Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  One day Bill Battle, another officer on Tulagi, noticed that all the Catholics, including Jack Kennedy and Red Fay, seemed to head off each afternoon to visit the chaplain, Charlie Webster, who’d played football at Princeton and was now a Franciscan. It turned out that Father Webster was doubling as a bartender, complete with his own stock of medicinal alcohol of some kind. Kennedy, who hardly ever drank, would join them for the ritual but spend more of his time reading and writing letters. “Jack was a big letter writer,” one of his crew members attested. But Jack would join other Catholics on a boat trip every Sunday to nearby Sesape Island for mass.

  “Getting out every night on patrol,” he wrote his parents in May 1943. “On good nights it’s beautiful—the water is amazingly phosphorescent—flying fishes which shine like lights are zooming around and you usually get two or three porpoises who lodge right under the bow and no matter how fast the boat goes keep just about six inches ahead of the boat.”

  He had found an unexpected comfort in the South Pacific. “That laugh of his,” Red later recalled, “the laugh was so contagious that it’d make everybody laugh.” Jim Reed was another friend Jack made for life out there. “There was an aura around him that I’ve never seen duplicated in anybody else. He had a light touch and a serious side,” said Reed. He once tossed a book onto an officer’s bed. “Get acquainted with this damn war,” he told him. “Read my favorite book by my favorite author.” It was Why England Slept.

  Kennedy loved mocking the brass that made occasional visits to the front lines. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral,” he wrote Inga. “He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three.” He went on to satirize the flag officer’s recent trip: the absurd questions, the vain jottings down of the obvious, the “inane” comment before he “toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table . . . That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.”

  Finding comedy around him always enlarged the picture. “His back was troubling him, he wasn’t well,” Jim Reed recalled. “But I can tell you this about Jack—he never complained. He always had a terrific humor—a really acute sense of humor. He was very self-deprecating. He claimed to me once that he’d never had an unhappy day in his life. Now, whether or not he’d had an unhappy childhood, he’d come to fall back on his inner resources. He loved to read. He was curious—he had a natural curiosity about anything.” Jack Kennedy often slept with a plywood board under him or, sometimes, even stretched out on a table. In another officer’s most vivid memory, he recalled a day when Jack paced worriedly, holding his torn sacroiliac belt and looking for someone who could lend him a needle and thread. He would rely on that corset for much of his life.

  When he did beef, he reserved his sounding-off for the officers above him and the orders they issued. Such predictable behavior eventually won him the nickname “Shafty.” If he got handed a crappy assignment, he’d say, “I’ve been shafted”—although, with his accent, it came out as “shofted.”

  Out there in the middle of nowhere, talk was one of the only entertainments, and Jack preferred political discussions. “What’s the purpose of having the conflict,” Red Fay recalled him asking during one of these sessions, “if we’re going to come out here and fight and let the people that got us here get us back into it again?” He was constantly asking questions. “We’d sit in a corner and I’d recall all the political problems in New Jersey and Long Island where I come from,” the PT commander at the Russell Islands base would recall. “He did that with everybody. He had a way of really picking your brain if you knew something he didn’t,” recalled another officer. “He loved sitting around talking with a bunch of guys, and he’d come out with these remarks—remarks like you’d never forget.”

  There were twelve crewmen aboard Jack’s command vessel, PT 109—the same number as the Muckers. The job of the PTs in the Russell Islands that August of 1943 was to patrol the Blackett Strait and attack Japanese convoys passing through. His trial by fire would come at 2:30 a.m. on August 2. It was pitch black. There was no radar. Only one of the three engines was running, standard procedure because the propellers stirred up the water, creating that phosphorescent light that Jack had told his parents was so beautiful, signaling their presence to Japanese planes patrolling overhead.

