32. The invoice for the car purchase, totaling $1,329.51, including sales tax, is in box 20, JPKP. Various historical accounts say the car was green in color, but according to the invoice it was black.
33. Quoted in Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 350.
34. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 351.
35. JPK to JFK, November 16, 1943, box 3, JPKP; JFK to JPK, n.d. (March 1940), box 5, JPKP.
36. Stanford Daily, October 30, 1940. As a student, he was entitled to deferment until at least July 1941.
37. Ralph Horton OH, JKFL; Blair and Blair, Search for JFK, 114.
38. Stansky, First Day. The house Kennedy rented is now the home of the Legoland Windsor Resort theme park.
39. Collier and Horowitz, Kennedys, 107.
40. Luce OH, JFKL.
41. In a letter to Jack in early August, he wrote, “The whole crux of the matter is, as I have said to you before, the strength of the German air force….No country today can stand up unless it has air parity with another country, assuming that the other country can get its airplanes in to fight, which of course the Germans can do very easily now because they have practically all the bases up and down the whole west coast of Europe.” JPK to JFK, August 2, 1940, box 2, JPKP.
42. JPK to JFK, September 10, 1940, box 4A, JFKPP.
43. JPK diary, October 19, 1940, box 100, JPKP; Arthur Krock private memo, December 1, 1940, box 1, AKP. On the twists and turns in the presidential election, see Moe, Second Act.
44. On October 16, 1940, Kennedy wrote in his diary, “Unless we handle our affairs with more vision than I think we are going to, we shall be getting ourselves deeper and deeper in the mud.” JPK diary, box 100, JPKP. See also Nasaw, Patriarch, 485–86; and Whalen, Founding Father, 347–48.
45. Whalen, Founding Father, 231–33; Goodwin, Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 517; Swift, Kennedys Amidst the Gathering, 81.
46. Account of Ambassador’s Trip to U.S. on Clipper, October 1940, box 100, JPKP; Arthur Krock private memo, December 1, 1940, box 1, AKP; Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, 216–19; Leamer, Kennedy Men, 155; Moe, Second Act, 295–99. When she learned of Kennedy’s plan to endorse FDR, Clare Boothe Luce wrote him, “I want you also to know that I believe with all my heart and soul you will be doing America a terrible disservice. I know too well your private opinions not also to know that half of what you say (if you say it) you really won’t believe in your heart.” Clare Boothe Luce to JPK, October 28, 1940, box 100, JPKP.
47. BG, November 10, 1940.
48. “Apparently, Joe Kennedy is out to do whatever damage he can,” Harold Ickes remarked in his diary. “The president said that, in his opinion, the interview obtained with Kennedy in Boston a couple of weeks ago was authentic, despite its subsequent denial by Kennedy.” Harold Ickes diary, December 1, 1940, HIP, LC.
49. JPK to JFK, telegram, December 5, 1940, box 4A, JFKPP; Nasaw, Patriarch, 506–9; Leamer, Kennedy Men, 160.
50. JFK to JPK, December 6, 1940, box 4A, JFKP. Emphasis in original.
51. JFK to JPK, December 6, 1940, box 4A, JFKP.
52. JFK “supplementary note,” n.d., box 5, JPKP.
53. Harriet Price to JFK, n.d., box 4B, JFKPP; Leamer, Kennedy Men, 162.
54. Even as Kennedy delivered the radio address, senior administration officials, including FDR, were not sure which way he would go. See Harold Ickes diary, January 19, 1941, HIP, LC. On the isolationist opposition in these weeks, much of it funded by Robert McCormick, see Smith, Colonel, 398–409.
55. See Edwards, Edward R. Murrow; and Cloud and Olson, Murrow Boys.
56. Searls, Lost Prince, 173; Collier and Horowitz, Kennedys, 112.
57. JFK passport file, box 6, JFKPP; RK, Times to Remember, 279.
58. Kaiser, No End, 200–204; Reynolds, From Munich, 126–30; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, 90.
59. Kershaw, Hitler: Nemesis, 393; Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion. For a summary of Hitler’s motives in launching the invasion, see Ferguson, War of the World, 426–31.
60. BG, April 30, 1941; Searls, Lost Prince, 172–73.
61. Schoor, Young John Kennedy, 118; Searls, Lost Prince, 174.
62. See Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 398–41.
63. Collier and Horowitz, Kennedys, 113.
CHAPTER 11: IN LOVE AND WAR
1. Blair and Blair, Search for JFK, 111–13.
2. Report of Physical Exam, August 5, 1941, box 11A, JFKPP; Investigation Report, USNIS, September 10, 1941, box 11A, JFKPP; Perrett, Jack, 94.
