Mary's Mosaic (39 page)

Not long after his visit with Mary in Provincetown, Jack had another revealing exchange with Priscilla McMillan, herself an attractive and articulate woman who resisted his advances. “I was one of the few he could really talk to,” McMillan told author David Horowitz. “Like Freud, he wanted to know what women really wanted, that sort of thing; but he also wanted to know the more mundane details—what gave a woman pleasure, what women hoped for in marriage, how they liked to be courted. During one of these conversations I once asked him why he was doing it—why was he acting like his father, why was he avoiding real relationships, why was he taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”
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McMillan, who went on to become a well-known author, later reflected on Jack’s compulsion for skirt-chasing: “The whole thing with him was pursuit. I think he was secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that the low esteem in which he held women was once again validated. It meant also that he’d have to start chasing someone else.”
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Indeed, “skirt-chasing” had become a Kennedy family heritage, what one perspicacious woman later referred to as “the wandering penis disease.” It had passed from father to son. In fact, Joe Kennedy Sr., himself afflicted, once told J. Edgar Hoover that he should have gelded Jack when he was a small boy.
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A number of prominent Kennedy biographers over the years have given credence to the fact that Jack led a kind of “double life,” a life of dysfunctional compartmentalization when it came to his sexuality and relationships with women. “Yet with Jack, something different was at work than [just] a liking for women,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “So driven was the pace of his sex life, and so discardable his conquests, that they suggest a deep difficulty with intimacy.”
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Presidential historian Robert Dallek underscored the idea that “Jack was a narcissist whose sexual escapades combated feelings of emptiness bred by a cold, detached mother and a self-absorbed, largely absent
father.”
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Even while married to Jackie, Jack’s unabashed philandering never abated; indeed, being married only seemed to exacerbate his compulsion.

From the very beginning, soon after she met Jack in the spring of 1951, Jackie had been warned about what life with Jack would inevitably entail. His Choate schoolmate Lem Billings told her in no uncertain terms before their marriage what she could expect with a man twelve years her senior who was, as he put it, “set in his ways.” Even more presciently, Jack’s close friend Chuck Spaulding observed, “Jackie wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like [her father] old Black Jack [John V. Bouvier III]. It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations. We all talked about it—even Jack, who didn’t particularly go for Freud but said that Jackie had a ‘father crush.’ What was surprising was that Jackie, who was so intelligent in other things, didn’t seem to have a clue about this one.”
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Marital fidelity wasn’t ever a part of this equation. Jackie valiantly tried to bury her head in the sand, but the toll it took undoubtedly aggravated the possibility of further miscarriages.

T
he antecedents of Jack’s long-standing problem of intimacy with women had a more dynamic dimension than just the imprinting of his childhood. Author Nigel Hamilton’s analysis of Jack’s mother Rose Kennedy as “a cold, unmotherly, and distant woman whose main contribution to Jack’s character was his strangely split psyche, leaving him emotionally crippled in his relations with women,” was only one part of this equation.
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Unlike Mary Meyer, he seemed to have had little interest in any sober self-examination, reflection, or understanding. No doubt his experience of abandonment as a child, sustained by the lack of little direct maternal care, aroused a projected vengeful disposition toward the opposite sex: Women were to be used, then discarded at his whim. Failing any deeper internal investigation, conquering his emptiness—and keeping it at bay—required an infusion of one sexual triumph after another, however momentary the relief. He had to have known he had a problem.

Nonetheless, the power of love beckoned him to romance during the same time that Mary Pinchot was in love with Bob Schwartz. During his stint as a Navy ensign in the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, Jack began a serious affair with a beautiful blonde, blueeyed Danish woman who had become a close friend of his sister Kathleen’s. Still married but estranged from her second husband, Inga Arvad was a classic stunning bombshell.
New York Times
columnist Arthur Krock, who had helped
procure her a job as a reporter at the
Times Herald
, once described Inga as “a perfect example of Nordic beauty.” Slightly older than Jack, she exuded sexuality. The two had no illusion that their relationship would be anything but a passing affair. It also had to be kept secret, so that Jack’s parents wouldn’t find out. Jack and Inga camouflaged their connection, using Kathleen and her boyfriend, John White, making it look like just a convenient foursome. Little did Jack know, however, that his father’s spy network was aware of the relationship right after their first date.

By all accounts, Jack became smitten with Inga, as did she with him, in spite of her making it clear that she “wouldn’t trust him as long term companion.” During World War II, many dating relationships were imbued with an ethos of “living in the present,” given the reality of an unknown, uncertain future during wartime. “Inga Binga,” as Jack affectionately called her, had tremendous self-assurance; her life purpose was not about just getting married and settling down. Though there are no in-depth accounts of their relationship, this was probably the deepest emotional, intimate attachment to a woman that Jack had ever made in his life up until that time. Yet, she was not the sort of woman for Jack to take home to mother and father, and he knew it.

In addition, Inga’s past soon rose to create problems from another direction. Years before, as an aspiring journalist, Inga had manipulated her way into being given access to the Nazi elite, including Adolph Hitler. Attending the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, sitting in the same box as the Führer, Inga had had her picture taken. After the United States entered the war against Germany, the FBI, already aware of Inga, began watching her when she was a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. It was feared she might be a spy. Because Jack was now a Navy officer with security clearances for his work at the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, unbeknownst to Jack, opened a file on their relationship.

