The two years between 1938 and 1940, then, were critical, he contends, because, had the war begun at the earlier date, Britain would have been naked to its enemies. The beauty of this argument is that it mitigates the moral failure of giving away a country and its people to Adolf Hitler. Joe Kennedy, one assumes, wouldn’t have forsworn appeasement based simply on a shift in the balance of weaponry. He didn’t believe in fighting Hitler under any circumstances. But, while Jack makes the case that Chamberlain had no choice but to parlay and retreat, the real issue now, for him, is that the United States, his own country, must take the lesson and do better.
“I do not believe necessarily,” he wrote, “that if Hitler wins the present war he will continue on his course to world domination. . . . But, in the light of what has happened in the last five years, we cannot depend on it.”
In other words, America needed to get its act together and stop blaming Chamberlain, and therefore his own father, for not doing what it still needed to do. It was a masterful exercise in intergenerational politics. Here was the son, taking on, without condemning, the father’s indefensible position on what would soon be revealed as the worst horror of the century. He was doing so with such a deft touch that his father took no apparent offense. In truth, he was saying that Britain should have been morally prepared to fight, and his father was saying Britain should still avoid the fight.
What Jack now proposed was that America be prepared to fight, not repeating Britain’s error. “England made many mistakes; she is paying heavily for them now. In studying the reasons why England slept, let us try to profit by them and save ourselves her anguish.” Why England Slept quickly became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic, and Jack donated the royalties from the British edition to the fund to rebuild war-scarred Plymouth.
It is yet another manifestation of the two Jacks: the young American drawn to Churchill’s mind and fearlessness on the one hand, and the son whose father was equally fearless but to a different purpose. To reconcile the lessons of these two figures was a task for which he had needed to make the effort.
Again, it was masterful politics. If Joe Kennedy had been paying strict attention, he would have spotted the end run his son was making around him here. Jack was arguing that Britain didn’t fight because it hadn’t rearmed. But wasn’t that tantamount to saying Britain should have been ready to fight? And wasn’t that a subversion of his father’s own position? Jack had done more than find a middle ground with his father; he’d subtly taken that ground right out from under him.
That fall, the senior Kennedy would be forced from his job in London, a victim of his poor judgment. He had been quoted in a Boston Globe column saying, “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.” Jack’s career would go on to be a continual balancing act between the nobility of valiant death on the battlefield, so admired by Churchill, and the horror of war itself, so understood by Chamberlain and backed by the hardnosed Joe Kennedy.
Jack felt deeply the emotional weight of the valor, commitment, and sacrifice demanded by war. Nothing makes this clearer than his beloved Pilgrim’s Way, the autobiography of John Buchan, famous for writing The Thirty-Nine Steps. Published in 1940, it immediately became a favorite and would remain the best-loved book of his life. Most significant, in its pages he again encountered the widely mourned figure of Raymond Asquith, about whom Churchill had written so movingly.
“He loved his youth,” Buchan wrote of Asquith. “And his youth has become eternal. Debonair and brilliant and brave, he is now part of that immortal England which knows not age or weariness or defeat.”
Jack loved courage, hated war. That conflict would define his view of history’s leaders. As we will see very soon, it will define how he viewed himself.
8. Inga Marie Arvad
9. Raymond Asquith
10. Red Fay
11. Chuck Spalding saluting
12. PT 109
CHAPTER THREE
SKIPPER
He had never found a circle where he was so much at home and his popularity was immediate and complete. He was an excellent battalion officer.
—John Buchan on Raymond Asquith,
from Pilgrim’s Way
Up until he went to war, Jack Kennedy had the luxury of living two lives. There was the often bedridden young man, who, loving books and loving heroes, greatly admired Winston Churchill. Twinned with him was the popular bon vivant son of the wealthy Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. One lived in the quiet world where history looks back and looms forward, where tales of majesty mingle with dreams of glory. The other lived in the divine, fortunate present of Mayfair addresses and country estates, of titled hosts and society hostesses.
War, for a time, joined the two Jacks as one. Called upon in 1943 to be a leader of men, he shouldered willingly the burden that comes with taking others into harm’s way and then getting them back alive and whole. His experience in the waters of the South Pacific was to be the most searing event of his life, the one that transformed him into a figure like those who previously consumed his imagination.
It would make of him a hero like those he’d read about. There is nowhere to hide any part of yourself when you face death. What’s more, Jack Kennedy now would be what he’d never been before: a regular guy. He was about to enter a world where he’d be accepted for the man he was. It didn’t matter where he’d come from, or what he’d done before. Finally, for the first time in his life, he was moving on to a level playing field. He proved more than up to the challenge, and the confidence that came of it would stay with him.
