JFK
Page 38
But where might it come? Neither Jack Kennedy nor his superiors in naval intelligence, nor any other American officials, were aware of what Japanese commanders were secretly planning: a daring raid on Hawaii, with the aim of knocking out the U.S. Pacific Fleet and thereby buying time to complete Japan’s southward expansion. An armada of sixty ships, with a core of six carriers bearing 360 aircraft, crossed three thousand miles of ocean, each ship maintaining total radio silence to avoid detection. In the early morning of December 7, some 230 miles northwest of Honolulu, the carriers unleashed their planes. Shortly before 8:00 A.M., they swept down on the unsuspecting naval base and nearby airfields at Pearl Harbor, dropping torpedoes and bombs and strafing buildings. An hour later came a second wave of planes. Twenty U.S. ships were crippled or destroyed, along with three hundred airplanes; 2,403 Americans died, and 1,143 were wounded. By chance, three aircraft carriers at sea escaped the disaster.
Critics would subsequently accuse Roosevelt of purposely leaving the Pearl Harbor fleet exposed to assault so that the United States could enter World War II through the “back door” of Asia.13 The charge was spurious. Although American cryptanalysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the intercepted messages never revealed detailed naval or military plans and never mentioned Pearl Harbor specifically. A late message sent from Washington to Pacific posts warning of imminent war had been too casually transmitted by a routine method and had arrived in Hawaii too late. Base commanders also believed Hawaii too far from Japan to be a target for all-out attack; they expected an attack on Thailand, British Malaya, or the Philippines. The Pearl Harbor disaster stemmed from errors and inadequate information (or, more to the point, a surfeit of information, pointing in myriad directions), not from conspiracy.
The attack brought to an end the long and bitter debate over America’s involvement in the war. The core isolationist argument—that the United States could remain aloof from the fighting, secure within its own sphere—had been shredded. Its chief adherents now put forth a new message, one of solidarity and determination, and of obeisance to presidential authority. “We have been stepping closer to war for many months,” Charles Lindbergh declared. “Now it has come and we must meet it as united Americans, regardless of our attitude in the past.” Robert McCormick, the staunchly isolationist publisher, spoke similarly in a front-page editorial in the Chicago Tribune: “All of us, from this day forth, have only one task. That is to strike with all our might to protect and preserve the American freedom that we all hold dear.” Joseph Kennedy, mere hours after the attack, cabled Roosevelt: “Name the Battle Post, I’m Yours to Command.”14
It wasn’t going to happen. Kennedy had burned too many bridges, had bad-mouthed the administration once too often. “The truth of the matter is that Joe is and always has been a temperamental Irish boy,” FDR wrote to his son-in-law John Boettiger a few weeks later, “terrifically spoiled at an early age by huge financial success, thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly selfish and thoroughly obsessed with the idea that he must leave each of his nine children with a million dollars (he has told me that often). He has a positive horror of any change in the present methods of life in America. To him the future of a small capitalistic class is safer under a Hitler than under a Churchill. This is subconscious on his part and he does not admit it….Sometimes I think I am 200 years older than he is.” The president tossed in that personally he was “very fond of Joe,” but the upshot was clear: no job offer would be forthcoming, either then or later.15
In the late morning of December 8, Roosevelt entered the House chamber to thunderous applause. Gripping the lectern, a sea of microphones arrayed in front of him, he delivered an address that, to an extent no one could yet know, transformed the world. “Yesterday,” he began, “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” He went on to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, noting that the Japanese had also attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and Midway, and he expressed the prevailing sentiment when he vowed that Americans would never forget “the character of the onslaught against us.” Then a promise: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.” Though only twenty-five sentences long, the speech took ten minutes to deliver, so frequent and lengthy were the interruptions for applause.16
The Senate voted unanimously in favor of war, while in the House only Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a pacifist and the first woman elected to Congress, voted against (as she had the last time around, in 1917). Britain declared war on Japan, but the Soviet Union did not. Three days later, Germany and Italy, honoring the Tripartite Pact, declared war on the United States. “Hitler’s fate was sealed,” Winston Churchill, who grasped America’s immense productive potential in wartime better than most, later wrote. “Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder….I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French government in exile, felt the same: “Of course, there will be military operations, battles, conflicts, but the war is finished since the outcome is known from now on,” he remarked. “In this industrial war, nothing will be able to resist American power.”17
In time, Churchill’s and de Gaulle’s optimism would be rewarded, but at this moment, in the second week of December 1941, when the future had yet to come, the outlook was ominous. Much of the U.S. Navy had been decimated, and the Army was as yet a mass of civilians without adequate equipment, training, or experienced officers. (The administration’s survey of war preparedness, named the “Victory Plan” and completed earlier in 1941, estimated that the nation could not be ready to fight before June 1943.) Industrial production, though theoretically just as awesome as de Gaulle surmised, still had to be converted from peacetime production. In Asia, Japan’s potential expansion in the short term seemed limitless—might it seize India, Australia, and Hawaii in addition to all of Southeast Asia?—while in Europe, Hitler’s forces controlled Western Europe and had reached the outskirts of Moscow. (Forward units were close enough to see the Kremlin’s golden domes.) They looked invincible, having already laid deadly siege to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and cut deeply into Ukraine, taking Kiev in September. More than a million Soviet soldiers had already perished in the fighting; another three million were captive. Who dared predict that the Red Army would withstand German power through another year, or another six months? Who dared deny that Hitler might put a stranglehold on the Mediterranean and impose his total will on the Middle East and North Africa, where his units were on the march and where British diplomats in Cairo were burning their papers? Anything seemed possible.
