An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (17 page)

Jack’s doubts about local commanders and the PTs as an effective fighting force extended to the crews manning the boats. In May he told his parents, “When the showdown comes, I’d like to be confident they [his crew] knew the difference between firing a gun and winding their watch.” By September, he declared that he “had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off.”

During his initial service in the Solomons in April and May 1943, Jack had seen limited action. The United States had won control of Guadalcanal by then, and Kennedy arrived during a lull in the fighting. Nevertheless, the island-hopping campaign against the Japanese was not close to being over. In anticipation of another U.S. offensive and to reinforce garrisons southeast of their principal base at Rabaul on New Britain Island, the capital of the Australian-mandated territory of New Guinea, the Japanese launched continual air and naval raids. In June, when U.S. forces began a campaign to capture the New Georgia Islands and ultimately oust the Japanese from New Guinea, the PTs took on what U.S. military chiefs in the region called the “Tokyo Express”: Japanese destroyers escorting reinforcements for New Georgia through “the Slot,” the waters in New Georgia Sound southeast of Bougainville Strait and between Choiseul Island and the islands of Vella Lavella, Kolombangara, and New Georgia itself.

Jack’s boat was sent to the Russell Islands southeast of New Georgia in June and then in July to Lumbari Island in the heart of the combat zone west of New Georgia. On August 1, his boat—
PT 109
—was one of fifteen PTs sent to Blackett Strait southwest of Kolombangara to intercept a Japanese convoy that had escaped detection by six U.S. destroyers posted north of the island. The fifteen were the largest concentration of PTs to that point in the Solomons campaign. It also proved to be, in the words of the navy’s official history, “the most confused and least effective action the PT’s had been in.” In a 1976 authoritative account, Joan and Clay Blair Jr. describe the results of the battle as “a personal and professional disaster” for PT commander Thomas G. Warfield. He blamed the defeat on the boats’ captains: “There wasn’t much discipline in those boats,” he said after the war. “There really wasn’t any way to control them very well. . . . Some of them stayed in position. Some of them got bugged and didn’t fire when they should have. One turned around and ran all the way out of the strait.”

The attack by the boats against the superior Japanese force failed. Broken communications between the PTs produced uncoordinated, futile action; only half the boats fired torpedoes—thirty-two out of the sixty available—and did so without causing any damage. Worse yet, Jack’s boat was sliced in half by one of the Japanese destroyers, killing two of the crew members and casting the other eleven, including Jack, adrift.

Since the speedy PTs were fast enough to avoid being run over by a large destroyer and since Jack’s boat was the only PT ever rammed in the entire war, questions were raised about his performance in battle. “He [Kennedy] wasn’t a particularly good boat commander,” Warfield said later. Other PT captains were critical of him for sitting in the middle of Blackett Strait with only one engine running, which reduced the amount of churning water that could be seen (and likelihood of being spotted and bombed by Japanese planes) but decreased the boat’s chances of making a quick escape from an onrushing destroyer.

In fact, the failure lay not with Jack but with the tactics followed by all PT boat captains and circumstances beyond Kennedy’s control. Since only four of the fifteen boats had radar and since it was a pitch-black night, it was impossible for the other eleven PTs to either follow the leaders with radar or spot the Japanese destroyers. After the radar-equipped boats fired their torpedoes, they returned to base and left the other PTs largely blind. “Abandoned by their leaders and enjoined to radio silence, the remaining PT boats had no real chance, in pitch dark, of ambushing the Japanese destroyers,” one of the boat commanders said later.

The ramming of Jack’s PT was more a freak accident than a “‘stupid mistake’” on Jack’s part, as Warfield’s successor described it. With no radar and only one of his three engines in gear, Jack could not turn the
PT 109
away from the onrushing destroyer in the ten to fifteen seconds between the time it was spotted and the collision.