Look back at Raymond Asquith. Comparing the pair at this moment—two men poised on the brink of different wars—offers clear parallels. Both had been born to privilege and attended the most elite of schools. Both were tall and handsome. Both seemed, effortlessly, to gain the loyalty and devotion of friends. Both volunteered at the outset of world war. Both were assigned cushy, safe postings in intelligence—and, in each case, in locations far from the front. Both, on their own, rejected that safety and sought aggressively to get to the action, wanting to be in the thick of things, in front-line combat units. And the fact that Jack identified with Asquith—who lost his life after being shot by a sniper at the Battle of the Somme, where the British casualties were 420,000 men—was never any secret from his friends.
• • •
Jack and Lem Billings were playing touch football on the Washington Mall the Sunday Pearl Harbor was attacked. It was December 7, 1941. They heard the news on the car radio as they were heading back to Jack’s apartment on Sixteenth Street. Jack had managed to join the navy earlier that fall after being rejected by the army for obvious health reasons.
In fact, the navy had turned him down, too, but he stubbornly went all out for five months, exercising to overcome the bad back problems that had caused him to flunk. Strengthened by the training regimen, he passed the physical on his second try, but he also benefited from the support of a naval captain who’d been attaché at the London embassy and was now the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the outfit to which Jack was immediately assigned in Washington. It was a no-sweat job that had him knocking out routine bulletins and briefing memos. While Jack considered the paper-pushing a waste of his time, it left him enough leisure to enjoy the distractions of the city’s buzzing social life, to which the threat of imminent war added an extra charge of intensity.
His specific distraction at that moment was a Danish beauty he’d met through his sister Kathleen and was dazzled by. Inga Marie Arvad, or “Inga Binga,” as Jack liked to call her, was working as a columnist at the Washington Times-Herald, where Kick was a research assistant to the executive editor. Four years older than he and European, she had just enough experience on him to be exciting. She’d acted in a couple of Danish films, and had married the director of one of them; in fact, she was still legally married to him when she was living in Washington.
Chuck Spalding, a Yalie Jack had met through Torby Macdonald the previous y
ear and who now was one of his closest pals, watched the relationship heat up with fascination. “Her conversation was miles and miles ahead of everybody,” he was to explain. “There was something adventurous about her. She’d done so much, been involved in so much. She was a fictional character almost, walking around. Of all the people that I ever saw him with I’d say she was the most compatible.”
She cherished the memories of their wartime love affair for the rest of her life. “He had the charm that makes birds come out of their trees,” was a description she would give.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one paying close attention to her. Washington was a hotbed of spies, obviously, each one masquerading as something else, and the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, was keeping a close eye on all resident aliens. The Bureau’s dossier on Inga contained enough to make her of serious interest to it, including one very explosive item: a photo of this gorgeous blonde in the company of the Führer himself.
That snapshot was a legacy of a stint she’d spent as a freelance reporter in Denmark, during which she’d gotten a tip, in early 1935, that the high-ranking Nazi Hermann Göring, a widower, was about to be married for the second time. Based on her scoop, she was assigned to cover the wedding that April, where she found herself being introduced to Hitler. Struck by the beautiful young Dane’s embodiment of the perfect Nordic physical ideal, he invited her to come back to Berlin the following August to be his guest at the 1936 Olympics.
The FBI didn’t like the looks of it. They refused to clear Arvad, suspecting her of being pro-Hitler or, worse yet, being a spy, using the Herald-Examiner job as a cover. They maintained surveillance of her comings and goings, being quite concerned about the company she was keeping, especially the time spent with the son of the rich former ambassador who backed appeasement.
Hoover’s agents bugged Inga’s rooms, and made voice recordings, with Jack clearly audible, which soon were in the files, testifying to the long weekends the couple spent together and Jack’s love of risk-taking. Before long, Ensign Kennedy was given a new assignment and dispatched to a Southern naval base, more than four hundred miles away. It’s likely the FBI had a hand in the transfer to Charleston, Hoover hoping to get him out of harm’s way by removing the immediate temptation. At least, JFK thought so: “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde, and they thought she was a spy.”
Away from the excitement of Washington, Jack quickly grew bored. Now, more than ever fed up with a desk job, what he wanted, above all, was to be where there was action. His pulse quickened by war fever, he could think only of getting to the front. Inga, who visited him, took his grand, if still unclear, ambitions seriously. “If you can find something you really believe in, then, my dear, you caught the biggest fish in the ocean,” she wrote. “You can pull it aboard, but don’t rush it, there is still time.”
The FBI, still on Inga’s trail, found the pair sharing a February weekend at the Fort Sumter House hotel. Its agent reported the two left the hotel only for late-night meals and to attend church together Sunday morning at the Catholic cathedral on Broad Street; young Kennedy was keeping up with church even as he shared a bed with Inga Binga.
Jack Kennedy, being a man of his times, felt the patriotic pull of service. His older brother had experienced the pull, too. Though Joe Jr., as in all things, had previously followed his father’s lead, identifying with the isolationist America First movement, by the summer of 1941 he was training to be a navy pilot. It was truly a time of testing for such elite young men, suddenly having to square their belief systems with their consciences.
