by Thomas Maier
Some of Jack’s spiritual concerns, though, could venture beyond the mandates of church attendance and the simple adherence to doctrine. He was hardly an overnight seminarian, yet he could pose thoughtful questions about what it meant to be a Catholic, particularly in a predominantly Protestant nation. At the navy yard in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1942, a city still very much a part of the Deep South, he wrote to Rose: “They want me to conduct a Bible class here every other Sunday for about 1/2 hour with the sailors. Would you say that that is un-Catholic? I have a feeling that dogma might say it was—but don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church. We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchical structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top—a structure that allows for no individual interpretation—or are we?” Then, as if catching his breath, Kennedy reverted to the familiar crutch of any young Catholic of his era confounded by questions about faith.“Just send me Father Conway’s Question Box as I would like to look through it,” he requested.
The best-selling book, The Question Box, first published in 1909 by the Paulist Press and periodically updated by its author, the Reverend Bertrand L. Conway, a New York–based priest, answered virtually every imaginable question about Roman Catholic doctrine. This handy book of apologetics armed Catholics against the inquisitive arrows flung by nonbelievers, disbelievers or amoralists—discussing not only the central tenets of the faith, but arcania such as how to spot signs of the devil and whether a divorcee might have sufficient terms for an annulment. Young Kennedy may have needed The Question Box as a bulwark from his own doubts or those posed by others. After all, a Roman Catholic leading a prayer get-together may not have gone down easy with his navy brethren, particularly in a place where the Ku Klux Klan remained quite active. Most historians have ignored this letter from young Kennedy, or suggested that it represents, as one wrote,“just a matter of doubt accumulating over time as his adult mind tried to reconcile and understand some of the illogical teachings he had learned as a child.” However, Jack’s letter and other missives suggest there was a bit more at play here that shouldn’t be so easily dismissed. The acquisition of The Question Box (assuming, of course, that his mother sent it to him) was an intriguing choice. Its author, Father Conway, roamed the United States for forty years, seeking converts to Catholicism with remarkable success. At the time of his death, Conway, whose other books included The Virgin Birth and Studies in Church History, was credited with actuating some six thousand souls into the Mother Church—a gargantuan effort at proselytizing, exactly the activity Protestants feared most from Rome and its avowed army. In this crusade, The Question Box served as Father Conway’s most powerful weapon, with more than four million copies distributed since its original publication. Though often consulted by Catholics, its expressed purpose, as the New York Times later observed, was as “a book designed to explain Catholicism to non-Catholics.”Was Jack Kennedy intent on the same purpose—the teaching of Catholic doctrine to a group of unsuspecting Protestant navy men? Given his future, it’s an amusing scenario to consider: Jack Kennedy—Converter of Souls. But the request for The Question Box was clearly sincere; and so, apparently, was his intent to do his best as a Bible class leader.
In his own irreverent way, Kennedy found himself struggling not only with the mortality of his young friend Mead, but his own wonderment about fate and the eternal verities raised by death. He was a doubter who needed convincing, and he wasn’t sure whether that would ever happen. Still, he clung intuitively to the symbols and conventions he’d learned from his Irish Catholic heritage. In his letters, Jack appeared to find it easier to express this conundrum in the form of a joke—the amiable needling the Kennedys all shared with one another as a universal language—than in some sober, ponderous meandering.“Mother, you will be pleased to know that their [sic] is a priest nearbye [sic] who has let all the natives go—and is devoting all his energies to my salvation,” he teased in July 1943. “I’m stringing along with him—but I’m not going over to [sic] easy—as I want him to work a bit so he’ll appreciate it more when he finally has me in the front row every morning screaming halleluyah [sic].” One could hardly picture skinny Jack Kennedy at a church meeting, hands shaking like a tam bourine and shouting “Hallelujah,” nor full of fire and brimstone and condemning his fellow mariners for their off-shore immoralities. But evidently, Kennedy as well as his colleagues felt comfortable enough for him to lead a group of Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and any others in a Bible class, at least for a time, under a category he considered “good works.”
In the Pacific as commander of a PT boat,Kennedy quietly practiced his religion despite the near impossible conditions of war. In one letter from a friend, Joe Kennedy heard of a priest who served as a naval chaplain in New Guinea, and passed along his admiration for young Kennedy.“His son, Jack Kennedy . . .was one of my parishioners—fine, upstanding lad, guts, brains, courage to give away, generous, worshipped by his lads. He does his Dad credit,” as Joe’s friend relayed. Confronted by random violence and the unfairness of dying far before one’s time, Jack’s voice in his letters home consistently maintained a mix of good humor leavened by occasional deeper references. “Your old brother looks a bit different these days—for one thing I’ve got a beard—a red, bristly unattractive-looking thing,” he wrote to his youngest sister, Jean, in talking about his next visit. “When I shall get there is extremely hard to say—whenever they send someone out to relieve me. I sometimes wonder if he is even born yet. In your prayer, you might pray that it is a boy and that he grows up fast and gets out here as soon as possible.” All Jack Kennedy’s thoughts about death and war and God—and his own family’s prayers—would soon be put to the test.
