By December 7, 1941, with Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and America finally in the war, it was over for Joe Kennedy. Caught up in his ambitions and his fears for the world economy, he had failed to see how Franklin Roosevelt connected to the American people. Kennedy, with his relentless social climbing and political scheming, had been on the wrong side of the greatest moral issue in his life—the need to stop Hitler’s Germany. It was a mistake his son Jack would not make.
Joe Kennedy’s political ambitions shifted, with a vengeance, to his two oldest sons, who would become his political surrogates, and would get the benefit of his money, intellect, and willingness to do anything. Joe Jr. was completing navy flight training in Jacksonville, Florida; Jack, a navy ensign, was assigned to the headquarters of the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, where he was put to work writing daily and weekly intelligence bulletins.
Even with the war on, Jack Kennedy still managed to find time for partying. Just before the end of the year he initiated a torrid affair with a married Danish journalist, Inga Marie Arvad, who was estranged from her husband, a Hungarian movie director named Paul Fejos. Arvad, a former beauty queen, had interviewed Hitler and briefly socialized with him and other leading Nazis in 1936, while covering the Olympics for a Danish newspaper. She had been spotted by Arthur Krock while attending the Columbia School of Journalism in 1941. Krock recommended her to Frank Waldrop, the editor of the isolationist Washington Times-Herald, and Waldrop hired her to write a fluffy human interest column that focused on new arrivals to wartime Washington. Jack Kennedy was among those she interviewed. The handsome twenty-four-year-old navy officer fell in love with the older, more experienced, and far more sophisticated former beauty queen.
The FBI, alerted to Arvad’s meeting with Hitler by a jealous fellow reporter on the Times-Herald, marked her as a potential Nazi spy and began an investigation into her background. One early allegation, eventually discredited, was that Arvad’s uncle was a chief of police in Berlin. By early 1942, J. Edgar Hoover, at the direct insistence of FDR, became personally involved in the Arvad investigation. The next step was classic Hoover. Walter Winchell, firmly established as the FBI director’s favorite columnist, published the following item on January 12: “One of Ex-Ambassador Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.” A few days later, Hoover personally relayed a warning to Joe Kennedy, as JFK told it, that “Jack was in big trouble and he should get him out of Washington immediately.”
Eager to save his son’s career, Joe Kennedy arranged for Jack’s immediate transfer to a desk job at a base in Charleston, South Carolina. Jack continued, nonetheless, to meet with Arvad for the next two months, as the FBI—at Hoover’s direction—maintained round-the-clock surveillance, wiretapping her in Charleston and at her apartment in Washington. Agents even broke into her apartment to plant eavesdropping devices and to search through her papers and other belongings. No evidence linking Arvad to any wrongdoing was found, but the FBI—and Hoover—accumulated a large file of explicit tape recordings of the lovers at play. Joe Kennedy was overheard on the FBI wiretaps discussing politics with his son, who, the transcripts showed, was writing drafts of his father’s speeches. One FBI summary, as reported in JFK: Reckless Youth, by the British biographer Nigel Hamilton, showed that Joe Kennedy had political ambitions at an early stage not only for Joe Jr., as is widely known, but also for his second-born son. The FBI summary said Jack told Arvad that his father had stopped fully defending his very unpopular political positions in public “due to the fact that he believed it might hurt his two sons later in public.” The FBI wiretaps further showed that Arvad, while involved with Jack Kennedy, was also spending some nights with Bernard Baruch, the international financier and stock market speculator, who was close to the White House.*
Young Kennedy’s involvement with Arvad dwindled by early March. Arvad got divorced in June 1942, moved to California, married the cowboy movie star Tim McCoy, and received her American citizenship. One of her references was Frank Waldrop, her former editor. In an unpublished essay written in 1978 and provided for this book, Waldrop, by then long retired, whimsically recalled how the much-ado-about-nothing FBI investigation had begun. A young female Times-Herald journalist who, wrote Waldrop, was Arvad’s rival for the attentions of the handsome Jack Kennedy, breathlessly informed him in the office one day that Arvad had been photographed in Hitler’s box during the 1936 Olympics. “That did it,” Waldrop wrote. “There was a row. So I took Inga by the elbow on one side and the other girl on the other and marched the pair of them over to the Washington field office of the FBI and told the agent in charge: ‘This young lady says that young lady is a German spy.’” At the time, Waldrop wrote, he did not know that a similar report by a fellow female student at the Columbia School of Journalism had been filed the previous year. “Nor did I guess what was going to happen next”—that a memorandum was sent by Roosevelt “directly to Hoover calling on him to have Inga ‘specially watched.’ How did FDR find out about Inga? Who broke in on his war planning to tell him about so trivial a matter, at the very time that the most critical moment of the war in the Pacific—the Battle of Midway—was in the making? I don’t know, though I have tried to find out.” In the end, Waldrop concluded, “Inga was no spy. Never had been. I have the official conclusions of the Department of Justice.”*
Waldrop’s assertions were confirmed in an interview with Cartha DeLoach, the FBI’s deputy director who worked closely with Hoover for nearly thirty years. “The investigation on Inga Arvad never conclusively proved that she was a German espionage agent,” DeLoach told me in 1997. “She had an amorous relationship with John F. Kennedy. And basically that’s what the files contained. She was never indicted, never brought into court, never convicted.”
Joe Kennedy understood what was going on. While some FBI field agents perhaps believed they were dealing with a true national security threat in the pretty Inga Arvad, the men at the top—Franklin Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover—were interested in payback, in reminding Joe Kennedy to stay in line and to remember that he was dealing with enemies who would be only too happy to hurt him. The FBI, as Joe Kennedy had to understand, had enough in its file on Jack Kennedy, complete with sound effects, to stop a future political career in its tracks.
Joe Kennedy knew what to do to safeguard his ambitions for his sons off at war. He had strayed from the church of Hoover and now sought redemption. In September 1943, Freedom of Information files show, Kennedy volunteered himself to the FBI bureau in Boston as a “Special Service Contact” and declared that “he would be glad to assist the Bureau in any way possible should his services be needed.” In a letter to Hoover, Edward A. Soucy, the agent in charge of the Boston Bureau, added: “Mr. Kennedy speaks very highly of the Bureau and the director, and has indicated that if he were ever in a position to make any official recommendations there would be one Federal investigative unit and that would be headed by J. Edgar Hoover.” A pleased Hoover accepted Kennedy’s offer and outlined, in a subsequent letter to Soucy, some of the requirements: “Every effort should be made to provide him [Kennedy] with investigative assignments in keeping with his particular ability and the Bureau should be advised as to the nature of these assignments, together with the results obtained.”
The full extent of Joe Kennedy’s machinations will never be known, but he left little to chance. The investigation into Inga Arvad and her relationship with Ensign Jack Kennedy had been supervised inside the Justice Department by James M. McInerney, who in 1942 was chief of the department’s national defense and internal security units. A former FBI agent, McInerney would remain in high policy positions in the Justice Department for the next ten years. In late 1952 McInerney successfully intervened to get Bobby Kennedy, just a year out of law school, a job as a staff attorney on the powerful Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In 1953 McInerney went into the practice of law as a sole practitioner, opening up a small office on F Street in downtown Washington. Joe Kennedy and his three sons, Jack, Bobby, and Ted, were among his first clients, and they remained certainly his most important ones. Over the next decade, James McInerney