With six crew members, including Jack, clinging to the hull of the boat, which had remained afloat, Kennedy and two other crewmen swam out to lead the other five survivors back to the floating wreck. One of the men in the water, the boat’s engineer, Pat “Pappy” McMahon, was seriously burned and Jack had to tow him against a powerful current. He then dove into the water again to bring two other men to the comparative safety of the listing hull. Two of the crew were missing, apparently killed instantly in the collision. They were never found, and Jack remembered their loss as a “terrible thing.” One, who had feared that his number was up, had been part of Jack’s original crew; the other had just come aboard and was only nineteen years old.

At 2:00
P.M.
, after nine hours of clinging to the hull, which was now close to sinking, Kennedy organized the ten other survivors into two support groups for a swim to a seventy-yard-wide deserted speck of land, variously known as Bird or Plum Pudding Island. Jack, swimming on his stomach, towed his wounded crewman by clenching the ties of his life jacket in his mouth while “Pappy” McMahon floated on his back. The swim took five grueling hours. Because the island was south of Ferguson Passage, a southern route into Blackett Strait normally traveled by the PTs, Kennedy decided to swim out into the passage to flag a boat. Although he had not slept in thirty-six hours, was exhausted, and would face treacherous currents, he insisted on going at once. An hour’s swim brought him into position to signal a passing PT with a lantern, but no boats showed up that night; believing that no one on the
PT 109
had survived the collision, the commanders had shifted their patrol to the northeast in the Vella Gulf. Bouts of unconsciousness marked Jack’s return swim to his crew, who had given him up for lost until he returned at noon. Too exhausted to try another swim to the passage on the night of August 3, he sent another crew member, who returned on the fourth with no better result.

That day, the party swam to the larger nearby Olasana Island, where they found no drinking water to relieve their increasing thirst except for some rain they caught in their mouths during a storm. On the fifth, Kennedy and Barney Ross, another officer who had come on the boat just for the August 1 patrol, swam to Cross Island, which was closer to Ferguson Passage. There they found a one-man canoe, a fifty-five-gallon drum of fresh water, and some crackers and candy. Jack carried the water and food in the canoe back to Olasana, where the men, who had been surviving on coconuts, had been discovered and were being attended to by two native islanders. The next day, after Jack returned to Cross Island, where Ross had remained, he scratched a message on a coconut with a jackknife, which the natives agreed to take to Rendova, the PT’s main base.
NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY
. The next day, four islanders appeared at Cross with a letter from a New Zealand infantry lieutenant operating in conjunction with U.S. Army troops on New Georgia: “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Meanwhile, I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova and we can finalize plans to collect balance of your party.” On the following day, Saturday, the seventh day of the survivors’ ordeal, the natives brought Jack to the New Zealander’s camp. Within twenty-four hours, all were aboard a PT, being transported back to Rendova for medical attention.

“In human affairs,” President Franklin Roosevelt had told the uncooperative Free French leader Charles de Gaulle at the Casablanca Conference the previous January, “the public must be offered a drama.” Particularly in time of war, he might have added.

Jack Kennedy was now to serve this purpose. Correspondents for the Associated Press and the United Press covering the Solomons campaign immediately saw front-page news in
PT 109
’s ordeal and rescue. Journalists were already on one of the two PTs that went behind enemy lines to pick up the survivors. In their interviews with the crew and base commanders, they heard only praise for Jack’s courage and determination to ensure the survival and deliverance of his men. Consequently, when Navy Department censors cleared the story for publication, Jack became headline news:
KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS PT BOAT
, the
New York Times
disclosed.
KENNEDY’S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC
, the
Boston Globe
announced with local pride.