3. Searls, Lost Prince, 181–82.
4. A biography is Farris, Inga.
5. Quoted in Farris, Inga, 3–4.
6. Arvad memoir in Ron McCoy Papers, quoted in Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 422; White interview at 423; Inga Arvad, “Did You Happen to See?” Washington Times-Herald, November 27, 1941.
7. Farris, Inga, 43; McTaggart, Kathleen Kennedy, 11, 62.
8. JFK to RK, n.d. (November 1941), box 21, JPKP.
9. JFK memo, “Dinner at Mrs. Patterson’s,” n.d. (November 1941), box 11, JFK Pre-Pres.
10. On the Newfoundland meeting and the Atlantic Charter, see, e.g., Wilson, First Summit; and Borgwardt, New Deal, part 1. Churchill recollection is quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 496. See also Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 1, 299.
11. Cull, Selling War, 185; Schlesinger, A Life, 256–57; Lepore, These Truths, 482; Berg, Lindbergh, 425–29.
12. On the developments in these months, see, e.g., Hotta, Japan 1941; Heinrichs, Threshold of War; and Gillon, Pearl Harbor.
13. See, e.g., Stinnett, Day of Deceit. For a critique, see Rosenberg, Date Which Will Live, 158–62.
14. Schlesinger, A Life, 241–61; Olson, Angry Days, 426–27; JPK telegram to FDR, December 7, 1941, printed in Smith, Hostage to Fortune, 533.
15. FDR to Boettiger, March 3, 1942, Boettiger Papers, FDRL, quoted in Nasaw, Patriarch, 520.
16. Hamilton, Mantle of Command, 76–77.
17. Churchill, Grand Alliance, 539–40; Fenby, Alliance, 79–80.
18. Roberts, Storm of War, 193–94. For the provocative argument that Hitler’s principal concern was never primarily Bolshevism, as has often been claimed, but “Anglo-America and global capitalism,” see Simms, Hitler.
19. JFK to KLB, December 12, 1941, box 1, KLBP.
20. Writing decades later under her married name, Page (Huidekoper) Wilson would say of Arvad: “I didn’t get the impression [in late 1941 and early 1942] that she was hiding any history of her life as a reporter in Germany.” Wilson, Carnage and Courage, 170.
21. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 427; Hardison Report, January 6, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
22. Hardison Report, January 6, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF, NARA; Ladd Memo for Hoover, January 17, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF; McKee report for Hoover, February 3, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
23. Berlingske Tidende, November 1, 1935, quoted in Farris, Inga, 137–38.
24. Kramer to Ladd, January 28, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF; FDR to Hoover, May 4, 1942, quoted in O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, 120. The request for phone surveillance authorization is in a Hoover “Memo for the Attorney General,” January 21, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF. Hoover wrote, “The combination of these facts indicates a definite possibility that she may be engaged in a most subtle type of espionage activities against the United States.”
25. Hardison Report, January 22, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
26. Hardison Report, January 6, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
27. New York Daily Mirror, January 12, 1942; Farris, Inga, 211–14. On Winchell’s extraordinary reach in terms of readership, see Gabler, Winchell. According to Rose Kennedy, Jack was “completely mystified” by the sudden transfer to Charleston. RK to children, January 20, 1942, box 2, JPKP.
28. On March 4, 1942, Kennedy again lobbied FDR for a job: “I don’t want to appear in the role of a man looking for a job for the sake of getting an appointment, but Joe and Jack are in the service and I feel that my experience in these critical times might be worth something in some position. I just want to say that if you want me, I am yours to command at any time.” JPK to FDR, March 4, 1942, printed in Smith, Hostage to Fortune, 541–42. On March 7, Kennedy wrote again. JPK to FDR, March 7, 1942, box 4A, JFKPP. Again, no significant offer materialized. Felix Frankfurter, in a diary entry in early 1943, would write, “I don’t suppose it ever enters the head of a Joe Kennedy that one who was so hostile to the war effort as he was all over the lot, and so outspoken in his foulmouthed opposition to the President himself, barred his own way to a responsible share in the conduct of the war.” Lash, From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter, 237–38.
29. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 447.
30. Inga Arvad to JFK, February 19, 1942, box 4A, JFKPP; Arvad to JFK, n.d. (1942), box 4A, JFKPP; Arvad to JFK, March 11, 1942, box 4A, JFKPP; S. K. McKee to J. Edgar Hoover, February 24, 1942, box 4, Hoover OCF.