I talked to one of Joe’s Choate classmates, Paul Ferber, then in his nineties, who’d never forgotten being at naval aviation school in Jacksonville, Florida, and running into young Joe there. He was deeply taken with his words. “I want to go over there and bomb the hell out of those Nazis!” Ferber, after all, was familiar with the antiwar sentiments of Joe’s dad.
In July, Jack transferred to midshipman’s school at Northwestern University, and from there applied to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island. The essential conditions being looked for in the Melville recruits were exactly the ones he possessed, he told Lem. “I have applied for torpedo boat school under Lt. Bulkeley. The requirements are very strict physically. You have to be young, healthy and unmarried. As I am young, healthy and unmarried, I’m trying to get in.”
Bulkeley was looking for hotshot junior officers used to handling high-powered speedboats and to the rigors of long sailing races. Fast thinking, teamwork, and endurance were everything. What this meant, then, was a group disproportionately Ivy League, ones who’d grown up summering in such places as coastal Maine or on Long Island Sound, where their families and friends belonged to yacht clubs. In other words, young men like Jack Kennedy.
Joining the PTs gave Jack the chance, finally, to command his own boat. His love of the sea is one of those things most people associate with him. Jack was proud of the Nantucket Sound sailing championship he’d earned. He and Joe had even been together on a victorious Harvard intercollegiate sailing team in ’38, but now he was ready to be the skipper.
There in Rhode Island, he shared a Quonset hut with Torby Macdonald, who, with a little help from Jack’s father, happily arrived to keep him company. After they completed their training and had their sights on the South Pacific, a snag arose when Jack received orders to stay stateside as an instructor. This time, political rescue came from on high in the person of Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs.
Yet barely was that issue resolved when another crimp appeared in Jack’s plans. It was his bad back and the pounding it could expect to suffer aboard a PT boat. While he got past muster, his health condition was precarious. No one knew this as well as Jack himself. Even going at half-speed, standing upright on these boats was as tough as riding a bucking bronco. One person this worried was Jack’s father.
“Jack came home,” he wrote Joe Jr., after Jack stopped for some R & R at Hyannis Port while at Melville, “and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back.” His son, ignoring all the danger signs, chose to make the best of it, preferring to get into the action rather than worry over its certain consequences for him.
He feared as much for what his sensitive gut would have to take. “I’m rather glad to be on my way,” he wrote Lem, “although I understand that this South Pacific is not a place where you lie on a white beach with a cool breeze, while those native girls who aren’t out hunting for your daily supply of bananas are busy popping grapes in your mouth. It would seem to consist of heat and rain and dysentery + cold beans, all of which won’t of course bother anyone with a good stomach. If it’s as bad as they say it is, I imagine I’ll be voting Republican in ’44.”
Kennedy’s first taste of the hazards of war came even before he reached his assigned PT base in the Solomon Islands, when his transport ship, an LST, was attacked by Japanese airplanes. A pilot, shot down and swimming off the side of his ship, was about to be picked up as a survivor. Then, just as the American crewmen prepared to begin the rescue, the flyer threw off his life jacket, pulled out a revolver he’d been hiding in the water, and fired two shots at the bridge, aiming for the ship’s captain and other ranking officers.
Describing the scene to Lem, he wrote: “I had been praising the Lord and passing the ammunition right alongside—but that showed me a bit—the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship. We returned the fire with everything we had—the water boiled around him—but everyone was too surprised to shoot straight. Finally an old soldier standing next to me—picked up his rifle—fired once—and blew the top of his head off. He threw up his arms—plunged forward—and sank—and we hauled our ass out of there. That was the start of a very interesting month—and it brought home very strongly how long it is going to take to finish this war.” What he’d now witnessed for himself was t
hat the Japanese they were fighting were not only willing to risk their lives but to sacrifice them.
Lieutenant (JG) Kennedy found for himself a new world in the navy. His fellow officers posted to the South Pacific were, by the fact of their commissions, college men, and many from the Ivies. Yet there were also self-described “weed leaguers,” young men from state universities. What united them all was merit; each had earned his place there. It was Jack’s first time in such a company of dedicated equals, all facing the same discomforts and, of course, the same danger of getting killed.
“It’s not bad here at all,” he told Lem in one letter from Tulagi Island in the Solomons. “They have just opened up an Officers Club which consists of a tent. The liquor served is an alcoholic concoction which is drawn out of the torpedo tubes known as torp juice. Every night about 7:30 the tent bulges, about five men come crashing out, blow their lunch and swagger off to bed.”
Soon he was collecting around himself new lifelong friends, just as he had at Choate and Harvard. One was Paul “Red” Fay, a Stanford grad whose father ran a San Francisco construction company. The two met when Fay, being instructed by Jack, ignored orders and got on the wrong PT boat. Kennedy dressed him down in powerful language Red Fay never forgot: “Do you realize that if what you did was compounded by every single person in the United States coming through training the war would be won by the Japs inside of three months!” Trust a pair of Irishmen to start a good friendship with a good fight.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 44