Still, Germany’s declaration of war solved a big problem for Roosevelt: it got the United States formally into the campaign against Nazi tyranny. And although historians forever after would puzzle over Hitler’s war declaration—the terms of the Tripartite Pact did not actually oblige him to join Japan’s struggle—in his eyes he was merely formalizing a state of affairs that had existed for months with the undeclared war in the Atlantic. The Führer also harbored a deep personal animus against Roosevelt (in his war declaration speech he said the “mentally disturbed” FDR was kept in power only by the sinister “power” of “the eternal Jew”), and he had long been preoccupied with what he saw as the colossal threat posed by American-led global capitalism. If major conflict with the United States was inevitable, and Hitler did not doubt it, why not claim the prestige of instigating it immediately, thereby assisting the Japanese by forcing on the Americans a two-front war? Only in hindsight is his poor timing fully evident. The declaration of war against Washington came within a week of his offensive against Moscow stalling as Stalin’s troops took German prisoners for the first time.18
III
The new work hours left little time for socializing, or for Inga Arvad, who, for that matter, had a new preoccupation of her own. A few days after Pearl Harbor, Page Huidekoper, a Times-Herald reporter (and former press assistant in Joe Kennedy’s London embassy), learned that a colleague had supposedly discovered a photograph of a smiling Inga sitting in Adolf Hitler’s box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Might this mean she was a spy for the Germans? Huidekoper wasn’t sure, but she passed the information on to Kick Kennedy and editor Frank Waldrop. He determined that he and Huidekoper should accompany Arvad to the FBI’s Washington office to try to clear her name.20 Arvad agreed. The agent who met with them sent a memorandum to director J. Edgar Hoover:
On the afternoon of December 12, 1941, Mr. Frank Waldrop, editor of the Washington Times Herald, called at this office with Miss. P. Huidekoper, a reporter of that paper, and Inga Arvad, columnist for the Times Herald….Briefly, Miss Huidekoper several days ago stated to Miss Kathleen Kennedy, a reporter on the Times Herald and the daughter of former Ambassador Kennedy, that she would not be surprised if Inga Arvad was a spy for some foreign power. She remarked to Miss Kennedy that one of her friends had been going through some old Berlin newspapers and had noted a picture of Inga Arvad taken with Hitler at the Olympic games in Berlin….Miss Kennedy, a very close friend of Inga Arvad, told her of Miss Huidekoper’s statement.21
The agent no doubt already knew the basics of Arvad’s glamorous and cosmopolitan story. Born in Copenhagen in 1913, she spent much of her youth in South Africa and England, as well as in Germany and France. Crowned a beauty queen in Denmark at age sixteen, she competed in Paris for the Miss Europe title the next year, and soon after that eloped with an Egyptian diplomat, divorcing him at age nineteen. In 1935, at age twenty-one, she met Hungarian American movie director turned explorer Paul Fejos, who was almost twice her age and whom she would later marry. That year she also signed on with the Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende, and in that capacity she visited Germany on numerous occasions. An enterprising reporter, Arvad secured an interview with Hermann Göring and attended his wedding, where she met Hitler (who reportedly referred to her as “the perfect example of Nordic beauty”). She subsequently interviewed the German leader twice and also talked with Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
To the FBI agent, Inga denied being any kind of spy for anyone, and insisted that her interviews with German leaders were entirely nonpolitical. Hers was the “human interest” beat—what they thought of marriage, what they ate for breakfast, and so on. She insisted she had little but contempt for the Germans for what they had done to Europe and to the world.22
Unbeknownst to Inga, the FBI had already begun investigating her months earlier, in the spring, upon learning of her “friendship” with Hitler and of the suspicion among several of her fellow students at Columbia that she harbored pro-German and anti-Semitic sentiments. (There is little explicit evidence to substantiate the latter suggestion, but her newspaper articles, all written several years before, had been sympathetic to German life and to the Germans she profiled, many of them Nazis. “One likes him immediately,” she had written of Hitler in Berlingske Tidende on November 1, 1935, after their first interview. “He seems lonely. The eyes, which are tender hearted, look directly at you. They radiate power.”23) Agents also looked into her and her husband’s friendship with Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren, one of the wealthiest men in the world—his net worth was estimated at $1 billion—who had made his fortune by popularizing the home vacuum cleaner and then become an arms contractor, and who was thought to be on friendly terms with Göring and other German leaders. Wenner-Gren’s yacht, the Southern Cross, was the largest private luxury vessel in the world and carried a crew of 315, in addition to being outfitted with machine guns, rifles, and sophisticated radio equipment. U.S. naval intelligence suspected that the yacht was being used to refuel German submarines, and in December 1941 the Roosevelt administration formally blacklisted Wenner-Gren.
