Chuck Spalding, a Yalie Jack had met through Torby Macdonald the previous year and who now was one of his closest pals, watched the relationship heat up with fascination. “Her conversation was miles and miles ahead of everybody,” he was to explain. “There was something adventurous about her. She’d done so much, been involved in so much. She was a fictional character almost, walking around. Of all the people that I ever saw him with I’d say she was the most compatible.”
She cherished the memories of their wartime love affair for the rest of her life. “He had the charm that makes birds come out of their trees,” was a description she would give.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one paying close attention to her. Washington was a hotbed of spies, obviously, each one masquerading as something else, and the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, was keeping a close eye on all resident aliens. The Bureau’s dossier on Inga contained enough to make her of serious interest to it, including one very explosive item: a photo of this gorgeous blonde in the company of the Führer himself.
That snapshot was a legacy of a stint she’d spent as a freelance reporter in Denmark, during which she’d gotten a tip, in early 1935, that the high-ranking Nazi Hermann Göring, a widower, was about to be married for the second time. Based on her scoop, she was assigned to cover the wedding that April, where she found herself being introduced to Hitler. Struck by the beautiful young Dane’s embodiment of the perfect Nordic physical ideal, he invited her to come back to Berlin the following August to be his guest at the 1936 Olympics.
The FBI didn’t like the looks of it. They refused to clear Arvad, suspecting her of being pro-Hitler or, worse yet, being a spy, using the Herald-Examiner job as a cover. They maintained surveillance of her comings and goings, being quite concerned about the company she was keeping, especially the time spent with the son of the rich former ambassador who backed appeasement.
Hoover’s agents bugged Inga’s rooms, and made voice recordings, with Jack clearly audible, which soon were in the files, testifying to the long weekends the couple spent together and Jack’s love of risk-taking. Before long, Ensign Kennedy was given a new assignment and dispatched to a Southern naval base, more than four hundred miles away. It’s likely the FBI had a hand in the transfer to Charleston, Hoover hoping to get him out of harm’s way by removing the immediate temptation. At least, JFK thought so: “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde, and they thought she was a spy.”
Away from the excitement of Washington, Jack quickly grew bored. Now, more than ever fed up with a desk job, what he wanted, above all, was to be where there was action. His pulse quickened by war fever, he could think only of getting to the front. Inga, who visited him, took his grand, if still unclear, ambitions seriously. “If you can find something you really believe in, then, my dear, you caught the biggest fish in the ocean,” she wrote. “You can pull it aboard, but don’t rush it, there is still time.”
The FBI, still on Inga’s trail, found the pair sharing a February weekend at the Fort Sumter House hotel. Its agent reported the two left the hotel only for late-night meals and to attend church together Sunday morning at the Catholic cathedral on Broad Street; young Kennedy was keeping up with church even as he shared a bed with Inga Binga.
Jack Kennedy, being a man of his times, felt the patriotic pull of service. His older brother had experienced the pull, too. Though Joe Jr., as in all things, had previously followed his father’s lead, identifying with the isolationist America First movement, by the summer of 1941 he was training to be a navy pilot. It was truly a time of testing for such elite young men, suddenly having to square their belief systems with their consciences.
I talked to one of Joe’s Choate classmates, Paul Ferber, then in his nineties, who’d never forgotten being at naval aviation school in Jacksonville, Florida, and running into young Joe there. He was deeply taken with his words. “I want to go over there and bomb the hell out of those Nazis!” Ferber, after all, was familiar with the antiwar sentiments of Joe’s dad.
In July, Jack transferred to midshipman’s school at Northwestern University, and from there applied to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island. The essential conditions being looked for in the Melville recruits were exactly the ones he possessed, he told Lem. “I have applied for torpedo boat school under Lt. Bulkeley. The requirements are very strict physically. You have to be young, healthy and unmarried. As I am young, healthy and unmarried, I’m trying to get in.”
Bulkeley was looking for hotshot junior officers used to handling high-powered speedboats and to the rigors of long sailing races. Fast thinking, teamwork, and endurance were everything. What this meant, then, was a group disproportionately Ivy League, ones who’d grown up summering in such places as coastal Maine or on Long Island Sound, where their families and friends belonged to yacht clubs. In other words, young men like Jack Kennedy.
