The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Jack obtained permission to fly to Washington on February 28; there he spent one last night with Inga and told her what he felt he had to tell her. “I may as well admit that since that famous Sunday evening I have been totally dead inside,” she wrote him afterward. She went out to Reno to obtain a divorce, returning afterward to Washington.

  Jack’s heart had led him into an emotional jungle where he had never ventured before. Inga may have betrayed him, but Jack’s heart had been a betrayer as well, leading him into this dangerous, uncertain world. He had fought his way out again, and he stood now in a world of clarity and distance. In her pain and emptiness, Inga admonished her lover: “If you feel anything beautiful in your life—I am not talking about me—then don’t hesitate to say so, don’t hesitate to make the little bird sing.”

  However much Jack mourned his loss, that suffering was probably nothing compared to his physical agony. He was racked with pain in his spine. His stomach was knotted up in cramps. Even Jack, for all his willful denial, could not pretend that all was well. His only choice was to return to his familiar haunts at the Mayo and Lahey clinics to consult specialists who so far had done little to help him.

  On his way to Rochester and Boston, Jack flew down to Palm Beach to spend a weekend with his family and his houseguest, Henry James. Joe had just endeavored to help extricate Jack from what his father considered his romantic debacle. These two days should have been a sentimental respite.

  Joe, however, was in a savage mood, and when Jack showed up late for lunch, his father exploded. “For God’s sake!” he yelled as the family quivered at every syllable. “Can’t you even get on time to meals? How do you expect to get anything done in your life if you can’t even arrive on time!”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Jack responded, and blamed his tardiness on his friend Henry. Joe prided himself on his punctuality. It irked him that his second son could not even adhere to this basic tenet of manners. Jack’s rudeness bordered on the insulting, but that was not what irritated Joe so much.

  As soon as he had heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Joe telegraphed President Roosevelt offering his services. He had received no immediate response, and that only darkened his deep melancholy about the future. At fifty-three, he was a vital, energetic man who could have contributed much to the war effort. The president finally responded with the suggestion that the former chairman of the U.S. Maritime Commission “could be of real service in stepping up the great increase in our shipbuilding.” He also had an offer to develop the civil defense program in the eastern United States. Joe turned down the proposals that were suggested to him, however, and told the president that he would “just be a hindrance to the program.”

  Joe had not been offered a cabinet-level position, but he had been offered what not all men receive: a second chance. He could have exorcised most of the bad feeling that his ambassadorship had engendered by pitching in and doing what he was asked. He was a man of such overweening pride, however, that he refused. He might merely have been trolling for a better offer, but a message from J. Edgar Hoover that arrived at the White House on April 20 probably ended that possibility.

  The FBI director addressed the confidential, hand-delivered letter not to Roosevelt personally but to his secretary, General Edwin M. Watson. This procedure gave the president the option of saying that he had not even seen the letter, for it involved his profligate son, Jimmy, in a matter that, if true, could have sent him to prison. The accuser, described by Hoover as a person of “unknown reliability,” charged that before the war Joe Kennedy and Jimmy Roosevelt had bribed then-Postmaster General James Farley to seek lower liquor tariffs.

  Even if the accusation was untrue, it could be enormously embarrassing, and it may well have been the reason that FDR offered Joe no more opportunities. Joe still could have found valuable work to do, but he did nothing. As vitally energetic as he was, Joe largely sat out the war overseeing his investments. His only contributions to the war effort were his complaints and criticisms, and the gift of his sons.

  Joe performed what he considered his patriotic duty in 1943 by becoming a “special service contact” for the FBI, passing on whatever information he thought Hoover might find useful. “In the moving picture industry he has many Jewish friends who he believes would furnish him, upon request, with any information in their possession pertaining to Communist infiltration into the industry,” noted the FBI’s Boston field office. He also proved himself useful to the FBI Hyannis agent in a case involving the shipbuilding industry.

