ELEVEN
IN LOVE AND WAR
It is a marked feature of John F. Kennedy’s early adult years that at certain key junctures, family connections got him to places he otherwise would never have reached. Such was the case in October 1941, when he became an officer in the Navy Reserve and was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., the same posting Joe Junior had turned down the previous spring. In August, Joseph P. Kennedy had approached Captain Alan Kirk, who had been naval attaché in London during Kennedy’s ambassadorship and who now headed the office, about getting his second son into the Navy despite his dodgy health record. “I am having Jack see a medical friend of yours in Boston tomorrow for physical examination and then I hope he’ll become associated with you in Naval Intelligence,” Kennedy wrote.1 Kirk was happy to help. In London he had headed the inquiry into the Athenia sinking in 1939, and in that capacity had gotten to know Jack. The young man’s mind and affability had impressed him, and he welcomed the idea of bringing Jack into naval intelligence, where physical robustness counted for little and brainpower counted for a lot.
And so it was that a few weeks later, the board of medical examiners declared Jack “physically qualified for appointment” as an officer in the Navy Reserve. The exam had been, at best, perfunctory, and the report miraculously omitted mention of his long hospital stays and recurring illnesses. The ONI expressed its delight at bringing on this “exceptionally brilliant student” who “has unusual qualities and a definite future in whatever he undertakes,” and assigned him to the Foreign Intelligence Branch in its Washington office. As an ensign, Jack outranked his older brother, a seaman second class. In theory, at least, Joe Junior would have to address him as “Sir.”2
It was another blow to the previously undefeated contender for family honors. Joe was shattered. He’d put in the grueling work to get his wings while Jack sauntered along, his usual casual self, yet in an instant Jack had been elevated above him. A family friend found Joe genuinely worried for his brother’s ailing back and—for a baser reason—irritated with his father for helping Jack get into uniform. He knew, moreover, that by long-held custom, naval precedence, unlike the army’s, was assigned for life and dependent on date of commissioning; it marched on, forevermore, independent of merit. Jack had passed him and he would never catch up, no matter how hard he tried.3
Jack’s work turned out to be more tedious than advertised. He did not have top-secret clearance, so mostly he spent his days compiling intelligence digests based on reports from overseas stations. Six days a week he toiled, from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., editing and condensing, out of a dingy room with metal desks. A glamour position it was not. But at least he was in Washington, the nerve center of American statecraft, where tensions ran high and critical policy choices loomed. And at least he could spend time with Kick, who, after two years in college, had taken a job as a reporter with the staunchly isolationist Washington Times-Herald. Rosemary was also there—having been moved back to the States the previous year, she now lived under nuns’ care at St. Gertrude’s convent. Even Lem Billings resided nearby, in Baltimore, where he worked in advertising and sales at Coca-Cola.
As always, Jack delighted in Kick’s company, and she in his. They shared a similar sensibility and self-deprecating sense of humor, a similar love of gossip, and—following their father’s ambassadorship in London—a similar affinity for upper-class English society. Even casual friends could see the special chemistry that existed between them, one that neither had with any of the other seven siblings. They finished each other’s sentences and seemingly could read each other’s minds. They even looked alike, with the same mop of thick hair, the same blue eyes. Upon arrival in the city, Jack had rented an apartment on Twenty-first Street, a few blocks from Kick, and she soon introduced him to her social circle. One figure stood out: Inga Arvad, an effervescent Dane who spoke four languages and wrote a breezy profiles column for the Times-Herald. Four years older than Jack and on her second marriage, she bowled him over from the first meeting.4
She was, everyone agreed, stunningly gorgeous, blond and blue-eyed, with high cheekbones and a flawless complexion, a woman who turned heads wherever she went. A slight gap between her two front teeth somehow only added to her mystique. But what really set Inga apart and drove an endless parade of suitors to distraction was her sensuality. It owed something to her looks, of course, but more to the ease and grace with which she carried herself as a former ballet dancer, to her warm and ready laugh and quick wit, to her elegance and warmth and the timbre of her voice.
Arthur Krock, who had helped get Inga the Times-Herald job when she was still a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, was “stupefied” by her classic beauty, while to John B. White, a reporter at the paper, she was “totally woman.” Frank Waldrop, the paper’s editor, said no photo “ever did her justice,” and journalist Muriel Lewis, following an interview with Arvad a few years before, wrote that no words could adequately describe her—“they would ring flat as the laudations of a cinema star in a magazine.”5 Jack Kennedy wholly agreed, but he also appreciated something else: Arvad’s obvious smarts. He saw her as an intellectual equal, with her linguistic prowess and her sharp mind.* She had seen as much of the world as he had, if not more. She was confident and straightforward without being the slightest bit conceited. And she had an absurdist sense of humor that he relished.
The appeal was mutual. Kick had waxed lyrical about Jack in advance of his arrival (unlike the rest of the family, she thought Jack, not Joe Junior, was the Kennedy destined for greatness), and Inga found that her friend “hadn’t exaggerated. He had the charm that makes birds come out of the trees.” To White she confided, “Jack’s an interesting man because he’s so single-minded and easy to deal with. He knows what he wants. He’s not confused about motives and those things. I find that refreshing.” In a profile she wrote of Jack that ran in the November 27 issue of the Times-Herald, Arvad remarked on his selfless curiosity and called him “the best listener between Haparanda and Yokohama. Elder men like to hear his views which are sound and astonishingly objective for so young a man.” She marveled at his ability to write a bestselling book at so tender an age (“here is really a boy with a future”) and at his skill at “walking into the hearts of people.” By the end of that month he had walked into hers, and they were lovers.6
Inga Arvad in 1931, as the newly crowned Miss Denmark.
It mattered to Jack that Kick had played the role of matchmaker. Her opinion of the girls he dated had always been important to him, even in his teenage years. He trusted her judgment. Not infrequently, he turned to her for advice on matters of love, and to more than a few dates over the years he had emphasized how important it was that they make “a good impression on Kick.” Inga had clearly passed the bar, with room to spare. She and Kick hit it off from the start, and Kick was eager to connect her with Jack, despite the fact that Inga was married. (Almost certainly, she did not expect the affair to last. And, like her mother, Kick believed there were different rules for men and women; for herself she ruled out sex outside marriage, but she did not expect her father or brothers to do the same. When told in 1939 about a husband’s unfaithful ways, she replied, “That’s what all men do. You know that women can never trust them.”7)
To his parents, Jack said nothing about the nascent romance—for obvious reasons. In his letters to his mother during this period, he maintained a lighthearted tone that in a later generation could be called condescendingly sexist but was also affectionate and witty, and that suggested he had little on his mind but family and work. “I enjoy your round robin letters,” he wrote to Rose in November, echoing John Keats in his final flourish:
I’m saving them to publish—and that style of yours will net us millions. With all this talk about inflation and where is our money going—when I think of your potential earning power—with you dictating and Mrs. Walker beating it out on that machine—it’s enough to make a man get down on his knees and thank God for the Dorchester High Latin School which gave you that very sound grammatical basis which shines through every slightly mixed metaphor and each somewhat split infinitive….
My health is excellent. I look like hell, but my stomach is a thing of beauty—as are you, Ma,—and you, unlike my stomach—will be a joy forever.8
Jack also got to know Kick and Inga’s boss, the flamboyant Times-Herald publisher, Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, who was impressed that he could come out with a high-profile book right out of college and invited him to a dinner at her mansion in Dupont Circle on November 10. Also in attendance that night were Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal, journalist Herbert B. Swope, financier Bernard Baruch, and isolationist senator Burton K. Wheeler. Jack was entranced by the discussion, which featured a spirited debate over intervention between Forrestal (for) and Wheeler (against), and afterwards he wrote up a summary for himself of what had occurred. Wheeler, Jack jotted, insisted that “there was not a real emergency here now—no one could possibly invade this country,” and therefore America should stand apart. “He admitted he was a cold-blooded Yankee and said while he was sorry for the Poles and the Czechs he believed that their misery should serve as a warning, not as an incentive for duplicating it.” Jack saw the power in this perspective, and acknowledged to the group that he had once shared it, but he now found himself agreeing with Forrestal’s twin claims: that America was already at war in all but name, and that it was better to take on the Germans now, while the United States still had allies, than to wait for those allies to fall and have to fight Hitler alone. When Forrestal insisted that the United States must become “the dominant power of the 20th century,” Jack voiced full agreement.