Joining the PTs gave Jack the chance, finally, to command his own boat. His love of the sea is one of those things most people associate with him. Jack was proud of the Nantucket Sound sailing championship he’d earned. He and Joe had even been together on a victorious Harvard intercollegiate sailing team in ’38, but now he was ready to be the skipper.
There in Rhode Island, he shared a Quonset hut with Torby Macdonald, who, with a little help from Jack’s father, happily arrived to keep him company. After they completed their training and had their sights on the South Pacific, a snag arose when Jack received orders to stay stateside as an instructor. This time, political rescue came from on high in the person of Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs.
Yet barely was that issue resolved when another crimp appeared in Jack’s plans. It was his bad back and the pounding it could expect to suffer aboard a PT boat. While he got past muster, his health condition was precarious. No one knew this as well as Jack himself. Even going at half-speed, standing upright on these boats was as tough as riding a bucking bronco. One person this worried was Jack’s father.
“Jack came home,” he wrote Joe Jr., after Jack stopped for some R & R at Hyannis Port while at Melville, “and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back.” His son, ignoring all the danger signs, chose to make the best of it, preferring to get into the action rather than worry over its certain consequences for him.
He feared as much for what his sensitive gut would have to take. “I’m rather glad to be on my way,” he wrote Lem, “although I understand that this South Pacific is not a place where you lie on a white beach with a cool breeze, while those native girls who aren’t out hunting for your daily supply of bananas are busy popping grapes in your mouth. It would seem to consist of heat and rain and dysentery + cold beans, all of which won’t of course bother anyone with a good stomach. If it’s as bad as they say it is, I imagine I’ll be voting Republican in ’44.”
Kennedy’s first taste of the hazards of war came even before he reached his assigned PT base in the Solomon Islands, when his transport ship, an LST, was attacked by Japanese airplanes. A pilot, shot down and swimming off the side of his ship, was about to be picked up as a survivor. Then, just as the American crewmen prepared to begin the rescue, the flyer threw off his life jacket, pulled out a revolver he’d been hiding in the water, and fired two shots at the bridge, aiming for the ship’s captain and other ranking officers.
Describing the scene to Lem, he wrote: “I had been praising the Lord and passing the ammunition right alongside—but that showed me a bit—the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship. We returned the fire with everything we had—the water boiled around him—but everyone was too surprised to shoot straight. Finally an old soldier standing next to me—picked up his rifle—fired once—and blew the top of his head off. He threw up his arms—plunged forward—and sank—and we hauled our ass out of there. That was the start of a very interesting month—and it brought home very strongly
how long it is going to take to finish this war.” What he’d now witnessed for himself was that the Japanese they were fighting were not only willing to risk their lives but to sacrifice them.
Lieutenant (JG) Kennedy found for himself a new world in the navy. His fellow officers posted to the South Pacific were, by the fact of their commissions, college men, and many from the Ivies. Yet there were also self-described “weed leaguers,” young men from state universities. What united them all was merit; each had earned his place there. It was Jack’s first time in such a company of dedicated equals, all facing the same discomforts and, of course, the same danger of getting killed.
“It’s not bad here at all,” he told Lem in one letter from Tulagi Island in the Solomons. “They have just opened up an Officers Club which consists of a tent. The liquor served is an alcoholic concoction which is drawn out of the torpedo tubes known as torp juice. Every night about 7:30 the tent bulges, about five men come crashing out, blow their lunch and swagger off to bed.”
Soon he was collecting around himself new lifelong friends, just as he had at Choate and Harvard. One was Paul “Red” Fay, a Stanford grad whose father ran a San Francisco construction company. The two met when Fay, being instructed by Jack, ignored orders and got on the wrong PT boat. Kennedy dressed him down in powerful language Red Fay never forgot: “Do you realize that if what you did was compounded by every single person in the United States coming through training the war would be won by the Japs inside of three months!” Trust a pair of Irishmen to start a good friendship with a good fight.
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 giv
ing 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. The skipper, he felt sure, had a lot to live for.
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