John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  Why England Slept was a surprising success. It appeared on the eve of the Nazi blitz of Britain, sold 40,000 copies in the United States and a like number in Britain, and won a gratifying reception from the critics. Reviewers were intrigued that this twenty-three-year-old could marshal his material so skillfully, make his judgments so temperately, and relate his conclusions so tellingly to America’s situation. Some felt, however, that he was still too easy on Baldwin and Chamberlain, that he distributed the blame for Munich so widely among so many impersonal forces, economic and political, that he left the reader unsure as to what exactly was the lesson for Americans. Kennedy had raised grave questions about the capacity of Western capitalist democracies to cope with totalitarianism, but he offered little advice as to what democrats could do about this except to produce strong leaders—more easily said than done.

  But while the reviewers studied the book’s ideas, Ambassador Kennedy looked at it through a proud father’s eyes. “You would be surprised how a book that really makes the grade with high-class people stands you in good stead for years to come,” he wrote to his son in August. “I remember that in the report you are asked to make after twenty-five years to the Committee at Harvard, one of the questions is ‘What books have you written?’ and there is no doubt you will have done yourself a great deal of good.” He sent copies of the book to Laski, to Churchill, and to the Queen.

  By the time Why England Slept reached the best-seller lists, Roosevelt was grappling with problems of leadership far more complex than those described in it. All at the same time, the President had to begin his campaign for re-election, send aid to the desperately pressed Churchill, rearm his own country, and soft-pedal the possibility of war. And he had to cope with members of his party who disapproved of a third term or of his decision to help Britain.

  The Kennedys had a curious relationship to these great events. Joe, Jr., still in Harvard Law School, shared his father’s opposition to intervention in behalf of Britain. In the spring of 1940, when Roosevelt was evading the third-term issue, Joe made his debut in Massachusetts politics by running for delegate to the Democratic national convention on a pledge to vote for Farley for president. Even when Roosevelt was nominated at Chicago on the first ballot, Joe stuck with Farley. A Roosevelt leader phoned the Ambassador and asked him to talk with his son, but he refused: “I wouldn’t think of telling him what to do.” After the convention, Farley quit his post as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Joe went on to become a fiery critic of Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policies, even to stating in January 1941 that the United States would be better off for economic reasons under a barter system with a Nazi-conquered Europe than engaging in a total war on the side of Great Britain.

  Kennedy, Sr. was a much more serious problem for the President. While the Nazis stepped up their massive bombing attacks during September 1940, the Ambassador dispatched telegram after telegram paying tribute to the British “stiff upper lip” but doubting that the country had either the leadership or the resources to withstand the Nazis for long. In Washington, campaign rumors were circulating that Kennedy might come home and stump for Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. He did come home, but Roosevelt quickly and shrewdly brought him into camp. He invited him to the White House, heard out his complaints about his treatment by the State Department, emphatically agreed that Joe had been badly abused, promised a real house cleaning after the election, and immediately won the Ambassador’s agreement to make a radio speech for him.

  In the last week of the campaign, Kennedy came through for the President with a speech, sponsored by him and his family and broadcast over 114 stations of the Columbia network. He announced his support of FDR and defended his own role as ambassador. He had been subjected, he said, “to deliberate smear campaigns.” “If by that word [appeaser], now possessed of hateful implications, it is charged that I advocate a deal with the dictators contrary to the British desire … the charge is false and malicious.…” But he went on to proclaim his opposition to war intervention: “Unless we are attacked, the American people do not have to go to war.”

  The next night, in Joe’s old home town, Roosevelt told a big crowd in the Boston Garden that he had been happy to “welcome back to the shores of America that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joe Kennedy.” And in this same speech, the President said: “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.… Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Some were to label Roosevelt a hypocrite for that last statement; others were to point out that he could not lead too far ahead of the people and that by December 7, 1941, the war would be no longer a “foreign” war, but a war brought home to America.

  In Boston, after the election, Kennedy indiscreetly poured out his feelings to a newspaper reporter, saying that democracy was finished in Britain, that if the United States got into the war with Britain “we’ll be left holding the bag,” that he was going to see Hearst about a campaign to keep America out of the war, and much else. When the story was published and the storm of protest broke at home and abroad, he knew that his ambassadorship was finished.

  And where was Jack Kennedy during his father’s diplomatic crisis? He favored Roosevelt’s re-election, too, but he was not active in the campaign. His main role, it seems, was to bring Grandfather Fitz around to see the President when he was campaigning in Boston. As usual, Roosevelt showed his masterly touch, greeting Fitzgerald warmly: “Everywhere I went on my South American trip they were asking after you. They all remember your singing ‘Sweet Adeline’ when you were down there. Yes,” said the President, while Fitzgerald beamed, “all the Latin Americans are singing ‘Adelina Dulce’ down there now!”

  For a year following the summer of 1940, Jack Kennedy marked time. He first planned on Yale Law School, but changed his mind, attended business school at Stanford for six months, but his heart was not in that either. Once again he got wanderlust and left to take a long trip through South America. During 1941, war spread to the Balkans and to Russia; it looked more and more likely that the United States would become involved, though the isolationists stepped up their pleas for “America First.”

