Part 3 (1/2)

There is no hint in these navy medical records of any treatment for his colitis. It may be a.s.sumed that Jack and Joe agreed that he should continue to hide the severity of his intestinal problems and say nothing to the navy about any treatment he was receiving. According to the notation in the Chelsea Naval Hospital record, Jack's ”general health has always been good. Appendectomy in 1932. No serious illnesses.” It is unlikely that any of Jack's navy doctors would have picked up on the possibility that steroids might be causing the ”arthritic changes” or deterioration of bone in his lower back. When Rose saw him in September, Jack's stomach, colon, and back problems went unremarked. ”You can't believe how well he looks,” she told Joe Jr. ”You can really see that his face has filled out. Instead of it being lean, it has now become fat.” (This was a likely consequence of steroid therapy.) By late June, Jack's doctors declared him fit for duty.

At this time, Jack considered renouncing Catholicism as a kind of retaliation against his parents for their pressure on him to drop Inga. But Jack's ties to Joe and Rose and the Church were stronger than his rebellious inclinations. His iconoclasm went no further than threats to teach a Bible cla.s.s, which he thought would be seen as ”un-Catholic.” ”I have a feeling that dogma might say it was,” he wrote his mother, ”but don't good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church. We're not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchical structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top-a structure that allows for no individual interpretation-or are we?”

His impulse to challenge authority also extended to the medical experts, who seemed unable to solve his health problems. In the midst of the war, however, Jack deferred his inclination to defy conventional wisdom and instead applied for sea duty, which would allow him to get out of the United States and away from his parents and Inga. But, as he would quickly find, life on the front lines provided no escape from his tensions with authority. Instead of unpalatable parental and religious constraints, he found himself frustrated by military directives and actions that seemed to serve little purpose.

IN JULY 1942, the navy granted Jack's request for sea duty and instructed him to attend mids.h.i.+pman's school at a branch of Northwestern University in Chicago. There, he underwent the training that was producing the ”sixty-day wonders,” the junior naval officers slated for combat. Jack found the demands of the program tiresome and less than convincing as a training ground for sea duty. ”This G.o.dd.a.m.n place is worse than Choate,” he wrote Billings. ”But as F.D.R. always says, this thing is bigger than you or I-it's global-so I'll string along.”

Jack's ambition was to command a motor torpedo boat, one of the PTs (for ”patrol-torpedo”), as they were popularly known. The papers were full of stories about the heroic work of these small craft and their foremost spokesman, Lieutenant Commander John Bulkeley, who had won a Congressional Medal of Honor for transporting General Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines through five hundred miles of enemy-controlled waters to Australia. Bulkeley was a great promoter of these craft and had convinced President Roosevelt of their worth. In fact, in his drive to attract aggressive young officers to join his service, Bulkeley had vastly exaggerated the importance and success of the PTs. While Jack's natural skepticism made him suspicious of Bulkeley's claims about all the damage his boats were inflicting on the j.a.panese, the glamour of the PTs and, most of all, the chance to have his own command and escape the tedium of office work and navy bureaucracy made Bulkeley's appeal compelling.

The compet.i.tion to become a PT commander was so keen and Jack's back problems so p.r.o.nounced that he saw little likelihood of being accepted by Bulkeley. But against his better judgment, Joe intervened on Jack's behalf. The positive publicity likely to be generated by having the former amba.s.sador's son in his command and the very positive impression Jack made in an interview persuaded Bulkeley to give Jack one of 50 places applied for by 1,024 volunteers. Once accepted, though, Jack worried about surviving the physical training required for a.s.signment to a boat. Riding in a PT, one expert said, was like staying upright on a bucking bronco. At full speed it cut through the water at more than forty knots and gave its crew a tremendous pounding. In September, while on leave, Jack went to see Joe at the Cape. ”Jack came home,” Joe wrote his eldest son, ”and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back... . I don't see how he can last a week in that tough grind of Torpedo Boats and what he wants to do of course, is to be operated on and then have me fix it so he can get back in that service when he gets better.”

