Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [18]
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 year 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