The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (33 page)

Inga believed that her Jack could journey up both roads, and she implored him to keep both dreams alive. “You are going away,” she wrote him. “And more important than returning with your handsome body intact … come back with the wish both to be a White-House-man and wanting the ranch—somewhere out west.”

As much as Jack might want to journey up both roads, Inga knew that most successful men chose only one road. “Put a match to the smoldering ambition, and you will go like wild fire,” she implored him. “It is all against the ranch out west, but it is the unequalled highway to the White House. And if you can find something you really believe in, then my dear you caught the biggest fish in the ocean. You can pull it aboard, but don’t rush in, there is still time. Nonsense? Maybe badly expressed, but it is right, perfect and powerful like Young Kennedy in person.” She saw that if he could only reach out and find the ideals that gleamed out there on the horizon, then he might indeed have both power and principle, great accomplishment and noble ends.

Inga was daring Jack to break out of his prison of intellect, forgoing his dependence solely on calculation and rationality. “Maybe your gravest mistake, handsome … is that you admire brains more than heart,” she wrote him, “but then that is necessary to arrive in the end so that Jack could prove that he was indeed ‘a man of the future.’”

When Jack and Inga met or talked on the telephone, he savagely rebuked the world in which he found himself. He wrote Inga condemning the excesses of “stinking New Dealism.” His stint in Washington had convinced him that the city was a political brothel. He despaired at the boastful headline screaming victory above a story that “stinks of defeat.”

Jack believed, like his father, that the war “may call for us to be regimented to the point that make the Nazis look like starry-eyed individualists.” He had a Puritan’s rage at the triviality of politics and the pathetic self-interest of people chasing pensions, not Nazis. He despaired even at himself and people like him who were thinking gloomy thoughts and “writing gloomy letters” instead of fighting the war that had to be fought.

One of the persistent themes of Jack’s life was the natural lethargy of democracy. He believed that most citizens, if they had heard Paul Revere’s clarion call in the night, would merely have turned over and gone back to sleep. It took fires in the night lapping against the very foundation of their homes to wake up the citizens of a democracy and send them out into the street to attack the forces that would destroy them.

Jack had seen it in England, and now he saw the same thing again in Washington and Charleston. In the nation’s capital, the politicians and bureaucrats and reporters trafficked in the trivial while, as he wrote Lem, “all around us are examples of inefficiency that may lick us—Nero had better move over as there are a lot of fiddlers to join him.”

As he sat in Charleston perusing the newspapers, he felt that “Washington is begginning
[sic]
to look more and more like the Cuban Tea Room on a Saturday night with the Madame out.” Jack, like his father, looked down with despairing eyes on the world in which he lived. He, however, could also look up and proclaim, “The reason we’re not witnessing a true tragedy is that we can do something that the Greeks couldn’t, we can prevent the gloomy ending.” Here then was the potential greatness of young Kennedy. Jack looked at humankind in all its frailties, weaknesses, and self-interests, shirking from none of the darkness, but then looked up and saw what might be.

At the same time Jack looked up from his cynical disregard for the female sex and conferred on Inga a passion that was as much emotional as physical. If love is emotional idealism, Jack bestowed that on her, in deed if not in word. She constantly showered her lover with verbal roses: “Honey,” “Darling,” “Honeysuckle,” “Honey Child Wilder.” She called him all these names and more. She proclaimed to Jack, “I love you.” He said nothing in return but sidled silently away from such professions. He may not have been demonstrative, but he told Inga that he had talked to the Church, presumably about the possibility of marrying a twice-divorced woman.

For all the hours that the FBI recorded their conversations over the telephone or in hotel rooms, not once did Jack mention Rosemary and her terrible fate. He did not talk of his own physical pain and how he hid that from the world. He did not explore the complicated relationships with his father, mother, or Joe Jr. This was the deepest love affair of Jack’s twenty-four years, but even in bed with Inga in their most intimate moments, he kept a distance from her, harboring his deep concerns like keys to an inner life that no one would ever see.

