The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [113]
Inga moved to Washington upon graduation, in part to get away from her mother’s ceaseless hectoring. She had met Arthur Krock at Columbia, where the New York Times columnist led her to believe that he was “a skirt chaser.” Krock used his formidable position to advance Inga as a candidate for a job at the Washington Times-Herald.
“I’ve got another one for you,” Krock told Frank Waldrop, the editor. “What are you, our staff procurer?” Waldrop remembered replying. Inga decided to display her abilities as a reporter by doing an interview with Axel Wenner-Gren, her husband’s employer, one of the world’s wealthiest men and a suspected Nazi spy. As she talked to the multimillionaire, she was under FBI surveillance.
Waldrop assigned Inga to write a benign, chatty column profiling the powerful and intriguing, the best possible entree to the highest ranks of the capital. Washington was a city of powerful men who fancied pretty women as one of the natural accoutrements of power. Inga had scores of admirers. In those early months in Washington, she was awakened every morning at seven-thirty by a call from Bernard Baruch, the legendary seventy-one-year-old financier. “He can help me a lot,” she wrote her mother, “but it won’t do any good for him to be so much in love.”
Inga knew that in all likelihood her future depended on powerful older men like Baruch and Krock, but she was drawn now into a liaison with Jack. Inga saw the deep complexities of the man. She saw how he could manipulate most people as easily as she could beguile men.
When they walked into parties, he lit up what he called his “BP” (big personality), charming his way across the room. And when he left, he dismissed everyone he had met. “What a drag!” he exclaimed. “What a bore!” Jack didn’t have friends. He had supplicants, lackeys, men like Torby Macdonald, whom Jack on occasion derided as little better than a stupid oaf.
When Jack arrived at Inga’s modest apartment, he whipped off his clothes, took a shower, and pranced around the living room in a towel. They made love when he wanted to make love. It did not matter if Inga had just dressed herself for a fancy party, if Jack was ready for sex, Inga had to accommodate him. “We’ve got ten minutes,” he told her. “Let’s go.”
At times Jack might have treated Inga with the same casual disregard that he did other women, but he was venturing into a deep emotional jungle where he had never gone before. Betty Coxe Spalding, Kathleen’s roommate, found it a strange, disconcerting relationship. “I think he was terribly dependent on her,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘God, it’s sort of … she’s motherly to him.’ I don’t know that he had too much physical affection from his mother, more from his father probably than their mother.”
John White, a journalist on the paper, talked to Inga about Jack and sensed her discomfort at how dependent Jack was becoming on her. She was used to older, powerful men who sheltered her from the world; now she was harboring Jack in her arms.
“She said that he began to come apart,” recalled White. “She said that Jack’s attitude was, if the girl wouldn’t go to bed, that was all right. But if she goes to bed, it was under his terms that she gets out and goes and that is it. No in between. No affection and no lasting relationship. But he wanted to hang on to Inga. It was a little embarrassing to have this uniformly successful man suddenly become groping.”
It had been unseasonably warm that December Sunday that would forever after be known as Pearl Harbor Day. The next morning everyone went back to his or her same job, but now that the war had begun, everything had changed.
At the Washington Times-Herald, one of the leading isolationist papers in America, a reporter on the paper felt that Inga might be a German spy. This was no longer a jealous suspicion