Since he wasn't about to have an operation and since the navy was not objecting to his service in the PTs, he decided to test the limits of his endurance. The almost daily exercises at sea put additional strain on his back. ”He was in pain,” a bunkmate of Jack's during training in Melville, Rhode Island, recalled, ”he was in a lot of pain, he slept on that d.a.m.n plywood board all the time and I don't remember when he wasn't in pain.” But he loved the training in gunnery and torpedoes, and particularly handling the boats, which his years of sailing off Cape Cod made familiar and even enjoyable work. ”This job on these boats is really the great spot of the Navy,” he wrote Billings, ”you are your own boss, and it's like sailing around as in the old days.” Rose told her other children that Jack's presence at Melville had changed ”his whole att.i.tude about the war... . He is quite ready to die for the U.S.A. in order to keep the j.a.panese and the Germans from becoming the dominant people on their respective continents... . He also thinks it would be good for Joe [Jr.]'s political career if he [Jack] died for the grand old flag, although I don't believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”

Rose and Joe were relieved that he didn't think it ”absolutely necessary” to give his life, but they found nothing funny in Jack's flippant remark about sacrificing himself for his brother's ambitions. Jack's decision to enter combat in the PTs was ”causing his mother and me plenty of anxiety,” Joe told a priest. He was proud of his sons for entering the most hazardous branches of the service, but it was also causing their parents ”quite a measure of grief.”

Joe's anxiety about seeing Jack enter combat as a PT commander may have been the determining influence behind a decision to keep Jack in Rhode Island for six months to a year as a torpedo boat instructor. A few of the best students in the program were routinely made instructors, Jack's commander said later. But a fitness report on him, which described Jack as ”conscientious, willing and dependable” and of ”excellent personal and military character,” also considered him ”relatively inexperienced in PT boat operations” and in need of ”more experience” to become ”a highly capable officer.” Why someone as inexperienced as Jack was made a training officer is difficult to understand unless some special pressure had been brought to bear.

Jack certainly saw behind-the-scenes manipulation at work, and he moved to alter his orders. He went directly to Lieutenant Commander John Harllee, the senior instructor at Melville. ”Kennedy was extremely unhappy at being selected as a member of the training squadron,” Harllee recalled, ”because he yearned with great zeal to get out to the war zone... . As a matter of fact, he and I had some very hard words about this a.s.signment.” But Harllee insisted that Jack stay.

It was not for long, however. Jack, distrusting his father's willingness to help, went to his grandfather, Honey Fitz, who arranged a meeting with Ma.s.sachusetts senator David Walsh, the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh, who was very favorably impressed with Jack, wrote a letter to the Navy Department urging his transfer to a war zone. In January 1943, Jack was detached from his training duties and instructed to take four boats to Jacksonville, Florida, where he would be given rea.s.signment.

Though he thought he was on his ”way to war,” as he wrote his brother Bobby, who was finis.h.i.+ng prep school, he was not there yet. During the thousand-mile voyage, he became ill with something doctors at the naval station in Morehead City, North Carolina, diagnosed as ”gastro-enteritis.” Since he recovered in two days and rejoined the squadron on its way to Jacksonville, he probably had an intestinal virus or food poisoning rather than a flare-up of his colitis. It was a signal nonetheless that his health remained precarious and that he was a wounded warrior heading into combat. ”Re my gut and back,” he soon wrote Billings, ”it is still not hooray-but I think it will hold out.” Upon his arrival in Jacksonville, his new orders a.s.signed him to patrol duty at the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Unwilling to ”be stuck in Panama for the rest of the war,” he immediately requested transfer to the South Pacific and prevailed upon Senator Walsh to arrange it. By the beginning of March, he was on his way to the Solomon Islands, where j.a.panese and U.S. naval forces were locked in fierce combat. After U.S. victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway in the spring of 1942, both sides had suffered thousands of casualties and lost dozens of s.h.i.+ps in battles for control of New Guinea and the Solomons.