  Barney Ross, one of his crewmen, thought he saw a shape out there in the darkness. Jack pegged it as another PT boat, and got consensus. But as it grew larger, the skipper became concerned. “Lenny, look at this,” he told his executive officer. “Ship at two o’clock!” a crewman shouted. Ross, who’d believed the oncoming vessel was running parallel, now saw it turning toward him.

  “Sound general quarters!” Lieutenant Kennedy ordered. He spun the wheel to the left in preparation for firing their torpedoes. But, operating on just the single engine, it was sluggish. Before a thirty-degree turn could be effected, a Japanese destroyer, heading at 40 knots, suddenly rammed them through. Jack was thrown hard to the deck, where, lying there, he thought to himself, This is how it feels to be killed. He then watched as the Japanese ship passed him, only a few feet away.

  All this had happened in less than fifteen seconds.

  In the darkness now, the only sound was the burning gasoline. Jack began to call out, “Who’s aboard?” Only five crewmen answered. Spotting fire just twenty feet away, he ordered them all to abandon ship.

  Pappy McMahon, the chief engineer, now in the separated stern of the plywood boat, found himself in far worse trouble. The flaming gasoline all around him had burned his face and hands, scorched his shins. Burning fuel continued to collect as he sank deeper into the water, the orange glare now above him.

  Jack, having taken a place with the five others in the bow, realized what was happening and instantly headed to Pappy’s rescue. Removing his shoes, shirt, and revolver, he dived into the water, wearing his rubber life belt, to search for the rest of his crew. Finding McMahon, he saw at once that his engineer was unable to use his badly burned arms. “Go on, Skipper,” McMahon mumbled. “You go on. I’ve had it.”

  Jack grabbed McMahon’s life jacket and began towing him to the floating bow, which had by this point drifted a fair distance away. Another crewman, Harris, was also losing heart. His leg was badly injured, making it difficult to swim. He wanted to stop trying, but Jack kept rallying him. “Come on! Where are you, Harris?” The crewman swore at his skipper, finally all but giving up. “I can’t go any farther.”

  “For a guy from Boston, you’re certainly putting up a great exhibition out here, Harris.” Jack was not going to leave him behind. “Well, come on!” he kept at him, purposely ignoring Harris’s bad leg. He then helped him take off the sodden sweater that was weighing him down, and that made a big difference. Harris could now move through the water.

  When the two reached the part of the boat that was still afloat, Jack took roll. Ten answered this time, all but Harold Marney and Andrew Kirksey. Could anyone spot them? For the rest of the night the crew called out the two names, to no avail.

  When dawn came, the hull flipped over on its back, becoming turtlelike. Slowly, it began to sink in the water, making it clear it wasn’t going to last through another night. By midday, Jack announced they’d soon have to abandon what was left of PT 109 and try to make it to land before too late in the day. He didn’t want the hull to sink in the middle of the night, and knew it would if they stayed. By two o’clock in the afternoon, they were ready to go.

  Each man was well aware of the gruesome stories about Japanese treatment of prisoners, which included horrific torture. The problem was, many of the islands around them were known to be occupied by the enemy.

  “There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this,” Kennedy had told his crew that morning at daybreak. “A lot of you men have families and some of you have children. What do you want to do? I have nothing to lose.” Jim Maguire, a fellow Catholic who’d gone to church regularly with Jack, found this hard to believe. Th
e skipper, he felt sure, had a lot to live for.

  There was also the question of Pappy McMahon, with his terribly seared flesh. And half the crew members couldn’t swim. Their skipper’s solution was to order nine of them to hang on to a floating eight-foot plank they luckily found nearby. Not only would this keep them together, but it would increase the nonswimmers’ chances.

  Lieutenant Kennedy then calmly pulled out his knife, cutting loose a strap of McMahon’s life jacket and taking it between his teeth. He intended to tow him that way. The engineer never forgot his matter-of-fact manner. To him, the skipper seemed almost casual, as if he did it all the time. “I’ll take McMahon with me,” Jack told them. Next, he issued the order “The rest of you can swim together on this plank.” Lenny Thom was put in charge.

