by Paula Byrne
Overnight, support for non-intervention disappeared. Even an isolationist newspaper like the Herald changed its view. John White wrote in his diary that his household had ‘jumped for joy’ on hearing the news.24 He immediately signed up for the navy. Billy Hartington wrote to Kick and asked if Jack still thought ‘that the British were decadent’.
Joseph Kennedy, shocked and appalled, cabled the President: ‘In this great crisis all Americans are with you. Name the battle post. I’m yours to command.’25 It was too little too late. He never even received a reply. Joe had been wrong – catastrophically, irrevocably wrong. From this point on, he was little more than an outcast.
32
Scandal
No sooner in office than he became embroiled in the great case of the Ambassador’s Son and the Beautiful Blonde Spy.
John White, January 19421
In the busy newsroom of the Times-Herald a scandal was brewing, and it involved Kick Kennedy. One of the newsroom girls had been flicking through old news footage in the ‘morgue’, the basement where photographs were stored, when she saw what she thought was a photograph of Jack’s girlfriend Inga taken with Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She told Page Huidekoper, who spread the gossip to Kick that Inga was a spy. Some whispered that Inga had attended the wedding of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring. Kick was outraged. Inga was Jack’s lover and her closest friend and she refused to believe the malicious gossip. She told Inga, who immediately made her way to the boss’s office: ‘I can still see Cissy Paterson sitting in her office disgusted with the rumors, wishing very much to help me, and seeing a wonderful story in the whole thing.’2
Cissy thought it would be best for Inga to go directly to the FBI with chief editor Frank Waldrop. He summoned Page. ‘OK. Get your coat.’ They made their way to Lafayette Square. Both girls gave statements in which Kick was cited and a memo was sent to J. Edgar Hoover which said that Miss Huidekoper stated to ‘Miss Kathleen Kennedy, a reporter on the Times Herald and the daughter of former Ambassador Kennedy, that she would not be surprised if Inga Arvad was a spy for some foreign power. She remarked to Miss Kennedy that one of her friends had been going through some old Berlin newspapers and had noted a picture of Inga Arvad taken with Hitler at the Olympic games in Berlin . . . Miss Kennedy, a very close friend of Inga Arvad, told her of Miss Huidekoper’s statement.’3
Though Inga protested that it was all a silly rumour, she had interviewed Hitler on two occasions. Struck by her good looks, the Führer described her as ‘a perfect example of Nordic beauty’. She said of him: ‘You immediately like him. He seems lonely. The eyes, showing a kind heart, stare right at you. They sparkle with force.’ Inga later admitted that she had become good friends with Göring, and with the Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, though she vehemently denied being pro-Nazi or a spy.
The damage was done. Jack and Kick were determined to stay loyal to Inga, but the FBI continued to monitor her closely. Jack was still in love with Inga and begged Kick and John White to double-date with him to play down the affair. Kick agreed, since she adored her brother and was extremely fond of Inga. Jack and Inga knew that they were being followed and wire-tapped. The FBI were convinced that she was using Jack to garner information, but as he was the former Ambassador’s son they knew that the situation was delicate. It was time for Joe to step in. By the beginning of the new year Jack had been transferred to the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina.4
His health, as ever, was uncertain, but he was determined to get out of doing a desk job. He was still in love with Inga, but he knew that the relationship was doomed. The family gathered at Palm Beach that Christmas. Inga wrote to Jack, saying that she was glad he was basking in the warmth of Florida, and that he was ‘one of the very rare people born to sunshine and happiness’.5 Inga was shrewd enough to see that Jack was pulling back from her, and she knew that it was because of his parents and his loyalty to the family above all else: ‘You belong so wholeheartedly to the Kennedy clan.’6
At the beginning of February 1942, Jack spent a torrid weekend with Inga at Charleston’s Fort Sumter Hotel. They barely left their room for the whole weekend. Unlike the other women he had met and slept with, Inga was his match. She also understood that behind the jokes and wisecracks, he was deeply ambitious. ‘You have just sufficient meanness in you to get along and enough brains and goodness to give to the world and not only take,’ she wrote.7 But they knew it was not to be. A few weeks later, Inga confided to Kick that her relationship with Jack was over, although they still saw one another sporadically. Kick was upset that Jack had been forced to leave Washington, and she spent hours with Inga talking about him. The one compensation was that she was able to move into his Washington apartment, much better located than hers. ‘The apartment is swell, you are swell . . . see you in my dreams,’ she told him.8
She had been promoted from being a secretary to reviewing plays. She wrote to Jack to tell him of her numerous beaux: she was seeing a bit of Torby, and a Lieutenant Jones ‘who claims . . . he is a bosom friend of yours [and] is dropping in this evening for a drink of grape juice . . . I still don’t know what his first name is. Inga tells me he is a great admirer of feminine pulchritude. Are you sure I am his cup of tea?’9 She also reported that Billy Hartington had been in touch.
