18

Backwater

ON THE SNOWY AFTERNOON of December 12, Times Herald editor Frank Waldrop escorted two young ladies out of the newspaper’s downtown office and ushered them several blocks to the FBI field bureau in the Panama Railroad Office Building on Lafayette Square. The two women—once roommates, once the closest of friends—exchanged no pleasantries during the trek, and indeed seemed intent on keeping Waldrop between them. After it was all over, those who knew them both said what lay at the bottom of the episode was jealousy over Jack Kennedy. Still, Jack’s name appeared nowhere in the memorandum—entitled “Mrs. Paul Fejos, alias Inga Arvad”—that landed on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk the next morning.

On the afternoon of December 12, 1941, Mr. Frank Waldrop, editor of the Washington Times Herald called at this office with Miss P. Huidekoper, a reporter of that paper, and Inga Arvad, columnist for the Times Herald. . . . Briefly, Miss Huidekoper several days ago stated to Miss Kathleen Kennedy, a reporter on the Times Herald and daughter of former Ambassador Kennedy, that she would not be surprised if Inga Arvad was a spy for some foreign power. She remarked to Miss Kennedy that one of her friends had been going through some old Berlin newspapers and had noted a picture of Inga Arvad taken with Hitler at the Olympic games in Berlin. . . . Miss Kennedy, a very close friend of Inga Arvad, told her of Miss Huidekoper’s statement.

Miss Arvad then contacted Mrs. Patterson and complained about such rumors. Mrs. Patterson was quite worried about this matter, stating to Miss Arvad that it might reflect unfavorably upon the Times Herald, an isolationist paper, if it became known that they had been employing a person suspected of being a spy; however, Mrs. Patterson professed to have complete faith in Miss Arvad and instructed Mr. Waldrop to take both of the young women to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so that a complete report might be made.

[While admitting her past associations with prominent Nazis, Miss Arvad states that she] detests the German people and their form of government and, if necessary, will bring suit against Miss Huidekoper to clear her name.

Subsequent investigations by the FBI revealed the sum of Inga’s story. As it turned out, Inga had made extensive visits to Berlin throughout the late 1930s (culminating in 1940) on assignment for various Danish newspapers. In the course of her sojourns in the city she had become friendly with a number of high-ranking Nazi officials. She’d been a guest at Hermann Goering’s wedding and even viewed some of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games from Hitler’s private box, where her photo had been snapped. Perhaps more troubling for FBI investigators, Inga had more recently been mistress to Axel Wenner-Gren, a German industrialist suspected of using his yacht (the Southern Cross, purchased from Howard Hughes) to help refuel Nazi submarines in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wenner-Gren had underwritten numerous documentary-film expeditions for Inga’s husband, Paul Fejos. He also owned his own bank in the Bahamas and was known to have laundered money for the Duke of Windsor (a Nazi sympathizer who thereby circumvented strict British currency restrictions). As for Inga, one of her former classmates at the Columbia School of Journalism told investigators that she was “very pro-Nazi” and “made no secret of her views. . . . She used to object to the fact that we had several Jewish members in our class. She called them ‘Chews.’ Those God-damned ‘Chews.’ That was her accent.” Still—as an outspoken supporter of the Nazis and a personal acquaintance of Hitler—she was the least likely of spies.

Subsequent surveillance by the frequently witless FBI failed to identify the young man—code-named “Jack”—who so often spent the night at Inga’s Washington apartment. Nevertheless, once Inga’s background became known, her beau received many warnings from friends and family to stay away from her. She could, Jack’s friends speculated, prove fatal to his career in naval intelligence. On top of that, Inga’s estranged and unpredictable husband, Fejos, twenty years Jack’s senior, appeared unwilling to let her go without a fight. Fejos set private eyes on Inga and Jack and even made a threatening personal visit to Ambassador Kennedy.

The ambassador soon came to suspect Fejos as Walter Winchell’s source for a column published on January 12, 1942, in which he wrote: “One of Ex-Ambassador Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so that she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.” The ambassador—recalled Frank Waldrop—“came boiling down” to Washington on the heels of Winchell’s piece, “and I sat in on one of the head butting sessions with his children.” The ambassador insisted Jack drop Arvad, and Jack refused. His sister Kick took his side, saying love was all that mattered, that love conquered all. The father in turn raged at their questioning of his authority in such matters. Jack said he wanted to marry Inga. “Damn it Jack,” said the father, “she’s already married.” Jack replied defiantly that he did not care.