  When one seaman expressed aloud the fear that they’d never get out of this, Kennedy disagreed. “It can be done!”

  For four hours they were out there in the water, their skipper pulling his engineer by his teeth and all the while keeping watch on his crew. Fortunately, the Pacific water was warm. For four hours Jack Kennedy plowed on, halting his breaststroke only occasionally to rest. The man he was pulling, meanwhile, hadn’t a clue his rescuer suffered from a bad back, slept on a sheet of plywood, and wore a corset for support. As McMahon floated on his back, he had nothing to do but look up at the sky. He was always aware of the rhythmic tugs of the skipper’s arm strokes. He would remember most the sound of Jack’s hard breathing.

  Plum Pudding Island, named for its shape, was the length of a football field and two thirds as wide at the middle. It had a few palm trees on it, like an island in a New Yorker cartoon. When he finally made it, Jack could only lie panting on the sand. And when he went to stand, he vomited from swallowing so much seawater. Soon his crew also reached the beach, all clutching the plank.

  Back at base, a very sad Red Fay was writing his sister: “George Ross has lost his life for a cause that he believed in stronger than any one of us, because he was an idealist in the purest sense. Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, was on the same boat. The man who said that the cream of a nation is lost in war can never be accused of making an overstatement of a very cruel fact.”

  Jim Reed would recall: “The next morning we heard that PT 109 hadn’t returned and they’d seen an explosion and a fire. I was very sad. I couldn’t believe it.” Of Kennedy, he said, “He had many friends here, almost everybody knew him. He was very well liked.”

  Meanwhile, on Plum Pudding Island, Kennedy was conferring with Thom and Ross. “How are we going to get out of here?” he wanted to know. But, in fact, he already had a plan. What he intended to do, Jack told them, was to swim out on his own into Ferguson Passage that night to try to signal a ship.

  Hanging his .38 pistol on a lanyard around his neck, he wrapped a flashlight in a life jacket to keep it afloat and headed off at sundown, knowing the PT boats went out on patrol then. Since no one had yet come to get them, he was thinking aggressively and taking matters into his own hands.

  There was little point in just camping out there on that island, waiting for the Japanese to butcher them. If and when he spotted a PT boat, he’d try to draw attention by firing three shots in the air and signaling with the flashlight. There was no other choice.

  Kennedy reached his destination at eight o’clock and stayed in place four hours. When no PT boats had appeared, he began the long swim back to the island. Unfortunately, he was caught in a powerful current that swept him past Plum Pudding. Drifting south, and after passing out several times, he stopped to sleep on a sandbar. The next morning he awoke and found his way back to his men. He arrived at noontime, looking scrawny and exhausted, with yellow skin and bloodshot eyes. He vomited again, and passed out.

  Opening his eyes, he saw Barney Ross. He managed to say only, “Barney, you try it tonight,” before, a second later, conking out.

  The next day, Kennedy decided they needed to move to a nearby, larger island. Again, he assembled his men on that eight-foot plank. Again, he swam on, dragging the badly burned Pappy by the strap held in his teeth. Still there was no sign of rescue, and all they had to drink was the rainfall they captured in their mouths as they lay in a storm. The day after that, Kennedy and Ross swam to yet another island, Nauru.

  There, they came upon some very welcome surprises—a dugout canoe, a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with freshwater, and a crate of crackers and candy. Exhausted, Ross fell asleep for the night, while Kennedy took the dugout back in the dark with the water and candy, supplies presumably left by the Japanese, to his crew.

  This time he was greeted not just by his men but by two islanders who’d unexpectedly arrived and had gotten a fire going. They were helping the Americans. Jack used his pocketknife to scratch a message on a coconut shell: NAURO ISL NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY. Handing it to them, he told the islanders where they must take it. “Rendova . . . Rendova,” he repeated.

