Rumor has it she was the only woman John Kennedy really fell in love with. Even Hitler adored her, considering her the “perfect Nordic beauty”.
Inga Arvad was a journalist from Denmark, born in 1913.
After a degree at the Columbia School of Journalism of New York, she moved to Washington D.C. where she worked as a columnist at the Washington Times-Herald. She met John F. Kennedy in Washington through his sister Kathleen, who was a reporter at the same newspaper. In 1941 they started a romantic affair.
Arvad was already being followed by the FBI because of her suspicious friendship with Hitler. In one of her articles, a description of Hitler was later translated into English as:
“You immediately like him. He seems lonely. The eyes, showing a kind heart, stare right at you. They sparkle with force.”
In 1935, as a freelance reporter, she interviewed Hitler, and this connection to the dictator would affect the rest of her life. She was one of the few Scandinavians who interviewed Hitler. Yet she never agreed with his political choices.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had concerns that she was a German spy. So Inga and JFK kept their relationship secret.US government thought she was using Kennedy to find out all she could about what was going on in the Navy Department.
Kennedy was reassigned to a desk job in South Carolina in January 1942, and the relationship with Arvad ended soon.They kept writing letters to each other for a while, John desperately wanted to marry her, but his father, Joseph Kennedy, prohibited their union. With the passing of time their love relationship definitively ended.
In the end, Inga reflected on her time with Kennedy as a “passing affair”. Yet, later, Kennedy admitted she was the love of his life.