nurturing relationship. authors have nurtured us and we've nurtured authors. >> next from portland author scott farris explores the life of inga arvad including her love affair with john kennedy and her connections to adolf hitler and fbi director j under hoover. >> inga arvad was one of the most alluring women apparently to ever walk the earth as she was a beautiful woman. he was missed denmark in 1931 but even as ready as she appears in these photographs people say that photograph didn't do her justice, you had to see her in person. he had extraordinary charisma and she's had a way about her that she would obviously take over a room when she would walk into it, turn heads and that was one reason she was such an interesting pairing

with kennedy who was a good-looking man with a lot of charisma but it wasn't just her looks. she was a very accomplished person, very bright. she's for four languages, danish, french and german but she was fluent in listening. she had a marvelous ability to draw people out, get them to talk about themselves and make them feel they were fascinating so inga is mentioned in all the kennedy biographies since the 70s because when they dated at the beginning of world war ii, they met in october 1941. inga at that time was still married to her second husband so that was a reason for them to be discreet . then they also , inga turned out to be a suspected nazi spy so she came under the surveillance of the fbi. they did their best keep their relationship a secret so it wasn't well known until after j edgar huber died and the fbi files were opened up and people learned more about this relationship that was pivotal in john f. kennedy's life so she appears in all

the biographies of kennedy as this important figure but not really devoted to her own life. i argue that inga arvad was the great love of john f. kennedy's life and that includes his relationship with jackie kennedy which is sad but i believe that should be true. that's not that he didn't love jackie and the toward the end of his life he developed an appreciation for all jackie brought to the white house but before that the woman he cared about the most was inga arvad and there are a variety of reasons for that. she was beautiful so she would attract men and she was his people in terms of sophistication. kennedy had traveled the world, his dad had been ambassador to great britain and he was interested in public affairs and world events and so was inga though they developed this bond together and she was a different kind of woman that anybody else he dated.

he tended to date either schoolgirls when he was in school or dated stewardesses and cocktail waitresses and they were purely therefore relationships but inga was somebody he became smitten with immediately andbegan talking about language . inga had not only been married once before, she was married to a second husband and the kennedys of course were america's preeminent catholic family and she had been devault with a divorce would've cost scandal in those days but he found her very attractive. they were introduced by his kathleen, everybody call her. she worked at the washington times which is something absorbed by the washington post and inga was a columnist thereto. she did a column called did you happen to see where she interviewed people who had come to participate in the war effort which as jay and her hoover pointed out was a great cover if she was a nazi spy kennedy, she was fascinating. she was beautiful his own admission, she was also quite how would i put this, she was

very skilled in the boudoir. he found that fascinating but found everything about her and he wanted to marry her but it just didn't happen. >> why did the romance draw attention from the fbi. >> in 1934 in the had been married and divorced twice and she had tried her hand acting, falling in love witha man who would become the second husband . charlie chaplin considered one of the geniuses of cinema. the odd thing is inga plugged in so many different parts of the world, it's a very wild trip but she turned out to be a great actress so she decided to do something different and she always enjoyed writing. she had a great deal of time so she went to newspapers and said would you give me press credentials so that i can become a foreign respondent in nazi germany because that

was where all the world's attention was focused. there was a great interest in what hitler was doing. germany had been on his knees after world war i, mired in a terribledepression with the staggering inflation , for your inflation, but for digit inflation and yet hitler turned everything around so everybody wanted to go to germany and find out why this was inga became a foreign correspondent for a couple danish newspapers and again because of her considerably charm, he became accepted in the higher catalogs of nazi society and eventually got to exclusive interviews with adolf hitler, both of which got international attention because he was doing what we would call human interest profiles of hitler which is hard to imagine with a character like hitler but she at that time, nobody knew the holocaust was years in advance, so she wrote these profiles of hitler as a humanitarian and all those kind of things and that got attention and hitler like a lot of men developed a small crush on her. he had a private dinner in her honor, gave her an