  Kennedy, Sr. had returned to his embassy for a few weeks after the 1940 election, but to the British he had become a symbol of appeasement and defeatism, and at the end of the year he resigned as ambassador. He never succeeded afterward in clearing the image of his position on foreign policy. He seemed so isolationist that the America First Committee considered him for its national chairman. “… I do not want to see this country go to war under any conditions whatsoever unless we are attacked,” he had said. And another time, “England is not fighting our battle. This is not our war.” On the other hand, he saw the Nazis as hostile to the rule of conscience and reason, “to law, to family life, even to religion itself,” refused the label of isolationist or appeaser, and vastly preferred the British, though they “snub us or sneer at us”, to the world of “Nazi brutality.” He simply refused to make a final commitment at a time when the world was choosing up sides—We or They.

  While his father retired to the sidelines, Jack moved near to direct involvement in the war. In the spring, he tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of his old back condition. He went through five months of strengthening exercises, however, and managed to pass a Navy fitness test in September. For a time he worked in Intelligence on a news digest for the Navy Chief of Staff in Washington. When Pearl Harbor came he applied for sea duty, but it was a long time coming. He was assigned for several months to a project in the South for protecting defense factories against bombing—a job he found dull and distasteful. Part of his spare time was devoted to Navy correspondence courses in Foreign Intelligence and Navy Regulations and Customs. Fearing that he might be given a desk job, he asked his father to use his influence with the Navy Department to insure that he would get sea duty. His father succes
sfully pulled some strings for his son. This episode had an ironic side, for Kennedy, Sr. had tried to get back into action the day of Pearl Harbor with a wire to the President: NAME THE BATTLEFRONT. I’M YOURS TO COMMAND. Somehow this telegram never reached the President; indeed, his fellow Bostonian, House Majority Leader John W. McCormack, told Kennedy that Roosevelt was surprised that Kennedy had not volunteered. He wrote then to FDR that he had; a friendly exchange of letters followed, but somehow Kennedy never did receive a wartime assignment.

  Late in 1942, Jack realized his hope of training for the kind of sea duty that seemed fitting for a man who had almost grown up in small boats—assignment to a Motor Torpedo Boat squadron. For six months he learned how to handle the speedy, brittle PT boats, most of the time at Portsmouth and Newport. His instructors graded him near perfect in ship handling, good in technical matters like engineering, and “very willing and conscientious.”

  Early in 1943, he shipped out from San Francisco for the South Pacific, where Allied forces were beginning slowly to turn back the long Japanese advance. By March, Lt. (j.g.) Kennedy was commanding his own PT boat in the Solomons, off Tulagi and the Russell Islands. By August, he was part of a vast air-sea-ground counterattack against the Japanese around New Georgia.

  “Jesus Loves Me”

  Shortly after midnight on August 2, 1943, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri cut through the dark waters of Blackett Strait west of New Georgia. On the bridge, Kohei Hanami, commander of the destroyer, peered through the cloudy, squally night; bedeviled by American planes during the day and by PT boats at night, he had ordered his men to maintain attack positions. Suddenly he saw a PT boat moving about a half-mile off.

  “Starboard ten degrees!” Hanami called to the helmsman. “PT boat—steady.” At thirty knots, he bore down on the boat, smashed into her amidships, cut her clean in two, and slid on without a jar. The PT boat was crunched apart with an unearthly noise, and the two halves flamed up in the water.

  On the PT boat, Lt. John F. Kennedy, skipper, and his twelve officers and men had watched helplessly as the destroyer bore down on them. The PT was leaden, for it was running on one engine to keep down noise. Two men were killed outright or were sucked down to die in the churning vortex of the destroyer’s wake; others struggled to keep afloat and away from the gasoline fire burning on the water. Kennedy was thrown hard in the cockpit and fell on his back across the deck. He thought: “This is how it feels to be killed.” But his half of the PT boat stayed afloat, and he and four others clung to it. He shouted for survivors in the water, and six more responded. One man, McMahon, was badly burned; another, Harris, had hurt his leg. Kennedy swam to them and half-tugged, half-guided them back to the PT boat.

  “I can’t go any farther,” Harris protested.

  “For a guy from Boston, you’re certainly putting up a great exhibition out here,” Kennedy retorted. Harris and the others, buoyed up by their life preservers and the skipper, made it to the drifting hulk after three hours.

  As day came, the eleven men waited for other PT boats to come to the rescue. Unaccountably, no one arrived. To the northeast, west, and south were islands swarming with Japanese. The boat was now listing badly and settling.

  “What do you want to do if the Japs come out?” Kennedy asked. “Fight or surrender?”

  “Fight with what?” someone asked. They had one Tommy gun, six 45-caliber automatics, and one .38.

  “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “Anything you say, Mr. Kennedy,” someone said. “You’re the boss.”