Unexpectedly, in January 1942, nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell revealed in the
New York Mirror
that Jack and Inga were “an item.” The story was so explosive that it had the potential to relieve Jack of his commission in the Navy, given the ONI’s paranoia. Instead, two days after the Winchell column, Jack found himself transferred to the Charleston Naval Shipyard. He told one 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!”
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Jack and Inga spent several months exchanging love letters and talking on the phone constantly, with Inga visiting Charleston on weekends. The relationship, however, grew stormy. Among other things, Inga feared she might
be pregnant. Jack knew he would never be allowed to marry her. His “fight for love” could not withstand the Kennedy family pressure, nor what would undoubtedly have been a epic confrontation with his father. He was still shackled by the expectations of paternal authority, unwilling to assert his full separation and independence. The epitaph of Jack and Inga, and the love they had shared, was being written.

For his part, patriarch Joe Sr. knew exactly what a toll his son’s struggles were taking. There were FBI wiretaps on Jack’s phone calls with Inga, as well as wiretaps in her hotel room when she came to visit him in Charleston. No doubt the elder Kennedy’s connections arranged them. Not wanting to incur any ill will from a tempestuous Jack, or spur any rebellion, the cunning father never indicated the slightest disapproval of his son’s relationship with Inga. But, according to several biographers, Winchell’s column was probably engineered by Joe Kennedy himself. When Jack, with Inga’s acceptance, finally ended the relationship several months later, according to these same biographers, Inga had been paid off by his father to finally leave.
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Heartbroken, Jack now turned his attention to preventing his unpredictable, precarious health issues from sidelining him to a desk for the duration of the war. More than ever, he wanted to break away from his father and the chains of the Kennedy family that enslaved him.

Jack’s closest platonic friendship with a woman was with his sister Kathleen, affectionately known as “Kick.” She was perhaps the only woman contemporary in his early adult life with whom he was able to sustain an ongoing emotional connection. Just three years younger than Jack, Kick had been born fourth in the family—after Joe Jr., Jack, and Rose Marie (“Rosemary”). Because Rosemary’s mental retardation relegated her to an institution, Kick was the eldest daughter in the Kennedy clan, and she and Jack forged an important bond. Both were rebellious, having contested the shackles of the Catholic Church and a mother chained to its religious dogma. Jack admired his sister’s spunk, her ability to speak her mind and create a life of her own choosing. He defended her when she courageously broke with her parents’ wishes by marrying non-Catholic Billy Cavendish, the young Marquess of Hartington. Unfortunately, young Cavendish was killed in the war in 1944, less than a month after their brother, Joe Jr. Devastated by these deaths, Kick and Jack, understanding more completely the frailty of life, shared an even deeper bond.

As a Massachusetts congressman in the summer of 1947, Jack visited Kick in Ireland. He was overjoyed to find her now in love with wealthy English aristocrat Peter Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam, however, was not only Protestant, but also
still married, although the plan was that he would soon be divorced and marry Kick. Despite both Joe Sr. and mother Rose’s eventual warning that they would disown her if she went ahead with this plan, Kick was undeterred. Seeing how happy she was, Jack again admired and supported his sister’s boldness and independence. Moved by and envious of Kathleen’s joy at being in love, he told his friend Lem Billings that in all of his relationships with women, except possibly for a short while with Inga, he had never lost himself, or fallen in love as his sister Kathleen had.
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Less than a year later, in May 1948, Kick and her husband-to-be died in a plane crash en route to the south of France. Her death threw Jack into deep despair, provoking a spiritual crisis about the meaning of life itself. Losing his brother Joe to the war effort could be understood and eventually accepted, but Kick’s death utterly confounded Jack in a way nothing in his entire life ever had. Unwilling to tolerate his mother’s glib explanation that this had been God’s way of saving her daughter Kathleen from a “sacrilegious marriage,” Jack had no one within his family to turn to for comfort. Not only had Kick been his best friend, she was also the only woman at the time who had provided a bridge to his confused and broken emotional life. Kick had been “the one in the family with whom he could confide his deepest thoughts,” said his close friend Lem Billings.
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Kathleen’s death left Jack emotionally barren. Resignation gripped him. “Kathleen’s death depressed Jack and made him even more conscious than ever of his own mortality,” noted presidential historian Robert Dallek. “He told the columnist Joe Alsop that he didn’t expect to live more than another ten years, or beyond the age of forty-five.”
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Scaling the White House didn’t eradicate his emptiness, nor did it ameliorate any of his physical infirmities, which sometimes intermittently became acute. Jack’s rampant promiscuity grew into a bona fide sexual addiction. His reckless daring was the kind of obsessive pursuit that was not only dangerous from a national security perspective, but ultimately personally destructive. Recurrent bouts of venereal disease, originally contracted when he was a student at Harvard from sex with prostitutes, plagued him during his years in the White House.

The other ingredient in this equation was drugs, to which Jack was introduced by Max Jacobson, MD, a New York physician known as “Dr. Feel Good,” who had a colorful reputation in the early 1960s for assisting fast-lane, high-society New Yorkers with their “moods.” He had been introduced to Jack by his close friend Chuck Spaulding during the 1960 presidential campaign.
Spaulding himself was a patient of Jacobson’s, whose elixirs by injection contained any number of amphetamine derivatives. “Miracle Max,” as he was also sometimes called, made more than thirty visits to the White House during the Kennedy presidency, not counting his trips to Palm Beach and Hyannis Port. So indispensable had Dr. Feel Good become that he even accompanied the president to Paris and Vienna in 1961. He also supplied Jack with vials of specially prepared concoctions, as well as the hypodermic needles to inject them on his own.
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