31. Inga Arvad to JFK, n.d. (1942), box 4A, JFKPP.
32. Torbert Macdonald to JFK, n.d. (1942), box 4B, JFKPP; Farris, Inga, 204.
33. ARV Summary, February 3, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
34. ARV Summary, February 3, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
35. E. H. Adkins Report, February 9, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
36. ARV Summary, March 2, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF; Ruggles to the director, February 23, 1942, box 5, Hoover, OCF.
37. ARV Summary, March 6, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF.
38. RK round-robin letter, February 16, 1942, printed in Smith, Hostage to Fortune, 539–40; KLB OH, JFKL.
39. RK, Times to Remember, 286; Byrne, Kick, 165.
40. Nasaw, Patriarch, 534–36. On the development of the procedure, and the roles played by Moniz and Freeman, see also Dittrich, Patient H.M., 77–88. New York Times is quoted at 83.
41. Marguerite Clark, “Surgery in Mental Cases,” American Mercury, March 1941; Waldemar Kaempffert, “Turning the Mind Inside Out,” SEP, May 24, 1941; “Neurological Treatment of Certain Abnormal Mental States Panel Discussion at Cleveland Session,” Journal of the American Medical Association 117, no. 7 (August 16, 1941); Larson, Rosemary, 161–62.
42. Walter Freedman and James Watts, Psychosurgery: Intelligence, Emotion, and Social Behavior Following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Mental Disorders (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1942), quoted in Dittrich, Patient H.M., 84.
43. Nasaw, Patriarch, 534–36; Larson, Rosemary, 161; Perry, Rose Kennedy, 164–65.
44. Eunice Kennedy Shriver interview by Robert Coughlan, February 7, 1972, box 10, RKP. See also Smith, Nine of Us, 236.
45. Larson, Rosemary, 169–70.
46. Goodwin, Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 644; Leamer, Kennedy Men, 170.
47. Larson, Rosemary, 160–61, 179–80; McNamara, Eunice, 22, 58; JPK to JFK, November 16, 1943, box 3, JPKP; JPK to JPK Jr., February 21, 1944, box 3, JPKP. To his wife, Kennedy wrote in November 1942, “I stopped off to see Rosemary and she was getting along very nicely. She looks very well.” JPK to RK, November 23, 1942, box 21, JPKP.
48. RK to children, December 5, 1941, box 55, RKP, JFKL. Her round-robin letter of January 20, 1942, gave no hint that anything was amiss. RK to children, January 20, 1942, box 21, JPKP.
49. Kennedy, Times to Remember, 286; Goodwin, Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 643. David Nasaw suspects that Rose had little say in the decision to operate, both because of the nature of the Kennedys’ marriage and because of the custom at the time. He quotes historian Janice Brockley’s finding that mental health professionals in midcentury often recommended that fathers—thought to be more emotionally detached, more clearheaded—take the decision-making burden from their wives when it came to the treatment options for disabled children. Nasaw, Patriarch, 534.
50. JFK to KK, March 10, 1942, box 4A, JFKPP. Emphasis in original. He also mused about a conversation he’d had in Palm Beach with Lord Halifax, the former British foreign minister and now ambassador to Washington, over the Christmas holiday. Halifax had asserted, Jack jotted in notes of the conversation, that “if England had fought in 1938, she would have been licked immediately. As evidence he repeated the conversation that he had with Sir John Dill, chief of the British General Staff. He asked him whether he would rather have fought in 1938 or 1939. Dill thought for a moment and then said, ‘I would rather have fought in 1940.’ ” Later in the conversation, Halifax dismissed Jack’s suggestion that a grand alliance with the Soviet Union might have been possible, and explained why he was not the right person to succeed Chamberlain as prime minister in 1940. “Talk with Lord Halifax,” n.d. (January 1942), box 11, JFK Pre-Pres.
51. Luce to JPK, February 5, 1942, box 4B, JFKPP. Taken aback by the letter, the elder Kennedy wrote to Jack, “Heaven knows, I don’t want any pessimism of mine to have any effect on you, but I don’t know how to tell you what I think unless I tell you what I think.” JPK to JFK, February 9, 1942, box 2, JFKP.
52. JFK, draft article, n.d. (Feb. 1942), box 11, JFKPP. In a letter to Rip Horton, Jack showed again that he didn’t share his father’s pessimism. Musing on the themes of Greek tragedy, he concluded: “We can do something the Greeks couldn’t—we can prevent the gloomy ending—it isn’t inevitable—something can be done.” JFK to Ralph Horton, n.d. (Feb. or March 1942), box 4b, JFKPP.
