Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [147]
Arvad was a journalist and socialite, Danish-born but with associations in Nazi Germany. She had interviewed Hermann Goring and Adolf Hitler, and by one report went to bed with the latter. She described Hitler in print as ‘very kind, very charming … not evil as he is depicted … an idealist.’
At first Arvad rang no alarm bells at the FBI. Ironically, as a reporter for the Washington Times Herald, she charmed her way to meetings with the Bureau’s top brass. She wrote flatteringly of Edgar’s secretary, Helen Gandy, with her ‘masculine intelligence and womanly intuition,’ and of Clyde, with his ‘intelligent eyes’ and a smile ‘like a good boy expecting the promised candy bar.’ Clyde even introduced Arvad to Edgar at a party.
In late 1941, however, officials scurried for cover. Arvad’s interviews were suddenly declared to have been ‘unsatisfactory.’ Edgar himself had ordered a probe that revealed that ‘a young Ensign of the U.S. Navy known as Jack … has apparently been spending the night with Miss Arvad in her apartment.’
Kennedy, then serving with Naval Intelligence, had been introduced to Arvad by his sister Kathleen. By January 1942, FBI surveillance records confirm, they were having a passionate affair. Kennedy called her ‘Inga-Binga.’ She called him ‘Honeysuckle’ and ‘Honey Child Wilder.’ They talked of marriage, a match – friends recalled – that his father violently opposed.
To separate the lovers, the Navy transferred Kennedy out of Washington, a move that only increased their ardor. Edgar’s agents listened to hidden microphones as the couple made love, ‘on numerous occasions,’ in Room 132 of the Fort Sumter Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. The surveillance was dropped for a while when Arvad began to suspect she was being bugged, then resumed in the summer of 1942. By that time Kennedy’s meddlesome father had arranged for his son’s transfer to the Pacific, where his heroism after the sinking of PT-109 would bring lasting fame.
Like a million wartime romances, the affair with Arvad lasted only months. The FBI’s surveillance had been a legitimate way of handling a potential security risk, and the lovers had done nothing disloyal. It was, however, the start of lasting bitterness between Kennedy and Edgar.
In March 1942, when Arvad realized she was being surveilled, she was overheard telling Kennedy she intended protesting directly to Edgar. She was going to say, ‘Now, look here, Edgar J., I don’t like everybody listening in on my phone …’ In fact, Arvad told Ronald McCoy, her son by a subsequent marriage, Kennedy went with her to confront Edgar. As McCoy recalled it, ‘Jack was furious. Through his father or through Arthur Krock, he knew everybody, so he and Mother went to see J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover told them his investigation showed she was not a Nazi spy or did anything for them. So Jack asked Hoover if he would give them a letter saying she wasn’t a Nazi spy. Hoover said he couldn’t, because if he gave her a letter and then she went out and started working for them tomorrow, his ass was on the line.’
That first encounter sowed the seeds of future discord. Pique aside, Kennedy sensed danger long before Edgar became a threat to the Kennedy presidency. Exposure of the affair with Arvad – a suspected Nazi spy – could have been disastrous. In 1946, the moment he became a career politician, Kennedy began worrying about Edgar’s dossier.
‘When Jack came down to Congress,’ recalled his friend Langdon Marvin, ‘one of the things on his mind was the Inga-Binga tape in FBI files – the tape he was on. He wanted to get the tape from the FBI. I told him not to ask for it … Ten years later, after he beat Henry Cabot Lodge in the Massachusetts senatorial race, Jack became alarmed. “That bastard. I’m going to force Hoover to give me those files,” he said to me. I said, “Jack, you’re not going to do a thing. You can be sure there