Later, Torby visited Jack in Charleston. Upon his return to Washington, he called Inga on the evening of February 3. The conversation was picked up by the FBI.
“Big Jack is very good and looking well,” Torby said, and living in a house “right up the street from the Fort Sumter Hotel. It’s a brick house on Murray Boulevard about ten [buildings] up from Sumter.”
“Does he like it?”
“He is not crazy about the people whose house it is but I guess he likes it. He misses you, Inga.” Together the two friends had attended the President’s Ball on Friday evening, and “I discovered a new Kennedy,” Torby went on. “It seems to me that he has a sort of different attitude towards girls now.”
“Oh you’re just kidding,” she answered, though grateful for the compliment. “You’re just the sweetest thing in the world.”
“Does he say anything about going to sea?” she asked later in the call. “I can feel it in my bones that he is going to sea.”
“If he does it will surprise him,” Torby replied.33
Late that same night, Jack phoned Inga.
“Why don’t you come here?” he said.
“I may,” she replied teasingly.
“Don’t say you may. I know I shouldn’t ask you to come here twice in a row but I’ll be up there as soon as I get permission.”
“Isn’t that sweet. I’ll come maybe.”
“I hate for you to come all this way just to see me.”
“Darling, I would go around the world three times just to see you.”
On they prattled, until Inga suddenly revealed what she had learned through her husband’s “spies”: that Jack had assured his father that he would never marry her and didn’t care about her all that much. Taken aback, Jack did not deny the claim but asked what else Fejos had said.
“Why, he said I could do what I wanted. He said he was sad to see me doing things like this. I’ll tell you about it and I swear that he is not bothering us and that you needn’t be afraid of him. He’s not going to sue you though he is aware what he could do by suing you.”
“He would be a big guy if he doesn’t sue me.”
“He’s a gentlemen,” Inga stressed. “I don’t care what happens, he wouldn’t do things like that. He’s perfectly all right.”
“I didn’t intend to make you mad,” Jack said.
“I’m not mad. Do you want me to come this weekend very much?”
“I would like for you to.”
“I’ll think it over and let you know. So long, my love.”
“So long.”34
Inga did come for the weekend, and agents followed the pair’s every move: “At 5:35 P.M. [on February 6], John Kennedy arrived at the Fort Sumter Hotel, driving a 1940 black Buick convertible Coupe, 1941 Florida license #6D4951, and went up to Mrs. Fejos’ room. He stayed there with her until 8:40 P.M., at which time subject and Kennedy went to the mezzanine floor of the Fort Sumter Hotel for dinner. No contacts were made by the party while at dinner. At 10:03 P.M., the subject and Kennedy took a walk down Murray Boulevard framing the harbor, and returned to her room by 10:35 P.M. without making any contacts. At 1:10 A.M. the subject and Kennedy were in bed and apparently asleep.”35
Though Hoover’s agents didn’t pick up on it, an air of uncertainty permeated the visit, less on account of Fejos than of Joe Kennedy, who had kept on pressuring his son to end the affair. The lovers’ feelings for each other had not dissipated, but each wondered if the end was nigh. Adding to the stress was their growing certainty that they were under at least partial surveillance when they were together. In late February, following another weekend rendezvous in Charleston, Jack asked for, and received, special permission to fly briefly to Washington. There he and Inga met and talked and agreed to separate. (Unbeknownst to Jack, she had resumed contact with a Danish ex-boyfriend, Nils Blok, and, according to the FBI, spent a night with him.)36
In the days thereafter Jack was tormented, second-guessing his action. He called her.
“Surprised to hear from me?”
“A little, maybe.”
“It’s about time.”
“Kathleen says every day that you will call me.”
“I’ve been in bed with a bad back….Why didn’t you come [to Charleston]?”
“What a question. Don’t you remember that we talked it over on Sunday?”
“I know it.”
“Oh, you don’t think it’s going to stay?”
“Life’s too short.”
“Oh Kennedy!” Inga exclaimed. Was Jack going back on their agreement to split up?
