The Patriarch (69 page)

“Rosemary’s,” her mother recalled in her memoirs, “was the first of the tragedies that were to befall us.”
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Twenty-nine

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n July 24, Japan sent forty thousand soldiers into French Indo-China. Roosevelt demanded that the troops be withdrawn, and when they were not, he seized Japanese assets in the United States and instituted a new “licensing” system that drastically reduced trade with Japan and cut oil exports by some two thirds. Negotiations between Japan’s ambassador in Washington and the State Department were held to defuse the crisis, but it was clear now, with Japan running short of oil and having insufficient reserves of rubber, rice, and iron ore, that the two powers were on a collision course.

The attack came on December 7, at Pearl Harbor. The following day, President Roosevelt asked Congress for and received a declaration of war. On December 11, for reasons historians are still debating, Hitler declared war on the United States. Kennedy’s nightmare had become reality.

At 6:20 on the evening of December 7, less than five hours after word of the attack reached the White House, he wired Roosevelt: “Dear Mr. President: In this great crisis all Americans are with you. Name the battle post. I’m yours to command.” Two days later, Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, replied for the president: “For the splendid assurance conveyed in your message he is more appreciative than he can say.”
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Kennedy expected to be called to Washington at once. When he heard nothing from the White House, he asked House Majority Leader John McCormack of Boston to intervene on his behalf. The president told McCormack he had never gotten Kennedy’s telegram. But even though he now knew—through McCormack—that Kennedy was prepared to return to Washington, he did not get in touch with him.
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Surprised and angered, Kennedy leaped to the conclusion, which he recorded in his diary, that the president’s reluctance to recall him was due to “a decidedly anti-Catholic feeling. . . . He has not appointed a prominent Catholic to any important post since a year ago last November.” Kennedy was not the only one who harbored suspicions that Roosevelt and his closest advisers were prejudiced against Irish Catholics. When Felix Frankfurter complained to Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy that “‘Roosevelt haters and self-promoters’ were attempting to ‘poison American opinion’ by claiming that Catholics like Joseph Kennedy were being denied a role in the war effort by ‘British bootlickers and Bolshevik Jews’ . . . Murphy retorted that it was a ‘fact’ that Catholics had been excluded from the war effort, ‘except to fight,’ because the ‘party clique mistrusted them.’”
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The truth, of course, was that Roosevelt had not called Kennedy to Washington not because he was Irish and Catholic, but because he didn’t trust him in any position of importance and knew he would accept nothing less.

As the weeks passed with no summons to Washington, even Rose, who was not always attentive to his moods, noticed Kennedy’s growing discontent. “Dad seems quite well,” she wrote the children on January 26, 1943, “although he gets very depressed at times about the whole war situation. I suppose he knows too much about the people who are running things. I really wish he were running something himself.” Kennedy was indeed so desperate to get back into the mix that on February 5, 1942, he telegrammed Lord Beaverbrook, now Churchill’s minister of supply, and offered “my services in any capacity here that would be of any value to England and to you.”
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n December 7, 1941, Joe Jr. was training at an air base in Jacksonville and Jack was working at naval intelligence headquarters in Washington. Six weeks later, without warning of any sort, Jack was transferred to the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina. He had, he told his mother, been “completely mystified as to why he was changed and he was quite stunned by the suddenness of the news. His only explanation was that I guess they just take those things out of a hat and his happened to be the name that was uppermost.”
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There was a better explanation. On Monday, January 12, Walter Winchell had announced in his syndicated column that “one of Ex-Ambassador 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.” Winchell had gotten his information from Drew Pearson, who had written him on January 6 that Inga Arvad was “casting eyes in the direction of ex-ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s offspring [and that] Old Joe is reported to be very hot and bothered about it.”
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Why Pearson gave the story to Winchell we do not know, but Winchell ran with it. Although he did not use either Inga’s or Jack’s name in his column, everyone in Washington knew whom he was referring to. Naval intelligence, which had been investigating Inga as a possible German agent and/or knew that the FBI was, removed Jack Kennedy from harm’s way by transferring him to Charleston.

Jack had been introduced to Inga Arvad by Kick Kennedy, her colleague at the
Washington Times-Herald.
A Danish native who had worked in Germany and gone to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Arvad was four years older than Jack, blond, blue-eyed, gorgeous, and one of the few women he had been with who was as witty, bright, well traveled, well connected, and glamorous as he was. In November 1940, a classmate at Columbia had sent the FBI a letter detailing his suspicions about the Danish student who complained bitterly about the large number of Jews in their class and who “speaks very convincingly of her intimacy with Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and Hess, and of the delightful impression she made on Hitler in her two interviews with him.” A little more than a year later, while Inga was working at the
Times-Herald,
a colleague reported that she might be a spy, and publisher Cissy Patterson directed editor Frank Waldrop to take the matter to the FBI. The FBI interviewed Inga, then assigned agents to monitor her activities, wiretap her phone calls, and when she left Washington for Charleston to visit Jack Kennedy, bug her hotel room. The decision was also made, probably by Hoover himself, that as a courtesy, whatever information the FBI gathered on young Jack Kennedy would be shared with his father, the ambassador.
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Kennedy kept close watch on his children, wherever they happened to be. He knew that Joe Jr. and Jack had lots of lovers. As a rule he left them alone, but not this time. Inga was older than Jack and Danish and Protestant. She was divorced from her first husband and still married to her second, a mysterious Hungarian film director who was currently employed by a Swedish millionaire suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer or operative. This much, at least, Kennedy had probably learned from Arthur Krock, who was jokingly referred to by Kick, Jack, and Inga as the ambassador’s spy in Washington.
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When Kennedy found out—from Kick or Krock—that Jack might be serious about Inga, he got in touch with his son. We don’t know precisely what he said, but whatever it was, his son listened, took it to heart, and pulled back. “I know who prompted you to believe or rather disbelieve in me, but still I dislike it,” Inga wrote him in late January. “I am not going to try and make you change—it would be without result anyway—because big Joe has a stronger hand than I.” She had no illusions about where Jack’s loyalties lay. “You belong so wholeheartedly to the Kennedy-clan,” she wrote him in mid-March, “and I don’t want you ever to get into an argument with your father on account of me. As I have told you a dozen times, if I were but 18 summers, I would fight like a tigress for her young, in order to get you and keep you.”
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By the end of February, Jack and Inga had agreed that they would stop seeing each other. Jack apparently was having trouble making a final break, because days later, on March 6, he called Inga at a little after ten
P.M.
to invite her to Charleston. Inga turned him down. In the course of their conversation, which was monitored by the FBI, Jack mentioned that he had talked to his father the Sunday before. “He said he got the report. He said he had just talked to Max Truitt and he said things aren’t quite right up there [in Washington]. I said I didn’t believe that. He said he was just telling me what he heard. . . . You are mixed up in something. . . . You’re not holding out on me, are you?”
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Though still infatuated with Inga, Jack was ready to move on, with or without his father’s prodding. Bored by his current situation, tired of being chained to a desk in Charleston, jealous of his brother and his friends who were preparing for active duty, he was desperate for a new assignment, preferably overseas on a battleship.

