Victura

CHAPTER 5 )

War and Destiny

The family was together again at Hyannis Port in the early summer of 1941. But not for long. Both Joe Jr. and Jack in those months pursued enlistment in the armed services. The attack on Pearl Harbor was still months away, and the question of whether the United States should intervene against Hitler or any other aggressors was still a matter of great national debate. One wonders what Rose and Joe Sr. thought that summer as they looked out from their wide porch to the yard, the shore, and sea. What would come of their sons in such turbulent times?

From that porch they might have watched as Jack piloted Victura off into Nantucket Sound for a crossing he made one day that summer to Martha’s Vineyard. As Jack finished the crossing and entered the harbor at Edgartown, he saw an impressive eighty-foot gray powerboat, brought over from Newport by the navy and put on exhibition. It was a new warship for the U.S. Navy, though the British and other navies had tried them in other conflicts. As he walked its deck, Jack was impressed. It was a Motor Torpedo Boat, PT boat for short.1

Jack tried to enlist that summer. But in the years before 1941 his undiagnosed maladies had developed into intestinal disorders that kept him undernourished, and he started having back pain, for which he consulted an orthopedist.² Thus, for health reasons Jack was rejected by both the army and navy. He devoted that Cape summer to getting in shape and improving his diet.

Joe Jr. was more successful and was accepted for Naval Aviation Cadet training in May 1941. Joe Jr. started his military service at Squantum Naval Air Station, then located south of Boston, about a mile south across the bay from the site where Victura today is displayed on the lawn of the JFK Library and Museum. There Joe learned to fly and had his first solo in an open-cockpit yellow Stearman biplane.³ A Stearman is controlled with a stick, which might have felt familiar, like a sailboat’s tiller. Proximity to Cape Cod gave him an opportunity to return on leave to race Victura in a July 10 race over an eight-mile course.

Two months later the family reassembled at Hyannis Port for Joe Sr.’s fifty-third birthday, but Joe Jr. was absent. The navy had sent him to the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, to learn to fly PBM Mariners, an ungainly looking “flying boat.” Next he went south to Banana River, where Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center would later be situated. On May 6, 1942, Joe Jr. received his naval wings in his father’s presence. He spent the rest of 1942 as a flight instructor, a role he thought could get him the flight hours necessary to command a plane’s crew. The gambit worked and by January 1943 he was in Puerto Rico, and then Norfolk, Virginia, leading patrol missions in search of U-boats. No one knew with certainty that U-boats on the American side of the Atlantic were a rarity. None were found until June 1943, when another plane’s crew in Joe’s squadron made a sighting one hundred miles east of Norfolk. They dropped depth charges, but the sub slipped away.4 If that was all the action there was, Joe was ready to cross the Atlantic.

Jack was finally accepted into the navy. “I’d spent a lot of time in boats,” Jack said later. “Therefore, when it looked as if the war was coming, I was interested in joining the navy. My brother was in the navy, too. I think everyone who could headed in that direction, and I joined in September 1941.”⁵

He got in the navy through a side door—the Office of Naval Intelligence, where physical requirements were less demanding and medical scrutiny less strict. To get the necessary security clearance he needed endorsement letters, one of which came from Cape Cod neighbor Jack Daly, who said Jack had a “very active mind” and was a “damn good sailor.”⁶ Jack was assigned to a desk job in Washington DC, writing briefing papers and memos, unsatisfying work for men like Jack, who thought only combat duty met the nation’s needs. At around the same time Kick took a job at the Washington Times-Herald, so Jack had his sister and his buddy Lem Billings in Washington with him.

Jack’s day job might not have been much, but the after-hours social life was good. Kick introduced Jack to Inga Arvad, a columnist she met from her newspaper job, leading to what was surely Jack’s most exotic romantic relationship as a bachelor. She was Danish, had acted in two Danish films, and had been a freelance reporter covering news of high-ranking Nazis in Germany in 1935–36. She interviewed Hitler and was invited to sit in the Fuhrer’s box at the 1936 Olympics.7 Four years older than Jack, she was already twice married and ending her second marriage when she took up with Jack. When the FBI got wind of the ambassador’s son’s relationship, they wondered if she was some kind of Mata Hari. The navy reassigned Jack to new duty in Charleston. Some, including Jack, have speculated that it was to separate him from the suspicious “Inga Binga,” as he called her. They still managed to visit each other and continued to correspond through his tour of duty in the South Pacific.

In July 1942, seven months after Pearl Harbor, Jack’s desire to see more action was set in motion when he transferred to officer training at Northwestern University, on the lakefront just north of Chicago. As a junior officer, Jack now militarily outranked his brother Joe, a circumstance of no small emotional significance, given how intensely competitive the two had always been.⁸ During Jack’s time at Northwestern, a group of PT boat service recruiters arrived with Lt. John D. Bulkeley, an early hero of the war and Medal of Honor recipient. He had evacuated General MacArthur from the Philippines and sank a Japanese cruiser in Subic Bay, turning PT boat service into something glamorous back home.

Jack was among the candidates Bulkeley interviewed. Jack’s sailing experience and race credentials made him a strong candidate for torpedo boat school, whose recruiters prized seamanship, small boat experience, and knowledge of ship deck teamwork. In fact, torpedo boat recruiting drew heavily on the Ivy League set, which disproportionately contained men who grew up around Atlantic Coast yacht clubs.⁹

Jack spent much of 1942 at the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island. His friend Torby Macdonald shared a Quonset hut with him. Practice runs in Narragansett Bay were only about a fifty-mile crow’s flight from Hyannis Port, and they sometimes traveled the same waters he sailed in Victura, weather notwithstanding. “Jack phoned us tonight,” wrote Bobby, “and said he had just taken a trip in his PT Boat and had gone to Edgartown where the temperature was 10 below zero, which I’m sure must have been delightful. He is very proud of himself at the present because Torb, because of the trip, is flat on his back with the grip while he is still moving around.”10

Cape Cod as a whole was transformed that year for the war effort:

Beside huge sprawling Camp Edwards, there was a vastly expanded Coast Guard detachment operating between Sandwich and Province-town; a naval base at Woods Hole; an antiaircraft training center at Scorton Neck Beach, and two amphibian commando training units at Camp Can-Do-It in sleepy unspoiled Cotuit and in Waquoit, adjacent to Falmouth. Hyannis Airport had been activated as a simulated flattop for the training of Naval Air Corps cadets; later it became an Army Cir Corps antisubmarine base. A mock German village of fifteen buildings, complete in every detail from German signs to flower boxes and birdhouses, was erected ... to prepare soldiers-in-training with actual village warfare conditions.¹¹

Blackouts were held in July in preparation for possible attacks.

Nonetheless, from time to time Jack could return to Hyannis Port on leave and reclaim a bit of home life. He raced Victura to a third-place finish in June. Less successfully, Robert was near the back of the pack in a major Wianno Senior regatta, moved to Lewis Bay from Wianno to accommodate army training maneuvers. A three-boat contest of Wianno Juniors was held, with Pat and Eunice sailing in Tenovus and One More, but the non-Kennedy boat won.¹²

At times during Jack’s navy service, he would use his family’s shared experiences sailing at the Cape to illustrate what he was experiencing in the navy. “Received a letter from Jack before he left for Florida and he didn’t seem too sure he was going to make it seeing that he couldn’t even find the right buoys off Hyannis Port,” Robert reported to his parents.¹³ Jack’s references to sailing put his family in his shoes and perhaps betrayed some homesickness. The references to home port would come up again in his letters from the South Pacific.

