Why a Senator Kennedy letter is the riskier buy

The usual rule

When I looked at whether "signed as president" is worth paying for, one of the reasons the rule bends was that the presidency is where the help was. Presidents in office had secretaries and, from Truman's time, an autopen. A signature dated in office is the one most worth having and the one most worth checking.

For Kennedy, the help arrived earlier.

How Kennedy signed, year by year

Kennedy entered the House in 1947 and the Senate in 1953. That year he hired Evelyn Lincoln, who would stay his personal secretary until the day he died.

According to the Raab Collection, he started using secretaries to sign for him around 1955. He then used autopens extensively during his run for the presidency, starting around 1959. In the White House, Raab says, "contrary to popular conception, JFK signed most things himself." He did use an autopen there too, but those patterns "bear little resemblance to his typical, authentic signature," so separating them from the real thing "is not difficult for an expert."

Not everyone puts it as cleanly. PSA/DNA, in its 2012 list of the most dangerous autographs, ranked Kennedy fourth among historical figures and noted that secretaries and the autopen produced Kennedy signatures during his time in office as well, on top of a large number of outright forgeries. So the White House years are not free of the problem. But the period the experts single out, where the secretarial signatures are most convincing, is the Senate and the campaign.

The robot

The man who first exposed all this was the autograph dealer Charles Hamilton. In 1965 he privately printed a book called The Robot That Helped to Make a President, about Kennedy's use of the autopen. A dealer's description of the book says it illustrates signatures from eight different autopens and fourteen secretaries, across his congressional and presidential years.

Washingtonian, looking back on it, reported that Kennedy's press secretary Pierre Salinger had answered the suggestion with "There is no such machine!" There was.

The secretary's letter

Evelyn Lincoln causes a second problem. One collectors' guide to presidential secretaries singles out signatures that came with letters of authentication from Mrs. Lincoln herself, and calls them particularly deceptive. A letter from the woman who ran his office looks like the best provenance a Kennedy item could have. It is not proof that he signed it.

She also kept a great deal. The National Archives later said she gave away or sold many Kennedy documents and artifacts she had been entrusted with, and a legal settlement in 2005 allowed the Archives, the Kennedy Library and Caroline Kennedy to recover thousands of pages. A Kennedy item with an Evelyn Lincoln provenance needs its own authentication like anything else.

What the index shows

Kennedy's page records only certified sales, so everything on it has already passed an expert.

On those terms, the office adds something but not a great deal. A letter from 1950, when he was a congressman, sold for $2,400. A letter signed in 1961, his first year as president, graded 9 for its autograph and framed with a photograph, sold for $3,600. A presidential appointment countersigned by his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, sold for $3,510. Undated typed letters sold for $1,440 and $2,751.

That is a premium of about half for the presidency. On a certified letter, it is a fair price for the office. On an uncertified one, the cheaper pre-presidential letter is not the bargain it looks like, because that is where the risk sits.

What to check

Get it certified, whatever the date. With Kennedy, this is not optional. A letter on Senate stationery from the mid-1950s onwards is exactly the kind of item a secretary signed.

Compare it with the same years. Raab notes that between 1945 and 1963 his signature both changed over time and came in variant forms at the same time. A genuine 1961 signature is the wrong yardstick for a 1956 letter.

Be suspicious of a neat one. Raab's general advice on autopens is that a pattern is often more legible than the signer's normal hand. Hamilton described Kennedy's real signature as "virile." A tidy, easily read "John F. Kennedy" deserves a second look.

Look for two the same. If two signatures are the same size and virtually identical, Raab says, they are presumptive autopen examples and should be avoided. Nobody signs the same way twice.

Value anything extra in his hand. Older autopens could not add a personal inscription or a handwritten line. A postscript, a correction or an inscription in his own hand is the best evidence a letter can carry. The inscribed first edition of Profiles in Courage on his page, sold with a 1956 typed letter, made $5,100, more than any of his letters.

Do not treat a secretary's letter as a certificate. Evelyn Lincoln's endorsement is a piece of history. It is not authentication.

The thing worth sitting with

Kennedy's political career was built in a hurry, and the machinery around him grew faster than any one man could sign. By the time he reached the White House, the secretaries and the autopen had been doing his signature for years. Once he was president he took a good deal of it back.

So the signature that feels like the safe, affordable way in, the young senator's, is the one that most needs checking. The president's is not risk-free, but it is the one the experts trust most.

We have covered the machine itself in the autopen and the signatures it made. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources