JFK
Page 37
Jack knew what he must do: he had to follow suit. He promptly volunteered for the Army Officer Candidate School, but failed the physical on account of his bad back. He then tried the Navy, with the same result. He vowed to press on, and in Hyannis Port that summer he embarked on an exercise regimen to strengthen his back, in anticipation of his next attempt to enlist. How effective the workouts were, he couldn’t tell, but he felt good overall, free to enjoy his favorite place and time: the Cape in the summer. An early highlight was the Fourth of July weekend—always a time of special celebration in the Kennedy household, with a festively decorated porch and a long wooden table piled high with summer delicacies. The scene was frenetic as always, and filled with laughter. Jack and his siblings loved it, but on this holiday their father found himself worrying that his worst fears were coming true: a war he detested was drawing ever closer to America, and one son had already enlisted, with a second determined to join him. Fifteen-year-old Bobby was not too far behind, and Kick and Eunice were musing aloud about joining the Red Cross or even the Women’s Army Corps. If U.S. intervention came, Joe wondered, would there ever be another family gathering like this one?
There were more fun times in that sun-drenched Hyannis summer—the touch football games on the sloping lawn, the board games, the movie nights, the outings to Rexall’s for ice cream. Joe Junior was around a lot, commuting on weekends from his training base at Squantum, near Boston. Visitors came and went. Torby Macdonald showed up, which was unexceptional except that his letters to Jack, always playfully sarcastic, had of late taken on darker tones, the sarcasm more biting, more caustic, as though he resented Jack’s successes. The two also disagreed politically, with Torby espousing pro-appeasement and indeed even pro-German views.62 Lem Billings came, too, of course, as did John Hersey. Chuck Spalding, ever observant, marveled anew at the spectacle he had first encountered the summer before, one he found at once unique and quintessentially American. “It was a scene of endless competition, people drawing each other out and pushing each other to greater lengths. It was as simple as this: the Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened and it rubbed off on the people who came in contact with them. They were a unit.”63
That they were—an extraordinary constellation of eleven handsome and energetic people, close-knit and loving, protective of one another, living under one roof in the three-gabled house overlooking Nantucket Sound. But not for much longer. The patriarch was right to feel a sense of foreboding: that summer of 1941 would be the last time his family was all together.
*1 Joe Kennedy’s personal frustration in the fall of 1940 did not keep him from plugging Why England Slept whenever possible, including in the highest places. “Her Majesty the Queen yesterday spoke to me about my son Jack’s book. Inasmuch as Her Majesty expressed interest, I am sending this copy of the English edition for her.” (JPK to A. Harding, October 21, 1940, box 4A, JFK Personal Papers.)
*2 Stack would later win fame as FBI agent Eliot Ness in the ABC television crime drama The Untouchables, during the time Jack Kennedy was president. Of Jack’s way with the opposite sex, Stack would remark in his memoirs, “I’ve known many of the great Hollywood stars, and only a few of them seemed to hold the attention for women that Jack Kennedy did, even before he entered the political arena. He’d just look at them and they’d tumble.” (Stack, Straight Shooting, 72–73.)
ELEVEN
IN LOVE AND WAR
It is a marked feature of John F. Kennedy’s early adult years that at certain key junctures, family connections got him to places he otherwise would never have reached. Such was the case in October 1941, when he became an officer in the Navy Reserve and was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., the same posting Joe Junior had turned down the previous spring. In August, Joseph P. Kennedy had approached Captain Alan Kirk, who had been naval attaché in London during Kennedy’s ambassadorship and who now headed the office, about getting his second son into the Navy despite his dodgy health record. “I am having Jack see a medical friend of yours in Boston tomorrow for physical examination and then I hope he’ll become associated with you in Naval Intelligence,” Kennedy wrote.1 Kirk was happy to help. In London he had headed the inquiry into the Athenia sinking in 1939, and in that capacity had gotten to know Jack. The young man’s mind and affability had impressed him, and he welcomed the idea of bringing Jack into naval intelligence, where physical robustness counted for little and brainpower counted for a lot.
And so it was that a few weeks later, the board of medical examiners declared Jack “physically qualified for appointment” as an officer in the Navy Reserve. The exam had been, at best, perfunctory, and the report miraculously omitted mention of his long hospital stays and recurring illnesses. The ONI expressed its delight at bringing on this “exceptionally brilliant student” who “has unusual qualities and a definite future in whatever he undertakes,” and assigned him to the Foreign Intelligence Branch in its Washington office. As an ensign, Jack outranked his older brother, a seaman second class. In theory, at least, Joe Junior would have to address him as “Sir.”2
It was another blow to the previously undefeated contender for family honors. Joe was shattered. He’d put in the grueling work to get his wings while Jack sauntered along, his usual casual self, yet in an instant Jack had been elevated above him. A family friend found Joe genuinely worried for his brother’s ailing back and—for a baser reason—irritated with his father for helping Jack get into uniform. He knew, moreover, that by long-held custom, naval precedence, unlike the army’s, was assigned for life and dependent on date of commissioning; it marched on, forevermore, independent of merit. Jack had passed him and he would never catch up, no matter how hard he tried.3
Jack’s work turned out to be more tedious than advertised. He did not have top-secret clearance, so mostly he spent his days compiling intelligence digests based on reports from overseas stations. Six days a week he toiled, from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., editing and condensing, out of a dingy room with metal desks. A glamour position it was not. But at least he was in Washington, the nerve center of American statecraft, where tensions ran high and critical policy choices loomed. And at least he could spend time with Kick, who, after two years in college, had taken a job as a reporter with the staunchly isolationist Washington Times-Herald. Rosemary was also there—having been moved back to the States the previous year, she now lived under nuns’ care at St. Gertrude’s convent. Even Lem Billings resided nearby, in Baltimore, where he worked in advertising and sales at Coca-Cola.
As always, Jack delighted in Kick’s company, and she in his. They shared a similar sensibility and self-deprecating sense of humor, a similar love of gossip, and—following their father’s ambassadorship in London—a similar affinity for upper-class English society. Even casual friends could see the special chemistry that existed between them, one that neither had with any of the other seven siblings. They finished each other’s sentences and seemingly could read each other’s minds. They even looked alike, with the same mop of thick hair, the same blue eyes. Upon arrival in the city, Jack had rented an apartment on Twenty-first Street, a few blocks from Kick, and she soon introduced him to her social circle. One figure stood out: Inga Arvad, an effervescent Dane who spoke four languages and wrote a breezy profiles column for the Times-Herald. Four years older than Jack and on her second marriage, she bowled him over from the first meeting.4
She was, everyone agreed, stunningly gorgeous, blond and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and a flawless complexion, a woman who turned heads wherever she went. A slight gap between her two front teeth somehow only added to her mystique. But what really set Inga apart and drove an endless parade of suitors to distraction was her sensuality. It owed something to her looks, of course, but more to the ease and grace with which she carried herself as a former ballet dancer, to her warm and ready laugh and quick wit, to her elegance and warmth and the timbre of her voice.
The appeal was mutual. Kick had waxed lyrical about Jack in advance of his arrival (unlike the rest of the family, she thought Jack, not Joe Junior, was the Kennedy destined for greatness), and Inga found that her friend “hadn’t exaggerated. He had the charm that makes birds come out of the trees.” To White she confided, “Jack’s an interesting man because he’s so single-minded and easy to deal with. He knows what he wants. He’s not confused about motives and those things. I find that refreshing.” In a profile she wrote of Jack that ran in the November 27 issue of the Times-Herald, Arvad remarked on his selfless curiosity and called him “the best listener between Haparanda and Yokohama. Elder men like to hear his views which are sound and astonishingly objective for so young a man.” She marveled at his ability to write a bestselling book at so tender an age (“here is really a boy with a future”) and at his skill at “walking into the hearts of people.” By the end of that month he had walked into hers, and they were lovers.6
Inga Arvad in 1931, as the newly crowned Miss Denmark.
It mattered to Jack that Kick had played the role of matchmaker. Her opinion of the girls he dated had always been important to him, even in his teenage years. He trusted her judgment. Not infrequently, he turned to her for advice on matters of love, and to more than a few dates over the years he had emphasized how important it was that they make “a good impression on Kick.” Inga had clearly passed the bar, with room to spare. She and Kick hit it off from the start, and Kick was eager to connect her with Jack, despite the fact that Inga was married. (Almost certainly, she did not expect the affair to last. And, like her mother, Kick believed there were different rules for men and women; for herself she ruled out sex outside marriage, but she did not expect her father or brothers to do the same. When told in 1939 about a husband’s unfaithful ways, she replied, “That’s what all men do. You know that women can never trust them.”7)
To his parents, Jack said nothing about the nascent romance—for obvious reasons. In his letters to his mother during this period, he maintained a lighthearted tone that in a later generation could be called condescendingly sexist but was also affectionate and witty, and that suggested he had little on his mind but family and work. “I enjoy your round robin letters,” he wrote to Rose in November, echoing John Keats in his final flourish:
I’m saving them to publish—and that style of yours will net us millions. With all this talk about inflation and where is our money going—when I think of your potential earning power—with you dictating and Mrs. Walker beating it out on that machine—it’s enough to make a man get down on his knees and thank God for the Dorchester High Latin School which gave you that very sound grammatical basis which shines through every slightly mixed metaphor and each somewhat split infinitive….
My health is excellent. I look like hell, but my stomach is a thing of beauty—as are you, Ma,—and you, unlike my stomach—will be a joy forever.8
Jack also got to know Kick and Inga’s boss, the flamboyant Times-Herald publisher, Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, who was impressed that he could come out with a high-profile book right out of college and invited him to a dinner at her mansion in Dupont Circle on November 10. Also in attendance that night were Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal, journalist Herbert B. Swope, financier Bernard Baruch, and isolationist senator Burton K. Wheeler. Jack was entranced by the discussion, which featured a spirited debate over intervention between Forrestal (for) and Wheeler (against), and afterwards he wrote up a summary for himself of what had occurred. Wheeler, Jack jotted, insisted that “there was not a real emergency here now—no one could possibly invade this country,” and therefore America should stand apart. “He admitted he was a cold-blooded Yankee and said while he was sorry for the Poles and the Czechs he believed that their misery should serve as a warning, not as an incentive for duplicating it.” Jack saw the power in this perspective, and acknowledged to the group that he had once shared it, but he now found himself agreeing with Forrestal’s twin claims: that America was already at war in all but name, and that it was better to take on the Germans now, while the United States still had allies, than to wait for those allies to fall and have to fight Hitler alone. When Forrestal insisted that the United States must become “the dominant power of the 20th century,” Jack voiced full agreement.
He had become, if he wasn’t before, a full-fledged interventionist. To himself he remarked dryly that he hoped he wouldn’t need these dinner notes for a follow-up volume on “Why America Slept.”9
The first week of December 1941 began uneventfully: Jack hosted his father for lunch at his apartment and received a shipment of furniture from the family residence in Bronxville, which had just been sold. (Thenceforth the Kennedys would alternate between the homes in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, fifteen hundred miles apart.) That Wednesday, December 3, he wrote to Lem Billings to urge him to come to Washington for the weekend, and to bring his tuxedo, as “we might go to Chevy Chase.” Lem, as always, was happy to oblige. On Sunday, December 7, the young men had just finished a rousing game of touch football with strangers near the Washington Monument when the news came in: Pearl Harbor was under attack.
II
It was ironic, in a way, that war came to America by way of Asia and the Pacific, not Europe and the Atlantic. Though armies had been fighting in the Far East since Japan attacked China in 1937, developments there never loomed as large in the American consciousness as those in Europe. (The ties with Europe were closer, and the threat there seemed bigger.) When Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met on a British battleship at Argentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, in August 1941, the Nazi threat dominated much of the discussion, with Japan getting less attention. The two leaders also issued the Atlantic Charter, a universalistic set of war aims espousing collective security, self-determination, disarmament, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas. According to Churchill’s recollection, the president assured him off the record that, although he could not ask Congress to declare war against Nazi Germany, “he would wage war” and “become more and more provocative.”10
Soon after their meeting, American and German ships clashed in the North Atlantic. On September 4, a few weeks before Jack Kennedy began his job with the Office of Naval Intelligence, a German submarine fired torpedoes at the U.S. destroyer Greer, narrowly missing the target. Roosevelt declared in response that henceforth the U.S. Navy would have the authority to fire first when under threat, and he added that American warships would commence convoying British merchant vessels. It marked the start of an undeclared naval war with Germany. In early October, a German submarine torpedoed the U.S. destroyer Kearny off the coast of Iceland, and later that month the destroyer Reuben James went down after a torpedo attack, claiming more than one hundred American lives. Congress promptly scrapped the cash-and-carry policy and altered the Neutrality Acts to allow transport of munitions to Great Britain on armed U.S. merchant ships.
The isolationists were a dwindling band, both on Capitol Hill and in the country at large—in one fall poll, only 20 percent of respondents would admit to being isolatio
nist, while 75 percent regarded “defeating Nazism” as “the biggest job facing the country.” But FDR continued to fear their power, and they knew how to make themselves heard. On September 11, Charles Lindbergh, in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, carried to a nationwide radio audience, asserted that three groups were pushing the United States into war: the New Dealers, the British government, and the Jews. “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Lindbergh declared, his familiar high-pitched voice growing ever more fervent. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” Wendell Willkie, who remained the titular head of the GOP a year after his election loss, called it “the most un-American talk made in my lifetime by any person of national reputation.”11
Tensions in Asia rose alarmingly that fall, notwithstanding Roosevelt’s desire to avoid war with Japan in order to concentrate on the German threat. The previous year, in September 1940, after Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact (and thus became the Axis powers), FDR had slapped an embargo on shipments of scrap metal and aviation fuel to Japan. When Japanese troops occupied French Indochina in July 1941, the administration froze Japanese financial assets in the United States, expanded the embargo, and stopped the export of all oil to Japan. The implications were huge for a country that consumed roughly twelve thousand tons of petroleum each day, most of it imported from America. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, a moderate, proposed a summit meeting with Roosevelt and offered to withdraw Japanese forces from Indochina as soon as Japan’s struggle with China was resolved. Roosevelt balked, persuaded by his aides to insist on Japanese disengagement from China as a precondition for any summit. The proposal collapsed, and Konoe was ousted in favor of Hideki Tojo, the militaristic army minister. In November, Tojo offered to disengage from Indochina immediately, and from China right after the establishment of peace, in return for a million tons of aviation gasoline. Secretary of State Cordell Hull turned down the offer and reiterated the U.S. insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China and Southeast Asia. An intercepted message that U.S. analysts decoded on December 3 instructed the Japanese embassy in Washington to burn codes and destroy cipher machines—a clear indication that war was coming.12