An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (15 page)

One month later, the board of medical examiners miraculously gave Jack a clean bill of health. Reading the report of his exam, one would think he never had a serious physical problem in his life. The doctors listed the “usual childhood diseases” and noted that he had been on a “restricted . . . diet of no fried food or roughage,” but they claimed that he had “no ulcers,” and declared him “physically qualified for appointment” as an officer in the naval reserve. It was a complete whitewash that would never have been possible without his father’s help. The Office of Naval Intelligence was delighted to accept this “exceptionally brilliant student, [who] has unusual qualities and a definite future in whatever he undertakes.” True, being in intelligence made it unlikely that he would be exposed to physical danger, but once in the service almost anything could happen.

Jack entered the navy in October 1941 as an ensign and immediately went to the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the ONI in Washington. He became a paper-pusher, collating and summarizing reports from overseas stations for distribution in ONI bulletins. It was uninteresting work. One of six officers assigned to a plain room with metal desks and typewriters, Jack spent his days “writing, condensing, editing” news of international developments. But his humdrum nine-to-five, six-day-a-week job changed with Japan’s December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor. Jack’s office then went to a round-the-clock schedule. He drew the night shift, working seven nights a week from 10:00
P.M.
to 7
A.M.
, an exhausting cycle. “Isn’t this a dull letter,” he wrote Billings on December 12, “but I’m not sleeping much nights.”

In contrast with his navy job, Jack enjoyed a rich social life in Washington. His sister Kathleen, who was a reporter for the conservative
Times-Herald,
gave him instant access to a social whirl in which groups of young men and women spent evenings together eating, attending movies, playing party games, exchanging gossip, and romancing one another. Through her, Jack met Inga Arvad, a blond, blue-eyed Dane who “exuded sexuality” and was described as “a perfect example of Nordic beauty.”
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock, who had helped Inga get a job at the
Times-Herald,
was “stupefied” by her beauty. Four years older than Jack, twice married, and worldly-wise, Inga Binga (as Jack fondly called her) was a daily columnist. “She couldn’t write anything extended at all,” her editor said later, “but she had a good intuitive style of writing about people.” Her interviews under the title “Did You Happen to See?” engaged a faithful audience as much by her personality as by her subjects. A column she did on Jack provided an amusing portrait of “a boy with a future” who did not like to be called “Young Kennedy” lest he be seen as in his father’s shadow and short on accomplishments.

The column was a small window on Jack and Inga’s relationship. She liked Jack, Inga told a fellow reporter. She thought him “refreshing” because “he knows what he wants. He’s not confused about motives.” As Inga was still married to her second husband, from whom she was separated, they began with an understanding that theirs was no more than a passing affair. “I wouldn’t trust him as a long term companion, obviously,” she added. “And he’s very honest about that. He doesn’t pretend that this is forever. So, he’s got a lot to learn and I’ll be happy to teach him.”

Jack and Inga kept up a pretense of not being lovers by double-dating with Kathleen and her current beau, John White, a feature writer at the
Times-Herald,
but despite the modest attempts to hide his involvement with Inga, Jack’s affair was an open secret. Joe, who kept tabs on everything the children were doing, was certainly well informed, and he did not object to Jack’s involvement with a twice-married woman as long as it was nothing more than a fling.

In spite of his intentions to keep the romance from becoming serious, Jack found himself smitten by Inga, and she reciprocated the affection. “He had the charm that makes birds come out of their trees,” she said later. “When he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering but exuding animal magnetism.” But their growing attachment became a source of unhappiness for both of them. A non-Catholic divorcée was hardly what Joe and Rose would find acceptable as a mate for any of their sons. And if that were not enough to sabotage the romance, revelations that Inga had been given privileged access to Nazi higher-ups, including Hitler, during a journalistic stint in Germany raised suspicions that she was a spy. The FBI had begun tracking her movements in the middle of 1941 after she had come to the United States to earn a journalism degree at Columbia University. Her affair with Jack fanned Bureau suspicions. It also worried the ONI, which now saw Jack as a potential weak link in naval security. Consequently, in January 1942, when nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell revealed that Jack was having an affair with Inga, it raised the possibility that he might be forced out of the service. Instead, the navy transferred him to a desk job at the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina. Jack later told a reporter, “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde, and they thought she was a spy!”