  Pride was the prison in which Joe lived, such willful, narrow pride that he refused to take a position that would place him beneath his exalted vision of himself. “When I saw Mr. Roosevelt, I was of the opinion that he intended to use me in the shipping situation, but the radicals and certain elements in the New Deal hollared [sic] so loud that I was not even considered,” Joe wrote Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. As always, the error lay not in him but in others. He found it discouraging that while “there is a great undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the appointment of so many Jews in high places in Washington,” the president “had failed to appoint an Irish Catholic or a Catholic to an important war position since 1940.”

  Jack left his father that weekend and flew north to begin medical treatment. He had become a medical kaleidoscope. Each doctor who looked at him saw something different and prescribed his own unique remedy. The doctors at Mayo and Lahey at least agreed that Jack needed a back operation, but the navy doctors said no, such a dramatic solution was uncalled for, and Jack returned to where he began—a quasi-invalid pretending to be a stalwart navy man.

  Jack should have been relegated to a desk job for the duration of the war, but instead he applied to and was accepted for midshipmen’s school. “He has become disgusted with the desk jobs and all the Jews,” Joe wrote Joe Jr. on June 20, 1942, “and as an awful lot of the fellows that he knows are in active service, and particularly with you in the fleet service, he feels that at least he ought to be trying to do something. I quite understand his position, but I know his stomach and his back are real deterrents—but we’ll see what we can do.”

  In July, on his way to the Chicago training facility, Jack stopped in Washington, where he saw Inga. He wanted to come to her apartment, but she preferred to keep her former lover just that. After chatting with Jack, she telephoned a friend and told her that the poor Jack she knew looked like a “limping monkey from behind. He can’t walk at all. That’s ridiculous, sending him off to sea duty.”

  In the first months of the war the allies had suffered a series of humiliating defeats, from the capture of Singapore to the fall of the Philippines. The American public had little to celebrate but the saga of the PT boats and their skippers. These cowboys of the seas were a daring, dauntless lot, darting in and out of combat in their eighty-foot wooden boats. It was just the image Americans had of themselves—quick, smart, intrepid, and inventive.

  The skippers, or many of them, came from upper-class backgrounds, having learned to sail as youths on sailboats or family yachts. The world of the PT boats was like that of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, gentlemen officers and roustabout sailors united in a gallant quest. For the men of Jack’s father’s generation, war was supposed to be an arena of heroism. This was the world that Joe had brought up his sons to believe still existed, a world where one day they would trade in their medals for their country’s highest political honors.

  While Jack was going through the ten-week officer training program at Northwestern University, one of the war’s earliest heroes, John D. Bulkeley, arrived at the training facility to recruit officers to captain PT boats in the Pacific Theater. The young lieutenant commander’s exploits had just been chronicled in a bestseller, They Were Expendable, and he had even had a ticker tape parade down Broadway.

  Bulkeley had won his hero’s appellation by rescuing General Douglas MacArthur from the besieged beaches of Bataan and carrying him through 560 miles of enemy waters to safe
ty. Now he told his enthralled audiences that all he needed were five hundred PT boats, and he and his colleagues could almost singlehandedly defeat the Japanese navy.

  It was an irresistible idea. Brave Americans would skim across the seas with speed and daring, slashing at their dull-witted, sneaky, evil enemy, and then zigzag away, each day closer to victory. They would vanquish their foe, not with steel and fire and might and blood but with wit and daring.

  Joe wanted to make sure that his son was among the chosen few. He might have attempted to dissuade Jack, for he, more than anyone, knew of Jack’s back problems and the punishment he would take in an eighty-foot armed vessel hurtling away from the enemy, planing along the top of the water. Joe, however, played this high-stakes game as if he had a marked deck and knew that he could not lose. In New York, he went to see Bulkeley and promoted Jack’s candidacy, suggesting that it would be good for his son’s future political career.

  Even without his father’s efforts, Jack probably would have been chosen for the Melville Motor Torpedo Boat School in Rhode Island. He was a superb sailor and had all the attributes of a PT skipper except one: good health. In this deception lay a moral conundrum of immense importance. Was it a willful, selfish, dangerous act for this man to attempt to brace himself on a deck where only an officer in good health could stand firmly? By doing so, was he risking not only himself but also his men in an impetuous attempt to prove himself a true man? Or did Jack have a spiritual fortitude that would help him stand up to trials of combat that might send a more physically fit officer crumbling to the deck?