The bonhomie of the Kennedy letters belie a certain nervous dread, as if they suspected that somehow fate might call one of their own. In a remarkable letter to her family in 1942, Rose observed that Jack’s “whole attitude about the war has changed and he is quite ready to die for the USA in order to keep the Japanese and the Germans from becoming the dominant people on their respective continents, believing that sooner or later they would encroach upon ours. He also thinks it would be good for Joe’s political career if he died for the grand old flag, although I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”
On the night of August 2, 1943, while cruising in dark, mist-shrouded waters with his small crew, Kennedy’s PT boat was sliced in half by a passing Japanese destroyer. “This is how it feels to be killed,” Lieutenant Junior Grade Kennedy later said he thought to himself. Two men lost their lives immediately and the inept circumstances of the accident lent to some serious consideration of disciplinary charges. But Kennedy’s heroic actions helped save the rest of his crew—and his reputation. During the next few days, Kennedy swam with his ten surviving men to safety on a small island; there, they carved a message of distress into a coconut shell and convinced some native fishermen to carry it back to the Allies. For his injuries and genuinely gallant actions, Kennedy later received the Purple Heart and the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, as well as a citation from Admiral William Halsey that read: “His courage, endurance and excellent leadership contributed to the saving of several lives and was [in] keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
When they were all picked up by another PT boat, Kennedy’s crew of survivors, battered, burned and bruised, bellowed a hymn to celebrate their survival. Their skipper, gaunt and with six days of beard growth, chimed in with his creaky Irish tenor:
Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to him belong,
They are weak, but He is strong,
Yes, Jesus loves me; yes, Jesus loves me . . .
Back home, Kennedy’s ordeal raised fears of the worst. Shortly after the PT boat’s remains were found, Joe Kennedy received a telegram about Jack’s disappearance, but he kept it a secret from his wife
and family. For a few days, he carried out his everyday routines as though nothing had happened, but finally he told Rose. When he heard a report on the car radio that Jack had been found, Joe became so excited that he nearly drove off the road. Rose knew of no other way but to thank God and the mercy he had shown their son. As she inscribed in her diary:“He is really at home— the boy for whom you prayed so hard—at the mention of whose name your eyes would become dimmed—the youngster who you would think dead some nights & you would wake up with sorrow clutching your heart. What a sense of gratitude to God to have spared him.”
Several biographers insist on portraying Kennedy as an absurdist hero who had no regard for religion. But Jack’s letters home after his rescue gave thanks as can only someone who nearly met his maker: “I can say that I am well and thanking my St. Christopher, my St. Elmo and my St. Clair. One of them was working overtime.” Jack typically made light of his actions. “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—and am back at the base now and am O.K.” Recalling later for friends how he swam virtually naked through the Blackett Strait during this ordeal, he claimed to worry that sharks might feast on his genitals. “I swam a lot of backstroke,” he quipped. But the brush with death did chasten his devil-may-care attitude. In discussing the PT boat incident with friends, he admitted that he had feared dying in the strong currents.“He said, seriously, ‘I never prayed so much in my life,’” recalled a girlfriend, Bab Beckwith.
His friends in the Pacific were also concerned about Jack’s whereabouts, and they noticed some changes when he returned. “I remember when I heard the 109 was lost, I was very upset,” recalled Johnny Iles, one of several Catholic and Irish pals who were part of Kennedy’s circle in the navy. “I went to the Catholic chaplain, Father McCarthy, and I asked him to say a mass for Jack.”A devout Catholic from Louisiana who seemed in awe of the Kennedy family, Iles remembered going with Jack to midnight Mass on Christmas 1943. At times, though, he questioned Jack’s faithfulness to church doctrine. When Lt. Kennedy was shipped back to America and entered a Boston hospital because of his ailing health, Iles visited him with a group of their friends. Rose Kennedy had just left the hospital room.“He was lying in bed,” Iles recalled.“The first thing I noticed was a rosary hanging on the bedpost. And I said, ‘Well, boy, it looks like you got back into favor.’And he just looked at me and grinned and didn’t make any comment at all.” When Iles told Kennedy how he asked the priest to pray for him when he was reported missing, the anticipated response of thanks didn’t transpire. “He was furious,” recalled Iles. “He read the riot act to me. He said he wasn’t ready to die just yet and why the hell had I given up hope?” Kennedy no doubt had in mind the experience of his fallen crewmate, Andrew Kirksey. Two weeks before the PT-109 incident, Kirksey had been with Kennedy when a bomb landed near their boat without detonating. The nearness of death seemed to unnerve Kirksey, who began to fear he’d never survive the war.“He never really got over it; he always seemed to have the feeling that something was going to happen to him,” recalled Kennedy, unusually sensitive to the fatalism of others. Intuitively, Kennedy felt that such guys would bring bad luck. He resolved to leave Kirksey—who had a wife and three kids—at the home base at the next available opportunity, which of course never came. “When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it, the only thing to do is to let him off the boat because strangely enough, they always seem to be the ones that do get it,” Jack later explained. “I don’t know whether it’s coincidence or what.”
