by Scott Farris
Still, the fan magazines played along with the charade that the war had brought hardship to the Reagan household. Modern Screen wrote, “It’s been nine months now since Ronald Reagan said, ‘So long, Button-nose’ to his wife and baby, and went off to join his regiment.” He, of course, had the opportunity to say “so long Button-nose” almost every morning. Reagan was happy to humor everyone and pretend that his service was a typical wartime experience. In his autobiography he wrote that after his discharge at the end of the war, “all I wanted to do—in common with several million veterans—was to rest up a while, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world.”
Reagan’s absence from the war zone was perfectly legitimate. He had 7/200 bilateral vision, which meant that a Japanese tank identifiable to a soldier with normal vision at two hundred feet would need to be within seven feet for Reagan to positively identify it as friend or foe. While correctible with eyeglasses, it disqualified the thirty-one-year-old Reagan from combat.
Even though he was stuck stateside, some of Reagan’s work was important to the war effort. He began his tour of duty as a personnel officer and was promoted to post adjutant, but he later requested a transfer to the war-film unit that was under the command of Colonel Jack Warner. Reagan made a handful of feature films during the war, such as This Is the Army, whose proceeds went to the Army Emergency Relief Fund, and he did numerous skits on the radio designed to keep up public morale. But he also helped make important training films, including several on how to avoid friendly fire incidents and most notably—and Reagan was enormously proud of how top secret this work was—films designed to train the pilots who were to have led the bombing runs in preparation for an invasion of Japan, an invasion made unnecessary by the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Despite this critical work, Reagan told fellow actor George O’Malley that he felt “guilty” seeing men who were smaller and scrawnier than he was headed to the war zone, while he remained in Hollywood making films and making love to his wife—no matter how important those training films might be. During and after the war he felt envious of those who had seen combat. Another friend and fellow actor, Eddie Albert, was a Marine who had fought at Tarawa, one of the most intense battles in the Pacific where six thousand Americans and Japanese soldiers were killed in just a few days of fighting. When Albert returned to California, he brought Reagan a souvenir, a netsuke (a small, hollow figurine that soldiers carried for luck and to hold personal items like tobacco) taken from a dead Japanese soldier. “I handed it over and explained what it was, and he was appreciative—but I’ve never forgotten the way he looked,” Albert said. “Like I’d humiliated him.” Richard Todd, who costarred with Reagan in 1949’s The Hasty Heart, thought that Reagan was “a frustrated soldier” wistful for battlefield experience. Even then, Todd noted, “I have never met an American who so profoundly believed in the greatness of his nation.”
While, as noted, Reagan may have exaggerated the hardship the war created in order to seem a regular GI, he did not embellish his record.* In his first memoir, he acknowledged that if it was true that war is long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of intense fear, then some pour soul in the Army had more than their share of fear “because I got more than my share of boredom.” He said that he declined to apply for a promotion to major because “who was I to be a major for serving in California, without ever hearing a shot fired in anger?” He also admitted to “an almost reverent feeling for the men who did face the enemy,” and suggested he felt that reverence more than most because he had seen uncensored war-film footage that brought the horrors of war home in a way most civilians and most soldiers who did not see combat would never know.
* A minor kerfuffle erupted while Reagan was president. On two occasions in 1983 he appeared to suggest to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and American Jewish leaders that he had been present for the liberation of the Nazi death camps. Of course, he had not, and Reagan never claimed so on any other occasion. More likely, Reagan, who was becoming deaf and, by his own admission, too vain to wear a hearing aid, misunderstood some of the conversation and was emphasizing how he had seen raw footage of the death camps’ liberation from film sent to Fort Roach. There is no doubt the footage, as filmed images often did, had an enormous emotional impact on Reagan. He kept a copy of a documentary Fort Roach made from the death camp footage and made each of his sons watch it when they turned fourteen.
Reagan continued this reverence into his presidency, beginning a new tradition since followed by presidents of returning the salutes of military personnel. Prior to Reagan, no president, not even Eisenhower, the former five-star general, returned salutes. Military protocol dictates that a person must be in uniform to salute, but Reagan argued that civilian clothes were the commander in chief’s uniform, and he felt awkward being saluted and not responding to the gesture. While remarked upon at the time, Reagan’s new tradition became especially controversial during the presidency of George W. Bush, who also had never seen combat but who similarly enjoyed military trappings. Historian John Lukacs called a presidential salute “the joyful gesture of someone who likes playing soldier. It also represents an exaggeration of the president’s military role.” Garry Wills added, “The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements.”
As will be discussed in a later chapter, Reagan did emphasize the president’s role as commander in chief, and one cannot help but think that even the small gesture of a saluting his Marine guards was partially rooted in his disappointment in not having the opportunity to be a war hero. Reagan had enjoyed being a hero as a young lifeguard, saving swimmers from death in the water. He would have liked to have been the hero again, and it is likely that when he read the news accounts, Reagan envied John Kennedy for saving most of his crew from death in the water during the war in the Pacific. That Kennedy was even in the Pacific was again due to his father’s influence.