As tightly as Jack guarded his own psyche, he was astute about human beings and their motivations. He may well have sensed that within the layers of Inga’s complexity lay ample room for carnal duplicities. During the first weekend in February that she took the train down to Charleston, the FBI
reported that she and Jack “engag[ed] in sexual intercourse on numerous occasions.” When she returned to Washington, she invited Nils, her former lover, to Washington; he would come only if she would “go to bed with him.” Inga told him that though she didn’t “want to sleep with a dozen men at one time,” she would “be with him.”

When Inga talked about her fear that she might be pregnant and her desire to get an immediate annulment, Jack remained silent, the loudest possible message. Jack’s father called and talked to his son about the affair. Inga blamed Jack’s father for injecting himself into their pure, perfect love.

She wrote him later: “If I were but 18 summers, I would fight like a tigress for her young, in order to get you and keep you.” She was not only four years older and twice married, but she was carrying on affairs with two different men. Joe was right in prophesying disaster if Jack did not back away from Inga. Whatever he said to his son, whether it was the logic of his words, the sheer emotional brutality of his revelations, or the strength of his threats, it was enough for Jack.

Jack obtained permission to fly to Washington on February 28; there he spent one last night with Inga and told her what he felt he had to tell her. “I may as well admit that since that famous Sunday evening I have been totally dead inside,” she wrote him afterward. She went out to Reno to obtain a divorce, returning afterward to Washington.

Jack’s heart had led him into an emotional jungle where he had never ventured before. Inga may have betrayed him, but Jack’s heart had been a betrayer as well, leading him into this dangerous, uncertain world. He had fought his way out again, and he stood now in a world of clarity and distance. In her pain and emptiness, Inga admonished her lover: “If you feel anything beautiful in your life—I am not talking about me—then don’t hesitate to say so, don’t hesitate to make the little bird sing.”

H
owever much Jack mourned his loss, that suffering was probably nothing compared to his physical agony. He was racked with pain in his spine. His stomach was knotted up in cramps. Even Jack, for all his willful denial, could not pretend that all was well. His only choice was to return to his familiar haunts at the Mayo and Lahey clinics to consult specialists who so far had done little to help him.

On his way to Rochester and Boston, Jack flew down to Palm Beach to spend a weekend with his family and his houseguest, Henry James. Joe had just endeavored to help extricate Jack from what his father considered his romantic debacle. These two days should have been a sentimental respite.

Joe, however, was in a savage mood, and when Jack showed up late for
lunch, his father exploded. “For God’s sake!” he yelled as the family quivered at every syllable. “Can’t you even get on time to meals? How do you expect to get anything done in your life if you can’t even arrive on time!”

“Sorry, Dad,” Jack responded, and blamed his tardiness on his friend Henry. Joe prided himself on his punctuality. It irked him that his second son could not even adhere to this basic tenet of manners. Jack’s rudeness bordered on the insulting, but that was not what irritated Joe so much.

As soon as he had heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Joe telegraphed President Roosevelt offering his services. He had received no immediate response, and that only darkened his deep melancholy about the future. At fifty-three, he was a vital, energetic man who could have contributed much to the war effort. The president finally responded with the suggestion that the former chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission “could be of real service in stepping up the great increase in our shipbuilding.” He also had an offer to develop the civil defense program in the eastern United States. Joe turned down the proposals that were suggested to him, however, and told the president that he would “just be a hindrance to the program.”

Joe had not been offered a cabinet-level position, but he had been offered what not all men receive: a second chance. He could have exorcised most of the bad feeling that his ambassadorship had engendered by pitching in and doing what he was asked. He was a man of such overweening pride, however, that he refused. He might merely have been trolling for a better offer, but a message from J. Edgar Hoover that arrived at the White House on April 20 probably ended that possibility.