Reading Winchell’s piece, J. Edgar Hoover immediately sized up the situation his muddling agents had not as yet been able to figure out. It was just a matter of days before Jack received an abrupt transfer to the ONI field office in the Sixth Naval District, Charleston, South Carolina, where a less sensitive job waited. Kick subsequently moved into Jack’s old rooms at the Dorchester, these being far more comfortable and plush than her previous digs.

Inga was placed under FBI “technical surveillance” several days before she arrived in Charleston for the first of several weekend visits on the 24th. She checked into the Fort Sumter Hotel, right up the street from Jack’s rooms in a private brick house on Murray Boulevard, and neither she nor Jack was seen outside the hotel for the duration of the weekend. “Inga returned with an infected throat,” Kick wrote Jack shortly after. “Torb and I want to know what you do to girls that causes TB or infected throats or causes them to marry someone else. The doctor advised her to retire to bed but she refused and is now in the pink of condition.”

Torb had arrived in town on the heels of Jack’s departure, his mission to avoid the draft by finding either a civilian government job with a deferment or a cush officer’s assignment without the threat of overseas service. Astonishingly—given her present situation—Inga suggested the FBI as a viable option. “She toted Torb around to see some guy [her attorney, Lyle O’Rourke] yesterday who used to be in the FBI but is now an independent lawyer,” Kick told Jack in her letter. “Of course Macdonald doesn’t have any idea what he wants to do. If he is looking for an easy job the FBI certainly isn’t the spot. . . .”

Evidence suggests that the weekend of the 24th included a lengthy discussion between Arvad and Kennedy on the subject of whether or not they should continue their relationship. Her letter to Jack on January 26 smacks of ambiguity:

He wants fame, the money—and what rarely goes with fame—happiness. He strives hard himself. More than any boy in the same cottonwool-position. He is a credit to the family and to his country. He is so big and strong, and when you talk to him or see him you always have the impression that his big white teeth are ready to bite off a huge hunk of life. There is determination in his green Irish eyes. He has two backbones: His own and his fathers. Somehow he has hit the bulls-eye in every respect. “He can’t fail” I have said to myself very often. I love him more than anything else or anybody in the world.

It is funny. In reality, we are so well matched. 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.”

. . . Plan your life as you want it. Go up the steps of fame. But—pause now and then to make sure that you are accompanied by happiness. Stop and ask yourself “Does it sing inside me today.” If that is gone, look around and don’t take another step till you are certain life is as you will and want it. And wherever in the world I may be, drop in. I think I shall always know the right thing for you to do. Not because of brains. Not because of knowledge. But because there are things deeper and more genuine.

“Distrust is a very funny thing, isn’t it?” she wrote him one day later, on the 27th. “I knew when Kick got a letter from you today why you haven’t written to me. There was a peculiar feeling at the realization that the person I love most in the world is afraid of me. Not of me directly but of the actions I might take some day. I know who prompted you to believe or rather disbelieve in me, but still I dislike it. However I am not going to try and make you change—it would be without result anyway—because big Joe has a stronger hand than I.” When she heard that Torb had chatted with Jack on the phone, she grilled him on what the ensign might be thinking and feeling. “[I] saw Inga . . .” Torb wrote Kennedy, “[and] had a long chat with her on our only subject. [I] controlled my nausea long enough to do a good journeyman job. She either is crazy about you or is fooling a lot of people. How was he—What did he say, etc., etc. I lied as usual, Kennedy. . . .”

Inga returned to Charleston on Friday, February 6, and registered once more at the Fort Sumter under the name Barbara White. FBI agents spotted the couple leaving their room several times for meals and tailed them on Sunday morning when Jack—feeling confused and low—dragged the bemused Inga to the ritualistic comfort of the mass. (“You always say you have faith,” she wrote him a few days later. “Sometimes I wonder if you believe it yourself. To me it seems that the faith you are born with is an empty one. The one you acquire later in life, when God has risen the curtain and showed you life, showed you all its beauties and many of its miseries—well, if you have faith then—that is worth something.”)