Jack's eagerness to put himself at risk cries out for explanation. Was it because he felt invincible, as the young often do, especially the privileged? This seems doubtful. The reality of war casualties had already registered on him. ”Your friend Jock Pitney,” he wrote Lem on January 30, 1943, ”I saw the other day is reported missing and a cla.s.s-mate of mine, Dunc Curtis ... was killed on Christmas day.” Was Jack then hoping for a war record he could use later in politics? Almost certainly not. In 1943, Joe Jr. was the heir apparent to a political career, not his younger brother. Instead, his compelling impulse was similar to that of millions of other Americans who believed in the war as an essential crusade against evil, an apocalyptic struggle to preserve American values against totalitarianism. One wartime slogan said it best: ”We can win; we must win; we will win.” Small wonder, then, that Jack applauded Lem's success in getting himself close to combat in North Africa by becoming an ambulance driver in the American Field Service. ”You have seen more war than any of us as yet,” he told Billings, who had failed his army physical, ”and I certainly think it was an excellent idea to go.” Jack also admired their friend Rip Horton for thinking about transferring from the Quartermaster Corps to the ”Paratroopers-as he figured if my stomach could stand that [the PTs] he could stand the other. He'll be alright if his gla.s.ses don't fall off.”

The seventeen months Jack would spend in the Pacific dramatically changed his outlook on war and the military. ”I'm extremely glad I came,” Jack wrote Inga, ”I wouldn't miss it for the world, but I will be extremely glad to get back... . A number of my illusions have been shattered.”

Among them were a.s.sumptions about surviving the war. The combat he witnessed in March 1943, on his first day in the Solomons, quickly sobered him. As his transport s.h.i.+p approached Guadalca.n.a.l, a j.a.panese air raid killed the captain of his s.h.i.+p and brought the crew face to face with a downed j.a.panese pilot, who rather than be rescued by his enemy began firing a revolver at the bridge of the U.S. s.h.i.+p. ”That slowed me a bit,” Jack wrote Billings, ”the thought of him sitting in the water-battling an entire s.h.i.+p.” An ”old soldier” standing next to Jack blew the top of the pilot's head off after the rest of the s.h.i.+p's crew, which was ”too surprised to shoot straight,” filled the water with machine-gun fire. ”It brought home very strongly how long it's going to take to finish the war.”

It also made the perils of combat clearer to Jack. His Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald described a letter Jack wrote the next day, telling Macdonald ”to watch out and really get trained, because I didn't know as much about boats as he [Jack] did, and he said I should know what the h.e.l.l I was doing because it's different out in the war zone.” A visit to the grave of George Mead, a Cape Cod friend who had been killed in the Guadalca.n.a.l fighting, underscored the grim realities of the war for Jack. It was ”among the gloomier events,” he told Inga. ”He is buried near the beach where they first landed.” It was ”a very simple grave” marked by ”an aluminum plate, cut out of mess gear ... and on it crudely carved 'Lt. George Mead USMC. Died Aug. 20. A great leader of men-G.o.d Bless Him.' The whole thing was about the saddest experience I've ever had and enough to make you cry.” When Rose told Jack that ”all the nuns and priests along the Atlantic Coast” were ”putting in a lot of praying time” on his behalf, he declared it comforting. But he hoped ”it won't be taken as a sign of lack of confidence in you all or the Church if I continue to duck.”

What impressed Jack now was not the eagerness of the men in the war zone for heroic combat-that was romantic stuff dispelled by battlefield losses-but their focus on getting home alive. He told Inga that the ”picture that I had in the back of my greatly illusioned mind about spending the war sitting on some cool Pacific Beach with a warm Pacific maiden stroking me gently” had disappeared. What ”the boys at the front” talked about was ”first and foremost ... exactly when they were going to get home.” He wrote his parents: ”When I was speaking about the people who would just as soon be home, I didn't mean to use 'They'-I meant 'We.'” He urged them to tell brother Joe not to rush to join him in the Pacific, as ”he will want to be back the day after [he] arrives, if he runs true to the form of everyone else.” When Billings told Jack that he was considering a transfer to Southeast Asia to fight with the British, Jack expressed delight that he was ”still in one piece,” noting that ”you have certainly had your share of thrills,” and advised him to ”return safely to the U.S. and join the Quartermaster Corps + sit on your fat a.s.s for awhile... . I myself hope perhaps to get home by Christmas, as they have been good about relieving us-as the work is fairly tough out here.”

