The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [114]
Inga did not know that she already had been under surveillance and had her own file at the FBI. The agency went ahead with a full-scale investigation. Agents broke into Inga’s apartment, photographing letters and other documents. They purloined her mother’s diary and letters. They wiretapped her phones and began around-the-clock observation.
The cold blasts of paranoia played across Washington that January, and everywhere the agents looked they found strange inconsistencies. An attaché at the Danish legation reported that he had never heard of Inga’s family in the circles in which she claimed acquaintance. And wasn’t it strange that Inga spoke such perfect English when she had arrived in America less than two years before? She said she didn’t know German, yet sources reported that she would occasionally utter German expressions. At one point the FBI inventoried her possessions and discovered the Hitler photo. A Nazi spy may not have been likely to be traveling with a signed photo of Hitler, but the FBI would have been foolhardy and derelict not to have thoroughly investigated Inga. It was all beginning to add up, or so it seemed. The agent in charge noted that the case had “more possibilities than anything else I have seen in a long time.”
Jack and Inga had been lovers probably no more than three weeks when their little dollhouse of romance began to come tumbling down. Jack was a navy intelligence officer bedding down with a suspected Nazi spy. If he had been a man of narrow political ambition, he would have fled from Inga. He knew that his lover was no Mata Hari, but in her fatal embrace might lie the end of his career as a naval officer as well as any future in politics.
Instead, Jack took what he considered precautions, silly little gestures like corralling a friend, John White, to accompany the couple on outings pretending that he was Inga’s date. Jack may have been an intelligence officer, but he did not notice the extensive government surveillance or the presence of two sets of detectives watching him and Inga—not only the FBI but also private detectives hired by Inga’s husband.
On January 12, 1942, Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist, carried an item blind only to the unsighted and the uninformed. The cognoscenti woke up that morning to read: “One of ex-Ambassador’s 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.”
“Pa Kennedy” not only did not like this situation but cringed at the potential consequences of this foolish affair. He had seen how close his affair with Gloria Swanson had come to destroying his marriage, and he could not understand why his second son couldn’t follow his father’s lead and keep his dalliances dalliances. Joe had received a telephone call from Inga’s jealous husband, an enraged, bitter man who was not going to go shuffling away into the dusk. Joe had long ago prophesied that war would mean the end of democracy, and he could surely see that if Jack did not end his affair with Inga, he might be swept away in the hysteria of a warring nation. Within twenty-four hours after the Winchell column, Jack found himself reassigned to the navy base at Charleston, South Carolina.
Jack spent his last three nights in Washington in Inga’s apartment. He could have gorged himself on her womanly charms before heading off satiated, ready to move on and to forget. Inga, though, was not just another fitful affair, and his very first weekend in Charleston she took the train down to South Carolina to spend more time alone with her lover.
Inga saw into Jack as no one else had—the light and the darkness, the glory and the doom, the nascent idealism and the desperate cynicism. She was lifetimes older. She talked and wrote to him as if he were all youth and future and hope.
“He is full of enthusiasm and expectations, eager to make his life a success,”