Writing their report about Inga’s weekend, the agents stated that from a listening device planted in the room they’d deduced that “Kennedy and Mrs. Fejos engaged in sexual intercourse on a number of occasions while she was occupying room 132 at the Fort Sumter Hotel.” About the same time, back in Washington, another FBI operative overheard Kick explain to a friend her father’s vehement opposition to Jack’s marrying Arvad. According to Kick, the ambassador did not like the idea of Arvad’s previous marriages and the implications this would have for Jack as a Catholic. Speaking to Eddie Moore at about the same time, the ambassador said his objection to Arvad hinged on the fact that friends of Hitler were likely to prove a liability in the long run if allowed to marry into the family. He also suspected that Inga might be something of a gold digger. (It appears that sometime during the first week of February, Ambassador Kennedy discussed both these theories with his son, who now responded more cautiously than before, saying he quite likely would not marry Inga but saw no reason why he could not continue to have some fun with her.)

Jack subsequently told friends he was completely in love with Arvad and wanted her desperately—though perhaps no longer as a wife. At the same time he remained a pragmatist and, in some moods, said that he should put as much distance as possible between himself and the Danish beauty. He confessed to Macdonald that having his name associated with Arvad’s could have a very bad impact on his career now and in the future, and that Inga seemed not to have any respect for this fact. (When Jack informed Inga he was being investigated because of his association with her, she rejoiced and predicted he would “soon be kicked out” of the navy. He, in turn, answered ruefully that there was “more truth than poetry” to Inga’s statement.) He became increasingly concerned early in the second week of February when Life magazine—its owner, Luce, still annoyed with Jack’s father for deserting the Willkie cause—threatened to run a piece about him and his now notorious girlfriend. And he was further harried when he discovered an operative for navy security copying his personal mail. He would, of course, have been even more upset if he realized—as the FBI knew already and Kick would soon learn—that Inga had been two-timing him for several weeks with an old Danish boyfriend, Nils Blok.

The frustrated and nervous Jack Kennedy wanted three things desperately: Inga, the absence of publicity, and a fresh assignment. “My plans are as usual varied and interesting,” he told Billings that February, “as I have a number of irons in the fire. One is an assignment to Pearl Harbor—the other to a battleship—both of which will probably fall flat on their arse but both of which make interesting conversation. . . .” He told friends he absolutely hated Charleston, which he viewed as a provincial backwater compared to Washington. He likewise hated his new job translating incoming ciphered messages for the base commander. Jack, recalled Billings, “wasn’t happy at all in what he was doing. . . . He was very frustrated. . . . it just seemed to him a waste of time. . . . At the time there was nothing he could do about it. He was very frustrated and unhappy.” “Have I discussed Southerners with you?” he asked in one letter. “It’s not so much that they say ‘hear’ after every God damned remark—‘now come and see us Kennedy, hear’—but it is the abots and oots—and all the rest of the shit that convinces me we should have let their bootucks go [at the time of the Civil War].”

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TO WHAT CAN WE ascribe Jack’s intense and out-of-character loyalty to Inga—a loyalty he initially clung to despite so many obvious obstacles? He’d for so long viewed most of the women he’d met as disposable, and even seems to have given up Frances Ann Cannon (whom he’d told friends he loved and wanted to marry) with relative ease after she refused him. At the same time, he had no stronger a track record than any of his siblings when it came to denying the wishes of his father: something he now did with a vengeance by continuing to see Inga.

Perhaps it was the timing of things, on the heels of Rosemary’s tragedy, that made Jack search for something deeper in a relationship and in turn made that relationship harder to give up. Perhaps the timing also made him less likely to take advice from the man, his father, on whose authority the lobotomy had been performed. In any event, a situation arose where it would take something more than Jack’s own most sensible instincts, and something more than his father’s insistence, to separate him from Inga.