The FBI director addressed the confidential, hand-delivered letter not to Roosevelt personally but to his secretary, General Edwin M. Watson. This procedure gave the president the option of saying that he had not even seen the letter, for it involved his profligate son, Jimmy, in a matter that, if true, could have sent him to prison. The accuser, described by Hoover as a person of “unknown reliability,” charged that before the war Joe Kennedy and Jimmy Roosevelt had bribed then-Postmaster General James Farley to seek lower liquor tariffs.

Even if the accusation was untrue, it could be enormously embarrassing, and it may well have been the reason that FDR offered Joe no more opportunities. Joe still could have found valuable work to do, but he did nothing. As vitally energetic as he was, Joe largely sat out the war overseeing his investments. His only contributions to the war effort were his complaints and criticisms, and the gift of his sons.

Joe performed what he considered his patriotic duty in 1943 by becoming a “special service contact” for the FBI, passing on whatever information
he thought Hoover might find useful. “In the moving picture industry he has many Jewish friends who he believes would furnish him, upon request, with any information in their possession pertaining to Communist infiltration into the industry,” noted the FBI’s Boston field office. He also proved himself useful to the FBI Hyannis agent in a case involving the shipbuilding industry.

Pride was the prison in which Joe lived, such willful, narrow pride that he refused to take a position that would place him beneath his exalted vision of himself. “When I saw Mr. Roosevelt, I was of the opinion that he intended to use me in the shipping situation, but the radicals and certain elements in the New Deal hollared
[sic]
so loud that I was not even considered,” Joe wrote Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. As always, the error lay not in him but in others. He found it discouraging that while “there is a great undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the appointment of so many Jews in high places in Washington,” the president “had failed to appoint an Irish Catholic or a Catholic to an important war position since 1940.”

Jack left his father that weekend and flew north to begin medical treatment. He had become a medical kaleidoscope. Each doctor who looked at him saw something different and prescribed his own unique remedy. The doctors at Mayo and Lahey at least agreed that Jack needed a back operation, but the navy doctors said no, such a dramatic solution was uncalled for, and Jack returned to where he began—a quasi-invalid pretending to be a stalwart navy man.

Jack should have been relegated to a desk job for the duration of the war, but instead he applied to and was accepted for midshipmen’s school. “He has become disgusted with the desk jobs and all the Jews,” Joe wrote Joe Jr. on June 20, 1942, “and as an awful lot of the fellows that he knows are in active service, and particularly with you in the fleet service, he feels that at least he ought to be trying to do something. I quite understand his position, but I know his stomach and his back are real deterrents—but we’ll see what we can do.”

In July, on his way to the Chicago training facility, Jack stopped in Washington, where he saw Inga. He wanted to come to her apartment, but she preferred to keep her former lover just that. After chatting with Jack, she telephoned a friend and told her that the poor Jack she knew looked like a “limping monkey from behind. He can’t walk at all. That’s ridiculous, sending him off to sea duty.”

I
n the first months of the war the allies had suffered a series of humiliating defeats, from the capture of Singapore to the fall of the Philippines. The
American public had little to celebrate but the saga of the PT boats and their skippers. These cowboys of the seas were a daring, dauntless lot, darting in and out of combat in their eighty-foot wooden boats. It was just the image Americans had of themselves—quick, smart, intrepid, and inventive.

The skippers, or many of them, came from upper-class backgrounds, having learned to sail as youths on sailboats or family yachts. The world of the PT boats was like that of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, gentlemen officers and roustabout sailors united in a gallant quest. For the men of Jack’s father’s generation, war was supposed to be an arena of heroism. This was the world that Joe had brought up his sons to believe still existed, a world where one day they would trade in their medals for their country’s highest political honors.

While Jack was going through the ten-week officer training program at Northwestern University, one of the war’s earliest heroes, John D. Bulkeley, arrived at the training facility to recruit officers to captain PT boats in the Pacific Theater. The young lieutenant commander’s exploits had just been chronicled in a bestseller,
They Were Expendable,
and he had even had a ticker tape parade down Broadway.