His father told Joe Jr. that summer, “Jack came home and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back.” Jack valiantly concealed his recurrent back trouble from his military superiors. A nagging concern for his family, and perhaps a source of some self-doubt for Jack, was how his back would handle the wave pounding of a PT.

Jack shipped out of San Francisco and arrived in the South Pacific in April 1943. His PT boat squadron was based at Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. The Solomons are an extraordinary scattering of almost a thousand islands stretching along a 930-mile-long line of ocean east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia. Tulagi was 20 miles north of the biggest island, Guadalcanal. Eight months earlier the island of Tulagi, two miles long and half a mile wide, had been occupied by five hundred Japanese soldiers. The August 1942 invasion of Tulagi by U.S. Marines involved intensive fighting that cost the lives of almost all the Japanese and about forty-five Americans. The much larger battle for Guadalcanal started the same month but took longer and was a costlier enterprise, starting with a shore landing of eleven thousand marines, the first major Allied offensive in the Pacific theater. The Japanese enjoyed significant naval power superiority, especially in nighttime operations, but the allies prevailed and the enemy finally evacuated Guadalcanal in February, two months before Jack’s arrival at Tulagi. The naval confrontations were so intense that nearby waters were dubbed “Iron Bottom Sound.”14

Settling in at camp on Tulagi and adjusting to the routine of life near the naval front, Jack wrote a letter to Kick expressing homesickness and other mixed feelings typical of sailors at war: “Thank you for your last letter—but how about cutting down on terse telegram communiqués—and sitting down and writing a letter. You should be able to do it—Sissie was paying you 40 clams a week for that cool limpid style. . . . That bubble I had about lying on a cool pacific island with a warm pacific maiden hunting bananas for me is definitely a bubble that has burst.”

Jack said he ran into an old friend:

I took him over to the officers club and gave him some of my liquor chits and he polished off five scotches with no visible effect except he could hardly stand by the time I got him out. He was due to take his boat out that night, but as it’s a boat that is supposed to go up on beaches, he couldn’t go wrong. . . . He speaks very fondly of married life, but then they all do out here.... You’ve got no idea of the monotony of some of the jobs which fellows have to do with no recognition or even the occasional stimulant of getting your pants scared off. As a matter of fact this job is somewhat like sailing, in that we spend most of our time trying to get the boat running faster—although it isn’t just to beat Daly for the Kennedy Cup—it’s the Kennedy tail this time.¹⁵

Jack was referring to “Black Jack” Daly, a favorite Wianno Senior racing rival back home.

Jack’s letter also mentioned a May 1943 Life magazine portrayal of PT boat crews, written by John Hersey, the very journalist who married his ex-girlfriend Francis Ann Cannon, just fourteen months after she and Jack split up. “Speaking of John Hersey, I see his new book, ‘Into the Valley’ is doing well. He’s sitting on top of the hill at this point—a best seller—my girl—two kids—big man on Time [magazine]—while I’m the one that’s down in the god damned valley. That I suppose is life in addition to fortune knows God, say I.”16

For the well-to-do East Coast Ivy Leaguers like Jack, the war was often the first time they made friends with working-class Americans who never knew boarding schools, yachting, or summer homes—farmers, Midwesterners, middle-class kids. Hersey was describing men like Jack when he wrote his piece for Life. It told of PT boat crew members feeling left out of the larger war effort, relegated to merely harassing the enemy rather than winning tide-turning battles. Writing from the perspective of three PT boat captains in the first-person plural, a narrative device foreshadowing his later innovations in journalism, Hersey wrote,

But bitter as we were when we left [PT boat duty], we were at least friends. For the boat captains, at any rate, that was worth all the horrible things. We boat captains mostly went to Ivy League colleges. We had led sheltered lives. Another way of saying, that is, that we were snobs. To discover what the men in our boats were like was the best thing that could have happened to us.

The enlisted men on the PTS don’t get much glory these days but we couldn’t have done a thing without them. We value their loyalty and friendship. [One captain said] that the thing that pleased him most out there was not sinking a destroyer, not getting his Silver Star. It was having one of his men come up one day and say: “Skipper, don’t mind if I say this, but I hope to Christ we’ll have a chance to go out on a binge together someday.” They have.¹⁷

Crewing together on a sailboat off Cape Cod may have been a fine way to make friends, but crewing together on a warship is, of course, something altogether different. In the South Pacific Jack would win the loyalty of his comrades and crew when tested, and they became lifelong friends. He got off to a good start when he first arrived, getting his hands dirty with his crew, scraping, painting, and repairing the sorry-looking boat he was given to command—PT-109. The enlisted men probably had low expectations of an Ivy League yachtsman from a famous family, but Jack had a knack for treating everybody the same and never made too much of his rank or social status. He was a regular guy. As they scraped and sanded and rid the boat of rats and cockroaches, Jack told them it reminded him of home, of getting Victura ready for the season.

But being on night patrols on a relatively small wood navy powerboat at the frontline in war, torpedoes strapped starboard and port, juxtaposed the beauty of the South Pacific Sea with the horrors of confronting the Japanese. Jack wrote his parents, “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.”18 Such good nights may not have been the norm, but it reassured his parents.

On PT boats Jack made friendships of a different kind for him, folks he would never have met in his boarding schools or seaside estates. Horrible as the war was, the slow erosion of class distinctions was at least making halting progress with people like Jack. True, it only went so far, for there were no African American sailors on PT crews. The navy was particularly segregated. Back home that very summer, on a Detroit assembly line manufacturing PT boat engines, white employees shut down the line rather than work alongside black workers.¹⁹

“PT boats ought to be manned by cats,” Hersey wrote.²⁰ They always patrolled at night watching for enemy ships exploiting the cover of darkness. Boats doused lights, leaving only the moon, stars, and reflections from shore to give silhouettes that might be friend, foe, or nothing at all. They were surrounded by small islands, some occupied by the enemy, some by allies, many deserted. Jack was reminded of sailing at night at home and looked at the sky for familiar constellations, points of light all humanity shared, all through time, in all countries.

The South Pacific was no place for recreational racing, but Jack did let his need for speed and competitive instinct get the better of him. Rushing his PT boat back to a dock, he had a habit of leaving the throttle well forward until the last moment, then throwing the engines into reverse to brake it to a quick stop. This was not advised for PT boats. The engines were so unreliable that a maneuver like that could kill the engine and leave it like a racing car without brakes. That was precisely how Jack accidentally rammed a dock, causing no small damage. He might have been severely disciplined, but the authorities were apparently too distracted by other concerns to make a big issue of it.