Inga understood that her twenty-four-year-old lover had no intention of staying stateside to be with her. She had dreamed of moving out west with him but understood now that there was no way that was going to happen. “Put a match to the smoldering ambition,” she wrote him, “and you will go like wild fire. (It is all against the ranch out West, but it is the unequalled highway to the White House.)” Arvad had grasped the truth that Jack usually kept hidden, that beneath the carefree, jocular appearance was a serious young man with “smoldering ambition.”
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Kennedy knew this and had already begun to prepare for the possibility that both of his older boys were going to enter politics in some capacity. In early 1942, after having shifted the entire family’s legal residence to Florida, he arranged for the two to become Massachusetts residents and began lining up the local media outlets that would be required should they ever run for public office. “Since my two boys are eventually going to make their homes in Massachusetts, if they get through this war successfully,” he wrote David Sarnoff on February 2, 1942, “I would be interested in purchasing any radio station that you might have for sale in Boston or Massachusetts. . . . My energy from now on will be tied up in their careers rather than my own.”
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n March 4, 1942, three months after he had first volunteered his services, Kennedy wrote Roosevelt a second time, enclosed a copy of his December 7 telegram, and sent the package to Grace Tully, who had taken over as Roosevelt’s personal secretary when Missy LeHand suffered a stroke in 1941. “I don’t want to appear in the role of a man looking for a job for the sake of getting an appointment,” he wrote Roosevelt, “but Joe and Jack are in the service and I feel that my experience in these critical times might be worth something in some position. I just want to say that if you want me, I am yours to command.” His letter, preceded and followed by calls and letters to friends in Washington, set in motion a scenario that would be repeated at regular intervals over the next few years.
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This time Roosevelt responded with a warm letter and a vague job offer. Kennedy had burned most of his bridges, but he still had friends in Congress, was an able administrator, and had experience in the shipping industry.

“I was,” Roosevelt wrote, “of course, sure that you wanted to do everything possible to help and I have had the suggestion from the Maritime Commission that you, knowing its earlier work and having had former experience with Fore River people, could be of real service in stepping up the great increase in our shipbuilding—especially in getting some of the new production under way. I know, for example, that you do not want to be merely a member of one of the many Commissions—that you do want actual, practical and effective responsibility in turning out ships. [Maritime Commission chairman Vice Admiral Emory Scott] Land and [Vice Chairman Howard] Vickery are keen to have you do this. Will you? I do hope to see you soon.”
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Kennedy called Land at once to find out exactly what he had in mind and what kind of authority he was willing to delegate. Land offered a few options, but none of them with the decision-making authority Kennedy wanted. He was well aware of his limitations. He could run an agency but not work for one run by anyone else. “He is in quite a quandary,” Kick wrote Jack in Charleston. “I am not sure what he is going to do.” After conferring with James Byrnes, now on the Supreme Court, and Jim Landis, Kennedy turned down the positions Land had outlined for him. “I think you know,” he wrote Roosevelt, “that if I am given a job cleanly and concisely I will work hard to get you the results you want, but running around without a definite assignment and authority, I’d just be a hindrance to the program.”
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Roosevelt was not pleased. “What do I do about this?” he wrote Land and Vickery. “My own personal slant is that you should offer him a specific, definite job: (a) To run a shipyard; (b) To head a small hurry-up inspecting organization under Vickery, to iron out kinks and speed up production in all yards doing Maritime Commission Work.”

Knowing full well what a nuisance Kennedy could be carping on the sidelines and how effective he might be in the right position, Roosevelt had decided to bring him back to Washington, though he realized it was not going to be easy to find a position for him. Kennedy was demanding the kind of authority Roosevelt was reluctant to yield to anybody. In war as in peace, the president excelled at designing confused, often contradictory organizational charts, with competing responsibilities and overlapping authority. There was an added and not insignificant complication. In his tenure at the Maritime Commission and his two years in London, Kennedy had acquired a great many enemies. Every time the press even hinted that he was being considered for a job, the White House was flooded by letters, calls, and telegrams denouncing him and anyone who dared suggest that he be brought back into government. Whatever position he was offered would have to be one that required no congressional hearings, oversight, or approval.
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Tentative job offers began to flow into Palm Beach: positions at the Maritime Commission, at the newly created Office of Defense Transportation, in the office of the alien property custodian. In mid-April, Kennedy stopped over in Washington and explained to the president why he was not going to accept any of the jobs that had been offered him. He was convinced that the president intended to “put me to work not particularly to help the war effort, but to help his politics.”
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