Billy had written to her to explain that he had broken off his engagement to Sally. He simply couldn’t stop loving Kick. His sister Anne later recalled Billy’s misery about Kick and being engaged to the wrong woman. Billy had confided to his mother, to whom he was so close, about his passion for Kick. ‘I long to come over,’ Kick wrote to Nancy Astor, ‘but it looks quite impossible.’10
Her father wrote to her in January 1942, urging her to make the most of her Washington experience by going to bed early and getting fresh air: ‘You are only twenty-one and your type is very susceptible to fading fast.’11 He sent shipments of oranges and grapefruits from Florida to freezing Washington. She enjoyed her work, writing to one of her priests: ‘working round this office has certainly been an education. The people are from another world, but a world that has much more color than I ever dreamed possible.’12 She told him that she was dreading the humid Washington summer, but that it was preferable to sitting ‘on the Cape all summer and do[ing] nothing. So we shall just see how long Kick can hold out.’13 Jack had continued to be plagued by back problems, and was now awaiting surgery in Charleston. Young Joe had just received his wings.
John White was still assiduously courting her. Without Jack to keep a beady eye on her, he began pressurizing her to become more intimate. He accused her of being cold and insisted that she should at least give him the occasional kiss. Inga often came along too and was witness to their arguments. Kick would telephone John to apologize, against Inga’s advice, who warned her against ‘crawling to the cross’.14
Even trying to make Kick jealous didn’t seem to work. His frustration was evident from his diary: ‘L’Affair Kathleen rocks along its windy way, very verbose indeed,’ or ‘Too many words and not enough action’. He also berated himself for his weak behaviour: ‘For two weeks as of this day, I shall not see her alone . . . but do it I shall to see if I can’t get some sort of control of myself.’15
Kick spent her twenty-second birthday in Florida with her friend Nancy Tenney. Having proved herself as a writer in the theatre column, Kick got a further promotion that spring, taking over Inga’s column ‘Did You Happen to See . . .’. Now she was interviewing notable Washington people as well as continuing to review plays and movies. She cut out all of her articles and pasted them into her scrapbook. She was proud of her journalism, which was improving all the time. She wrote in a crisp, eloquent style, with a light sprinkle of Kennedy wit. A feature on Maxine Davis began: ‘Her father was a cynic, her mother an idealist. She struck a happy medium and has become one of America’s leading magazine writers.’16 She could almost have been writing about a possible future for herself. Her career was going from strength to strength an
d yet her heart remained in England. She applied to become the paper’s correspondent in London, but was turned down.
In March 1942, Kick got a letter from Lady Astor begging her ‘to stop all this foolishness and come right over and marry Billy’. She wrote to Jack for advice. He responded with characteristic forthrightness: ‘I would strongly advise against any voyages to England to marry any Englishman.’