With so many chronic health problems, Kennedy failed his first entrance physicals with both the Army and the Navy, and while he began an exercise regimen to strengthen his back, his father worked behind the scenes to ensure that Jack did not fail his second physical with the Navy. Joe Senior further ensured that Jack received an interesting assignment in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Jack’s primary job was to read, analyze, and distill information received from a variety of foreign sources. He seldom, if at all, dealt with top-secret or highly sensitive information, which later saved him from being cashiered out of the Navy.
For while Jack was stationed in Washington, DC, he began an affair with a stunning former Miss Denmark named Inga Arvad, a curvaceous Nordic beauty whom Jack nicknamed “Inga Binga.” Arvad, then married but separated from a second husband, had worked as a reporter in Europe, where she finagled a number of interviews with high-ranking Nazi officials, including Hitler (twice), and she was even invited to Herman Goering’s wedding. Coming to America, Arvad landed a job in Washington at the old Times-Herald newspaper, where Kennedy’s sister, Kathleen, was also employed. It was Kathleen who introduced Inga to Jack.
By all accounts, Jack and Inga enjoyed an intense sexual relationship, though it also appears Jack had true feelings for Inga and he annoyed his parents by occasionally threatening to marry Arvad, despite her marital status. Arvad’s past connections to key Nazis had placed her under suspicion as a possible spy, and the FBI placed Arvad under surveillance. Her apartment was bugged, a move that led the FBI to confirm, to J. Edgar Hoover’s delight, that Jack and Inga did indeed have an intense sexual relationship, and that Jack often talked about his work with Inga. Fortunately, since he knew little of value to a spy (Arvad was never charged with espionage), instead of being cashiered as his commanding officer desired, Jack instead got transferred when his father int
ervened.
In July 1942, the Navy granted Jack’s request for sea duty and sent him to midshipman’s school in Chicago, where he decided to apply for command of a PT (“patrol torpedo”) boat. A PT command was in great demand after the squat but fast eighty-foot-long boats were publicized in the book and film They Were Expendable, which documented how MacArthur had been evacuated from the Philippines. There were more than a thousand volunteers for fifty command slots, but Jack was one of those chosen because the men in charge of the program thought selecting the ambassador’s son would be good publicity. To a large degree, PT commanders were from wealthy families; they were among the few Americans who had experience piloting a motorboat. Kennedy’s orders to enter the war zone were delayed because he turned out to be an exceptional instructor and the Navy wanted to keep him in Chicago. Per normal, he had his father intervene and got his orders to go overseas.
Jack liked being commander of a PT boat because, as he told Billings, “you are your own boss.” But it was also painful for Kennedy. PT boats often bounced across the surf at speeds of forty knots—the equivalent of forty-five miles per hour on land—and riding in one was “like staying upright on a bucking bronco.” Kennedy’s back took a terrific pounding, and one of his crew said, “He was in a lot of pain. . . . I don’t remember when he wasn’t in pain.”
In April 1943, Kennedy was granted command of the PT-109, which had seen service during the Guadalcanal campaign and come out of the experience battered and in need of restoration. By most accounts of his superiors, his peers, and his crew, Kennedy was a good commander who soon had the ship back in shape. Kennedy earned an excellent performance rating from his commander, having received a perfect 4.0 for shiphandling, and a near-perfect 3.9 for command ability.
But if the military thought well of Kennedy, the respect was not returned. Kennedy’s letters homes are filled with complaints about perceived incompetence, particularly among senior officers, which most definitely included MacArthur. Kennedy said that MacArthur’s nickname among the troops was “Dug-out Doug” for his alleged affinity for staying behind the lines. MacArthur would have no future in politics, Kennedy predicted, once the soldiers came home and told what they knew.
Kennedy further opined that he thought most career naval officers “give the impression of their brains being in their tails.” He said the Navy “screwed up everything it touched,” adding, “Even the simple delivery of a letter frequently overburdens this heaving, puffing war machine of ours. God save this country of ours from those patriots whose war cry is ‘what this country needs is to be run with military efficiency.’” In addition to his litany of complaints about officers, Kennedy also found the average enlistee’s attitude wanting; it consisted of too much griping and not enough fight—a belief he held until August 1, 1943.
That night, PT-109 joined fourteen other PT boats sent to Ferguson’s Passage in the Russell Islands (about seven hundred miles east of New Guinea) to intercept a Japanese convoy. Aboard were Kennedy, his crew of eleven, and a guest, Ensign Barney Ross, a friend of Kennedy who volunteered to come along on the mission to help man the 109’s machine gun. Poor communication and coordination that night against a superior Japanese force led to only half the PT boats firing their torpedoes, while in that very black moonless night a Japanese destroyer rammed and sliced the PT-109 in two at about 2:30 a.m. the morning of August 2. The collision and resulting fire killed two of Kennedy’s crewmen and left the other eleven men, including Kennedy, adrift in the ocean. Thirty-seven-year-old Motor Machinist Mate Patrick McMahon was badly burned.
