The House of Kennedy(18)
Joe Sr. hopes to keep him out of trouble at home, but Jack keeps finding ways to wreak havoc.
Chapter 12
In wartime Washington, DC, Jack Kennedy falls in love—with a twice-married Danish journalist suspected of being a Nazi spy.
Inga Arvad—a former film actress and Miss Denmark whom Hitler once called “the most perfect example of Nordic beauty”—is hired by the Washington Times-Herald as a columnist. Jack’s sister Kick also works for the Times-Herald, although she pines for England and her future husband Billy Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington.
At Kick’s suggestion, Arvad interviews Jack for her weekly social column, “Did You Happen to See?” touting him to Washington in November 1941 as “a boy with a future.”
The blond, blue-eyed international sophisticate beguiles the younger man—twenty-four to her twenty-eight—who cuts a handsome figure in his navy dress whites.
Inga Arvad’s already on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar as a possible Nazi spy. Her FBI file would eventually grow to over twelve hundred pages. But although in the 1930s the columnist had written flattering pieces about Nazi leaders—like Hermann Goering, whose 1935 wedding she attended, and Hitler, who invited her to his private box at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and gave her an autographed photo signed “To Inga Arvad, in friendly memory of Adolf Hitler”—the only secrets she reveals to her willing young lover involve pleasing a woman in bed. She has “gooey eyes” for Jack, and he calls her “Inga Binga.” “He had the charm that makes the birds come out of their trees,” she writes in a private letter. “When he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering, but exuding animal magnetism.”
They spend hours making love in her Washington apartment, which the FBI has bugged, and Hoover documents the encounters. The bugs make it a threesome of sorts. If the espionage accusations against Arvad hold true, Inga Arvad could be the Mata Hari of the Second World War.
As FBI investigations into Inga’s background continue, with even her Washington Times-Herald colleagues questioning her loyalties (one approaching Jack’s sister to ask, “Kick, do you think it is possible Inga could be a spy?”), Hoover warns Joe Sr. that Jack is “in big trouble and that he should get his son out of Washington immediately.” He orders his agents to break in to Arvad’s apartment, where no evidence discrediting Arvad is found—but plenty of salacious material regarding Jack comes to light.
As Kick would tell her journalist suitor, John White, when Jack informs Joe Sr. of his plans to marry the Protestant Arvad—once she is officially divorced from her jealous second husband, the Hungarian film director Paul Fejos—Joe was “getting ready to drag up the big guns” to end the affair.
But the navy is a step ahead, ordering a precautionary transfer to the Charleston Naval Shipyard, where Jack lectures factory munitions workers on safety procedures. The FBI comes, too, all the way to South Carolina.
Bugs in a Charleston hotel room reveal Arvad was never a spy, and Hoover closes his file on her. In March 1942, Jack does the same. (But the wartime confidences Jack exchanged with Arvad would never leave him. When Jack is elected president, Hoover reveals that he’s preserved the intimate wiretap recordings. The master spy’s hint at blackmail keeps him atop the ranks of the FBI.)
The breakup, in the end, is mutual, as their relationship seems doomed. As Arvad writes, her love for Jack overshadows her “reason. It took the FBI, the US Navy, nasty gossip, envy, hatred and big Joe” before she could see past it. “There is one thing I don’t want to do, and that is harm you,” she tells Jack. “You belong so whole-heartedly to the Kennedy clan, and I don’t want you to ever get into an argument with your father on account of me.”
Jack’s friend Torbert MacDonald observes, “The breakup with Inga helped install a certain, ‘I don’t give a damn’ mentality that made Jack want to go to the Pacific.” It was the kind of attitude that could end in a serviceman sacrificing his life for his country.
Jack enrolls in an officer training course in Chicago. Having spent his childhood racing sailboats for the Kennedy “Cape Cod Navy,” Jack honed his competitive instincts on the water.
Thomas Bilodeau, a frequent guest at the three-acre Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, recalls the extreme measures Jack would take to win a race. “We were coming down to the finish line, and the winds let up…the boat was slowing down with my weight [215 pounds],” Bilodeau says, “and Jack turned to me and said, ‘Over the side, boy. We’ve got to relieve ourselves of some weight.’ So right out there in open water, I proceeded to just go over the side and he ran on to win the race.”
Lem Billings also commented about his old friend, “Jack always had something to prove, physically.” Given his lifelong poor health, he would “overcompensate and prove he was fit when he really wasn’t. So, he turns into this killer football player and he turns into a voracious womanizer, a stud. Then what’s next? Well, of course he turns into a voracious warrior, hungry for a fight. It was the logical next step given the times.”
Jack’s wartime hero is Lieutenant John Duncan “Sea Wolf” Bulkeley, winner of the Medal of Honor. Bulkeley, who from PT-41 led Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, performed a daring two-day rescue in March 1942, bringing to safety General Douglas MacArthur, commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East safely from Corregidor Island in the Philippines in advance of the nearby island of Bataan’s fall to the Japanese.