The PT boats with which Jack served were on the lookout for the Tokyo Express—racing destroyers that the Japanese used for rapid troop movement. PT boats watched for them at night and sought to intercept, harass, terrorize, and torpedo them. One August night was too dark even for silhouettes; it was like being “in a closet with the door shut,” recalled one of Jack’s crew.21 Said Jack, “It was one of those tropical black nights without a star or the moon and the Japs were taking advantage of the darkness to try to relieve their garrison at Kolombangara. The job of our boats was to stop them from doing so.”²²

Jack’s PT-109 had a crew of thirteen, several of them helping to keep watch. Boats ran slow to minimize the phosphorescent wake that helped enemy aircraft spot targets. Jack, at the wheel, had just one of his three engines in gear, a common practice. A crewman saw a distant dark shape, but no one’s straining eyes could tell what it was.

“Ship at two o’clock!” someone shouted. Boats, whether powered by wind or engine, respond to steering with agonizing sluggishness when underpowered, and Jack had just the one engine engaged. He spun the wheel. Minimal response. There has been some speculation that Jack might have too quickly thrust his three throttles forward, stalling the engines. Whatever the case, he had an unresponsive PT boat and no time to get it moving.

“Sound general quarters!” Jack yelled. By then they saw the Japanese destroyer doing perhaps forty knots right at them, growing giant as seconds passed. It sliced through the water, then sliced right through PT-109’s wooden hull. Two members of the crew, Harold Marney and Andrew Jackson Kirksey, were probably killed at once. Jack was thrown against the cockpit wall; only the angle of impact saved him from being crushed too. Patrick McMahon was in the engine room with no knowledge of what was happening. At one moment he was checking gauges on an idling motor, the next he was surrounded by flames and then underwater. His face and hands were badly burned. Charles “Bucky” Harris, alarmed by a crewmate’s shout, looked up, saw the destroyer’s bow heading right at him, and leapt. Still in the air on impact, something rose up and struck him hard in the thigh. He wound up in the water. William Johnston was thrown in the water too and could watch, as did Jack, as the huge hull powered through the wreckage. Johnston could see the destroyer’s crew, but then he was suddenly caught in the propeller’s wake and sucked underwater. Like McMahon, he finally made it to the surface, beating away flames to breathe.

Another PT boat’s crew saw the impact from a distance. The record isn’t entirely clear, but they apparently thought PT-109’s explosion so horrendous that the chance of finding survivors was too small to risk staying behind with Japanese destroyers racing about. Survivors there were, however, and Jack and three other crew were still on what remained of the PT boat’s bow. Watertight chambers below kept the wreck afloat. “Everybody into the water,” Jack yelled to those still on board. With flames all around he was afraid the boat would explode. The destroyer’s wake cleared enough of the flames aside to give them a place to jump. PT-109 had a crew of thirteen that day, but floating with Jack were only two, John Maguire and Edgar Mauer. As the flames subsided so did the apparent danger of an explosion. The three climbed back aboard and used a light to signal the others in case any were swimming in search of the boat.

They heard a voice and Maguire went back in the water, despite the choking fumes all around, and helped three additional crew back to the boat. Other voices called for help, and this time Jack swam to them. By now the flames were doused completely and the pitch-black night was the new threat. “I’m over here ... where are you?” Jack called out. “This way,” they responded. Jack made it to them, but McMahon, who had been in the engine room, was too badly injured to swim, though he had a flotation vest. The other man, Harris, had an injured leg but seemed in better shape. Jack slowly towed McMahon back to the boat, guided there by the calls from the crew. Harris started falling behind, his left leg failing him and drowsiness taking over. Jack tried urging him on, and Harris swam a little more, then quit. With McMahon returned to the boat, Jack returned to Harris, calling his name until he found him.

Jack, frustrated, said, “For a guy from Boston, you’re certainly putting up a great exhibition out here, Harris.” Harris cursed Jack for making light of his situation, then got Jack to help him pull a heavy sweater and jacket off. With a lighter load, Harris could paddle back. Johnston needed help too, his lungs and stomach filled with heat and fumes, coughing violently and vomiting. Leonard Thom pulled him back to the wreck. The last of the missing survivors was Raymond Starkey, who drifted alone, unsure what to do. Eventually he spotted the boat and swam to it. That left two still missing, fate unknown. They drifted there in the blackness for the rest of the night, calling out, “Kirksey ... Marney,” every now and then. “Kirksey . . . Marney,” repeated through the night. The collision caused a ringing in their heads that slowly waned. So too did their discussion about what to do next. The sound of the night sea’s silence and their vulnerability occupied their minds until dawn.

~ Daylight brought more discussion of what to do. Jack, the skipper, abandoned rank. “There’s nothing in the book about a situation like this. Seems to me we’re not a military organization any more. Let’s just talk this over,” said Jack.23

They knew where they were geographically, but situationally they were adrift, exposed in broad daylight, surrounded by islands, some occupied by Japanese, some perhaps not. They had wet side arms that may or may not fire, some knives, and no first aid kit. By midday, to ensure they had enough daylight left, they took what meager supplies and weapons they had and slipped back into the water. They all had flotation vests. Jack said he would take the badly injured McMahon, and the others wrapped their arms around a wooden plank to stay together. They picked a destination they thought close enough to PT boat cruising areas and started paddling.

The definitive account of PT-109 comes from Robert J. Donovan, whose 1961 book recounts Jack and McMahon’s venture, with the rest of the crew swimming separately:

McMahon, sure that death was only a matter of time, remained silent when Kennedy helped him into the water, which stung his burns cruelly. In the back of his kapok a three-foot-long strap ran from the top to a buckle near the bottom. Kennedy swam around behind him and tried to unbuckle it, but the strap had grown so stiff from the immersion that it wouldn’t slide through. McMahon was surprised at the matter-of-fact way Kennedy went about it all. It was as if he did this sort of thing every day. After tugging the strap a few times Kennedy took out his knife and cut it. Then he clamped the loose end in his teeth and began swimming the breast stroke. He and McMahon were back to back. Kennedy was low in the water under McMahon, who was floating along on his back with his head behind Kennedy’s.24

For hours Jack swam, swallowing water, jaw aching from the pull of the strap. When he periodically stopped to rest, McMahon would ask, “How far do we have to go?” Jack’s reply was always along the lines of “We’re going good, how do you feel, Mac?” McMahon’s reply was always, “I’m OK, Mr. Kennedy. How about you?”²⁵

It took them some five hours to cross three and a half miles of water to reach Plum Pudding Island, a hundred yards in diameter with enough foliage to provide hiding space. Since the collision Jack had been in the water for more than fifteen hours except for short intervals floating on the PT wreckage. They were completely exhausted. They weighed options and came to agree their only chance would be to somehow signal a PT boat on night patrol in Ferguson Passage, two or three miles away. They had a ship’s light and a pistol they hoped would work. Despite his exhaustion, Jack told the men he would go. The others thought Jack’s chances too slim and tried to talk him out of it. After nightfall, he went anyway. He stripped to his undershorts, shoes, and a flotation belt and carried the light and pistol. He made his way though water mostly shallow enough to allow him to stumble along an uneven coral bottom, made harder by the darkness. Sometimes it was deeper and he had to swim. He saw the shapes of large fish and mostly did not know what he was stepping on or swimming through.

