The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  During most of Jack’s senior year at Choate, he stayed out of hospitals; in 1935, at Princeton, however, “He was sick the entire year.… He just wasn’t well,” had to withdraw—and spent nearly two months at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. “The most harrowing experience of all my storm-tossed career,” the eighteen-year-old youth wrote Billings. “They came in this morning with a gigantic rubber tube. Old stuff, I said, and rolled over thinking naturally that it would [be] stuffed up my arse. Instead they grabbed me and shoved it up my nose and down into my stomach. Then they poured alcohol down the tube.… They had the thing up my nose for two hours.” The blood counts were very bad. “My … count this morning was 3500,” he wrote Billings. “When I came it was 6000. At 1500 you die. They call me ‘2000 to go Kennedy.’ ” A few days later, he wrote again. “They have not found anything as yet.… Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin.” But when the next year, during what a biographer calls a “brief Indian summer of good health,” he enrolled at Harvard, he tried out for end on the freshman football team. “He was pathetic because he was so skinny. You could certainly count his ribs,” one member of the team recalls. The captain, Torbert Macdonald, who was to become another lifelong friend, counted something else, however. “As far as blocking and that sort of thing, where size mattered, he was under quite a handicap,” he was to write. But, he added, “Guts is the word. He had plenty of guts.” He made the freshman second team, until coaches found out about a party he organized at which a number of players, in his words, “got fucked,” after which he was demoted to the third team. Nonetheless, although he had barely made the team, he had made it.

  By 1938, he was back in a hospital, “trying to get rid of an intestinal infection I’ve had for the last two weeks.” And for the next three years, he would be in and out of hospitals, with a pain in his stomach that he told Billings felt “like a hard knot,” and that never seemed to leave him, and with chronic vomiting and diarrhea and fever, and unending concern about his weight and his blood count. But when he wasn’t in the hospital, he was always organizing pranks and parties, and never talking, except, it seems, to Billings, about what was going on in the intervals. Many years later, Billings told an interviewer: “Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way. Jack never wanted us to talk about him, but now that Bobby has gone and Jack is gone, I think it really should be told.”

  LATE IN 1940, having turned his Harvard honors thesis into a best-selling book, Why England Slept, he felt a sudden pain in his lower back, as if “something had slipped,” and not long afterwards his back started to hurt him so badly that he was hospitalized; some years later, when he was operated on, the surgeons would find puzzling deterioration in his lumbar spine, with “abnormally soft” material around the spinal disks, almost as if the spine had rotted away; there would be speculation then that adrenal extracts which had been prescribed for his stomach and colon problems had caused his spine to deteriorate. He was forced to wear a canvas-covered steel brace. But when, in the summer of 1941, it became obvious that war was coming, he tried to enlist. And when, despite his attempts to conceal his condition, he was unable to pass physical examinations for either the Army or Navy, he kept trying—first spending five months trying to build up his back through calisthenics so that he could pass another examination and, then, when that didn’t work, insisting that his father arrange for a special, in effect fixed-in-advance, examination by a Navy Board of Examiners that, in October, cleared him to enlist.

  His back spasms grew rapidly “more severe,” and the pain “very bad”; during training, he had to sleep on a table instead of a bed. Despite his efforts to hide his condition, he had to go to a Navy doctor, who declared him unfit for duty; he was given permission to visit the Mayo Clinic, where he was told an operation to fuse his spine was necessary. But he chose sea duty instead, and used all his father’s influence to get it—once, when his father, worried about his condition, didn’t move fast enough for him, he went to his grandfather, former Boston mayor “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who interceded with Massachusetts senator David Walsh, whose word as chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee was law with the Navy—and the duty Jack Kennedy chose was, of all possible assignments, one for which a man with a bad back was particularly unsuited: service on speedy patrol torpedo boats. With a back as sensitive as Kennedy’s, any jolt hurts, and on the small, thin-hulled PT boats, it sometimes seemed that every wave was a jolt; “the bucking bronchos of the sea,” a magazine writer named them after spending a day aboard—“ten hours of pounding and buffeting.… Even when they are going at half speed it is about as hard to stay upright on them as on a broncho’s back.” And at top speed, “planing over the water at forty knots and more, with bows lifted, slicing great waves from either side of their hulls, they gave their crew ‘an enormous pounding.’ ” Kennedy “was in pain, he was in a lot of pain,” a fellow trainee was to recall. “He slept on that damn plywood board all the time and I don’t remember when he wasn’t in pain.” In desperation, he went to his father, hoping that an operation could be arranged, and that he could recuperate quickly enough to go back on duty. “Jack came home,” his father wrote Jack’s older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., “and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back.” But the lengthy recuperation period that would be required for an operation made that plan unfeasible, and Lieutenant Kennedy went back to duty, persuading Senator Walsh to arrange his immediate transfer to the South Pacific—where, on the night of August 1, 1943, the boat he was commanding, PT-109, was part of a patrol torpedo squadron sent to intercept a Japanese convoy of troop carriers, escorted by destroyers, as it came through a strait in the Solomon Islands.

  The action was not successful—it was, according to one account, “the most confused and least effective action the PTs had been in”; only half the boats fired their torpedoes, and none caused any damage—but if, in a starless, “pitch dark” night with only four boats equipped with radar and all the boats enjoined to radio silence, there was confusion, there was none about what happened after a Japanese destroyer, looming suddenly out of the dark, smashed into PT-109, slicing it in half.

  One half of the boat sunk immediately, the other half remained afloat. Two of the crew were dead; Kennedy and ten others were alive, he and four men on the hull, the others widely scattered, including two, Charles Harris and the boat’s thirty-seven-year-old engineer, Pat “Pappy” McMahon, who were near each other about a hundred yards away. All were wearing their kapok life jackets. Harris shouted, “Mr. Kennedy! Mr. Kennedy! McMahon is badly hurt.” Shedding his shoes, shirt and revolver, Kennedy swam to the engineer, whose hands, arms and neck were so badly burned that they were only raw flesh, and began towing him back to the half of a hull. A wind kept blowing the boat away from them. Harris, swimming beside him, said, “I can’t go any farther.”

  “For a guy from Boston, you’re certainly putting up a great exhibition out here, Harris,” Jack Kennedy said. Harris stopped talking and kept swimming, and eventually the three men reached the hull. Like the others, they fell asleep on the tilted deck.

  As John Hersey related in The New Yorker, after interviewing Kennedy and members of his crew some months later, there wasn’t room on the hull for all the men, and it was beginning to sink, so when daylight broke, Kennedy ordered the uninjured men into the water, and went in himself. All morning they clung to the hull, and finally Kennedy decided they would swim to a small island, one of a group of little islands about three miles away. Nine of the men made the swim hanging on to a large timber from the boat. Pappy McMahon was unable to do even that. Slicing loose one end of a long strap on McMahon’s life vest, Kennedy took the end in his teeth, and told McMahon to turn on his back. Then he towed him, swimming the breaststroke, his teeth clenched around the strap.

  The swim took five hours. After he pulled McMahon up on the beach, Kennedy lay
on the sand, exhausted. “He had been in the sea, except for short intervals on the hull, for fifteen and a half hours,” Hersey relates. But he lay there only for a few minutes, and then he got up, and tied his life vest back on to go back into the water. He had realized that beyond the next small island was Ferguson Passage, where PT boats sometimes patrolled. His men tried to dissuade him from going, saying he was tired, and that the currents in the passage were treacherous. Tying his shoes around his neck, he swam out into the passage, carrying a heavy lantern wrapped in a life vest to signal passing boats. It took him about an hour to swim out far enough into the passage so that he felt a boat could see him, and he stayed there, treading water, holding the heavy lantern, for hours, until, finally, he realized that no boats would be coming.

  Trying to get back to the island, he was too tired to fight the current, which carried him right by it. He stopped trying to swim, and, as he later told Hersey, “seemed to stop caring.… He thought he had never known such deep trouble.… His body drifted through the wet hours, and he was very cold.” He got rid of his shoes. But the lantern was his only means of signaling, and he never let go of it. “He drifted all night” with his fist “tightly clenched on the kapok.” When the current, which had carried him during those hours in a huge circle, finally deposited him back on the second small island, he was still holding it. Crawling up on the beach, he vomited, and passed out.

  The next day, he decided they would have a better chance of finding food, and of making contact with the Navy, on another of the islands. Swimming to it took three hours, the other men hanging on to the timber again, Kennedy again towing McMahon by clenching the strap in his teeth.

  Hungry and thirsty, his men started to despair, but Kennedy never stopped trying to get them rescued. The cuts on his bare feet from the sharp-edged coral reefs were so festered and swollen that his feet “looked like small balloons,” but he and one of his men crossed other reefs and swam to another island, where they found a Japanese cache of food to take back to the rest. Then he found a native canoe. With the wind rising, he had to order a member of his crew to help him take the canoe with the food out into Ferguson Passage: “the other man argued against it; Kennedy insisted.” Waves five and six feet high swamped their canoe, and as the two men clung to it, the tide carried them toward the open sea while they pushed and tugged the craft to try to turn it toward the island. “They struggled that way for two hours,” Hersey wrote, “not knowing whether they would hit the small island or drift into the endless open.” Eventually the tide carried them toward the island, but first they struck a reef around it; the waves crashing on the reef tore them away from the canoe, and spun Kennedy head over heels so that “he thought he was dying” until he suddenly found himself in a quiet eddy. While he was away on one of his trips, two friendly natives came upon the crew and told them their squadron had given them up for lost. When he returned, Kennedy scratched a message to his squadron on a coconut shell for the natives to take away with them, and two days later, on the sixth day of their ordeal, his note having been delivered, they were rescued.

  DURING THIS EPISODE, the pain in his back had grown worse, and so had his stomach, but he insisted he was all right. New PT boats were being fitted out with heavier guns, and he wanted command of one. “He wanted to get back at the Japanese,” his squadron commander was to recall. “He got the first gunboat,” PT-59. And the commander would recall that “I don’t think I ever saw a guy work longer, harder hours,” as it was being made ready for sea. His crew were all volunteers, five of them from PT-109—one remembered how they went down to the dock where the skinny lieutenant was fitting out the new ship. “Kennedy said, ‘What are you doing here?’ We said, ‘What kind of a guy are you? You got a boat and didn’t come get us.’ Kennedy got choked up. The nearest I ever seen him come to crying.” His new executive officer later said that “what impressed me most … was that so many of the men that had been on PT-109 had followed him to the 59. It spoke well of him as a leader.”

  Kennedy had six weeks of action on PT-59, on one occasion sinking three Japanese barges. Finally, he was no longer able to walk without the aid not only of a back brace but of a cane as well, he was terribly thin, and his stomach pain had become so intense that he had to see Navy doctors, who found “a definite ulcer crater.” X-rays of his back found a chronic disk disease that had obviously been aggravated by the pounding inflicted on the boats. Shipped home, he had his back operated on in June, 1944, but the operation, for a ruptured disk, didn’t work; obviously something else was wrong: the “abnormally soft cartilage” was found; the degeneration of his lower spine was wider than had been feared—the surgeons had no real explanation; when he tried to walk again, the pain was so bad that it could be controlled only by what one of the surgeons calls “fairly large doses of narcotics.”

  “PT-109” WOULD BECOME a highly publicized saga of courage and duty—members of Jack Kennedy’s crew would talk in later years of his obvious feeling of obligation to get as many of them back to safety as possible, no matter what the cost to himself. The courage required for that episode, however, had had to last for only six days. What came next in Jack Kennedy’s life—his campaign for the House of Representatives in 1946—would require courage for much longer than that, and on more levels.

  His older brother, Joe Jr., had been the one who had been supposed to make that race; he was the Kennedy boy, handsome, poised, outgoing, who was destined for politics and who embraced the destiny, but Joe had been killed in the war. No one could have seemed less suited to take over his role than Jack. “Joe used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it,” his father was to say. “He was altogether different from Jack—more dynamic, sociable and easygoing. Jack in those days … was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet.” He did not, the ambassador was to say, have “a temperament outgoing enough for politics.” “His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.”

  And his health had not improved. “He looked jaundiced—yellow as saffron and thin as a rake,” says a friend who saw him when he came back from the war. To try to build himself up, in 1945 he went to the Camelback Inn in Arizona. A couple who sat at an adjoining table for a month saw an “ill, sad and lonely young man,” so pale and gaunt that they thought he was “trying to recover from shock.” So bad was his back that he went to the Mayo Clinic again, but no one there had anything new to suggest. In August, he had a violent incident of stomach pain, vomiting and high fever. But, also in August, his father wrote to a friend that while Jack was “very thin … he is becoming quite active in the political life of Massachusetts.” Ill suited though he might have seemed for his brother’s role, he was accepting it. (He would say later that it was because of his father. “It was like being drafted,” he would explain. “My father wanted his eldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it.”) “I’m just filling Joe’s shoes,” he told friends. “If he were alive, I’d never be in this.” There had, however, also been hints that there might be reasons that had little to do with his brother. In the Pacific, Jack’s squadron commander was to recall, “We played a lot of cards. Jack never played cards. He spent most of his time looking for officers who weren’t in any game, as he did with me. We’d sit in a corner and I’d recall all the political problems in New Jersey and Long Island, where I come from. He did that with everybody—discussed politics.” The politics Kennedy discussed, morever, was politics with a purpose. Says the commander of another PT boat in the squadron: “He made us all very conscious of the fact that we’d better do some reading, we’d better be concerned about why the hell we’re out here, or else what’s the purpose of having the conflict, if you’re going to come out here and fight and let the people that got us here get us back into it again.… He made us all very aware of our obligations as citizens of the United States to do something, to be involved in the process.” Whatever the reasons, in
1946, John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced that he was running for Congress, in Boston, in Massachusetts’ Eleventh Congressional District.

  HIS FATHER’S MONEY played a huge role in the campaign, buying unprecedented amounts of radio, newspaper and billboard advertising, but his father’s money couldn’t get him onto the street corners, and into the bars—couldn’t help with his shyness. Although the Eleventh District included Harvard, most of it was a tough working-class area. An old Irish pol who was “handling East Boston” for him recalls that at first, “He was very retiring. You had to lead him by the hand. You had to push him into the poolrooms, taverns, clubs.… He didn’t like it at first. He wanted no part of it.” Says another campaign aide: “He was not the ordinary type of campaigner in the sense that he was not affable or easygoing.… His shyness came through.” It was, another aide recalls, “Very hard for him to go up to someone he’d never met, and say, ‘I’m Jack Kennedy.’ ”