It was the only occasion during the entire war when a PT boat had been rammed by an enemy craft. To this day, it remains unclear whether the collision was simply a freak accident in unusually dark conditions, or whether the collision was due in part to faulty seamanship by Kennedy. Some critics have suggested Kennedy did not have his crew on full alert, or that he did not have all his engines properly in gear in order to make the rapid maneuver necessary to avoid the collision. Kennedy denied those charges, but would later acknowledge that the story of PT-109 was “fucked up.”
Whether Kennedy was at fault in the collision or blameless, his behavior in the wake of the disaster was exemplary. Having decided by 1:00 p.m. on August 2 that no rescuers were returning to the scene (though, thankfully, neither were the Japanese), Kennedy decided to take his crew to a small nearby island. McMahon was so badly burned he could not swim, so Kennedy placed the rope from McMahon’s life preserver in his teeth, and then had McMahon ride atop his back while Kennedy did the breast stroke for three and a half miles to Plum Pudding Island. The swim took more than four hours.
Despite being exhausted (he had been without sleep for thirty-six hours) and suffering numerous cuts from coral spikes and spurs, Kennedy decided the next night, August 3, to swim two and a half miles out into Ferguson’s Passage in hopes of flagging down an American ship. Unfortunately, it had been assumed all hands on the PT-109 had been lost in the accident, and American operations had moved farther north.
The next day, August 4, Kennedy decided to move his crew, with Kennedy once again towing McMahon, to a larger island, Olasna, in hopes of finding water and coconuts for food. Finding neither, Kennedy and Ensign Ross swam the next day, August 5, to yet another island, Naru, where they found a one-man canoe loaded with a fifty-five-gallon drum of drinking water and some crackers and candy. Ross stayed on Naru while Kennedy used the canoe to return to Olasna. Back at Olasna on August 6, Kennedy was astonished by what he found. Two islanders who worked with a nearby Allied watch station, and who had been alerted to look for any unexpected survivors of PT-109, had discovered his crew.
Kennedy carved a message on a coconut shell for the natives to take back to the watch station, which was manned by a New Zealander, but the watch station was already aware of the survivors and their location. Other natives in canoes were dispatched to bring the PT-109 survivors to the watch station on New Georgia Island. A full seven days had passed since Kennedy’s boat had sunk. Twenty-four hours later, PT boats arrived to transport Kennedy and his men back to base for medical treatment and rest.
Word of Kennedy’s heroics soon became front-page news across the country. The New York Times headlined the story, Kennedy’s son is hero in pacific as destroyer splits his pt boat. The Boston Globe’s version read, Kennedy’s son saves 10 in pacific. Later, the writer John Hersey wrote a lengthy account of the ordeal for the New Yorker, which was then, primarily through Joseph Kennedy’s doing, condensed and reprinted in the Reader’s Digest, ensuring mass circulation. The Reader’s Digest version would be reprinted and handed out by the tens of thousands during each of Kennedy’s political campaigns.
Certainly, part of the reason this episode became famous was because of the prominence of Joseph Kennedy, but historian Robert Dallek notes that it was also an appealing story because it reminded Americans of the egalitarian way in which the war was waged; even the sons of the rich and privileged were fighting and dying and sometimes becoming heroes. Kennedy himself recognized the absurdity in his becoming a hero, though it should be noted that after his recuperation he went back to the Pacific to finish his tour of duty and he saw additional combat. When a young skeptic later asked him to account for his military fame, Kennedy replied, “It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half.”
Whatever the cause of the mishap, and whatever foolish risks he might have taken in attempting to get his crew rescued, Kennedy’s crew, unanimously, always believed he had acted appropriately and heroically. To a man, they believed that they owed Kennedy their lives because of his own will to survive and the efforts he made to do so. Kennedy, meanwhile, said the actions of his crew caused him to reassess his opinion of the American fighting man. In a letter to his parents, he wrote, “I had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off. But with the chips down—all that faded away. I can now believe—which I
never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake.”
Kennedy’s opinion of the top brass, however, never changed. Already inclined to resist all authority figures (excepting his own father), generals and admirals, “almost by virtue of rank seemed to get under his skin.” As president, while reflecting on his World War II experiences, Kennedy said to a writer who was preparing a book and a movie treatment on the PT-109 incident, “How do we ever win any wars anyway? You know the military always screws up everything.” Kennedy made that comment in 1961, when he was still seething over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which (in private) he partially blamed on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Those sons-of-bitches with all the fruit salad [military decorations] just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” he complained.
In turn, many senior military officers despised Kennedy for refusing to come to the aid of the small, outmanned force of Cuban exiles who had hoped to overthrow the Castro regime. They saw Kennedy as weak. When Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara rejected a funding demand by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, LeMay told colleagues, “Would things be much worse if Khrushchev were Secretary of Defense?”*
* LeMay would be devastatingly and hilariously caricatured in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.