  When the PT 109 crewmen awoke the next morning, a large canoe was just arriving on the beach. From it stepped eight islanders, who presented Lieutenant Kennedy with a letter that read: “On His Majesty’s Service / To the Senior Officer / Nauru Island / I have learned of your presence on Nauru Island. I am in command of a New Zealand infantry operating in conjunction with US Army troops on New Georgia. I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Lt. Winscote.”

  Their friends waiting for them on the base at Rendova were so happy to see them they cried. Jack became angry when a fellow officer said he’d had a mass said for his soul.

  “Kennedy’s Son Is Hero in Pacific as Destroyer Splits His PT Boat,” read the New York Times headline on August 20, 1943. The New York Herald Tribune told its readers that John F. Kennedy had written a “blazing new saga in PT boat annals.”

  A more personal commendation would come from a fellow officer, Dick Keresey, writing years later. “As a captain, Jack Kennedy was a man of courage, a good PT-boat man, and he was good company. Ranking the virtue of good company on a level with the other two may have been peculiar to those on PT boats. We were almost always on the front lines. We knew it was time to pack when the base got showers. When the movies showed up, we were long gone. So we were highly dependent on conversation to divert ourselves, and Kennedy was a good listener and an amusing talker. Our conversation was seldom deep and never about future plans, for this brought bad luck.”

  Jack had his own account, which he mailed to Inga, and it wasn’t what made it into the headlines and news stories. It’s a testament to his writing ability—but also to his heart.

  He typed it in block letters on a navy typewriter:

  The war goes slowly here, slower than you can ever imagine from reading the papers at home. The only way you can get the proper perspective on its progress is put away the headlines for a month and watch us move on the map. It’s deathly slow. The Japs have dug deep, and with the possible exception of a couple of Marine divisions are the greatest jungle fighters in the world. Their willingness to die for a place like Munda gives them a tremendous advantage over us. We, in aggregate, just don’t have the willingness. Of course, at times, an individual will rise up to it, but in total, no . . . Munda or any of those spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope to never see again.

  We are at a great disadvantage—the Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to secure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most possess . . . The Japs have this advantage: because of their feeling about Hirohito, they merely wish to kill. An American’s energies are divided: he wants to kill but he also is trying desperately to prevent himself from being killed.

  The war is a dirty business. It�
��s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars, and millions of soldiers, that thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it, for if it isn’t, the whole thing will turn to ashes, and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war.

  I received a letter today from the wife of my engineer, who was so badly burnt that his face and hands were just flesh, and he was that way for six days. He couldn’t swim, and I was able to help him, and his wife thanked me, and in her letter she said, “I suppose to you it was just part of your job, but Mr. McMahon was part of my life and if he had died I don’t think I would have wanted to go on living.”

  There are many McMahons that don’t come through. There was a boy on my boat, only twenty-four, had three kids, one night, two bombs straddled our boat and two of the men were hit, one standing right next to me. He never got over it. He hardly ever spoke after that. He told me one night he thought he was going to be killed. I wanted to put him ashore to work. I wish I had. He was in the forward gun turret where the destroyer hit us.

  I don’t know what it all adds up to, nothing I guess, but you said that you figured I’d go to Texas and write my experiences. I wouldn’t go near a book like that. This thing is so stupid, that while it has a sickening fascination for some of us, myself included, I want to leave it far behind when I go.

  Inga Binga, I’ll be glad to see you again. I’m tired now. We were riding every night, and the sleeping is tough in the daytime but I’ve been told they are sending some of us home to form a new squadron in a couple of months. I’ve had a great time here, everything considered, but I’ll be just as glad to get away from it for a while. I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through. It’s a funny thing that as long as you have that feeling you seem to get through. I’ve lost that feeling lately but as a matter of fact I don’t feel badly about it. If anything happens to me I have this knowledge that if I had lived to be a hundred I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell. I’ll cut it. You are the only person I’m saying it to. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an already bright twenty-six years.