It took hours to get to Ferguson Passage. He floated far offshore to where he hoped he might intercept a passing PT boat. He floated there in darkness for hours more. He saw lights and boat movement miles in the distance, but this night no one came through the passage. Eventually he allowed the realization to set in that the boats were taking another route, patrolling another area, the first time they had done that in many days. They sent no boats or planes to search for the crew of PT-109, and now they did not even patrol the same waters as they had the previous days. Hours of pulling McMahon, hours making his way to Ferguson Passage and waiting, treading water there, exhausted him further.

Jack gave up. He tried to make his way back toward the island and his crew, but now a current pulled him in another direction and he hadn’t the strength to fight it. “He thought he had never known such deep trouble,” said one account, based on an interview with Jack a few months later:

He stopped trying to swim. He seemed to stop caring. His body drifted through the wet hours, and he was very cold. His mind was a jumble. A few hours before he had wanted desperately to get to the base at Rendova. Now he only wanted to get back to the little island he had left that night, but he didn’t try to get there; he just wanted to. His mind seemed to float away from his body. Darkness and time took the place of a mind in his skull. For a long time he slept, or was crazy, or floated in a chill trance.26

He drifted that way until dawn and with light returned consciousness. Amazingly, he was still roughly where he was the night before, within swimming distance of a little island close to his crew’s island. The currents in the islands were not all linear; some took circular routes. He made it ashore and fell hard asleep.

~ The men feared Jack was lost. But late that morning Maguire looked out and saw a figure in the water approaching their island. As the figure drew closer they were happy that it was Jack, but he looked awful. They helped him to the bushes and soon he fell asleep. Before he did he looked at George “Barney” Ross and said, “Barney, you try it tonight.” Ross never liked the plan, but if Kennedy could do it he could. He was somewhat better rested than Jack had been when he set out, and he had Jack’s advice on how to get out to the passage. He tried it, but again the night passed without PT boats. Ross went back ashore on the same small island Jack had found and slept, returning to the men late that morning. The men were disheartened, hungry, and thirsty; small amounts of coconut juice were all they had to drink. McMahon’s burn injuries needed treatment. It was clear they were given up for dead by the men at the base. They did not know that a memorial service had already been held for their lost souls, and one officer wrote his own mother that George Ross and Jack were dead. “Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, was on the same boat [as George] 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.”27

They decided to move to Olasana Island, closer to Ferguson Passage and about one and three-quarter miles away. Again, Jack towed McMahon and the rest swam together with the plank of wood. Luckily they encountered no Japanese on their new island, but they did find more coconut trees. They spent the night there but did not make another attempt at swimming into Ferguson Passage. It rained and they licked rainwater from leaves.

The collision with the destroyer happened at two thirty in the morning of Monday, August 2. It was now Thursday morning. At a loss for options, Jack looked across the water at another small island called Naru, half a mile away. With no clear purpose in mind, Jack asked Ross to join him for the swim to Naru so they could explore. Once ashore, they crossed to the opposite side, which directly faced Ferguson Passage, a location that made it a risk for the presence of Japanese. They walked the shore and saw the wreck of a small ship, then a crate on the beach that contained hard candy. Then what must have seemed a miracle: they found a dugout canoe with a tin of rainwater. This offered all kinds of possibilities. Jack and Ross drank from the tin.

Back in Hyannis Port, Joe Sr. was informed by friends that his son was missing in the South Pacific. For days he told neither Rose nor anyone else in the family.

~ Up to 1943, as Japanese forces occupied an ever-expanding region of the Pacific, there was a very real fear that even Australia and New Zealand were threatened by invasion. In the island territories occupied by the Japanese, they faced resistance from two peoples. One consisted of Australian expatriates who served as “coast watchers,” using secret observation posts to collect and relay to Allied forces intelligence about Japanese ship and troop movements. The other pocket of resistance consisted of the aboriginal native population, many of whom to this day live in traditional huts without electricity and whose diet consists of coconuts, other gathered foods, and fish caught using dugout canoes and spears. They are the descendents of an ancient people who, over tens of thousands of years, gradually introduced human habitation to new islands in the South Pacific, migrating from one island to the next in their little dugouts.

Among these aboriginal peoples were great seafarers, crossing vast oceans in canoes outfitted with sails, navigating in ways still unknown, to impossibly remote islands. There are today still pockets of islanders who speak ancient languages that predate not just the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century but even the arrival four thousand years ago of speakers of the Austronesian language. Their small villages formed communities that for centuries stayed largely autonomous, preserving distinct tongues, so that Melanesia still has the world’s largest diversity of languages concentrated in the smallest area. More than 1,300 distinct languages are spoken on the islands that arc across the northeast coast of Australia.28 They are one of the few dark-skinned people in the world who are sometimes born with blond hair not genetically traceable to Europeans. The Japanese invaders treated them brutally, driving many to the side of the Allies.

Two native scouts for the Allied forces were named Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana. They worked closely with an Australian named Reginald Evans, a sublieutenant who occupied a secret lookout on a volcano on the Japanese-occupied island of Kolombangara, a peak that rose above Blackett Strait, where PT-109 was sunk. Gasa and Kumana paddled from island to island in their dugouts, reporting on Japanese movements to Evans, who relayed the information on his radio. One night the two Melanesians heard an explosion offshore and saw big flames rising from a boat. Evans saw it too and in the morning saw wreckage afloat. He sent the scouts to investigate and perhaps look for survivors. They found nothing. Four more days went by. They paddled by the island of Naru and saw the wreckage of a Japanese ship in a reef just offshore. They climbed onto the wreckage and poked around, looking for anything salvageable. Suddenly, a mile away on the beach they saw two light-skinned men who they assumed were Japanese. Gasa and Kumana ran to their canoe and fled. The two light-skinned men were Jack and Ross, and they saw the natives too. From that distance Jack and Ross thought Gasa and Kumana were Japanese. Jack and Ross fled too.

As Gasa and Kumana paddled away from Naru, they grew thirsty and stopped for coconuts on Olasana Island. Once ashore, they spotted another light-skinned man and turned to run. By chance, they had come upon the rest of the crew of PT-109. The crew did not know what to make of the two black men. Lenny Thom took a gamble and approached them.

“Navy, navy,” he yelled. “Americans, Americans.”

Gasa and Kumana spoke almost no English and did not trust this man.

“Me no Jap.” Then Thom pointed to the sky. “White star, white star.” For some reason this clicked. The natives knew white stars were painted on the wings of American aircraft. Eventually, Gasa and Kumana were confident enough to pull their canoe ashore and hide it in the bushes near the crew. Later, Jack returned to Olasana in the other canoe and discovered his smiling crew with two new friends.

The famous idea of using the two natives as messengers did not immediately occur to them. With two canoes at their disposal, they must have been reluctant to send one of them off. Instead, Jack asked Ross to join him in paddling a canoe out into Ferguson Passage for one more attempt at hailing a PT boat. The weather had taken a turn, however, and the waves beyond the reef were too big for a canoe. Jack was more accustomed to braving extreme weather, but Ross objected. They tried anyway and capsized.

“Sorry I got you out here, Barney,” said Jack, as they struggled with the boat and waves.

“This would be a great time to say I told you so, but I won’t,” he answered.