Jack's letters make clear that he was particularly cynical about commentators back home pontificating on the war from the safety and comfort of their offices and pleasure palaces. ”It's not bad here at all,” Jack wrote Billings, ”but everyone wants to get the h.e.l.l back home-the only people who want to be out here are the people back in the states-and particularly those in the Stork Club.” He made a similar point to Inga: ”It's one of the interesting things about this war that everyone in the States, with the exception of that gallant armed guard on the good s.h.i.+p U.S.S. Stork Club-Lt. Commander Walter Winch.e.l.l-wants to be out here killing j.a.ps, while everyone out here wants to be back at the Stork Club. It seems to me that someone with enterprise could work out some sort of exchange, but as I hear you saying, I asked for it honey and I'm getting it.” ”I always like to check from where he [the columnist] is talking,” he wrote his parents, ”it's seldom out here.” All the talk about ”billions of dollars and millions of soldiers” made ”thousands of dead” sound ”like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw [on my boat]-they should measure their words with great, great care.”

Jack admired the courage and commitment to duty he saw among the officers and men serving on the PTs, but he also sympathized with their fear of dying and saw no virtue in false heroics. When one of the sailors under his command, a father of three children, became unnerved by an attack on their PT, Jack found his reaction understandable and tried to arrange sh.o.r.e duty for him. After the man was killed in another attack on Jack's boat, he wrote his parents: ”He never said anything about being put ash.o.r.e-he didn't want to-but the next time we came down the line-I was going to let him work on the base force. When a fellow gets the feeling that he's in for it-the only thing to do is to let him get off the boat-because strangely enough they always seem to be the ones that do get it.”

Jack reserved his harshest criticism for the high military officers he saw ”leading” the men in his war zone. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, was no hero to him. Jack thought MacArthur's island-to-island strategy was a poor idea. ”If they do that,” he wrote his parents, ”the motto out here 'The Golden Gate by 48' won't even come true.” Jack reported that MacArthur enjoyed little or no support among the men he spoke to. The general ”is in fact, very, very unpopular. His nick-name is 'Dug-out-Doug,'” reflecting his refusal to send in army troops to relieve the marines fighting for Guadalca.n.a.l and to emerge from his ”dug-out in Australia.”

The commanders whom Jack saw up close impressed him as no better. ”Have been ferrying quite a lot of generals around,” he wrote Inga, ”as the word has gotten around evidently since MacArthur's escape that the place to be seen for swift and sure advancement if you're a general is in a PT boat.” His description to Inga of a visit to their base by an admiral is priceless. ”Just had an inspection by an Admiral. He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three... . 'And what do we have here?'” he asked about a machine shop. When told what it was, he wanted to know what ”you keep in it, harrumph ah ... MACHINERY?” Told yes, he wrote it ”down on the special pad he kept for such special bits of information which can only be found 'if you get right up to the front and see for yourself.'” After additional inane remarks about building a dock in a distant bay, he ”toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table... . That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.”

Worse than the posturing of these officers was the damage Jack saw some of them inflicting on the war effort. As far as he was concerned, many of them were little more than inept bureaucrats. ”A great hold-up seems to be the lackadaisical way they handle the unloading of s.h.i.+ps,” he wrote his parents a month after arriving in the Solomons. ”They sit in ports out here weeks at a time while they try to get enough Higgins boats to unload them... . They're losing s.h.i.+ps, in effect, by what seems from the outside to be just inertia up high... . They have brought back a lot of old Captains and Commanders from retirement and stuck them in as heads of these ports and they give the impression of their brains being in their tails, as Honey Fitz would say. The s.h.i.+p I arrived on-no one in the port had the slightest idea it was coming. It had hundreds of men and it sat in the harbor for two weeks while signals were being exchanged.” Jack was pleased to note, however, that everyone had confidence in the top man, Admiral William ”Bull” Halsey. But he was especially doubtful about the academy officers he met. Now Rear Admiral John Harllee recalled Kennedy's feeling in 1947 that ”many Annapolis and West Point graduates were not as good material as the country could have selected... . He felt, for example, that some of the senior officers with whom he had had contact in the Navy left something to be desired in their leaders.h.i.+p qualities.” Somewhat ironically, given his own convoluted path into military service, Jack saw political influence on admitting candidates to the academies as the root of the problem. The resulting unqualified officers were a significant part of what he called ”this heaving puffing war machine of ours.” He lamented the ”super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.”

