THE ONLY WOMAN JFK EVER LOVED AND OFFERED TO LEAVE POLITICS FOR

This accused spy had a fling with JFK and stole Hitler’s heart. Even the head of the FBI was obsessed with her.

Quote:

“Knowing you has been the brightest part of an extremely bright twenty six years.”

—Jack

“I love him more than anything.”

—Inga

Inga Arvad and John F. Kennedy found each other at a cocktail party in Washington, D.C. “In a noisy place, I met a boy who was supposedly brilliant, and who laughed the whole time,” she later wrote him, referring to him in the third person, as she often did. “There is determination in his green Irish eyes.… 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 chunk of life.”

It was the fall of 1941, long before Kennedy’s entry into politics. He was 24, fresh off the publication of Why England Slept, his bestselling book, and was serving as a naval ensign just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Suffering from a bad back and with his older brother first in line for a political career, he faced an uncertain path. Arvad was four years older and working as a newspaper columnist. A former Miss Denmark, she had already traveled the globe, had bewitched the world’s most powerful men, was married to a Hungarian filmmaker, and was suspected of spying for the Nazis.

Hoover had investigated Kennedy and Arvad’s relationship. He kept the resulting documents in his Official and Confidential files, the trove of sensitive information he often used to blackmail political foes and maintain power.

Fascinated by the romance, I also learned that after she’d split up with Kennedy, Arvad had quietly married a cowboy movie star and moved out West, where she raised two sons on a ranch. Read more by clicking here

The relationship they had began with problems. She wasn’t Catholic. She was married. She had interviewed Hitler several times and written glowingly about him (he also hosted a party for her). FDR signed a memo asking FBI head J. Edgar Hoover to watch her, but because JFK was an officer in the military it fell on Navy Intelligence to watch them both.

They even recorded the two of them having sex.

“There was a notion that beautiful exotic women who speak a lot of languages were inherently suspicious,” says Scott Farris, author of the new book “Inga” (Lyons Press), noting that Arvad’s FBI file was 1,200 pages long.
“As it turns out, Nazi Germany actually had a terrible espionage network,” he adds. “But the FBI didn’t know that at the time. They were desperate to find something. And the less they found, the more they were convinced [Arvad] was hiding stuff.”

While reporting in Berlin, she had penned flattering profiles of top Nazi officials, including Hitler, of whom she wrote, “You immediately like him . . . The eyes, showing a kind heart, stare right at you. They sparkle with force.”

To be fair, Farris points out that this is not quite as outrageous as it sounds, as it was the mid-’30s. “A lot of people were fascinated by Hitler in 1936,” he says. “No one could envision the Holocaust at this point.” Hitler even gave Arvad an autographed picture of himself, signed, “To Inga Arvad, in friendly memory.”

She scooped the continent with the news of Nazi leader Hermann Göring’s engagement to actress Emmy Sonnemann. “Never has the bride looked more enchanting,” Arvade wrote of the wedding, describing how Sonnemann’s arm extended in a Nazi salute.
The Nazis enjoyed her profiles so much, in fact, that they asked her to become a spy for them, something Arvad said she would consider. Instead, it was her wake-up call. She took the next plane to Copenhagen, Denmark, stunned and scared.
More here

The FBI did not know at this time how bad Germany’s espionage was but they collected enough rumor and innuendo to own JFK. It is believed when JFK and RFK confronted Hoover to fire him for sending letters to Martin Luther King telling him to kill himself and sent tapes of King with other women to his wife, Hoover reminded JFK of Inga.

Hoover kept his job.

With the pressure on Inga she would break up with Jack, stating that he had 2 spines, his own and his fathers. But that was not the end.

After the disastrous PT 109 episode Joe Kennedy had a fictitious version of the story written for Reader’s Digest which would become the story of heroism it is still considered. Being the only PT boat rammed by the Japanese, everyone thought they were headed for a court martial. The article was leaked to the press, it had been written by a person who interviewed no one and created the myths out of whole cloth.

Inga was actually the first person to interview Jack.

But that was not the last time they met. There is evidence they shared a room at the Waldorf in 1946. Her son McCoy would have been conceived between November 15 and November 23, 1946, a period that covers Kennedy’s second weekend in New York. Could Arvad have been there, fulfilling the wish she’d shared with him before so many forces pushed them apart?

“Could I do what I wanted today, without consideration to anybody, I think I would go out West,” Arvad wrote Kennedy during the height of their romance. “Before I left I would make sure that I had your baby along with me. You may say why mine? Well, not because I love you but because you are the kind the world ought to swarm with. You have just sufficient meanness in you to get along, and enough brains and goodness to give the world and not only take.”

She had divorced, married a cowboy star and moved out West.

For more on the Kennedy’s:

Behind the paywall: PT Boats in the Pacific Documentary

A PT boat (short for Patrol Torpedo boat) was a torpedo-armed fast attack craft used by the United States Navy in World War II. It was small, fast, and inexpensive to build, valued for its maneuverability and speed but hampered at the beginning of the war by ineffective torpedoes, limited armament, and comparatively fragile construction that limited some of the variants to coastal waters.