If Arvad thought her appearance at the FBI office cleared things up, she was mistaken. Through the early months of 1942, the Bureau kept her under surveillance, tapped her phone, and intercepted her mail. Even Franklin Roosevelt briefly got into the act: “In view of the connection of Inga Arvad…with the Wenner-Gren Expeditions’ leader, and in view of certain other circumstances which have been brought to my attention, I think it would be just as well to have her specially watched,” the president wrote Hoover.24
At this point one might have expected Jack Kennedy to leave Inga Arvad alone, at least until she cleared her name. Prudence dictated as much in a time of war. But the two lovers carried on as before, perhaps unaware of the FBI’s surveillance of her apartment on the fifth floor at 1600 Sixteenth Street. Or perhaps they simply doubted—accurately, as it turned out—the Bureau’s competence in acting on whatever it uncovered. Agent C. A. Hardison, setting up watch on the flat, duly noted the arrival of Inga’s husband, Paul Fejos, and his departure, but seemed to have no clue about the identity of the mysterious lover who then entered the residence and stayed the night—a young man who, according to “Informant A,” wore “a gray overcoat with raglan sleeves and gray tweed trousers. He does not wear a hat and has blonde curly hair which is always tousled.”25
Jack’s affectionate cable of New Year’s Day 1942, successfully intercepted, likewise left Hardison stumped as to its source:
THEY ARE NOT KEEPING THEM FLYING SO I WON’T BE THERE UNTIL 11:30 BY TRAIN. I WOULD ADVISE YOUR GOING TO BED, BUT IF YOU COME, BUY A THERMOS AND MAKE ME SOME SOUP. WHO WOULD TAKE CARE OF ME IF YOU DIDN’T? LOVE, JACK.26
There matters might have rested were it not for the sleuthing efforts of gossip journalist Walter Winchell, whose column appeared in more than two thousand newspapers nationwide. Relying in part on his sources within the FBI, Winchell reported in the New York Daily Mirror on January 12, 1942: “One of Ex-Ambassador Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so she has consulted a barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.” Coincidentally or not, within twenty-four hours Jack received orders transferring him from Washington to a desk job in Charleston, South Carolina, and “Pa Kennedy” soon appeared in Frank Waldrop’s office to press him for details about Arvad and her past.27 Joe had always nodded and winked at his older boys’ skirt-chasing ways, had even egged them on—they were, after all, following in his footsteps. But as Jack and Inga grew serious, he sensed trouble. Inga was four years older than Jack, she was on marriage number two, and she was suspected of being a German spy—a problematic trifecta, to say the least. Even worse, Arvad seemed intent on divorcing Fejos (from whom she had been estranged for some time) so she could be with Jack. A marriage between them would scuttle any hopes Jack might have for elected office and might also damage the political aspirations of Joe Junior, who would be tainted by association. The elder Kennedy, more and more frustrated by Roosevelt’s steadfast refusal to grant him a wartime posting and sensing that henceforth he would have to channel his ambitions through his sons, made clear to Jack that the relationship should end.28
Jack resisted, showing again his growing independence from the old man. Instead he arranged for “Inga Binga,” as he liked to call her, to co
me to Charleston in late January and again in early February, surely aware that the authorities would find out what he was up to. (As indeed they did: the FBI bugged the pair’s hotel room and overheard a little gossip, a lot of sex, and no discussion of state secrets.) He couldn’t get enough of her, loved just listening to her speak, loved how—like many otherwise fluent Scandinavian English speakers—she sometimes mixed up her v sounds and her w sounds, so that vegetable became wegetable and shovel became showel. More than that, Jack cherished Inga’s warm, womanly affection; never before had he experienced anything remotely like it.29 He felt free around her in a way he felt around few others, free to confide his fears and hopes and dreams. (Including political ones: the letters and intercepted conversations reveal that high elected office was already on his mind.) She, for her part, was completely taken by his boyish energy, his looks, and his curiosity about the world.