We don’t know exactly how Kick became aware of Inga’s cheating on Jack, but it happened sometime during the second week of February. The revelation changed her perspective on the wisdom of Jack’s affair. “Kathleen,” Inga wrote Jack, “[is] sweet. I love her for admitting that what really gets her goat is that she is jealous of me. My God. What I give you—if I give you anything—and what I take—which is plenty—that is something she couldn’t do for you anyway. But she is young and as yet intolerant. She is more afraid of the pain that I shall cause you in the future, than she is concerned with the happiness we may enjoy at present.” Staying with her parents at Palm Beach for the week after Valentine’s Day—during which General Percival surrendered the British garrison at Singapore to the Japanese—Kick filled her father in on Inga’s “other man.” Kick had no way of knowing that at the same time Arvad—conflicted—was debating which of her two lovers to marry, Kennedy or Blok. The Dane finally decided in favor of Kennedy, who as yet had not heard about the existence of his rival.

Jack and Inga tried to avoid the now obvious surveillance at Fort Sumter when she arrived on Friday, February 21. They did not, however, outmaneuver the FBI for long. Their room at Charleston’s Francis Marion Hotel, just a few blocks away, received listening devices while they breakfasted downstairs on Saturday morning. Thus we know much of the conversation that weekend involved Inga trying to lure Jack into marriage. Inga raised the possibility of annulments (she’d be needing two of them) as the perfect cure for religious difficulties. She also voiced her perhaps contrived fear that she might be pregnant. Jack, however, did not rise to the bait. A few days later, on Friday the 27th, he spoke to his father at length on the telephone and learned of Mr. Blok. He traveled to Washington the next day, spent what he thought would be one last night with Inga, and formally broke off the relationship on the afternoon of Sunday, February 29. “I may as well admit,” she wrote him a week later, “that since that famous Sunday evening I have been totally dead inside.”

If not dead inside himself, Jack certainly became increasingly bored and gloomy. The news of the war did not help. The Japanese had already taken Malaya, Thailand, Wake Island, Hong Kong, and the Dutch East Indies by that first week in March, when the Allies surrendered 100,000 American, British, and Dutch troops at Java. Jack also noted General MacArthur’s escape from Corregidor Island, just off the embattled Bataan Peninsula, on a PT boat during the night of March 11. Jack was still talking a lot about the rescue of MacArthur and his family by Bataan’s Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3, commanded by Lieutenant Commander John Duncan Bulkeley, five weeks later when Bataan fell and 75,000 Americans became prisoners of war. The PT boats seemed, from a distance, to offer the only good news out of the Pacific. Of course it didn’t help Jack’s spirits that his morbid father made a religion of passing on every bit of defeatist gossip and commentary he could find.

“The newspapers still go on printing headlines that say Victory,” Jack wrote sourly to his old Choate classmate Rip Horton, “and a news-story that stinks of defeat. I suppose that a lot of the trouble comes from the fact that nobody knows exactly what the hell the war is all about. There’s still too great an impression that we’re embarked on a lofty crusade for the Four Freedoms, not a bitter savage back-to-the-wall fight for our survival. Because that’s what its turning into. I really think now that we will be either defeated—that is, we will make a compromise peace, [and] by compromise I mean we will settle for the US’s territorial integrity—or we will fight a war that will take eight or ten years, a war that will make any resemblance between our democratic life as we know it today and our life then purely coincidental. . . . The lineup for this war is not drawn definitely—there’ll be some changes made. You could write another version of An American Tragedy. The very definition of tragedy in Greek means that the disaster in the last act is inevitable and inherent in the attitude of those who are involved. Now, I don’t mean that we inevitably are going to watch the American Tragedy on a larger scale than Mr. Dreiser played with. 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—it isn’t inevitable—something can be done, but before its ended it may call for us to be regimented to the point that [will] make the Nazis look like starry eyed individualists. If we decide that its worth it—what we’re fighting for warrants the sacrifice—we’ll win. Otherwise we won’t. . . .”

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HAVE BEEN OFFERED commission in Navy,” Macdonald wrote Jack at the start of February, “at rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade as assistant athletic director at Naval Flying Station at Pensacola—full ratings and pay etc. & exemption from draft. However, high draft number, 8900 out of 9300 to be called from Malden + local draft boards’ statement they won’t grab me till next April + varicose veins (you know I couldn’t march, Jack) = indecision on taking the job as once in the Navy I’m good for the duration of the emergency. But as have been deferred from accepting the job till June am going to wait till then to see what Roosevelt’s next act of aggression will be. After his speech last night am beginning to think the softest place I could be is a non-combatant officer at Pensacola (but not in the summer). God damn Hitler. God damn the English & double God damn Roosevelt.”

