JFK

by Fredrik Logevall

  Her husband was driving back from his horseback ride that morning of the nineteenth when he, too, heard the happy news on the car radio. He was so overcome with joy, he later told his son Teddy and his nephew Joey Gargan, that he momentarily lost control of the car and drove into a field.55

  A day or two later, there arrived at the Cape a letter that Joe and Rose read and reread, and then read again. “Dear Folks, This is just a short note to tell you that I am alive—and not kicking—in spite of any reports that you may happen to hear. It was believed otherwise for a few days—so reports or rumors may have gotten back to you. Fortunately they misjudged the durability of a Kennedy—am back at the base now—and am OK. As soon as possible I shall try to give you the whole story. Much love to you all Jack.”56

  The news of Lieutenant Kennedy’s exploits hit the front pages on August 19, after clearing censors. By chance, two leading war correspondents, Frank Hewlett of United Press and Leif Erickson of the Associated Press, were at the Rendova base on the day of the rescue and hopped aboard the PT boat for the pickup. They promptly filed accounts that made headlines across the country. KENNEDY’S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC, read one of them. The New York Times, in a story datelined “Aug 8 (delayed),” reported on page 1, KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS BOAT. “Former Ambassador and Mrs. Kennedy today shouted in joy when informed of the exploit of their son,” read a separate Times story by Arthur Krock, but also “expressed deep sorrow for the two crewmen who lost their lives.” Congratulatory telegrams and letters flowed into the family home from near and far, and Joe set about trying to answer each one.*2 “I’ve been a little lax in writing you recently,” he wrote one London friend, “but Jack’s exploits in the South Pacific have kept me pretty well tied up. It is the consensus of the newspaper men here that there hasn’t been a better story since the war started than the one of young Jack. He really came through with flying colors.”57

  Joe and Rose implored their son to ask to be sent home. He had more than fulfilled his obligations, they believed, and moreover they worried about his health. Jack refused. He spent a week in the hospital in Tulagi, looking more emaciated than ever and brooding about the lack of rescue attempts following the ramming and about the loss of two of his men. To his squadron commander, Cluster, Jack poured out his frustration that neither Potter nor Lowrey had come to his boat’s aid, even though they clearly knew something bad had happened. But his frustration only strengthened his desire to return to duty, and he felt as well a deeper connection to his men. “On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time,” he wrote his parents, “was the way everyone stood up to it.

  “Previous to that I had been somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off. But with the chips down, that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it’s in the middle, then there’s trouble. It was a terrible thing though, losing those two men. One [Andrew Kirksey] had ridden with me for as long as I had been out here….He had a wife and three kids. The other fellow [Harold Marney] had just come on board. He was only a kid himself. It certainly brought home how real the war is—and when I read the papers from home, how superficial is most of the talking and thinking about it.”58

  But his overarching view of the war had not changed. Upon learning that his seventeen-year-old brother Bobby was clamoring to get into a PT boat, Jack insisted that he was “too young to be out here,” and that “the fun goes out of the war in a fairly short time and I don’t think that Bobby is ready yet to come out.”59 In September, he assumed command of a new boat, the former PT 59, which had been retrofitted—the torpedoes were removed and replaced with guns—to become Gunboat No. 1, making Jack the first gunboat commander in the Pacific. Later that month he remarked to Inga Arvad on how slowly the fighting was progressing.

  This war here 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 sounds like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten that 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….

  I received a letter from the wife of my engineer, who was so badly burnt that his face and hands and arms 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.”

  At the end he turned personal, and showed his depth: “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 lived to be a hundred, I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell, [but] you are the only person I’d say it to anyway. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an extremely bright twenty-six years.”60

  He still had feelings for Inga, strong feelings, even though the relationship was over. He loved everything about her—her looks, her sexiness, her sophistication, her sense of humor, her warmth. She had awakened something in him he didn’t know he had, had believed in him, had encouraged him to reach for the stars and to cultivate his interests in a potential political career. Even before meeting her, he had begun to move out of his older brother’s shadow, but there’s little doubt that her bullish and indefatigable advocacy was further incentive for him to see himself as coequal—at least—with Joe. Now, with his wartime exploits capturing headlines at home, some part of him understood the process was complete.

  Joe Junior sensed it, too. Testy and irritable that summer of 1943, he agitated to get into combat, and seemed to his fellow fliers to have a giant chip on his shoulder. In July he seized on the chance to volunteer for a highly dangerous mission patrolling the English Channel in order to hunt down German U-boats near where they lived, in the Bay of Biscay and along the French coast south of Brest. As he waited for the order to ship out, Joe learned to fly the new B-24 Liberator and soon found himself flying them across the country, from the factory in San Diego to Norfolk, Virginia. On one of the San Diego stops a family friend showed him a letter indicating that Jack was missing in action. “I read this about three hours before I saw the papers [indicating the rescue],” Joe wrote to his family, “and got quite a fright.” But it seems he did not call his parents at the time, because some days later his father wrote to say he and Rose “were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you. I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had any news as to how Jack was.”61

