 'I fell in love with you tonight.’” But, Kennedy admitted, there was a problem: he was about to get married. “If I had met you one week before,” he told her, “I would have cancelled the whole thing.”

Kennedy returned to America where, three weeks later, on September 1 1953, he married Jacqueline Bouvier. But Gunilla remained smitten and, by her own account, was thrilled when she received the first of a series of love letters (with trans-Atlantic phone calls in between), in which Kennedy spoke of his hopes of organising a clandestine reunion.

Their relationship was finally consummated when he contrived to visit Sweden with a friend in August 1955: “I was relatively inexperienced, and Jack’s tenderness was a revelation,” she wrote. “He said, 'Gunilla, we’ve waited two years for this. It seems almost too good to be true, and I want to make you happy.’” He made love, she recalled “with a surprising innocence” — swooning, sighing, weeping. At one point he lifted his eyes to the heavens and proclaimed, “The stars, Gunilla. The stars!”

The pair spent a week together during which Gunilla introduced her beau to family and friends. Despite his infamous claim that “If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches”, Gunilla felt that Kennedy was not a man who “simply needed a woman to satisfy his cravings and would then go on to something else”.

The week ended with painful farewells at the airport. The night before, Kennedy told her repeatedly: “I love you, Gunilla. I adore you. I’m crazy about you and I’ll do everything I can to be with you.”

Subsequently, by her account, he called his father Joe to tell him he wanted to divorce Jackie and marry Gunilla. But the Kennedy patriarch was having none of it: divorce was out of the question because it would ruin Jack’s hopes of making it to the White House.

Kennedy’s subsequent attempts to persuade Gunilla to move to New York and work as a model foundered on her refusal to accept anything short of marriage. A few months later the affair was over, with Kennedy sending a last, handwritten, note saying: “I just got word today — that my wife and sister are coming here” and describing his emotions as “complicated”.

But Gunilla’s memories remained sweet: “I borrowed him for a week, a beautiful week that no one can take away from me” she wrote.

Karin Adele Gunilla von Post was born on July 10 1932 in Stockholm. She trained in hotel management and cookery and attended a finishing school in Lausanne.

Shortly after her affair with Kennedy ended, she married Anders Ekman, a wealthy Swedish landowner, and Kennedy sent his best wishes. Three years later, she and her husband were guests at a charity ball at the Waldorf Astoria, New York, where Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, were on the dais. From her table, Gunilla scribbled a note on her napkin and asked a waiter to give it to the senator. Shortly afterwards Kennedy signalled to her to meet him in a corridor: “He just gave me a huge hug. And then he said 'It’s wonderful to see you. I love you’,” she recalled. “ It was lovely.” It was the last time they would meet.

Despite the former president’s reputation as a world-class womaniser, some found Gunilla von Post’s account too overwrought to be entirely convincing. Its veracity, however, was borne out last year when she decided to sell 11 of Kennedy’s handwritten letters and three telegrams on a Chicago online auction site.

In the letters, all written after his marriage, Kennedy expressed his urgent longing to see his “Swedish Gorilla” (a reference, no doubt, to her first name rather than her physique): “Do you remember our dinner and evening together this summer at Antibes and Cagnes,” he asked in the first missive, sent in March 1954, five months after his marriage. “How are you? — and what are you now doing in Paris, you said you were going to work for an airline. Do you — and do you fly to the United States. I expect to return to France in September. Will you be there?”

A few weeks later he returned to the charge: “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks with you as crew. What do you think?” But before the assignation could take place Kennedy sent a telegram cancelling it after suffering a back injury that required extensive surgery.

As the auction website explained: “He pursued [Gunilla] despite the daily demands of public service and newly-wed nesting, and even despite a near-death experience on the operating table. No obstacle was too great to bar the soon-to-be King Arthur from courting his beguiling Lady of the Lake.”

The sale of the letters raised $115,537.50, well over the original estimate of $40,000 to $50,000.

Anders Ekman died in an accident, and Gunilla later married Weisner Miller, an American IBM executive, and moved to the United States. The marriage ended in divorce, but Gunilla continued to enjoy life on the international social circuit, supporting animal and children’s charities and flitting between homes in Palm Beach, Switzerland, Sweden and the south of France. “I feel as if home is mid-Atlantic,” she once said.

Gunilla von Post is survived by two daughters of her first marriage and a son of her second. Another son died in infancy.

Gunilla von Post, born July 10 1932, died October 14 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8870897/Gunilla-von-Post.html

[Guest Robert Morrow]

The JFK Groupies can't handle the harsh reality of this. But JFK's rampant sexual promiscuity is very important. As was Lyndon Johnson's and Bill Clinton's. You learn a lot about a person by this. It speaks volumes and most of the time it is not good. Often it goes hand in hand with other addictions (alcohol, drugs) or is a symptom of narcissism. Or recklessness or untrustworthiness.

I also think that Robert Kennedy's torrid love affair and sexual relationship with Jackie post JFK assassination is very important. It tells a lot about Robert Kennedy's character ... or LACK of character for a married man with 9 or 10 kids to be catting around with the widow of his brother.

I have been told - but not confirmed - that the RFK and Jackie affair began BEFORE 11/22/63.

You can read about the RFK/Jackie affair in "Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story" by C. David Heymann. That is a book that I highly recommend.

http://www.amazon.com/Bobby-Jackie-C-David-Heymann/dp/B004KAB5OQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321426706&sr=1-1

"JFK Groupyism" blinds one to the truth, not just in the JFK assassination, but in other areas.

A few years ago, we had a prominent JFK researcher declare in 2007 that, hey, Vincent Bugliosi was right after all... that there was no conspiracy in the JFK assassination. I am convinced that this man's JFK groupyism blinded him to the truth to the massive conflict that RFK/JFK were having with folks like LBJ, Hoover, Dulles, the military industrial complex, the CIA. A JFK groupie won't understand why or how the Kennedys were angering so many powerful players. That is because a JFK groupie always thinks the Kennedys are "innocent" in all respects.

This same prominent JFK researcher interviewed a lot of Secret Service agents, asked them leading questions and got a lot of them to say really nice pleasant sounding things about the Kennedys. He is clueless to why many of those same Secret Service agents (not all, but many) hated, absolutely hated the guts of the Kennedy brothers.

Thank God for the Dark Side of Camelot and the story of Abraham Bolden. Read those sources and you will learn a lot about Secret Service agents in 1963 who hated the Kennedys and who said they would never take a bullet for them.

So a Kennedy groupy - after asking all these leading questions to Secret Service agents and getting "happy" answers - would not understand or conceive that *some* of these SS agents, especially leadership were probably involved in the JFK assasination as facilitators.

That is what Kennedy groupyism does - it blinds you to the ugly truth and the next thing you know you are yapping on YouTube about what a masterpiece Vincent Bugliosi has written and how this village idiot is right after all about the JFK assassination.

This prominent JFK researcher has made some significant contributions to understanding the JFK case; but he is also an example of the dangers of Kennedy groupyism. Just think how much MORE he could have learned about reality, the Kennedys and the JFK assassination if he had asked all those Secret Service agents what did you NOT like about the Kennedys, tell us their dirty secrets, what was really going on, tell us about the women and the parties, any information on possible drug use, etc. I would have asked them WHO hated the Kennedys and why. Tell me the real scoop, especially the suppressed dirt.

Always look for the truth, even if it is the ugly truth. A JFK assassination researcher should not act like a PR person or a defense attorney for the Kennedys ... or anyone else!

Edited November 17, 2011 by Robert Morrow