Jack did not applaud Macdonald’s reluctance when it came to the service. “Macdonald is up in Boston,” he wrote Claiborne Pell, now engaged in dangerous convoy duty in the North Atlantic. “He is intent on finding himself a safe harbor state-side for the duration. A decade from now he will be able to tell his children he threw a football or pushed a pencil all through the war, and won’t they be proud. He was never chicken-shit on the football field, and would have scoffed at the stuff it takes to run cross-country for Princeton, but when push came to shove you wound up in torpedo alley and he wound up in the whiner’s corner.” (Pell had been a cross-country star at Princeton.)

Despite Macdonald’s carefully calculated plans to avoid risk to life or limb, he subsequently decided he’d be more than happy to go to war after enduring several weeks of utter tedium in the safe, noncombatant job he eventually negotiated for himself: clerk in the office of the Inspector of Naval Material, Boston. “I swear to God Kennedy I’ve worked like a damned nigger (pre 1865 vintage),” he wrote on March 9, “and have been so God damned tired that I go home & fall in bed, not that I’m tired literally, but that I know I will be at 7 am when that fucking alarm goes off. Life was never like this & for my dough they can have it.” He was now, after laboring so hard to get safe duty stateside, considering applying for a post at sea because, he told Jack, he’d “just as soon drown as suffocate here beside this radiator for 3 years. . . . If you can arrange it why don’t you go to sea with me as your valet or in charge of diet & we can involve ourselves in some feminine troubles in the lower color scheme. As a veteran habitué of the Balinese Room I figure a few days in Bali could get us in a lot of trouble (I hope). Seriously though . . . while I realize this war is no ‘Great Adventure’ or a Harvard/Yale game we might as well see what its like & not live the same sort of life we’ve lived in these troubled times. If we do we’ll probably regret it later on.” Macdonald would subsequently apply for a transfer to PT boats, and he and Jack would meet up again in short order.

Meanwhile their friend George Mead—the paper-company heir who had enlisted in the Marine Corps even before the war began—got word that he and all the other men of the 5th Marine Regiment would soon depart for the South Pacific. As soon as George received his orders, his mother scheduled a weekend-long party at the family’s winter plantation in Aiken, South Carolina. She wanted, she said, her eldest son to have one more really good time before he went to war. Chuck Spalding, Jack Kennedy, Kick, and other friends—among them Lady Astor, then visiting relatives in Virginia—all gathered to wish George well. Sometime during the festivities Mead picked up a tape recorder and, pretending to be an interviewer asking questions of the famous news commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, asked: “Mr. Kaltenborn, do you think this is the beginning of the beginning or the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?” Later on, talking confidentially to Jack and Chuck Spalding, Mead admitted he was frightened. Jack’s advice: George should avoid thinking he was going to be killed, because those who fixated on the possibility were the ones, in his opinion, most likely to receive a free government headstone.

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WHILE JACK TRIED to learn to do without Inga, the ambassador tried once again to get a job from FDR. A telegram he’d sent the President on December 7, 1941—“Name the battle post. I’m yours to command”—had gone unanswered. “I don’t want to appear in the role of a man looking for a job for the sake of getting an appointment,” Kennedy told the president in a letter dated March 4, “but Joe and Jack are in the service and I feel that my experience in these critical times might be worth something in some position.”

When FDR replied warily that he might be able to find him a post, Kennedy leaped at the opportunity and came immediately to Washington, arriving March 12. Simultaneously, according to the now standard choreography associated with Kennedy’s successive bids for appointed office, Arthur Krock used his New York Times column to issue a call for Kennedy’s return to public life. This time, however, the publicity backfired. After Krock’s piece, the White House received hundreds of wires and letters denouncing Kennedy as a fool at best and a pro-fascist traitor at worst. As a result, FDR wound up offering the former ambassador a low-profile assignment advising on how to overcome bottlenecks in the building of destroyers—a position Kennedy declined. He may not have wanted to appear like a man looking for a job for the sake of getting an appointment, but he was quick to refuse when offered a position that lacked the dignity and importance he required. So much for “Name the battlefront. I’m yours to command.” FDR had called Kennedy’s bluff.