“No,” he replied, “not till next time I see you. I’m not too good, am I?”
“Did you think I was coming to Charleston?” she asked a little later.
“I had big hopes.”
They moved to other topics, turning finally to Inga’s planned divorce.
“I know that I will never go back to him.”
“I just wanted to be sure that this is what you want to do. From what you have said, I didn’t have anything to do with you getting the divorce.”
“You pushed the last stone under my foot but that doesn’t hold you responsible for anything. Meeting you two and a half months ago was the chief thing that made up my mind. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t exist anymore. That’s how I felt an hour ago. I still love you as much as always and always will. But you don’t figure in my plans whatsoever.”
“O.K.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“I’m still going to [divorce him].”
“O.K.”
“Drop me a line.”
“I will and I’ll call you next week.”37
Jack Kennedy’s desk job in Charleston proved no more stimulating than the one he’d had in Washington. “Jack finds his present post rather irksome,” his mother said in a round-robin letter to her children in February, “as he does not seem to have enough to do and I think will be glad to transfer.” Billings would later recall that his friend found the work “a waste of time. He was very frustrated and unhappy.”38
News from home may have added to his disaffection, though to what degree we cannot know. A few months before, in November 1941, Joe Kennedy had made a decision that would haunt him to the end of his days, and shadow his wife and children to the end of theirs. Eldest daughter Rosemary, now twenty-three, was increasingly frustrated and aggressive, feeling marooned at St. Gertrude’s as she fell further and further behind her hard-driving siblings. “In the year or so following her return from England,” Rose Kennedy wrote in her memoirs, “disquieting symptoms began to develop. Not only was there noticeable retrogression in the mental skills she had worked so hard to attain, but her customary good nature gave increasingly to tension and irritability. She was upset easily and unpredictable. Some of these upsets became tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard. Also there were convulsive episodes.” At St. Gertrude’s that fall there occurred troubling episodes in which Rosemary wandered out of the urban school after midnight on her own. Nuns would fan out to find her and bring her back and put her to bed, but all worried about what would happen the next time if a male stranger happened upon her and got ideas.39
Distraught at these developments, her parents suspected that, as Rose put it much later, “there were other factors at work besides retardation. A neurological disturbance or disease of some sort seemingly had overtaken her, and it was becoming progressively worse.” Joe, always impressed by innovations in healthcare, consulted with prominent practitioners, among them Dr. Walter Freeman, the chair of the department of neurology at the George Washington University Medical School and a leading figure in the new field of psychosurgery. Following in the path of Portuguese psychiatrist Egas Moniz, who in 1935 performed the first lobotomy for relief of complex mental disorders (and in 1949 won a Nobel Prize for his work), Freeman helped pioneer the practice in the United States, performing hundreds of lobotomies with his associate, the surgeon James Watts. A charismatic and articulate self-promoter, Freeman was the subject of fawning profiles in the press—one early story, in The New York Times on June 7, 1937, gushed about his “new surgical technique, known as ‘psycho-surgery,’ which, it is claimed, cuts away sick parts of the human personality, and transforms wild animals into gentle creatures in the course of a few hours.” By 1941 Freeman had convinced many experts that the lobotomy procedure was relatively harmless, with only minor side effects, and highly beneficial in many cases.40
The favorable coverage continued. “Few surgical events can top the dramatic simplicity of a typical frontal lobotomy as performed in an up to date hospital,” enthused Marguerite Clark in The American Mercury in 1941. Top scientists in the field had determined that the frontal lobes were responsible for the frustration, depression, and worry experienced by some people, and further that “these unfortunates may, in some cases, be brought back to useful life by the surgical removal of the frontal lobes of the brain.” An article in the May 1941 issue of The Saturday Evening Post that Joe and Rose may well have read highlighted the work of Freeman and Watts and praised the “sensational procedure” for transforming patients who were “problems to their families and nuisances to themselves…into useful members of society,” even as it also noted that some neurologists denounced the operation. It’s less likely Joe and Rose read another, more specialized article, this one in the August 1941 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, that warned against the use of lobotomies until more research could be done.41