expensive gift which was a framed picture of himself but a silver frame, personally autographed and insisted she be his private guest at the berlin olympics in 1936. he was very proud of that, there was the greatest interview of the world, it was a two for a young reporter, she was only in her early 20s but when she came to the united states, she got into the columbia school of journalism even though she didn't have a high school degree let alone a college degree but she got into the graduate degree program at columbia and she said i knew all these nazis, here's my clippings, i knew goering, goebbels, the whole bunch but that raised eyebrows and people began to wonder if she was a nazi spy and things got so carried away that after she was brought to the attention of the fbi the fbi became convinced convinced not only might cd a nazi spy but the key to the entire not the espionage ring in the united states which was ridiculous so hoover took personal charge of the investigation. again, it wasn't just at the

lowest levels of the fbi not only huber but roosevelt had taken a personal interest in the case. at one point, even hoover had decided it was more smoke than fire here and he suggested that the end the fbi surveillance of inga. president roosevelt himself didn't huber a note and said i want you to keep inga arvad under surveillance. i want to know what she's doing. and when john kennedy was nominated for president in 1960, director huber bobby kennedy was jack's brother and his campaign manager and said he was calling to ensure the kennedys that even though the file existed at the fbi on jack and inga arvad that they can rest assured j edgar hoover make sure that file was taken care of and wouldn't see the light of day. the kennedys got the message and the very first phone call jack kennedy literally the first after he was elected

president the day after the election was to call j edgar hoover and asked him to stay on as director of the fbi even though he had been under pressure from liberals to fire huber huber is the relationship with inga arvad to keep ensure his performance at the fbi. >> what is the importance of the inga and huber story? >> i don't believe he would've been president without knowing inga arvad. first, inga arvad gave him the confidence to pursue a political career. he always carried about world affairs and wanted to go into politics that he understood he always been compared within the family to his older brother. kathleen kennedy said it was heresy to suggest jack was better than joe junior in any sense. inga said that's nonsense, i've met hitler, the president of france, king and queen of denmark. i can tell you somebody who's been all the world stage you have everything it takes to be president of the united

states so she put a fire to that ambition to go to the white house and she encouraged jack to confront his father and tell him what his aspirations were and only january 1942 with a dozen encouragement jack went to palm beach florida to the kennedy compound and had a frank discussion with his father and said dad, i would like , don't think that joe is the only one and from that moment joe kennedy senior ramon in both his son's careers. within a week of having that conversation he called david sarnoff, the president of nbc and said i want to buy radio stations because i'm going to be promoting the political careers of both my older son's so that was one thing. thing was that order that is that john kennedy and bennett were too well, he had been interviewed as a hollow son of a rich man, give him a congressional seat but nothing else but after his affair with inga was exposed, and the panic then they went to court-martial him, better of it and that would exacerbate the scandal so they transferred jack to the naval yard to charleston

south carolina and gave him apparently on the one of the dullest jobs in the navy because he been there a few months and he was so isolated he began to pester his father, please be transferred to combat duty so he was put into the pt school to become in command of pt boat and given command of the pt 109's he was the skipper. kennedy, john f. it was a black night, august 1, 43. the place, like it's paid in the south. the duty? a troll and intercept enemy shipping without the help of radar. >> and of course the one thing about the kennedy history, you know that kennedy was missing for about a week but through some tremendous efforts on his staff was able to rescue the 11 surviving members of his crew. but that's the second way inga helped him. he would never have the dawning to combat. but people have to know, he

first disappeared and there were news stories particularly from the sun of a former ambassador but not a lot of detail about what happened. kennedy came stateside in 1944. he didn't visit his mom and dad, you can visit friends, he immediately went to visit inga arvad who by this time was a very powerful and influential gossip columnist with 20 million readers of her column every day. and he was trying to rekindle their romance which got, she was fed up. but she was amazed by what he told her that he had undergone and his own efforts, many people still relate whether the accident itself was a lack of seamanship but after the aftermath he performed and really did allow his crew to survive so she said jack, she wrote it up and this nationally syndicated story