Animosity seemed to abound when it came to Kennedy, now a political untouchable. “A funny thing happened the other day,” Kick wrote her parents on March 20. “A rather cultured gentleman called to give Mr. Waldrop an idea for a column. As Mr. Waldrop was busy on another phone I asked if I could take the message. The voice on the other end then proceeded to tell me that he had just learned that Supreme Court Justices (active and retired) do not pay any Federal Income Tax. (We have found this to be false.) I asked his name. He said that it didn’t matter—it was just an old Irish name. I replied ‘Tell me because I certainly have an Irish name.’ He said, ‘What is it?’ ‘Kennedy,’ I answered. The voice continued, ‘I’ve liked every Kennedy I’ve ever known except Joe Kennedy.’ My ears perked up. ‘Why don’t you like him? I hear he’s quite a nice guy.’ With a bite in his voice the answer came from the other end, ‘I know him; I went to college with him.’ ”

Ensign Jack visited Palm Beach in the company of his Stanford friend Henry James just a few days after the ambassador rejected Roosevelt’s halfhearted job offer. Smart, confident, and not easily intimidated, James took an instant dislike to Jack’s father, whom he quickly came to view as a despot torturing his sons and daughters, most of whom appeared frightened to death of him. James became indignant one afternoon when the ambassador chewed him and Jack out for arriving late to dinner. Unlike Jack and his siblings, the objective James shrewdly surmised the root of the ambassador’s belligerence. This small circle of space, this dinner table overlooking the ocean, was one of the few tiny islands left in the world where the ridiculed and repudiated old man could exercise immediate and total power. James came away thinking the ambassador was not scary at all—just pathetic.

So too was Jack when it came to his physical health. Still “pessimistic on all fronts,” Jack wrote a friend he felt “more scrawny and weak than usual” and that he had lately been harassed by intense pains in his spine and stomach. (Jack’s superiors at Charleston had recently given him a score of 3.0, out of a possible 4.0, on his fitness report. They graded his job performance at the highest level of excellence, but docked him a full point because of his physical condition, most especially the problem with his back. Jack, wrote his Charleston commander, “has been greatly handicapped by trouble with his lower spine which will require long surgical attention.”)

Citing his back condition, Jack arranged to take ten days’ unpaid personal medical leave following his brief visit to Palm Beach. Experts at both the Mayo Clinic and Lahey Clinic studied him up and down and diagnosed chronic, recurrent dislocation of the right sacroiliac joint: a condition requiring surgical fusion of the joint. A few weeks later, physicians at the Charleston Naval Hospital—where Jack commenced a one-month incarceration on April 13—disagreed about the advisability of surgery as compared to physical therapy and drugs. Finally, Jack wound up ordered to the Chelsea Naval Hospital, Massachusetts, in mid-May, there to turn twenty-five and linger yet another month while doctors x-rayed, studied, and debated. He wrote Billings that he would enter the hospital a pauper and depart a man of means, since he would—like his brother before him—come into his share of the family trust upon reaching the quarter-century mark.

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JOE JR. TOOK NO particular notice of the PT that scooted MacArthur away from the embattled island of Corregidor on March 11 and landed him on the marginally safer island of Del Monte. He did, however, talk a great deal about the two B-17E Flying Fortresses which swept down on Del Monte a few days later to collect MacArthur and his party. He told Killifer he wished he’d been one of the pilots ferrying the general to Australia. He clearly envied those who were close to the firing line.

It had taken till mid-November for Joe to finally get up in the air above the golf courses of friendly Jacksonville. Once again he was in a Yellow Peril. He shared dual controls with his instructor until December 9—two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—at which point his superiors approved him as “safe for primary solo.” That is, his primary instruction ended on the 9th and he received approval to go on to basic pilot training, in which he was involved that spring while Bataan collapsed and Jack languished in his various hospital beds. Basic pilot training would, in turn, be followed by advanced pilot instruction and operational training, if Joe made the grade. His record in the air, however, left something to be desired. “This student does not absorb instruction readily,” read one report. “He cannot remember things from one day to the next. . . . student does not look where he is going.” On another day: “Student flies with head in cockpit too much. Student is afraid of inverted spins; consequently recovery uncertain.” Translated this meant Joe spent too much time rationalizing and thinking out the mechanics of flight instead of feeling the plane beneath him and working with its flow. He needed more instinct and less intellect.