  In the Quonset huts at Melville, Jack was cheek by jowl with men of backgrounds as diverse as the country itself. His old friend and new mate at Melville, Torby Macdonald, had wryly commented on the spectacle of his snooty friend among the unwashed and the unlettered. “I swear to God Jack I thought I’d die of exhaustion from laughing—I’d laugh going to bed and wake up at it having dreamt of you in camp with Moe Sidelburg and Joe Louis as bunkmates.”

  Now, however, when Jack popped off with an anti-Semitic aside, accusing the Jews of sneaking out of danger’s way by “going into the Quartermaster Corps,” he not only had Torby presumably nodding his agreement—and perhaps adding a few more ugly insinuations—but a Jewish classmate, Fred Rosen, standing there to confront him. Rosen knew how to count, an ability that Torby would most likely have attributed to race. Rosen added up the number of Catholic and Jewish volunteers at Melville ready to risk their lives. When he showed Jack his tabulation, Jack had little choice but to apologize.

  After graduating from Melville, Jack served as an instructor for five weeks before he received orders in January 1943 to take a convoy of four of the squadron’s boats to Jacksonville, Florida. It was a tedious journey, the only heartening aspect being that the farther south they traveled the warmer it became.

  On the third day, one of the boats ran aground. Jack wanted to throw a towline to the beached boat and yank it out, but as he attempted to do so, not only did his own boat run aground, but the towline managed to snarl itself around the propeller. Someone was going to have to dive into the frigid waters and free the rope. By any measure, including health, seniority, or simple logic, Jack was the last person who should have been designated to strip down and jump overboard.

  “It was wintertime, and it was goddamn miserable in those boats in the wintertime,” recalled Holton Wood, who attended Melville with Jack. “Because if you were going at any kind of speed, you got cut by this cold wind and spray and so forth. And he ran aground, and it was cold. It was sufficiently aground so that they couldn’t back it off. If you hit rocks, you could grind up the propellers.

  “And so he decided that somebody had to go over the side. Now, he could have designated anybody else, but he did not. He went over himself. He could have been badly injured. He went under the boat to see what the bottom was like. And he then came up, and as he was getting up on the slippery, icy deck, he slipped and fell and injured his back again.”

  Jack was successful, but the following day, when the boats stopped in Morehead City, North Carolina, he was so sick that he ended up in a sick bay with what was diagnosed as “gastroenteritis acute.” Jack had performed an act as brave as it was foolhardy, and the boats had to sail the rest of the way to Florida without him. Jack’s conduct had not answered the question of whether he should have been there, but he had displayed one of his psychological paradoxes.

  Jack’s health was so bad, and his denial so extreme, that he was attempting to will himself not only into some semblance of normality but also into a veritable superman. He had such a need to test his manhood and his courage that he telephoned Senator David Walsh for help in getting reassigned to a PT-boat squadron in the South Pacific.

  11

  A Brothers’ War

  On the troop ship sailing eastward, Jack told a new friend, James Reed, about his favorite book, Pilgrim’s Way by John Buchan. The book tells the story of the generation of upper-class British who fought and died in World War I. Buchan knew the dread realities of the trenches, but the stench of rude death does not hang over the book. Young men die, but there is perfect beauty in their deaths. “For the chosen few … there is no disillusionment, they march on in life with a boyish grace,” Buchan writes of one fallen hero. “Death to him was less a setting forth than a returning,” he writes of another.

  There is no sentimentalist like a cynic in his moments of vulnerability, and as Jack sailed toward combat, Pilgrim’s Way was among his bibles of life. Jack was skittish when it came to blood. So were Buchan and Teddy Roosevelt and other philosophers of true manhood.