that appeared in newspapers around the country including the front page of the boston globe . and it became the template for the story of john kennedy and the pt 109 and the story was read by another writer named john hershey was sort of a casual acquaintance of the kennedysto read it . he read the story about what you did in the pacific and can i do a longer version for the new yorker? kennedy gave him more and hershey's story became famous and was reprinted in the reader's digest and this was the primary campaign material that john kennedy handed out every year he participated so that was due to inga arvad. had she not gotten that story out first it might never have become, people had to talk about it. he felt he was at least partially if not fully responsible for the incident and the death of his two crewmembers and he didn't really want to be seen as a hero. he was okay with a football hero but he didn't want to grab that because it opened up questions so this was the three ways and i helped him. she gave him the confidence, it was their affair that

sentiment combat and it was she that publicized his work. >> what happened to inga? >> so the pressure on the relationship was extraordinary. and she did, she and jack both knew they were under surveillance by the fbi. the family was trying hard to keep up with their relationship as was inga's husband. and so finally, the pressure was too much and jack kennedy said they would have to end the relationship and inga was heartbroken. jack kennedy called up and said see, we should get together this weekend and she said wait a minute, you make clear that we have no future and if romance is not an option, i love you, i'll always care about you but we're done . so jack kennedy , he couldn't say no for an answer so over the next seven years he would try to rekindle the relationship and tried to get

the romance going and inga was glad to see him but she said no. it's time for us to move on. they had one final assignation right after he was elected to congress in november 1946 and inga was at an odd place so they had one more romantic interlude and then didn't talk to each other again. jack went on, he went into congress, inga mary for a third time and so their lives diverge. they thought about each other a great deal. i argue there's a lot of losing kennedy's behavior in his relationships post 1946 that showed inga was always on his mind and she always followed his career. she sent him a congratulatory telegram and that sort of thing and when he was shot in dallas in 1963 she was devastated, went to a room for several days and cried but they met an awful lot to each other and it was a great romantic story, obviously a little bit of a tragedy but they both felt, they had enriched each other's lives

in that something special but at some level they had a perfect love except that she was already married to another man and she was under suspicion of being a nazi spy. >> what is the tech away from your book? >> i think one of the things, one of the reasons i wrote the book in addition to explaining the wonderful woman who is fascinating, somebody of the everyone like to get to know. everyone would say what a life, i wish i could sit down at a cup of coffee and hear more about her life. but i think that she does, kennedy has gone up and down. when he was first assassinated he was a saint. you couldn't say anything negative about the kennedys. then there were these terrible reactions the other way in which revisionist history where well, kennedy was a terrible president. we wouldn't have had the bay of pigs or the cuban missile crisis if he hadn't been so inept. he was a philanderer and a

liar and the kennedy family is corrupt, this dog pile on the kennedy plan so one of the things about the book as it provides a balanced, nuanced portrait of jack kennedy. you look at him closely in a certain age when he's emerging as a real personality, trying to find himself in the world and you find through inga's eyes this appealing young man was very bright, had these great ambitions, loves life . he knew even then his mortality was not going to be as long as most people.he had all sorts of ailments and he was anxious to get things done but for the right reasons. he did bring people to him and he did have a big heart in many ways and so he had his faults and in the book he obviously could have treated inga much better but he was a full human being. these flesh and blood, he wasn't a saint and he wasn't a devil, he was something in between and complicated but very appealing and that's why he's one of her most popular

presidents. there's something about john kennedy that he's a leader you want to follow. he was inspirational and he remains one of a template for what every democratic presidential aspirants would like to be. this eloquence, vibrant guy who can inspire people to do great things so i think the take away from the book, i certainly don't want inga to get lost because she's a fascinating woman with the kind of life you can dream up no matter what novel you were trying to write . >> with the help of our cable partner comcast, book tvs visit to portland continues. next up, former state senator avel gordly ascribes her personal and professional journey . >> 80, avel gordly is a portland born treasure. she grew up in a family of hard-working churchgoing people and in a community with a key sense of history