The next day Jack took Gasa with him to Naru for yet another look at Ferguson Passage. At around the same time Jack on Naru and Thom on Olasana had the same idea. Send for help with the natives as messengers. Jack could find nothing to write on, so he took a coconut and used his knife to carve a note:

NAURO ISL.

NATIVE KNOWS POSIT

HE CAN PILOT II ALIVE. NEED

SMALL BOAT

KENNEDY

Years later Ted Kennedy was interviewed on the subject of Cape Cod sailboat races, and he brought up PT-109. “No question in my mind that the fact of his [Jack’s] association both with sailing [Wianno] Seniors, the competition that he had with that, the knowledge of the sea, was absolutely indispensable in saving his life in the Pacific when his ship was sunk by the Japanese, and he was able to save directly the two men who he dragged to shore, [and] save the rest of his crew as well. And I am absolutely convinced it was those lessons that he learned on the Victura and racing Seniors that made such a big difference.”30

~ Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was driving his car home from a trip to Osterville with the radio on. Suddenly he heard his son’s name. John F. Kennedy had survived six days lost in the South Pacific after his boat was rammed by a destroyer. It so stunned Joe that he drove off the road.³¹ Joe still had told no one at home that Jack was missing. Sometime after he returned to the house, Rose came running to him, crying. She too had the radio on. “They say Jack’s been saved. Saved from what?”³² Eleven-year-old Teddy and his sister and friends rode bicycles to a newsstand to buy papers for their parents. There a front-page story caught Teddy’s eye. The Boston Herald had a drawing of a PT boat being rammed by a much bigger ship, accompanied by a story of Jack’s crew.³³

“I was dumbfounded,” Ted said. “I hadn’t been told anything about it.”³⁴

Some have said that Jack’s older brother, Joe, while certainly happy for his brother’s survival, grew jealous of his sudden fame. He was still flying missions from bases in the United States when he got the news. When the family heard nothing from Joe, their father wrote him to express his disappointment in his lack of curiosity about Jack’s well-being. When Joe Jr. finally wrote home on August 29, he made light of everything: “With the great quantity of reading material coming in on the actions of the Kennedys in 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 and Virginia Beach . . . will now step to the microphone and give out with a few words of his own activities.”³⁵

Later that summer, Joe had time on leave to visit Hyannis Port for his father’s birthday. During that furlough, Joe Jr. took Victura out for a sail in the waters in front of the big house. He also demonstrated his new skills as a pilot by borrowing a training plane from the Hyannis Airport and buzzing the harbor and waterfront. Airport authorities soon told him to cut it out; several people had called to complain.³⁶ At a party for Joe Sr., the police commissioner, Joe Timilty, gave a toast: “To Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” Unmentioned in the toast, Joe Jr. apparently could not hide the offense taken. Timilty that night took a guest bed in a room shared with Joe Jr. and claims he heard Joe cry.37

Joe Jr. got up the next morning, glanced at the house and at Nantucket Sound, and left to report for duty in Norfolk. He would never return to Hyannis Port.

~ With the crew of PT-109 safely returned to Tulagi and on the mend, Jack had a debriefing with authorities to anticipate. He was a hero to his crew, and reporters were on hand for their return to base, so their survival story was quickly told across the country back home. But Jack had to wonder how his loss of the boat and two crew would be viewed by his superiors. Engaging the enemy is one thing; unintentionally idling right into the path of a speeding Japanese destroyer, one he was supposed to instead be attacking with torpedoes, was something else. His snide brother Joe later asked Jack questions Jack’s superiors might ask. “What I really want to know is where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar?”³⁸ It all left Jack feeling guilty. He was skipper and at the wheel when the collision killed two of his crew. For a long time afterward, when asked about his heroism, he replied, “It was involuntary—they sank my boat.” His survival also left him thirsty for revenge against the Japanese, more risk prone and impulsive, willing to volunteer for dangerous missions when others in his place might have felt they had done their duty.

It was what Jack did to save his crew after the collision that impressed everyone most. He and Thom both received promotions, command of new PT boats, and the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Jack also earned a Purple Heart for his injuries. His father tried to get him home, but Jack wanted to stay and sought command of a new boat. This he received—PT-59—and some of his PT-109 crew volunteered to serve with him again, even though their “new” boat was old and retrofitted as a gunboat without torpedoes. With Jack at the wheel, it saw a lot of action evacuating marines. On one occasion, again as always on a night mission, Jack had to expose PT-59 to enemy fire from shore to rescue about forty-five marines from a damaged boat they were unsuccessfully trying to use for their escape. The marines clamored onto Jack’s boat, occupying every square foot of its deck. The worst-injured marine, Corp. Edward James Schnell of Wilmette, Illinois, was carried below and laid in Jack’s bunk. PT-59 delivered the marines to yet another boat for their final voyage to safety, but they kept Schnell aboard so they could rush him to where he could get emergency medical attention. As they pressed on, Jack checked on Schnell from time to time. He grew worse. Before they could reach their destination, Schnell died in Jack’s bunk.

In September, the sinking of his ship fresh in mind, Jack wrote to tell his father that Bobby was still too young for Pacific duty. “To try to come steaming out here at 18 is no good. . . . It’s just that the fun goes out of war in a fairly short time and I don’t think Bobby is ready to come out yet. I also think Joe is nuts to come. He’s doing more than his share by merely flying.”39

He wrote a war-weary letter to Inga too, expressing emotions he wouldn’t convey to a brother or sister, and perhaps also tugging strings for sympathy from a woman he hoped to see again. Perhaps, too, he was thinking of her status as a journalist who would appreciate his perspective from the front.

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 to 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 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 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 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 it 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’d say it to anyway. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an extremely bright twenty-six years.40

~ Prolonged PT boat duty was physically punishing for a man who had battled illness, stomach maladies, and a bad back since childhood. Jack’s symptoms of ill health returned and multiplied. His skin was yellow, a navy doctor said he had a duodenal ulcer, and back pains returned. His weight dropped to 120 pounds. X-rays led a doctor at Tulagi to diagnose “chronic disc disease.”⁴¹ Nine months after arriving in the Solomon Islands, Jack was ordered home. He missed getting home for Christmas, arriving in San Francisco on January 7, 1944.

He made it to Los Angeles and saw Inga. No doubt he still had feelings for her; what homesick warrior returning home to a beautiful girlfriend would not hope for the warmest kind of reunion. But it appears she had a new beau, and their reunion was as friends. She was still a working journalist too, and their talk shifted from conversation to interview. Inga, apparently unconcerned about her capacity for objective journalism, wrote a glowing account of Jack’s heroism that was picked up within a week of Jack’s stateside return by the Boston Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other newspapers. Her account began in part, “This is the story ... about the skipper hero, 26-year-old Lt. John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, now home on leave, who though he saved three lives and swam for long hours in shark-infested waters to rescue his men, today says, ‘None of the hero stuff about me . . . ’”

For her article Inga interviewed the wife of the crewmate Jack had towed to safety by pulling his strap with his teeth. “With tears in her eyes and a shaky voice she said, ‘when my husband wrote home, he told me that Lt. Kennedy saved the lives of all the men and everybody at the base admired him greatly. I wrote and told Lt. Kennedy that “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 .”’”42 That was the sentence Jack quoted in his letter to Inga.