  Young Joe’s reply bespoke his frustration about having a younger brother who had allowed his boat to be lost to the enemy and yet somehow still came out looking every bit the conqueror. “With the great quantity of reading material coming in on the actions of the Kennedys in the various parts of the world, and the countless number of paper clippings about our young hero, the battler of the wars of Banana River, San Juan, Virginia Beach, New Orleans, San Antonio, and San Diego, will now step to the microphone and give out a few words of his own activities,” the letter began. Only once did it mention his brother’s name.62

  Granted a few days’ leave at the start of September, Joe returned to Cape Cod in time for his father’s fifty-
fifth birthday celebration. During a festive dinner, Judge John J. Burns, a longtime acquaintance of Joe Senior’s, rose to offer a toast “to Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” That was it. No mention of the older son, who was seated right next to his father and who in a few days would be heading to England to go against the thrust of the ferocious Nazi war machine. As the judge sat down, Joe Junior lifted his glass and smiled stiffly. But another guest, Boston police commissioner Joe Timilty, said that that night he could hear Young Joe sobbing in the bed next to his and muttering, “By God, I’ll show them.”63

  Decades later, his mother would acknowledge the import of the PT 109 episode: “In their long brotherly, friendly rivalry, I expect this was the first time Jack had won such an ‘advantage’ by such a clear margin. And I daresay it cheered Jack and must have rankled Joe Jr.”64 This seems half-right: yes, Jack had indeed gained the “advantage” over his brother, but it rings false to suggest that the fraternal competition was a zero-sum game that still mattered equally to both of them. The drive to be supreme among the nine Kennedy children had always been an all-out obsession for Joe more than for Jack. And especially in recent years, as Jack scored impressive accomplishments of his own, he had become less mired in the rivalry than his brother was.

  VI

  On October 8, 1943, Jack received promotion to full lieutenant, and on the sixteenth his Gunboat No. 1, along with the rest of the squadron, moved to Lambu Lambu, the new forward base on the island of Vella Lavella, west of New Georgia. There followed numerous missions through the end of October and into November, many of them aimed at intercepting Japanese barges at the western and southern approaches to Choiseul Bay. On November 2, Jack rescued wounded Marines trapped on Choiseul Island, then endured seeing several of the men suffer on board his boat, including one who died in his own bunk. On the night of November 5–6, with his friend Byron “Whizzer” White on board, No. 1 opened fire and destroyed three Japanese barges at Moli Island.65

  Jack volunteered for many of these missions, and seemed unfazed by risk. “He had guts,” said one crewman. “No matter how dangerous the mission was, he’d always volunteer.” At one point, senior commanders wanted to send a boat through Blackett Strait to draw enemy shell fire so that American aircraft could identify the guns. Jack offered to do it. “He said he’d go if they could find somebody else to go with him,” the crewman remembered. Since no one else came forward, the mission was scrapped. But through his leadership and calm friendliness in these autumn weeks, Jack won respect and affection. “He was a good officer in that he knew how to handle men,” related Chief Petty Officer Glen Christiansen.66

  His health, however, was spiraling downward. His back troubles and stomach pains intensified in the weeks after the PT 109 ordeal, and his weight, already worryingly low, dropped still further. He suffered headaches and fever. The precise cause was not clear, but the long hours and lack of sleep didn’t help. On November 18, a doctor at the base in Lambu Lambu ordered Jack to shore and he returned to Tulagi. Additional tests there, including X-rays, identified an “early duodenal ulcer” and the presence of malaria.67 Barred from further duty, he bided his time in Tulagi, penning letters and waiting for his orders home. To brother Bobby, who had joined the Navy Reserve while in his final months at Milton Academy, he wrote:

  The folks sent me a clipping of you taking the oath. The sight of you up there, just as a boy, was really moving, particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on. I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing out here, while you go stroking around in my drape coat, but I suppose that what we are out here for—or so they tell us—is so that our sisters and younger brothers will be safe and secure. Frankly, I don’t see it quite that way—at least if you’re going to be safe and secure, that’s fine with me, but not in my coat, brother, not in my coat. In that picture you look as if you are going to step outside the room, grab your gun, and knock off several of the house-boys before lunch.68

  Four pals in Tulagi, autumn 1943. From left: George “Barney” Ross, Kennedy, Paul “Red” Fay, and James Reed.

