JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 by Fredrik Logevall

Author:Fredrik Logevall [Logevall, Fredrik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non-fiction, biography
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

III

By this time Jack had completed his period of rest and recovery in Arizona’s Bradshaw Mountains and had also paid a visit to Hollywood, in the company of Pat Lannan and Chuck Spalding. There they roomed at the fashionable Beverly Hills Hotel and sampled the nightlife, hobnobbing with film celebrities such as Gary Cooper, Walter Huston, Olivia de Havilland, and the ice skater Sonja Henie. Jack had a blast, even if Cooper’s lack of depth and conversational skill during dinner stunned him—“That’s about a three-word dinner we had,” Jack remarked to Spalding, who had penned a bestselling book, Love at First Flight, that Cooper was interested in adapting for the screen. “Nobody said anything, and if we did, Gary said zero!” An afternoon at de Havilland’s home ended in comical fashion as Jack, his eyes fixed firmly on the movie star, turned the wrong doorknob and opened a tightly packed hall closet, sending tennis rackets, balls, and shoes crashing down on him.15

The trio also met with Inga Arvad, and Spalding could immediately see why Jack had fallen for her, quite apart from her looks—she was warm and witty and enchantingly cosmopolitan. But the relationship was by now purely platonic, whatever faint hopes Jack may have had for more. (Some weeks earlier, he had told Billings that he planned to visit Southern California and “tangle tonsils with Inga Binga.”) Inga’s relationship with William Cahan held steady, and she liked her West Coast life. She feared (wrongly) that she was still under FBI surveillance, moreover, and had no interest in restarting the difficulties she and Jack had experienced in 1942, particularly given his possible pursuit of a political career.16

On April 25, 1945, after a brief stop at the Mayo Clinic for medical tests, Jack headed back west to cover the founding conference of the United Nations, in San Francisco, the greatest gathering of world statesmen since the Versailles Conference of 1919.17 Though the suggestion would subsequently be made that Hearst executives were doing the Kennedys a favor by employing him, it was really shrewd self-interest that drove them—for a modest fee of $750, they got sixteen informative and lucid articles from a war hero who had written a respected book on international affairs and had important family connections to senior U.S. and British officials. He might have still been shy of twenty-eight, but he had credibility.18

The young correspondent’s first story, filed on April 28, reflected his realist outlook, as he cautioned readers that the conference had been given too much of a buildup, with exaggerated hopes for what it could accomplish in a world still driven by core national interests. “There is an impression that this is the conference to end wars and introduce peace on earth and good-will toward nations—excluding of course, Germany and Japan. Well it’s not going to do that.” The leading powers would wish to preserve considerable latitude for themselves—one of them, the Soviet Union, seemed intent on raising a ruckus at the meeting and getting its way on several important issues.

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