Only days later, yet another of Jack’s former romantic attachments had a hand in yet another major news account of Jack’s heroism, though this time the girlfriend’s role was indirect. Visiting New York, Jack paid a visit to an old flame, Frances Ann Cannon, and her new husband, John Hersey. Listening to Jack’s PT-109 experience, Hersey thought it would make a good subject for an article he would pitch to Life magazine. Hersey then wrote a gripping account with Jack as the central character that began, “Our men in the South Pacific fight nature, when they are pitted against her, with a greater fierceness than they could ever expend on an enemy.” Hersey wrote, “I asked Kennedy if I might write the story down. He asked me if I wouldn’t talk first with some of his crew.” Hersey interviewed three crewmen, and all spoke glowingly of their commander. Then, afterward, Hersey interviewed Jack, who was by then recovering from back surgery in a Boston hospital. Although Hersey was at the start of a successful career, winning a Pulitzer Prize that very year for the novel A Bell for Adano, his account of PT-109 was rejected by Life as too long. It was published instead in the June 17 New Yorker and titled “Survival.” Though pleased by the article, the Kennedys would have preferred Life’s larger circulation. Never one to accept less than a complete success, Joe used his influence to persuade Reader’s Digest to run a condensed version of “Survival” in August. Reader’s Digest had an even bigger circulation than Life, and Joe still had 150,000 additional reprints made. The story of PT-109 was becoming seafaring legend.

~ In the summer of 1944, Jack was at home in Hyannis Port recuperating from surgeries on his back and rectum, neither of which were successful. He rested much of the time on a wicker chair on the veranda, watching boats sail in and out of the harbor. Bob, now nineteen, enlisted in the Naval Reserve and set to enter Harvard in the fall, was sailing Victura in Jack’s stead, though not particularly well. He placed last in the Edgartown Regatta the previous year, still not mastering the sport the way his brothers did. At least he enjoyed himself. It might have been a happy time, especially with Jack safe, home and enjoying new fame as a war hero. Instead, the five months from May to September 1944 proved to be one of the most crushing and trying periods ever for the Kennedys, a family known for its large share of trials.

A year earlier in the summer of 1943, Kick had returned to London and was working for the Red Cross. In addition to serving the war effort, it was an opportunity to return to England, which she had come to love during the ambassadorial years. It also became an opportunity to rekindle a relationship with Billy Cavendish, Marquis of Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire and one of England’s most eligible bachelors. They had been an item before, and their renewed appearances together sparked much gossip, particularly because he was Protestant and she Irish Catholic.

Joe Jr. was also assigned to duty in England and arrived not long after Kick, bearing a gift for her from Hyannis Port. On the way over he teased a fellow pilot that—engine problems notwithstanding—there would be no delay in landing. “I can’t stick around and circle. I’ve got a crate of eggs for my sister.”43 Given that eggs were rationed in England, it was exceptionally precious cargo. Later, a member of Joe’s crew told Kathleen, “I certainly hope you enjoyed those eggs. There wasn’t anything Mr. Kennedy didn’t make our plane do on the excuse that those eggs should arrive fresh and unbroken.”⁴⁴ On arrival he was stationed some distance from London, but Joe and Kathleen spoke by phone two or three times a week, and when he visited London he made sure to see her every day. They also enjoyed an enviable social life together. They dined at the Savoy with war correspondent William Randolph Hearst, and when Kick threw a party for Joe, Irving Berlin showed up to play the piano and lead the guests in song.

By early 1944 Kick and Billy Cavendish grew serious. Informed by Kick of their intent to wed, Joe and Rose expressed firm opposition, especially Rose. A Catholic does not abandon faith in God, Rose believed, merely for the love of a man. Rose’s telegram to Kick said, “Heartbroken. . . . Feel you have been wrongly influenced—sending Arch Spellman’s friend [Archbishop Godfrey] to talk to you. Anything done for our Lord will be rewarded hundred fold.”45 They sought a way to structure a marriage or raise children in some way acceptable to religious authorities, but there was no Catholic, Protestant, or Anglican solution satisfactory to all sides. They hoped Joe Sr. might pull strings, but that was not to be. With the invasion of Europe looming and Billy headed into battle, they wanted to act fast. They announced their engagement on May 4, 1944, and were joined in a civil ceremony two days later, Joe Jr. the only Kennedy family member in attendance.

Joe Jr.’s communiqués home kept the family informed about the marital negotiations, and he helped Kick arrive at legal settlements necessary to become a Cavendish. Joe Sr. had earlier chastised his eldest son for not communicating after Jack’s PT-109 incident; now the table was turned. Joe wired his father: “The power of silence is great.” Their father sent Kick a telegram: “With your faith in God you can’t make a mistake. Remember you are still and always will be tops with me. Love Dad.”⁴⁶ Rose still communicated nothing. Worsening the situation, the drama of Kick’s romance played out in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. It was too good a personification of the ongoing drama of American-British cooperation in the war effort at the time of D-Day.

Kick later said of her brother,

Never did anyone have such a pillar of strength as I had in Joe in those difficult days before my marriage. From the beginning he gave me wise, helpful advice. When he felt that I had made up my mind, he stood by me always. He constantly reassured me and gave me renewed confidence in my own decision. Moral courage he had in abundance and once he felt that a step was right for me, he never faltered, although he might be held largely responsible for my decision. He could not have been more helpful and in every way he was the perfect brother doing, according to his own light, the best for his sister with the hope that in the end it would be the best for the family. How right he was!47

One after another, the days of June ticked off moments of lasting consequence for the Kennedys. Kick and Billy were married only a month when D-Day occurred on June 6. On June 13 the Germans first targeted a new weapon on London—the V-I, or buzz bomb, a winged, pilotless, jetpowered flying bomb that was as terrifying as it was destructive. A dangerous mission to destroy the V-I ‘s launching facilities near Calais, France, using another experimental flying weapon conjured up by the Americans, would be piloted by Joe in a few weeks’ time. On June 17, as Jack recuperated at Hyannis Port, the New Yorker article about PT-109 appeared. Billy’s company was called to duty June 20.

~ Joe Jr., groomed to lead and ambitious all his life, by now felt surpassed by Jack. Joe won his promotion to full lieutenant, but Jack had achieved that faster. Jack was now a champion sailor, a Harvard scholar–turned-author, and a celebrity war hero. Joe might have wondered if he could ever be that good, but they all learned from racing sailboats that just because you are behind at any given time, does not mean the wind and current will not favor you in the final leg. It would be easy to attribute Joe’s motivation to jealousy and sibling rivalry. Ascribing such feelings to him unjustly oversimplifies Joe’s motives for volunteering for every dangerous mission offered him. Joe was unquestionably brave. He stepped forward when duty called. Doing that, no matter the motivation, defines a hero.