  Jack spent abundant time with Red Fay, who tried every method to get Jack interested in playing cards. Results were poor. Instead Fay and a few others would descend on Jack’s tent, where he would lead informal group discussions on the topics of the day—on wartime strategy, politics, military leadership, education, and, inevitably, girls. Ideas interested him, the others could see—he kept a loose-leaf notebook to record thoughts—and he was stimulated by debate. “There was no question in my mind or the minds of Barney Ross, Jim Reed, and Byron White that Jack Kennedy was an exceptional man,” Fay, an admitted devotee, later said. Making book on who among them could become president of the United States, Fay and Ross set Jack’s odds at ten thousand to one (“because he was still out in the war zone, his health was poor, he was young and unforeseen circumstances could make it impossible for him to reach the White House”), and their own odds at between one million and two million to one. “Jack Kennedy’s greatness was so apparent to me,” Fay added, “that I did something unusual for a man. I saved every letter or note that he ever sent to me, beginning during the war years.”69

  The orders home came through on December 14, 1943. By then the great campaign of which he had been a part was well on the way to success, with Allied forces mopping up the central Solomons to claim Vella Lavella and Bougainville and put themselves in a position to cut off and neutralize Rabaul, key to the entire Japanese position in the South Pacific. By the end of the month they would capture Cape Gloucester, at the western end of New Britain. And days after that, a major air offensive would render Rabaul more or less useless to enemy aircraft and ships, leaving its 100,000-strong garrison bereft and strategically irrelevant.70

  Jack was granted thirty days’ leave starting upon arrival in the United States, and he would then report to Melville for his next assignment. He left Tulagi on the twenty-first, bound first for Espiritu Santo and then—aboard the USS Breton—San Francisco. He arrived on U.S. soil on January 7 and the following day headed south to Los Angeles, where he met with Inga Arvad, who had relocated there some months prior to write a gossip column called “Hollywood Today” for a national newspaper syndicate. (The FBI, having found no evidence she was engaged in espionage activities, had ceased its surveillance of her.)

  Any hopes Jack had of rekindling the romance were immediately dashed. Life had moved on, and so had Inga. In her son’s recollection, “she’d been through the thing about the old man’s violent objections and just didn’t want to go through it again.” She loved Jack, and when she saw his cadaverously thin frame in her doorway she felt a rush of maternal compassion; some part of her thought she would never feel the same way about any man ever again. But she knew that sooner or later Jack, if he had designs on a political career, would again conclude—as he had almost two years before—that he could not marry her. What’s more, Inga found she liked her new life as a Hollywood columnist and had no desire to give it up. To punctuate the new reality, she even introduced Jack to her new beau, William Cahan, a naval doctor. Jack got the message. At Inga’s apartment, he chatted amicably with Cahan about Harvard, football, and show business, but after a while it became clear that one of them would have to leave. Exit Jack.71

  But Inga had one parting gift for her love, in the form of a high-profile newspaper article that did much to cement the legend of Jack’s heroics in the Solomons. Based on an interview they conducted during his visit, the article—a puff piece that would be ethically problematic today—appeared in dozens of papers, including on page 1 of The Boston Globe on January 11, 1944, under the heading JFK TELLS STORY OF PT EPIC: KENNEDY LAUDS MEN, DISDAINS HERO STUFF. “This is the story of the 13 American men on PT Boat 109 who got closer than any others to a Japanese destroyer and of the 11 men who lived to tell about it,”
Inga began. She heaped praise on the skipper for swimming “long hours through shark-infested waters to rescue his men” and quoted his description of the moment of impact on the night of August 2: “I can best compare it to the onrushing trains in the old-time movies. They seemed to come right over you. Well, the feeling was the same, only the destroyer did not come over us, it went right through us.”

  Inga emphasized Jack’s reluctance to talk about himself and his preference for heaping praise on his crew. But there was also acclaim for him. Inga wrote of meeting Patrick McMahon’s wife, a resident of Los Angeles who “with tears in her eyes and a shaky voice…said, ‘When my husband wrote home, he told me that Lieutenant Kennedy was wonderful, that he saved the lives of all the men and everybody at the base admired him greatly.’ ”72

  Jack, however, rejected the hero label that Inga tried to pin on him. “None of that hero stuff about me,” the article quoted him as saying. “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.”73

  On the evening of January 10, just a few hours before the story ran, Jack Kennedy boarded an airplane in L.A., bound for points east. He was only on a thirty-day leave, but in his mind he had already made his determination: if he never saw another day of combat in his life, it would be too soon.

  *1 Jack’s crew aboard PT 109 that night consisted of: Executive Officer Leonard “Lennie” Thom, Sandusky, Ohio; Ensign George “Barney” Ross, Highland Park, Illinois; Seaman First Class Raymond Albert, Akron, Ohio; Gunner’s Mate Second Class Charles A. “Bucky” Harris, Watertown, Massachusetts; Motor Machinist’s Mate William Johnston, Dorchester, Massachusetts; Torpedoman Andrew Jackson Kirksey, Reynolds, Georgia; Radioman John E. Maguire, Dobbs Ferry, New York; Motor Machinist’s Mate Harold W. Marney, Springfield, Massachusetts; Seaman First Class Edgar E. Mauer, St. Louis, Missouri; Motor Machinist’s Mate Patrick (“Pappy” or “Pop”) McMahon, Wyanet, Illinois; Torpedoman Second Class Raymond Starkey, Garden Grove, California; and Motor Machinist’s Mate Gerard E. Zinser, Belleville, Illinois.