Jack became the center of the journalists’ accounts, though not simply because he was a hero—there were many other stories of individual heroism that did not resonate as strongly as Jack’s. Nor was his family’s prominence entirely responsible for the newspaper headlines. Instead, Jack’s heroism spoke to larger national mores: he was a unifying example of American egalitarianism. His presence in the war zone and behavior told the country that it was not only ordinary G.I.s from local byways risking their lives for national survival and values but also the privileged son of a wealthy, influential father who had voluntarily placed himself in harm’s way and did the country proud. Joe Kennedy, ever attentive to advancing the reputation of his family, began making the same point. “It certainly should occur to a great many people,” he declared, “that although a boy is brought up in our present economic system with all the advantages that opportunity and wealth can give, the initiative that America instills in its people is always there. And to take that away from us means there is really nothing left to live for.”

Jack himself viewed his emergence as an American hero with wry humor and becoming modesty. He never saw his behavior as extraordinary. “None of that hero stuff about me,” he wrote Inga. “The real heroes are not the men who return, but those who stay out there, like plenty of them do, two of my men included.” Asked later by a young skeptic how he became a hero, he said, “It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half.” He understood that his heroism was, in a way, less about him than about the needs of others—individuals and the country as a whole. Later, during a political campaign, he told one of the officers who had rescued him, “Lieb, if I get all the votes from the people who claim to have been on your boat the night of the pickup, I’ll win easily!” When
The New Yorker
and
Reader’s Digest
ran articles about him and
PT 109,
he enjoyed the renown but had no illusions about military heroes and worried about their influence on national affairs. “God save this country of ours from those patriots whose war cry is ‘what this country needs is to be run with military efficiency,’” he wrote a friend. When Hollywood later made a film about
PT 109,
which served his political image and ambitions, he was happy to go along. But at a special White House showing, he made light of the occasion. “I’d like you to meet the lookout on
PT 109,
” he jokingly introduced Barney Ross. In his chuckle was an acknowledgment of an absurdity that had lasted.

In fact, for all the accuracy of the popular accounts praising Jack’s undaunted valor, the full story of his courage was not being told. Everything he did in the normal course of commanding his boat and then his extraordinary physical exertion during the week after the sinking was never discussed in the context of his medical problems, particularly his back. Lennie Thom, Jack’s executive officer on
PT 109,
was writing letters home at the time discussing Kennedy’s back problem and his refusal to “report to sick bay. . . . Jack feigned being
well,
but . . . he knew he was always working under duress.” Jack acknowledged to his parents that life on the boats was not “exactly what the Dr. (Jordan) ordered. If she could have put in the last week with me, she would have had that bed turned down for me at the [New England] Baptist [Hospital].” Yet Jack did not let on to his crew or commanding officer that he was ill or in pain. And except for his chronic back ailment, which he simply could not hide and which he seemed to take care of by wearing a “corset-type thing” and sleeping with a plywood board under his mattress, his men on
PT 109
saw no health problems. Joe Kennedy knew better, writing son Joe after news of Jack’s rescue that he was trying to arrange Jack’s return to the States, because “I imagine he’s pretty well shot to pieces by now.” Joe Sr. told a friend, “I’m sure if he were John Doake’s son or Harry Hopkins’ son he’d be home long before this.”

But even if the navy were willing to send him home, Jack was not ready to go. He wanted some measure of revenge for the losses he and his crew had suffered. He felt humiliated by the sinking of his boat. According to Inga: “It was a question of whether they were going to give him a medal or throw him out.” Jack’s commanding officer remembered that “he wanted to pay the Japanese back. I think he wanted to recover his own self-esteem—he wanted to get over this feeling of guilt which you would have if you were sitting there and had a destroyer cut you in two.” He took ten days to recuperate from the “symptoms of fatigue and many deep abrasions and lacerations of the entire body, especially the feet,” noted by the medical officer attending him. On August 16, he returned to duty “very much improved.”

The PTs were now in bad standing, but there were so many of them that the navy needed to put them to some good purpose. Consequently, the brass was receptive to converting some PTs into more heavily armed gunships. Jack’s boat—which he helped design—was the first of these to enter combat, in early October. And for the next six weeks he got in a lot of fighting and, to his satisfaction, inflicted some damage on the enemy.