immediate escort home, telling “young Kennedy that [if] the whole American Navy had gone after Amelia Earhart, why couldn’t a destroyer or two come for us. He smiled patiently and said he would tell his father. The group, of course, was somewhat hysterical: most of us were thankful for one ship.”
A report in the London Evening News lauds his efforts, “Mr. Kennedy displayed a wisdom and sympathy of a man twice his age.”
Citing to school officials the same “lack of transportation” that the Athenia survivors experience, Jack is late returning to Harvard to join his senior class. But the experience abroad cements a thesis he goes on to write called “Appeasement at Munich,” a firsthand critique of England’s inaction against Hitler and those (like Joe Sr.) who felt remaining neutral was an option. It goes on to be published in the United States in 1940, as the bestselling—due in part to Joe Sr. buying copies in bulk—Why England Slept, an allusion to Churchill’s own 1938 book, While England Slept.
Kennedy graduates cum laude from Harvard in the spring of 1940 with a BA in government and international affairs. That fall he’s back on campus—in California—auditing classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In 1941, after Joe Jr. enlists as one of “Roosevelt’s Millions,” Jack changes course.
At a dock in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, he tours a navy display of a PT—torpedo patrol—and becomes transfixed by the vessel. As America inches closer to war, he decides to follow his older brother’s example and enlist.
But his dubious medical history disqualifies him for service. He is rejected, twice, by both the army and the navy.
Eventually, Joe Sr.’s powerful connections override Jack’s poor health records, and he’s given a place as an ensign in the Naval Reserve, writing weekly reports for the Office of Naval Intelligence out of Washington, DC.
Joe Sr. hopes to keep him out of trouble at home, but Jack keeps finding ways to wreak havoc.
Chapter 12
In wartime Washington, DC, Jack Kennedy falls in love—with a twice-married Danish journalist suspected of being a Nazi spy.
Inga Arvad—a former film actress and Miss Denmark whom Hitler once called “the most perfect example of Nordic beauty”—is hired by the Washington Times-Herald as a columnist. Jack’s sister Kick also works for the Times-Herald, although she pines for England and her future husband Billy Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington.
At Kick’s suggestion, Arvad interviews Jack for her weekly social column, “Did You Happen to See?” touting him to Washington in November 1941 as “a boy with a future.”
The blond, blue-eyed international sophisticate beguiles the younger man—twenty-four to her twenty-eight—who cuts a handsome figure in his navy dress whites.
Inga Arvad’s already on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar as a possible Nazi spy. Her FBI file would eventually grow to over twelve hundred pages. But although in the 1930s the columnist had written flattering pieces about Nazi leaders—like Hermann Goering, whose 1935 wedding she attended, and Hitler, who invited her to his private box at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and gave her an autographed photo signed “To Inga Arvad, in friendly memory of Adolf Hitler”—the only secrets she reveals to her willing young lover involve pleasing a woman in bed. She has “gooey eyes” for Jack, and he calls her “Inga Binga.” “He had the charm that makes the birds come out of their trees,” she writes in a private letter. “When he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering, but exuding animal magnetism.”
They spend hours making love in her Washington apartment, which the FBI has bugged, and Hoover documents the encounters. The bugs make it a threesome of sorts. If the espionage accusations against Arvad hold true, Inga Arvad could be the Mata Hari of the Second World War.
As FBI investigations into Inga’s background continue, with even her Washington Times-Herald colleagues questioning her loyalties (one approaching Jack’s sister to ask, “Kick, do you think it is possible Inga could be a spy?”), Hoover warns Joe Sr. that Jack is “in big trouble and that he should get his son out of Washington immediately.” He orders his agents to break in to Arvad’s apartment, where no evidence discrediting Arvad is found—but plenty of salacious material regarding Jack comes to light.
As Kick would tell her journalist suitor, John White, when Jack informs Joe Sr. of his plans to marry the Protestant Arvad—once she is officially divorced from her jealous second husband, the Hungarian film director Paul Fejos—Joe was “getting ready to drag up the big guns”