For almost two months after going to Charleston, Jack clung to the relationship. He was unhappy about being sent into exile, disliked his work, and greatly missed Inga. “Jack finds his present post rather irksome,“ Rose 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 of a transfer.” His desk job in Charleston “just seemed to him a waste of time,” Billings recalled. “He was very frustrated and unhappy.”

Without work to absorb him, Jack was easily preoccupied with Inga. They exchanged love letters, spoke on the phone, and spent long weekends together in Charleston, where she went to visit him a few times. But their relationship grew stormy. FBI wiretaps on their telephone calls and conversations in a hotel room during her visits to South Carolina make clear the growing divide between them. She was worried about being pregnant and “accused Jack of ‘taking every pleasure of youth but not the responsibility.’” When she “spoke of the possibility of getting her marriage annulled,” Jack “had very little comment to make on the subject.” It was clear to Inga that he would never be able to wed her. “We are so well matched,” Inga told him. “Only because I have done some foolish things must I say to myself ‘NO.’ At last I realize that it is true. We pay for everything in life.”

In fact, it is doubtful that Jack would have agreed to marry Inga, but any thoughts he might have had along those lines were largely squelched by his father, who warned Jack that he would be ruining his career and hurting the whole family. In early March 1942, Jack, with Inga’s assent, ended the romance. “There is one thing I don’t want to do,” Inga told him, “and that is harm you. You belong so wholeheartedly to the Kennedy-clan, and I don’t want you ever to get into an argument with your father on account of me. . . . If I were but 18 summers, I would fight like a tigress for her young, in order to get you and keep you. Today I am wiser.” And possibly richer: Inga’s ready acquiescence in the breakup raises the possibility that Joe paid her off to end the romance quietly. Joe had made such arrangements for himself. Although their intimacy ended, Jack and Inga kept up a correspondence and a friendly relationship that lasted for three more years.

The recurrence of Jack’s back problems in March and April added to his miseries. Since the treatment at the Lahey Clinic in 1940 for back pain, Jack had suffered “periodic attacks of a similar nature.” After he entered the navy, his spasms had become “more severe.” Moreover, in March 1942 he told Billings that he had thrown out his back while doing calisthenics. His stomach was also acting up again. He went to Palm Beach to talk to Joe, who advised him to consult Dr. Lahey in Boston again.

By April his backache had become so severe that he sought medical attention from the local navy doctor, who declared him unfit for duty and noted that the Mayo Clinic had “advised that a fusion operation was indicated.” The navy physician diagnosed the problem as a chronic, recurrent dislocation of the right sacroiliac joint and set it down to a “weak back.” By May, with no change in Jack’s condition, he was authorized to go to the naval hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts, for further evaluation and treatment. He was then also able to consult his doctors at the Lahey Clinic about possible back surgery. Since such an operation might end his naval career, Jack and the doctors were reluctant to do it. Besides, the navy physicians at Chelsea concluded that it was unnecessary. They saw no ruptured disk, and now advised that “tight muscles in his legs and abnormal posture consequent thereto” were causing Jack’s back pain. By late June his doctors (perhaps with prodding of navy brass by Joe) changed Jack’s diagnosis from a dislocation to a “strain, muscular, lower back,” which was described as “probably secondary to arthritic changes due to unusual strain from the tenseness of his leg muscles.” The recommended course of action was no more than massage and exercise.

There is no hint in these navy medical records of any treatment for his colitis. It may be assumed that Jack and Joe agreed that he should continue to hide the severity of his intestinal problems and say nothing to the navy about any treatment he was receiving. According to the notation in the Chelsea Naval Hospital record, Jack’s “general health has always been good. Appendectomy in 1932. No serious illnesses.” It is unlikely that any of Jack’s navy doctors would have picked up on the possibility that steroids might be causing the “arthritic changes” or deterioration of bone in his lower back. When Rose saw him in September, Jack’s stomach, colon, and back problems went unremarked. “You can’t believe how well he looks,” she told Joe Jr. “You can really see that his face has filled out. Instead of it being lean, it has now become fat.” (This was a likely consequence of steroid therapy.) By late June, Jack’s doctors declared him fit for duty.