He had become, if he wasn’t before, a full-fledged interventionist. To himself he remarked dryly that he hoped he wouldn’t need these dinner notes for a follow-up volume on “Why America Slept.”9
The first week of December 1941 began uneventfully: Jack hosted his father for lunch at his apartment and received a shipment of furniture from the family residence in Bronxville, which had just been sold. (Thenceforth the Kennedys would alternate between the homes in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, fifteen hundred miles apart.) That Wednesday, December 3, he wrote to Lem Billings to urge him to come to Washington for the weekend, and to bring his tuxedo, as “we might go to Chevy Chase.” Lem, as always, was happy to oblige. On Sunday, December 7, the young men had just finished a rousing game of touch football with strangers near the Washington Monument when the news came in: Pearl Harbor was under attack.
II
It was ironic, in a way, that war came to America by way of Asia and the Pacific, not Europe and the Atlantic. Though armies had been fighting in the Far East since Japan attacked China in 1937, developments there never loomed as large in the American consciousness as those in Europe. (The ties with Europe were closer, and the threat there seemed bigger.) When Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met on a British battleship at Argentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, in August 1941, the Nazi threat dominated much of the discussion, with Japan getting less attention. The two leaders also issued the Atlantic Charter, a universalistic set of war aims espousing collective security, self-determination, disarmament, economic cooperation, and freedom of the seas. According to Churchill’s recollection, the president assured him off the record that, although he could not ask Congress to declare war against Nazi Germany, “he would wage war” and “become more and more provocative.”10
Soon after their meeting, American and German ships clashed in the North Atlantic. On September 4, a few weeks before Jack Kennedy began his job with the Office of Naval Intelligence, a German submarine fired torpedoes at the U.S. destroyer Greer, narrowly missing the target. Roosevelt declared in response that henceforth the U.S. Navy would have the authority to fire first when under threat, and he added that American warships would commence convoying British merchant vessels. It marked the start of an undeclared naval war with Germany. In early October, a German submarine torpedoed the U.S. destroyer Kearny off the coast of Iceland, and later that month the destroyer Reuben James went down after a torpedo attack, claiming more than one hundred American lives. Congress promptly scrapped the cash-and-carry policy and altered the Neutrality Acts to allow transport of munitions to Great Britain on armed U.S. merchant ships.
The isolationists were a dwindling band, both on Capitol Hill and in the country at large—in one fall poll, only 20 percent of respondents would admit to being isolationist, while 75 percent regarded “defeating Nazism” as “the biggest job facing the country.” But FDR continued to fear their power, and they knew how to make themselves heard. On September 11, Charles Lindbergh, in a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, carried to a nationwide radio audience, asserted that three groups were pushing the United States into war: the New Dealers, the British government, and the Jews. “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences,” Lindbergh declared, his familiar high-pitched voice growing ever more fervent. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” Wendell Willkie, who remained the titular head of the GOP a year after his election loss, called it “the most un-American talk made in my lifetime by any person of national reputation.”11
Tensions in Asia rose alarmingly that fall, notwithstanding Roosevelt’s desire to avoid war with Japan in order to concentrate on the German threat. The previous year, in September 1940, after Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact (and thus became the Axis powers), FDR had slapped an embargo on shipments of scrap metal and aviation fuel to Japan. When Japanese troops occupied French Indochina in July 1941, the administration froze Japanese financial assets in the United States, expanded the embargo, and stopped the export of all oil to Japan. The implications were huge for a country that consumed roughly twelve thousand tons of petroleum each day, most of it imported from America. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, a moderate, proposed a summit meeting with Roosevelt and offered to withdraw Japanese forces from Indochina as soon as Japan’s struggle with China was resolved. Roosevelt balked, persuaded by his aides to insist on Japanese disengagement from China as a precondition for any summit. The proposal collapsed, and Konoe was ousted in favor of Hideki Tojo, the militaristic army minister. In November, Tojo offered to disengage from Indochina immediately, and from China right after the establishment of peace, in return for a million tons of aviation gasoline. Secretary of State Cordell Hull turned down the offer and reiterated the U.S. insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China and Southeast Asia. An intercepted message that U.S. analysts decoded on December 3 instructed the Japanese embassy in Washington to burn codes and destroy cipher machines—a clear indication that war was coming.12
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