  “There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this,” Kennedy said. “Seems to me we’re not a military organization any more. Let’s just talk this over.” But talking led to arguing, and Kennedy finally realized he would have to take command. He ordered all but the three injured men into the water to give the wounded room. But soon the hulk turned turtle. Kennedy decided that the only hope lay in their swimming for a small island three miles to the southeast. He towed McMahon, holding in his teeth one end of a long strap on the burned man’s Mae West. Although he swallowed a lot of salt water through his clenched teeth, Kennedy made it to the island in five hours. He had been in the sea for almost fifteen hours.

  The men sprawled exhausted on the little island. Kennedy decided to strike out on his own to a further island and try to intercept a PT boat along the regular route through Ferguson Passage. In the twilight he swam to the reef, hugging the ship’s lantern. Once he saw a huge fish in the water; he remembered one of his men saying, “These barracuda will come up under a swimming man and eat his testicles.” Like a drunken man, he made his way slowly along the reef, the sharp coral cutting his shins and ankles, swam out into Ferguson Passage; and there, treading water, chilled to the bone, he waited for a PT boat. Nothing came. He started back, but the current was faster now, he was tired, and he drifted right by the little island where his men waited. At last he stopped trying to swim; he seemed to stop caring, as if in a trance; but he held the heavy lantern as if it were a link with his men. At times he drifted off into sleep or unconsciousness. He thought he might be dying. But the current, slowly carrying him in a huge circle, took him back into Ferguson Passage to the spot where he had been. Once again he started home, picking his agonizing way along the rough coral reef, in bare feet. Finally he made the island, crawled up the beach, and vomited on the sand. His men moved up to him. Kennedy looked at his third officer. “Ross, you try it tonight,” he said. Then he passed out.

  Back at the squadron’s base, hope had been given up for the thirteen survivors. Services were held in their memory. One of the officers wrote to Ross’s mother that her son had died for a cause he believed in “stronger than any one of us.” Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, the letter went on, was on the same boat and also lost his life. “The man that said the cream of a nation is lost in war can never be accused of making an overstatement of a very cruel fact.…”

  Ross swam out into Ferguson Passage that evening but met no better luck than had his chief. Kennedy, cold and sick, was awake most of that night. The men were terribly thirsty. In the morning Kennedy insisted that they keep moving; he swam out with them toward an island nearer Ferguson Passage. Three hours later, they landed and found coconuts. The thirsty men broke them open and greedily drained their milk, only to turn sick and spew it out. Rain fell during the night, and the men crawled through the brush licking water off the leaves. In the morning they saw that the leaves were covered with bird droppings. Sourly they named the place Bird Island.

  This was now the fourth day. One sailor pointed to a rosary another wore. “McGuire, give that necklace a working over.” McGuire said quietly, “Yes, I’ll take care of all you fellows.” But to Kennedy the only hope was to keep moving, so he and Ross swam to Nauru Island, even nearer the passage, and here their luck turned. They found two natives, some Japanese provisions, and a canoe. The natives fled, but later, when the canoe was swamped, other natives appeared. Kennedy found a coconut with a smooth shell and cut a message on it with his knife: ELEVEN ALIVE NATIVE KNOWS POSIT AND REEFS NAURU ISLAND KENNEDY. “Rendova, Rendova,” he said to the natives. One seemed to understand; taking the coconut, they paddled off.

  Kennedy lay sick and dazed on Nauru all day and then determined that he and Ross must go out into Ferguson Passage in the dugout and watch for PT boats. The wind was high and the choppy waves soon overturned their canoe. The two men struggled for two hours against a tidal current headed for the open sea.

  “Sorry I got you out here, Barney!” Kennedy shouted.

  “This would be a great time to say I told you so,” Ross shouted back, “but I won’t!”

  They forced their way out of the current and toward the island. Ahead was the heavy roar of the waves smashing on the dangerous reef. A wave tore Kennedy from the canoe and spun him around and down, but miraculously he landed not on coral but in an eddy. Ross was badly cut on the arm and shoulder, and his feet were now so lacerated that Kennedy ha
d to lay the paddles down, step by step on the beach, so that Ross could walk on them. They fell on the beach at Nauru and slept.

  Their ordeal was almost over. In the morning four natives awakened them. One said in excellent English, “I have a letter for you, sir.” It was from the commander of a New Zealand infantry patrol on New Georgia urging them to follow the natives back to his camp. The rescue could not have come much later. McMahon’s burns had begun to rot; Ross’s arm had swelled to the size of his thigh. The natives placed Kennedy in the bottom of their canoe, concealed him from Japanese planes with palm fronds, and paddled him to the New Zealand patrol. A few hours later, a PT boat arrived. “Hey, Jack!” someone called.

  “Where the hell you been?” Kennedy called back.

  “We got some food for you.”

  “No thanks,” Kennedy said. “I just had a coconut.” A moment later, he jumped into the boat, and hugged the men aboard—they were his friends from the base.

  The native guided them back to Bird Island for the rest of the men; and in the middle of the night the PT boat sped back to the base with its joyful passengers. On the way, one of the survivors tippled rather heavily of the brandy that the squadron surgeon had sent to revive them. Then he sat topside, his arms around a couple of plump, missionary-trained natives. Together they sang a hymn all three happened to know:

  “Jesus loves me, this I know,