At this time, Jack considered renouncing Catholicism as a kind of retaliation against his parents for their pressure on him to drop Inga. But Jack’s ties to Joe and Rose and the Church were stronger than his rebellious inclinations. His iconoclasm went no further than threats to teach a Bible class, which he thought would be seen as “un-Catholic.” “I have a feeling that dogma might say it was,” he wrote his mother, “but don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church. We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchical structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top—a structure that allows for no individual interpretation—or are we?”

His impulse to challenge authority also extended to the medical experts, who seemed unable to solve his health problems. In the midst of the war, however, Jack deferred his inclination to defy conventional wisdom and instead applied for sea duty, which would allow him to get out of the United States and away from his parents and Inga. But, as he would quickly find, life on the front lines provided no escape from his tensions with authority. Instead of unpalatable parental and religious constraints, he found himself frustrated by military directives and actions that seemed to serve little purpose.

IN JULY 1942
, the navy granted Jack’s request for sea duty and instructed him to attend midshipman’s school at a branch of Northwestern University in Chicago. There, he underwent the training that was producing the “sixty-day wonders,” the junior naval officers slated for combat. Jack found the demands of the program tiresome and less than convincing as a training ground for sea duty. “This goddamn place is worse than Choate,” he wrote Billings. “But as F.D.R. always says, this thing is bigger than you or I—it’s global—so I’ll string along.”

Jack’s ambition was to command a motor torpedo boat, one of the PTs (for “patrol-torpedo”), as they were popularly known. The papers were full of stories about the heroic work of these small craft and their foremost spokesman, Lieutenant Commander John Bulkeley, who had won a Congressional Medal of Honor for transporting General Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines through five hundred miles of enemy-controlled waters to Australia. Bulkeley was a great promoter of these craft and had convinced President Roosevelt of their worth. In fact, in his drive to attract aggressive young officers to join his service, Bulkeley had vastly exaggerated the importance and success of the PTs. While Jack’s natural skepticism made him suspicious of Bulkeley’s claims about all the damage his boats were inflicting on the Japanese, the glamour of the PTs and, most of all, the chance to have his own command and escape the tedium of office work and navy bureaucracy made Bulkeley’s appeal compelling.

The competition to become a PT commander was so keen and Jack’s back problems so pronounced that he saw little likelihood of being accepted by Bulkeley. But against his better judgment, Joe intervened on Jack’s behalf. The positive publicity likely to be generated by having the former ambassador’s son in his command and the very positive impression Jack made in an interview persuaded Bulkeley to give Jack one of 50 places applied for by 1,024 volunteers. Once accepted, though, Jack worried about surviving the physical training required for assignment to a boat. Riding in a PT, one expert said, was like staying upright on a bucking bronco. At full speed it cut through the water at more than forty knots and gave its crew a tremendous pounding. In September, while on leave, Jack went to see Joe at the Cape. “Jack came home,” Joe wrote his eldest son, “and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back. . . . I don’t see how he can last a week in that tough grind of Torpedo Boats and what he wants to do of course, is to be operated on and then have me fix it so he can get back in that service when he gets better.”

Since he wasn’t about to have an operation and since the navy was not objecting to his service in the PTs, he decided to test the limits of his endurance. The almost daily exercises at sea put additional strain on his back. “He was in pain,” a bunkmate of Jack’s during training in Melville, Rhode Island, recalled, “he was in a lot of pain, he slept on that damn plywood board all the time and I don’t remember when he wasn’t in pain.” But he loved the training in gunnery and torpedoes, and particularly handling the boats, which his years of sailing off Cape Cod made familiar and even enjoyable work. “This job on these boats is really the great spot of the Navy,” he wrote Billings, “you are your own boss, and it’s like sailing around as in the old days.” Rose told her other children that Jack’s presence at Melville had changed “his whole attitude about the war. . . . He is quite ready to die for the U.S.A. in order to keep the Japanese and the Germans from becoming the dominant people on their respective continents. . . . He also thinks it would be good for Joe [Jr.]’s political career if he [Jack] died for the grand old flag, although I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”