The vicissitudes of fate, the loss of two crewmates and the nearness of death sobered Kennedy, a twenty-six-year-old who suddenly felt much older. He was touched by a letter written by the wife of one of the men he had helped save, Patrick McMahon, who was badly burned. With McMahon in a life preserver, Kennedy swam with the jacket’s strap between his clenched teeth and pulled his crew member to safety. McMahon’s wife later told Kennedy that his intervention had saved more than one life. “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,” she admitted. Kennedy’s experience with death in battle curbed his hunger for more bloodshed. It made him wary of powerful men who established war policy and spoke with grand bellicose visions. “People get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands of dead sound like a drop in the bucket,” he wrote home.“But if those thousands want to live like the ten I saw—they should measure their words with great care. Perhaps all that won’t be necessary—and it can all be done by bombing.”
Jack, the affable good-time boy, now noticed the suffering of others in ways that he’d never done before. Sometime in late 1943, Jack and his brother Joe were among a group of several men in uniform who visited the Mott Street headquarters of the Catholic Worker in Manhattan, a small storefront soup kitchen run by the revered Dorothy Day and others. As Day recalled, the Kennedy brothers and their friends listened with interest to the Catholic Worker ideals, which included pacifism and a commitment to helping the poor. A former leftist journalist who had converted to Catholicism, Day would champion many of the social causes of liberal American Catholics from the Depression of the 1930s through to the Vietnam era. Her penny-a-copy newspaper, the Catholic Worker, was read by thousands; its writers included John Cogley and Michael Harrington, both of whom influenced Jack Kennedy in later years. That night in 1943, Day recalled, she and the Kennedy boys went to a nearby restaurant to discuss “war and peace and man and the state.”
During this visit home, Jack flew to Palm Beach, where his old friend, Chuck Spalding, met him; they immediately grabbed some dinner at a favorite restaurant.“I can still see him sitting there in that restaurant, the war running through his head, and certainly through a lot of his body—he was pretty well banged up,” recalled Spalding. “He didn’t say a thing.” During the meal, Kennedy stared out at the crowd, his grayish eyes fixed on the men and women in formal attire, all laughing without a care. “He just sat there, looking and thinking. And you could just tell what was going through his head—the terrific discrepancy between people at home dressed in white jackets with bow ties, looking like asses . . . and thinking of the nonsense of people being killed, somebody having his leg blown off. You could see the anguish in his face as he was trying to put it together. We stayed there an hour and I don’t think he said one word, not one word.”
THE STORY OF Kennedy’s exploits soon became legend, though not necessarily of their own volition. Joe Kennedy seized upon his son’s unfortunate accident as a public relations bonanza, turning the episode into an ocean-faring myth of Melvilleian proportions, a virtual Jack Kennedy and the Argonauts. The New York Times and the Boston papers all carried front-page stories about Kennedy and PT-109.Within weeks, Jack’s old girlfriend, Inga Arvad, penned a newspaper column in San Francisco about his heroic exploits on the PT boat (privately he told her the navy was deciding “whether they were going to give him a medal or throw him out.”) The most remarkable coup for Kennedy père was writer John Hersey’s saga published in the New Yorker and reprinted in Reader’s Digest, where it enjoyed an even wider popular audience. Ironically, Jack knew Hersey (who married an old flame of Kennedy’s) and envied his accomplishments as a writer. Now, Hersey was making Kennedy into a national hero with an account that read like a gripping adventure story. Increasingly, Jack felt uneasy about all the attention, especially because two men had lost their lives on his watch, and he also suffered from guilt that heroism by others had been ignored or given short shrift. When asked how he became a hero, Jack gave a wry response:“It was involuntary—they sank my boat.”
Joe Kennedy would have none of that false modesty. Some of his enthusiasm surely sprang from the sheer glee and than
ksgiving of a father who had feared his son dead only to see him return alive. But undeniably, Joe Kennedy recognized the political capital to be gained from having a war hero in the family, even if he wasn’t running for office. Many months later, when the PT-109 account grew to true epic proportions, Kennedy marveled how his father had worked in some aspect of the story to appeal to everyone. “My story about the collision is getting better all the time,” Jack commented dryly to a friend. “Now I’ve got a Jew and a Nigger in the story and with me being a Catholic, that’s great.”When Jack expressed his concerns to his father, Joe Kennedy barely paused to consider them.“Jack’s only concern is that it may be building him up too much,” the elder Kennedy wrote to Hersey,“but I told him that if you and the editor, in your judgment, thought you had a story, he could rest assured that it was one.” Of course, Joe Kennedy had already negotiated with the New Yorker’s editor, Harold Ross, about how the piece would be presented. With this crafty letter of his own to Hersey, Joe Kennedy accomplished two goals: he acknowledged his son’s misgivings about the hype, but he also firmed any soft spots of doubt that Hersey may have had in building up the PT-109 affair, especially if Hersey gave any credence to Jack’s self-effacing account. Joe Kennedy had fought like hell to avoid war, but now that the conflagration was on, he was damned sure to have his son declared a hero.“We have the PT boat picture and mother is having it framed and saving it for you,” he wrote to Jack.