It was likely nervousness over not performing well that caused him to drop twenty pounds early in the new year. “I saw young Joe in Jacksonville last week,” his father wrote a friend near the end of January, just as Jack’s relationship with Inga became news for Winchell. “They are working them frightfully hard and he’s quite thin, but he seems to be very happy and anxious to do his bit.” In fact he was altogether too anxious. His anxiety only mounted when he graduated to the SNJ low-wing metal monoplane. He continued to draw questionable comments from his instructors, and soon—at the start of February—the Jacksonville flight surgeon ordered him to take a week off. He was—the surgeon noted on his record—“temporarily incapacitated” because of “accumulated stresses.”

Friends who saw him at Palm Beach said he did not seem able to relax, so concerned was he about what he was missing back at Jacksonville and who might be pulling ahead of him in class standing. Things were slow to get better after his return when he began flying the PBY Catalina twin-engine patrol plane—a “flying boat”—off the St. Johns River. “Student is tense in cockpit. Did not perform cockpit check when I asked him. . . . Does not know course rules.” In the end, he graduated seventy-seventh out of eighty-eight pilots in his class. Joe’s final report from his last instructor described “Cadet Kennedy” as someone who had “a cheerful, co-operative disposition and a strong, forceful character. His handling of his regular and additional duties has been [only] satisfactory, but he is expected to improve considerably in this respect as he gains experience in the naval service.”

Such were the mixed reviews that Joe Jr. took with him as he departed Jacksonville for operational training at Banana River, Florida, near Cocoa Beach, during the second week of May 1942, just a few days after his father addressed the graduating naval air cadets at Jacksonville. As many who witnessed the graduation recall, the ambassador became extremely emotional and broke down in the course of his remarks to the cadets. Writing later to base commander G. R. Fairlamb, he apologized for his performance, saying: “The sight of those boys moved me so deeply that I am afraid I did not do what I consider my customary job in speaking. It made me realize how unimportant everything and everybody is today compared to them.”

Joe’s graduation coincided with the Battle of the Coral Sea, a fight during which naval aviators showed for the first time what they were really made of. (It would, in fact, go down as the first naval engagement of history fought without opposing ships making contact. All the action happened in and from the air.) The fight had begun on May 4 when the naval fighters of Task Force 17 (commanded by Rear Admiral F. J. Fletcher) took off from the carrier Yorktown and bombed Japanese transports engaged in landing troops at tiny Tulagi Island, which with the larger Florida Island formed the southern edge of the Solomons. (An ungarrisoned but strategically important strip of land, Tulagi boasted a splendid port from which the Japanese would be well positioned to mount a thrust toward New Caledonia and New Zealand.) By the end of the 4th, the naval aviators had damaged several Japanese transports and sunk one destroyer. Subsequently, Fletcher’s task force teamed up with Task Force 11 (commanded by Rear Admiral A. W. Fitch) and the carrier Lexington south of the Lousiades. The bulk of these combined units then moved northward in search of the enemy covering force that would, if left unhindered, occupy Port Moresby, New Guinea, in short order.

Early on the 7th, carrier aircraft located and sank the light carrier Shoho. They also damaged but did not succeed in sinking the carrier Shokaku the next day. At the same time, enemy planes damaged the Yorktown and set off uncontrollable fires on the Lexington, which caused her to be abandoned and sunk. In the end, the score for ships sunk or damaged favored the Japanese, and they maintained control of Tulagi, but the action of the navy fighters did at least cause the Japanese to give up on their attempt to occupy Port Moresby by sea. Still, the prospects for the Allies in the Pacific seemed bleak, given the overwhelming Japanese superiority in ships, planes, and men.

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WHATEVER THE PROSPECTS for Allied victory in the Pacific, May saw a drastic improvement of Kick Kennedy’s prospects for victory on a very different front. “I got an excited note from Debo yesterday,” she wrote Jack on the 20th, “and another from Billy H. himself today: the wedding to Sally is off, says Billy, due to irreconcilable differences between the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom. Of course, I am infinitely happy about this for Billy’s sake, and perhaps for my own. Time will tell.” For now, however, Billy remained an entire dangerous ocean away.