Joe’s roommate in the squadron, Louis Pappas, said, “There was never an occasion for a mission that meant extra hazard that Joe did not volunteer for. He had everybody’s unlimited admiration and respect for his courage, zeal and willingness to undertake the most dangerous mission.”⁴⁸

It has also been suggested that Joe, bred to win, was driven by an excessive need to please his father. But their father was clearly worried about his children and had no desire to see them in harm’s way. When Joe wrote in March that he might have to fly ten more missions beyond the thirty that made him eligible to be relieved, his father replied, “I sincerely hope that they’ll call it a day at 30.”49 On July 26 Joe wrote his parents, “I am going to be doing something different for the next three weeks. It is secret, and I am not allowed to say what it is, but it isn’t dangerous so don’t worry. So probably I won’t be home till sometime in September.”⁵⁰ Joe Sr. replied, “I can quite understand how you feel about staying there . . . but don’t force your luck too much.”⁵¹

~ At their peak V-I buzz bombs, “doodlebugs,” as they were also known, were falling at a rate of a hundred a day on London and southeast England. In her diary Kick wrote of them and of “the inability to hit back at a human target.” Kick continued, “People are absolutely terrified and one senses that they are always listening first for them to arrive and next for the sound that the dreaded engine has stopped,” signaling it would fall and explode somewhere near.⁵² Joe Jr. told his parents that Kick “is terrified of the Doodles as is everyone else, and I think she is smart not to work in London.”⁵³

The V-I was developed at a secret rocket research facility near Peenemunde, Germany, on the Baltic Sea. Along with the V-I, scientists there also created the V-2 ballistic missile, fired at London for the first time on September 8, 1944. The v-2 looked like something out of early science fiction and rocketed at multiples of the speed of sound. Though not an effective weapon for the Germans, the liquid-fueled v-2 was the precursor to all the Cold War ballistic missiles that came in the following decades, including those that could carry nuclear weapons across continents and men into space.

A principal Peenemunde scientist and v-2 engineer was Wernher von Braun. When the Allies finally entered Germany, von Braun surrendered himself and many of his fellow rocket scientists to American soldiers. Before long, they were building rockets for the United States and, in time, von Braun became a central figure in the space race to the moon that Jack would initiate. But von Braun’s days as one of President Kennedy’s chief rocket engineers were two decades ahead. At the time of Joe’s service in England, von Braun was filling that role for Adolf Hitler.

~ There were several V-I launch sites along the coast of France, and Allied forces diverted enormous resources to bombing missions aimed at taking them out. Heavily fortified, they were hard to destroy using conventional aerial bombing or artillery. Thus, Operation Aphrodite was conceived, a project for which Joe volunteered. Old, war-worn B-17 Flying Fortresses and PB4Y bombers were stripped of all weight except that which was necessary to get airborne. The planes were then packed solid with twelve or more tons of Torpex explosive, 50 percent more powerful than TNT. Rather than drop bombs, the planes were themselves a single enormous missile that would be flown by radio control directly into their targets.

Its crew canopy was removed so that two men—a pilot and engineer —could get it airborne before parachuting to safety while still over England. Control devices on the pilotless plane would afterward keep it on its path, radio controlled by a remote pilot on a trailing plane. The drone had two television cameras so the remote pilot could see its instrument panel and view of the ground. The top of the plane was painted white to make it more easily seen from above against the background of the earth below.

Piloting these flying bombs was strictly voluntary. Only half a dozen attempts at these missions had been tried, most dismal failures, none of them deemed entirely successful, two of which were fatal to their pilots. Joe signed on nonetheless and his turn as pilot came on August 12, 1944. The day before he was to fly he called William Randolph Hearst’s wife, Lorelle, in London and told her, “I’m about to go into my act. If I don’t come back, tell my dad—despite our differences—that I love him very much.”54

~ On the evening before his mission, Joe rode his Raleigh bicycle to make a final inspection of his plane, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin. “The bomber . . . sat, huge and clumsy, on the field, her body already so crammed with explosives that she seemed about to squash her tires.... He pedaled back to base, scrambled some eggs for his roommate and himself, and then, as he always did before turning in, he knelt on the floor to pray.”⁵⁵

The mission was to be flown in the early evening, and it was not until two in the afternoon that Joe was told the secret of his target. It was to be a V-I launch site at tiny Mimoyecques, eight miles southwest of Calais. Of all the V-I sites, this was closest to London.

Three planes would accompany Joe’s, one of which serendipitously carried Franklin Roosevelt’s son Elliott, an “Iliad-level” detail of the story, as one writer called it, referring to the son of one president flying with the son of the father of another president.56 Elliott planned to photograph the crew’s bailout.

Ensign James Simpson helped Joe get his plane ready for departure: “I was in the plane testing and double checking three minutes before takeoff. I shook hands with Joe and said, ‘So long and good luck, Joe. I only wish I were going with you.’ He answered, ‘Thanks Jim, don’t forget you’re going to make the next one with me. Say, by the way, if I don’t come back, you fellows can have the rest of my eggs.’”⁵⁷

Shortly before 6 p.m. Joe’s plane made its lumberous way down the airstrip, left the ground, and responded sluggishly to his steering, compared to what he was accustomed to in PB4YS not so laden with heavy explosives. Joe banked, pointed the plane toward Calais, and reached two thousand feet, the planned maximum altitude to stay below German radar. The target was only an hour away. Into the microphone Joe said, “spade flush,” code words signaling the remote pilot to take control of his plane. Control was successfully transferred, and the TV cameras were transmitting a signal adequate for the remote pilot to see by. As the plane approached Newdelight Wood, at 6:20, a radio command was sent to bank the plane slightly left. At that instant the plane erupted with two enormous blasts, each a second apart.

Elliott Roosevelt saw it happen, then felt the shock wave violently hit his twin-engine Mosquito aircraft. Control of a nearby B-17 was almost lost, and its crew considered bailing out. One thought it was the biggest explosion he’d ever seen, other than later pictures of the atomic bomb. Joe vanished.

~ At Hyannis Port, the afternoon of Sunday, August 13, was warm and sunny enough for lunch on the porch, picnic style. Afterward, as was his habit, Joe Sr. went upstairs for a nap while the children gathered in the sunroom, softening their voices to avoid disturbing their father, listening to a recording of Bing Crosby singing, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Gathered there were Jack, Ted, cousin Joey Gargan, Jean, Eunice, and a friend of Eunice’s. There was a knock at the door, and Rose saw two Catholic priests on her porch. They asked to see Joe Sr. Such visits by clergy were not out of the ordinary, so Rose explained that her husband was resting and asked if they could join the family in the living room until Joe returned downstairs. Their message was urgent, they said, and could not wait. It concerned Joe Jr. They said Joe Jr. was reported missing in action the day before.

“I flew upstairs, hesitated, stumbled,” Rose said, and told Joe about the visitors and their news. The children had overheard words such as “missing” and “lost.” Joe and Rose invited the priests into a room where they could talk privately. There they were given fuller details, as much as could be said about a secret mission. There was no hope; Joe was dead.58

The children waited, sensing something awful was happening. Joe opened the door and his face conveyed as much as his voice. Tears in his eyes, he said, “Children, your brother Joe has been lost. He died flying a volunteer mission.” Then he added, “I want you all to be particularly good to your mother.”⁵⁹ Joe stumbled upstairs and there followed several minutes of children sobbing.