He wrote her a long, detailed letter explaining why he thought it was ‘time to write the obituary of the British Empire. Like all good things it had to come to an end sometime, it was good while it lasted.’ He outlined his theory, comparing Britain to the Roman Empire, and added, ‘any time the Prime Minister of a country will admit to his own people that another country is going to save them – it’s on the toboggan’. Jack’s letter shows a new seriousness; there is none of their usual mocking banter. He explained to his sister his view that the war would mean the end not just of the British Empire but also of the old social order: ‘the old school tie won’t see much service in the future’.17
She wrote back, ‘As for your words of advice Brother I’ll take ’em. Boy the only persons you can be sure of are your own flesh and blood and then we are not always sure of them.’18 Deep down, though, Kick just couldn’t see it the same way. Days after she moved into Jack’s old apartment she was paid a visit by Lem Billings. He noted with amusement the display of photographs of ‘countless dukes and lords of the United Kingdom’. There was no photograph of her boyfriend John White.19
33
‘Did You Happen to See . . .’
the drippings from my pen.
Kick Kennedy
On 2 March 1942, Kick received a letter from her father, kindly and lovingly berating her for listening too much to the opinions of other people: ‘Without meaning any criticism of your very excellent character, I have noted that with you, popular opinions are frequently accepted as true opinions.’ He advised her to trust her own judgement: ‘So don’t bum rides on other people’s opinions. It’s lazy at best – and in some cases much worse.’1
The trouble was that she disagreed with the father she had adored, who had been proven to be wrong and was now persona non grata in DC. Kick would never abandon her belief that the English would defeat the Nazis. She and her siblings were witnesses to their father’s humiliation and ostracism, on both sides of the pond. She was still desperate to return to England, but she was concerned about how her English friends would react in the light of her father’s unpopularity.
The President had offered him an ignominious job advising on bottlenecks in the shipping industry. He turned it down. Kick and her siblings tried hard to raise their father’s depressed spirits as he sat aimlessly in the Florida sun. They wrote constantly and he visited them in Washington, but they could see he was a broken man. Kick wrote long, newsy letters. One of them was to tell him the latest joke that was circling Washington. It was about a man who was having terrible headaches and asked his doctor to remove his brain, dust it off and give it back to the patient. The patient didn’t return for his brain, and when his doctor met him in the street he asked for the reason. ‘Oh that’s alright,’ said the patient, ‘I won’t need a brain any more, I have just gotten a job in Washington.’2 It was a good joke, partly at her own expense. However, given her sister’s botched brain operation, it was insensitive, and perhaps an indication of some unresolved anger over the fate of the sister she had loved and tried so hard to protect.
Many of Kick’s and Jack’s friends were being posted overseas. There was Lem’s farewell party in March. He was going to Africa as an ambulance driver. And in April there was a weekend party in South Carolina for George Mead. George had a huge crush on Kick and had often taken her out in Washington. The beloved eldest son in a family of five children, he had joined the Marines, and was headed overseas to fight the Japanese. That weekend, he was unusually quiet. Kick was puzzled and worried that he didn’t seem happy to see her and her friends, who had all made such an effort to bid him farewell. George confessed to a friend that he was scared. His friend passed him Jack Kennedy’s advice ‘that if you didn’t think you were going to be killed, you’d survive’.3 The problem was that George thought that he would be killed, and he couldn’t bear the thought of being a coward.
Jack, recovering from his back surgery, was his usual high-spirited self, not allowing anyone to see his agony. He was the life and soul of George’s party, full of jokes about the navy versus the Marines. Despite his health problems, he signed up for combat action in high-speed PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats – sometimes known as ‘bucking broncos’. He covered up his medical history in order to be accepted. He wanted action and nothing was going to stop him.
Kick sent John a telegram from South Carolina to say that she had been delayed from returning to Washington: ‘Sickness prevents meeting.’ He was furious and felt that she was excluding him.4 When she came back, they quarrelled. To her surprise, he asked her what she thought about marrying him. ‘Not the way you are now’ was her response.5 He felt that she was dropping him and it made him love her all the more.