  When Jack arrived in the New Hebrides, there were no philosophers present to explain the unexplainable, no eloquent memoirists to take away death’s sting. He saw life and death and combat not through another’s lens but through his own clear eyes. In April 1943, Jack was ferried on a small transport ship to Guadalcanal. The young men crowded on the deck knew that death might face them out there over the horizon, but few of them realized as intimately as Jack did that death resided within their own bodies. He had already cheated mortality even before he saw the enemy and was carrying into combat a body that in some ways was already wounded.

  All his life Jack had been a rich boy among rich boys, but now he was among young men who ridiculed his strange accent and his seemingly affected ways. These men figured they knew life the way a rich boy never could, and he became the butt of their jokes. One of them, Ted Guthrie, a poor boy from the hills of South Carolina, joined in the merriment. “We made fun and called you a sissy,” he wrote Jack later. “This due to the fact you were a rich man’s son.”

  Then they sailed into the midst of an air attack on other boats and the joking ended. Jack’s boat was so loaded with fuel oil and bombs that it risked exploding in instant conflagration. Those on board were no longer rich and poor, northerner and southerner, but men who knew that they might soon die together. “I was only sixteen years old and scared to death,” Guthrie remembered. “Our ship had just been straddled by bombs and our gun tub was knee deep in water. I wanted to run but gained strength by the courage shown by Mr. Kennedy.”

  Jack figured the captain would hightail it out of the battle zone. Instead, in a pause in the attack, Jack’s boat sailed over to pick up a Japanese pilot who had parachuted into the water. “He suddenly threw aside his life-jacket + pulled out a revolver and fired two shots at our bridge,” Jack wrote Lem. “I had been praising the Lord + passing the ammunition right alongside—but that slowed me a bit—the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship. We returned the fire with everything we had—the water boiled around him—but everyone was too surprised to shoot straight. Finally an old soldier standing next to me—picked up his rifle—fired once—and blew the top of his head off.”

  Jack was startled to discover that what Americans considered mindless fanaticism was the common code of the Japanese officers. In Why England Slept, he had described how hard it is
for democracies to come together in peacetime on difficult issues. Now he observed why democracies find it so hard to fight a war with the narrow will and focus of totalitarian regimes. The Americans had the finest planes, the newest ships, and equipment beyond measure. Their weakness was human lassitude. He was appalled by the “lackadaisical way [the swabs] handle the unloading of the ships,” as if they were Stateside with nothing more at stake than filling a warehouse, not the lives of men. “Don’t let any one sell the idea that everyone out here is hustling with the old American energy,” he wrote his parents in May. “They may be ready to give their blood but not their sweat, if they can help it, and usually they fix it so they can help it.”

  Back at Northwestern, Jack had heard John D. Bulkeley tell the awestruck midshipmen that a mere five hundred PT boats would defeat the Japanese in the naval war. Out in the South Pacific, life was a little different. On the Blackett Strait, the men had much to fear from their own planes shooting at them, and many of them died from shelling by their comrades. Jack had a sense of life stripped of all the literary pretense, all the philosophical garnishes, all the propaganda and cant.

  Jack willed himself to health, dismissing his back pains with a twist of wit. He was not as good at disguising his problem, however, as he thought. Leonard “Lenny” Thom, his executive officer, wrote home to Kate, his fiancée, that Jack Kennedy, the new skipper of PT-109, was half sick but pretended he was healthy. Lenny, who had played football at Ohio State, knew what it meant to play hurt, and he admired the cantankerous disregard the man showed for his own well-being, refusing to sign in for sick bay.

  Just as Jack believed he could will himself to good health, so too he believed that he could will himself to live. Back in the States in April 1942, he had spent a weekend at George Mead’s family plantation in South Carolina. George, an heir to the Mead paper fortune, had enlisted early and was already a marine corps officer. George had been afraid that his fear of dying might make a coward of him. That spring weekend Chuck Spalding had cheered up glum George with Jack’s philosophy: if you thought you were going to live, you’d live. It was that simple. George just had to get his head in the right place. George would go on to fight at Guadalcanal. He would be no coward, but he would die in those jungles, not that far from where Jack stood now. George Mead was the first of Jack’s friends to go, shot in the head with a Japanese bullet.