On any other Sunday afternoon, the children would race their sailboats. On this Sunday there are two versions of what happened next. Some have said that Joe told them they should keep their plans and sail, which they did, though Jack went instead for a solitary walk on the beach. The alternate account told separately by both Joey and Ted is that it was Jack who said, “Joe wouldn’t want us sitting here crying. He would want us to go sailing.”⁶⁰ In both versions Kennedy children headed out into the Sound on a sailboat, most likely Victura.

Timothy Reardon, Joe Jr.’s Harvard roommate and close friend for years afterward, finished a posthumous tribute to Joe with the words, “Were I a painter, I would conclude with a portrait of Joe as I like best to think of him—stripped to the waist, his body brown and strong, his hair lightened by the sun, his eyes sparkling and his lips parted in a full smile, at the rudder of a white sailboat against a background of blue skies and the blue-green ocean. And under it I would write simply, ‘A True Man—A Great Friend ’”61

Goodwin observed that had Joe’s mission been successful, his heroism would likely have been judged greater than Jack’s, for he entered into it in full knowledge of its danger, knowing others had died trying it before. He risked his life trying to destroy a key component of Germany’s ability to bomb and terrorize England. But that outcome was not to be.⁶²

~ Three weeks after Joe’s death, for Labor Day weekend Jack hosted a reunion of his PT boat comrades at Hyannis Port. In attendance were Red Fay, Jim Reed, Lenny Thom, and Barney Ross. The joy of being with old friends and survivors must have been a relief from days of grieving, and the men enjoyed old stories and teased one another. It was too much for Joe, though, who shouted from an upstairs window, “Jack, don’t you and your friends have any respect for your dead brother?”⁶³ For years to come Joe found it all but impossible to talk about his eldest son without tearing up. Jack later privately published a collection of tributes, called As We Remember Joe, but the pain was so great that Joe Sr. could never bring himself to read it.

~ The USS Warrington, a Somers-class navy destroyer with a crew of more than three hundred, saw duty in the Solomon Islands and other South Pacific ports of call at the same time Jack served on PT-109. Like Jack, the Warrington headed home in 1944, making its way north past Bora Bora, then through the Panama Canal, arriving for repairs on July 15 at the New York Navy Yard. The following month it moved to the Norfolk Navy Yard for more alterations. On September 10 it set out for an assignment in the Caribbean.

On September 9 a hurricane in full fury, heading northwest toward the United States, was first spotted by reconnaissance flight crews northeast of Puerto Rico. Two days out of Norfolk, the USS Warrington, now with a crew of 321, was warned that it was headed straight toward a storm that, it was later said, generated 150-knot winds and seventy-foot waves. They rode it out through the night, but on the morning of the thirteenth, about

450 miles east of the Florida coast, the Warrington began losing headway. It took on water through vents. Electrical power was lost, then the main engine. Another engine that powered steering shut down. Distress calls were issued to any ship able to provide assistance. The ship took on more water and the captain ordered it abandoned. Almost immediately after the men entered the hellish waters, the Warrington went down. Of the 321 aboard, all but 73 were lost.64

Hurricanes in those days were not given names, but the intensity of this one prompted weather emergency authorities to dub it the Great Atlantic Hurricane. It continued on its path to the coast. As it made its way, a 136-foot minesweeper, the USS YMS-409 foundered and was sunk, all 33 aboard lost. The storm continued on a path toward the Outer Banks, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod. Two coast guard cutters, the Bedloe and the Jackson, were destroyed and the coal-cargo steamer ss Thomas Tracy ran aground at a beach in Delaware.⁶⁵

On the evening of September 14, as the Great Atlantic Hurricane approached Cape Cod, a 123-foot Lightship, the Vineyard Sound, was at its mooring, marking the entrance to Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound, about thirty-five miles southwest of Hyannis Port and just ten miles west of Martha’s Vineyard. It sank with all 12 aboard lost.⁶⁶

Jack was at home in Hyannis Port, recovering from surgery undertaken a month earlier to relieve lower abdominal pain.⁶⁷ “On leave” from Chelsea Naval Hospital, Jack got in his Buick to check the harbor where Victura was moored. The storm “swept Hyannis Port’s harbor clear of boats, and many of those that came ashore were smashed to pieces on the beach.” It destroyed several buildings along the waterfront and harbor; the surge washed a pier and a yacht club building away. Porches were ripped off homes and trees uprooted. The Kennedy home sustained some water damage but was relatively unharmed. At the harbor Jack somehow managed to secure the two-ton Victura on the beach, protected from pounding waves and the surge. Victura’s damage was thus minimal compared to many others.

When Jack later returned to his car, he found himself stranded, the road to Hyannis Port flooded by the storm surge. He climbed in his car and waited out the storm until the waters receded, in the meantime declining a passerby’s offer of coffee and a place “to get out of the storm.” The next afternoon, the storm over, national guardsmen were in the Hyannis Main Street business district, protecting storefronts with broken windows and assisting with clean up. Two young sisters spotted Jack and another man picking their way through the wreckage of other sailboats and waterfront debris. Befitting an emerging pattern in Jack’s life, he had befriended a Life magazine staffer, in town to write photo captions. Jack—in a blue baseball cap, open-collared white shirt, khakis, and sneakers—approached the two sisters and made introductions.

“He looked ill,” said one of the sisters later. “But he certainly didn’t act it. And he had the most charming smile.” She was also surprised at how young he looked for a man of twenty-seven. After awhile, with some coaxing, Jack persuaded the girls to join his new journalist friend and him for lunch. Later, he took them to the family’s house, where he changed into a “rumpled and unpressed” navy uniform so they could go to dinner. After dancing they agreed to meet the following day and go to the Center Theater in Hyannis. They were going to go out on the third evening too, but at the last minute Jack had to cancel his plans. There was a family emergency and he needed to go to New York.68

~ In the space of five months from May to September 1944, Kathleen married out of the church and broke her mother’s heart; Jack went through two painful, less-than-successful surgeries while simultaneously gaining war hero fame in magazines and newspapers; doodlebugs and v-2 rockets started falling on London; and the Allied D-Day invasion occurred with Joe Jr. and Kick’s husband in the thick of the fighting. Then Joe Jr., the anointed son, was killed. After that, one of the worst hurricanes in New England history was visited on Hyannis Port.

On September 9, on the same day the Great Atlantic Hurricane was first spotted in the Caribbean, a German sniper in Belgium pointed his rifle’s barrel at a British army soldier and squeezed the trigger. His bullet went straight through the heart of Billy Cavendish. He and Kick had been married for just four months and had spent just five weeks together as a married couple. Joe Jr. had been dead less than a month. Kick did not get the news of her husband’s death until a week later, when she and some of the Kennedy clan were in New York City.

“So ends the story of Billy and Kick,” Kick wrote in her diary a few days later. To her parents she wrote, “If Eunice, Pat & Jean marry nice guys for fifty years they’ll be lucky if they have five weeks like I did—Tell Jack not to get married for a long time. I’ll keep house for him.”69

In a letter to Jack’s friend Lem Billings, Kick quoted a friend who told her, “One thing you can be sure of life holds no fears for someone who has faced love, marriage and death before the age of 25.”⁷⁰

“Luckily I am a Kennedy,” Kick continued. “I have a very strong feeling that that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability to not be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”⁷¹