One evening, as he said his farewell, he was struck by an overpowering feeling of love and affection. ‘What a sweet, sincere, good-hearted little thing she is,’ he thought. Then he truly let his guard down and whispered, ‘I love you, Kathleen.’ The next day at the office, he drew back and was cold with her. After accompanying her home, he walked down the hall and then heard her footsteps. She was crying. She asked him whether he meant what he had said. When he confirmed it, she told him that she loved him too. She said she was sorry for the mistakes she felt she had made in her relationship with him. He put in his diary, ‘Think there are none.’6
The next day he sent her a dozen roses, took her out for dinner and enlisted in the Marines. By June, John, Jack and Joe had all gone. Jack made a special visit to Kick before he left for PT boat duty, in which he confided in her that he was thinking of renouncing the church. Kick was shocked. She found it unthinkable that he could hurt the family, knowing what this would do to her mother.7 On the other hand, her relationship with John White had led her to question some of the strict tenets of her religion.
Inga had left Washington for New York, so Kick threw herself into her work on ‘Did You Happen to See . . .’. One of her articles explored the idea of women running for office in times of war: ‘What about it, girls? Are you ready to take on the responsibilities of the world? Well, and what does the stronger sex think about this proposal to displace them?’8 As a Kennedy woman, she loved the idea of women in politics.
Kick was becoming a writer and had finally found her voice. She wrote to Jack with the ‘drippings from my pen’ and encouraged him to send his own literary endeavours for her to copy-edit.9 Brother and sister exchanged letters, in which they discussed everything from politics to the ideals of England. Kick corrected Jack’s spellings, and encouraged him to think carefully about his prose.
For the summer of 1942 Kick headed off for the Cape. For the first time other senior family members were missing. There was no Joe Jr, Jack or Rosemary. It simply wasn’t the same without them, and the rest of the family felt subdued and dispirited. Kick left the family in August to meet up with White in the exclusive resort of Jones Beach. They spent a memorable day swimming, surfing and picnicking. White tried to kiss her underwater, and then they lay on the sand on top of his United States Marine Corps blanket. White kissed her passionately in front of the crowds. Somehow in this new and dangerous situation, she allowed him to take liberties.10
The weekend continued well. They took the train to Manhattan and met up with Inga, who had remarried quickly after her rejection by Jack. She told Kick she still loved him. Then Kick and John sipped brandy Alexanders at the Rockefeller Center and saw Porgy and Bess on Broadway.11
Kick invited John to Hyannis Port for Labor Day. He was anxious about meeting the family for the first time. Arriving late, he was given a stony reception by Joe and Rose, who made it perfec
tly clear that they disliked and disapproved of him. The rest of the family were pleasant, especially the funny and charming Teddy, who was now ten. But it wasn’t a success. It was difficult for John to witness Kick back in the Kennedy fold; he saw that she was far more competitive than normal, and yet he also sensed that she was pulling back from the claustrophobia of the family, that she did not seek their approval in the same way as her siblings. He never saw the Kennedys again.
In August 1942, George Mead landed on Guadalcanal island in the Solomons and, after fierce fighting, was killed by a bullet in the face. His mother wrote to his friends, including the Kennedys: ‘The love in our hearts for George certainly is there stronger, if possible than ever before, and always will be. What is death, then, but a physical change which does not interfere in any way with our power to love?’12 Kick only learnt of his death at the beginning of September. She was devastated and wrote back to his mother:
Your words to us meant more than all the things I have ever read, learned or been taught about death, war, courage, strength . . . Future days may bring bad news to all of us, but remembering your words and the way you have acted, one cannot help but feel – Please God, let me act in a similar fashion.13
Kick also told Mrs Mead how much she had admired George for his strong sense of duty to his parents.
Back in Washington, without Jack or Inga, Kick continued to work hard at her job. She interviewed General Eisenhower’s brother, finding him ‘very interesting and very nice’. She had dinner with the ‘future pres[ident] of the United States (aka Brother Joe)’. Her letters home to her parents were full of news about her life as a reporter: ‘The column is going along very well. Still have plenty of people that must be interviewed. Yesterday I had a woman in, who the paper has been trying to get for years. She never would consent to be interviewed before.’14 Kick had the ability to get people to open up to her. They trusted her and responded to her warmth and good humour and intelligence.