Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Also, in confronting the President about his sexual escapades, Hoover was fortified by the experience of having done so twenty years earlier. During World War II, FBI agents watching a Danish reporter named Inga Arvad (who was suspected as a spy because she had known Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, and other top Nazis) had discovered that she was having an affair with Kennedy, then a Navy lieutenant. Acting on FBI accusations, the Navy had punished Kennedy with a transfer, and Hoover had denied Kennedy a written absolution from suspicions of disloyalty, refusing even personal appeals from his friend Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Afterward, when Lieutenant Kennedy continued the affair, FBI agents had bugged their trysts to obtain tape recordings of Navy talk mixed with pillow talk. Hoover did not forget the episode. Upon Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960, he asked his assistant Cartha “Deke” DeLoach to retrieve the Kennedy-Arvad tape recordings from the FBI files for review. DeLoach, who had heard only rumors about the tapes, recalled them as involving Joseph Kennedy, not his son, but the Director said firmly, “No, it was the boy.”