Another difficulty Jack and others saw was the overestimation of the PTs' ability to make a substantial contribution to the fighting. Despite wartime claims that just one PT squadron alone had sunk a j.a.panese cruiser, six destroyers, and a number of other s.h.i.+ps in the fighting around Guadalca.n.a.l, a later official history disclosed that in four months of combat in the Solomons, all the PT squadrons combined had sunk only one j.a.panese destroyer and one submarine. One PT commander later said, ”Let me be honest. Motor torpedo boats were no good. You couldn't get close to anything without being spotted... . Whether we sunk anything is questionable... . The PT bra.s.s were the greatest con artists of all times. They got everything they wanted-the cream of everything, especially personnel. But the only thing PTs were really effective at was raising War Bonds.” Jack himself wrote to his sister Kathleen: ”The glamor of PTs just isn't except to the outsider. It's just a matter of night after night patrols at low speed in rough water-two hours on-then sacking out and going on again for another two hours.” The boats were poorly armed with inadequate guns and unreliable World War I torpedoes, had defective engines and highly imperfect VHF (very high frequency) radios that kept conking out, lacked armor plating, and turned into floating infernos when hit.

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 Guadalca.n.a.l by then, and Kennedy arrived during a lull in the fighting. Nevertheless, the island-hopping campaign against the j.a.panese was not close to being over. In antic.i.p.ation of another U.S. offensive and to reinforce garrisons southeast of their princ.i.p.al base at Rabaul on New Britain Island, the capital of the Australian-mandated territory of New Guinea, the j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese from New Guinea, the PTs took on what U.S. military chiefs in the region called the ”Tokyo Express”: j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese planes) but decreased the boat's chances of making a quick escape from an onrus.h.i.+ng destroyer.

In fact, the failure lay not with Jack but with the tactics followed by all PT boat captains and circ.u.mstances 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 j.a.panese 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 ambus.h.i.+ng the j.a.panese 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 PT 109 away from the onrus.h.i.+ng destroyer in the ten to fifteen seconds between the time it was spotted and the collision. away from the onrus.h.i.+ng 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. 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 Pa.s.sage, a southern route into Blackett Strait normally traveled by the PTs, Kennedy decided to swim out into the pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing PT with a lantern, but no boats showed up that night; believing that no one on the PT 109 PT 109 had survived the collision, the commanders had s.h.i.+fted 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 pa.s.sage on the night of August 3, he sent another crew member, who returned on the fourth with no better result. had survived the collision, the commanders had s.h.i.+fted 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 pa.s.sage 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 Pa.s.sage. 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 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, Sat.u.r.day, 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 a.s.sociated Press and the United Press covering the Solomons campaign immediately saw front-page news in PT 109 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 KENNEDY'S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS PT BOAT, the New York Times New York Times disclosed. disclosed. KENNEDY'S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY'S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC KENNEDY'S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY'S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC, the Boston Globe Boston Globe announced with local pride. 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 The New Yorker and and Reader's Digest Reader's Digest ran articles about him and ran articles about him and PT 109, PT 109, he enjoyed the renown but had no illusions about military heroes and worried about their influence on national affairs. ”G.o.d 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 he enjoyed the renown but had no illusions about military heroes and worried about their influence on national affairs. ”G.o.d 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, 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 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, 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, 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 was writing letters home at the time discussing Kennedy's back problem and his refusal to ”report to sick bay... . Jack feigned being well, 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 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 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.” 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 j.a.panese 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 bra.s.s was receptive to converting some PTs into more heavily armed guns.h.i.+ps. 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.

By the late fall, however, he was weary of the war and ready to go home. He wrote Inga that the areas over which they were battling were ”just G.o.d d.a.m.ned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope never to see again.” And the war itself now seemed ”so stupid, that while it has a sickening fascination for some of us, myself included, I want to leave it far behind me when I go.”