53. Clinical report, Chief of Bureau of Navigation to JFK, May 8, 1942, box 11A, JFKPP.
54. RK to JPK Jr., September 29, 1942, quoted in Goodwin, Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 647–48; Dallek, Unfinished Life, 76.
55. Farris, Inga, 283; ARV Summary of June 24, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF; JFK to RK, n.d. (1942), box 2, JPKP. Arvad had moved to Reno, Nevada, for several weeks to secure a divorce from Fejos but had recently returned. The FBI had promptly resumed technical surveillance. Memo for the Director, June 16, 1942, box 4, Hoover OCF.
56. Goodwin, Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 635.
57. Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 16.
58. JFK, “For What We Fight” (speech), July 4, 1942, box 28, DFPP.
59. ARV Summary, July 24, 1942, box 5, Hoover OCF; Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 494.
60. Admiral Chester Nimitz said of the early developments after Pearl Harbor: “From the time the Japanese dropped those bombs on December 7th until at least two months later, hardly a day passed that the situation did not get more chaotic and confused and appear more hopeless.” Quoted in Toll, Pacific Crucible, 129. On Japan’s advances in these months, see also Calvocoressi and Wint, Total War, 722–37.
61. On the results at Midway, see Costello, Pacific War, 305–8; Toll, Pacific Crucible, 473–76.
62. JFK to KLB, n.d. (July 1942), box 1, KLBP.
63. Donovan, PT 109, 23.
64. Breuer, Sea Wolf, 108–9.
65. O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, 130.
66. JPK to JPK Jr., October 1, 1942, box 2, JPKP.
67. Dallek, Unfinished Life, 88.
68. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 513.
69. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 512.
70. Quoted in O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, 131.
71. David I. Walsh to John Fitzgerald, December 21, 1942, quoted in Goodwin, Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, 648.
72. JFK to RFK, January 10, 1943, quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 54.
73. Pitts, Jack and Lem, 87–88; Dallek, Unfinished Life, 90. According to Rose, Jack was “quite ready to die for the U.S.A. in order to keep the Japanese and the Germans from becoming the dominant people in their respective continents, believing that sooner or later they would encroach on ours.” RK to children, October 9, 1942, box 4a, JFKPP.
CHAPTER 12: OVERBOARD
/> 1. Quoted in Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 530.
2. Buchan, Pilgrim’s Way, 49–50. See also David Shribman, “Remembering a Forgotten Man and His Forgotten Book,” Toledo Blade, May 28, 2017.
3. Buchan, Pilgrim’s Way, 58; Sorensen, Kennedy, 14. In the same way, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a White House aide during the Kennedy administration, would remark, “Only the unwary could conclude that his ‘coolness’ was because he felt too little. It was because he felt too much and had to compose himself for an existence filled with disorder and suffering.” Quoted in Rubin, Forty, 252.
4. James Reed interview in Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth, 526–27; “Edgar Stephens Remembers JFK He Knew in Navy,” Albany Gazette (MO), November 23 and 25, 1988, box 132, JFKPOF; Meyers, As We Remember, 39.
5. The literature is enormous. See, e.g., Beevor, Stalingrad; Glantz and House, To the Gates; Atkinson, Army at Dawn.
6. Hastings, Inferno, 256. Costello, Pacific War, 364.
7. Kennedy, Victory at Sea, chap. 8.
8. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun, 222–26.
9. Manchester, Glory and the Dream, 266; Hynes, Soldiers’ Tale, 159–60.
10. Thomas, Sea of Thunder, 69. Before the war, Tulagi had been the capital of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate.
11. Toll, Conquering Tide, 202; JFK to KLB, May 6, 1943, quoted in Pitts, Jack and Lem, 97.
12. JFK to RK and JPK, received May 10, 1943, box 2, JPKP.
13. JFK to RK and JPK, n.d. (early May 1943), printed in Smith, Hostage to Fortune, 550–51; JFK round-robin letter, June 24, 1943, box 2, JPKP; Dallek, Unfinished Life, 91.
14. JFK to JPK and RK, May 14, 1943, box 2, JPKP.
15. JFK to Inga Arvad, n.d. (spring 1943), quoted in Stern, Averting “The Final Failure,” 37; JFK to RK and JPK, May 14, 1943, box 5, JFKPP. The letter to the parents concluded with a note of assurance for Rose: “P.S. Mother: Got to church Easter. They had it in a native hut and aside from having a condition read ‘Enemy aircraft in the vicinity’ it went as well as St. Pat’s.”
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