PT 109

by William Doyle

  The final citation for Kennedy’s Navy and Marine Corps Medal, signed by Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal and dated May 19, 1944, read: “For extremely heroic conduct as Commanding Officer of Motor Torpedo Boat 109 following the collision and sinking of that vessel in the Pacific War Theater on August 1–2, 1943. Unmindful of personal danger, Lieutenant (then Lieutenant, Junior Grade) Kennedy unhesitatingly braved the difficulties and hazards of darkness to direct rescue operations, swimming many hours to secure aid and food after he had succeeded in getting his crew ashore. His outstanding courage, endurance and leadership contributed to the saving of several lives and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

  The rescue of Kennedy and his crew occurred at almost exactly the moment the Allied drive against the Japanese in the Solomons gained a critical burst of momentum. Historian John Prados wrote of August 8, 1943: “While that day marked the end of an ordeal for Jack Kennedy and his men, it also framed the moment Japan tumbled over the edge into an abyss.”

  Through 1943, the Japanese were expelled from much of the Solomon Islands as the Allies pushed inexorably north and west, and Japanese aircraft and supply losses escalated to intolerable proportions. “So it was that the Solomons became the grave of Japan’s dream,” wrote Prados. “Here the pendulum of the Pacific War began to swing against Tokyo. The Battle of Midway robbed the Japanese of momentum and stripped their aura of invincibility. But after Midway the pendulum hung in balance. Japan retained numerical superiority and some distinct qualitative advantages. The dream was still attainable. In the Solomons the war was fought to a decision.” After the war, Rear Admiral Sokichi Takagi of the Naval General Staff admitted that when the Allies invaded the Solomons, he said to himself that if Japan lost there, “all roads would lead to Tokyo.” And so they did.

  Physically, Kennedy was a wreck by November 1943.

  His back was paining him, and he would soon be diagnosed with both malaria and colitis, or inflammatory bowel disease. He was severely underweight. On November 18, Lieutenant Al Cluster relieved Kennedy of command of PT 59 and sent him to the hospital at Tulagi. Bidding an emotional farewell to his sailors, Kennedy shook each of their hands and told them, “If there is ever anything I can do for you, ask me. You will always know where you can get in touch with me.”

  At Tulagi, X-rays were given and “chronic disc disease of the lower back” was added to his medical record, as well as the diagnosis of an ulcer. (A year later he would be given a medical discharge from the Navy for physical disability and placed on the retirement list, which was finally made official on March 1, 1945. The reason for his discharge was colitis.) In late December, 1943 it was clear Kennedy would not recover, and Cluster officially detached him from duty with his PT squadron: JFK’s war was over.

  Kennedy left the South Pacific from Espiritu Santu on December 23, 1943 aboard the escort carrier U.S.S. Breton, for passage via Samoa and Pago Pago back to San Francisco. He remained in the United States for the rest of the conflict.

  John Kennedy had begun the war as a pampered, globe-trotting young man barely out of college. But now, after seven months in the combat zone, the PT 109 crash and the rescues of his crewmen and the marines at Warrior River, Kennedy had proven to himself and to others that he was capable of leadership and command, and possessed considerable courage under fire.

  12

  THE WINGED CHARIOT

  But at my back I always hear

  Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;

  And yonder all before us lie

  Deserts of vast eternity.

  “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell (d. 1678),

  Excerpted by John F. Kennedy in his 1951 travel diary

  John F. Kennedy returned to the United States from the Pacific War in January 1944, landing in San Francisco, then making a brief stop in Beverly Hills to see his old girlfriend Inga Arvad, now a syndicated columnist and reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Though it became clear to both their romance was over, Arvad interviewed Kennedy for her column, and Kennedy gallantly rejected any claims of self-aggrandizement. “None of that hero stuff about me,” he declared in the story, which was picked up on the front page of the Boston Globe. “The real heroes are not the men who return, but those who stay out there, like plenty of them do, two of my men included.”

  Kennedy headed for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic, then to his family’s Mediterranean palazzo-style estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where he spent several weeks relaxing in idyllic splendor after nine months in the war zone. His mother wrote in her diary, “What joy to see him—to feel his coat & to press his arms,” “to look at his bronze tired face which is thin & drawn.” On February 5, Kennedy flew to New York City for a few days’ stopover en route to his assignment back at the PT boat training center at Melville, Rhode Island, and then to a Navy posting in Miami for much of the rest of the year.

  Once in Manhattan, Kennedy headed straight into the arms of a new girlfriend, freshly divorced model and fashion editor Florence Pritchett. He took her for a night on the town that started at the world-famous Stork Club, on East Fifty-Third Street just off Fifth Avenue. The club, presided over by a colorful character named Sherman Billingsley, was a mecca for the rich and famous of the era—and for American military servicemen as well, who were welcomed to the club as honored guests. When soldiers returning from overseas were asked where they were headed, many would gleefully exclaim, “The Stork Club!” The nightspot became a cultural icon for the music, liquor, food, and female companionship that soldiers and sailors yearned for when they came home. One wartime photograph of John Kennedy at the Stork Club shows him on the dance floor with an exotic beauty, a delirious smile plastered on his face.

  On a given night at the Stork, one could bump into J. Edgar Hoover, Fred Astaire, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, Alfred Hitchcock, or Helen Keller, as GIs and sailors hobnobbed with millionaires and starlets. “From the late 1930’s to the mid-1950’s, Billingsley’s place at 3 East 53rd Street was the headquarters of what was called cafe society: the social merging of the children of the old rich with movie stars, gossip columnists, prewar Eurotrash, politicians, judges, some favored cops, a few good writers and a sprinkling of former bootleggers,” wrote Pete Hamill. “These were people who did not stay home at night; they went out to see and be seen, to audition for one another, to scheme and lie and laugh, to drink hard, to pick up men or women and above all, in the Stork Club, to be socially ratified. Admission to the holy place, along with a good table, was an achievement; rejection was a humiliation. Billingsley always had the last word.”

  A skeletal Kennedy, showing the effects of multiple illnesses and eight months in the tropical combat zone, back in the United States in 1944. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  One evening in 1940, Ernest Hemingway paid a bar bill at the Stork Club by cashing in the $100,000 check he’d just earned for selling the movie rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls. On another night, Hemingway punched out the warden of Sing Sing prison, laying him flat out on the club’s floor. “If you were at the Stork, you would not have to think at all,” Hemingway happily recounted. “You would just watch the people and listen to the noise.”

  Patrons entered the Stork Club under a green canopy guarded by a whistle-blowing doorman uniformed in blue. Past him flowed a veritable parade: “men in black tie and silk hats, servicemen in uniform, and veiled ladies in capes and furs and seamed stockings, black stiletto heels going tap-tap-tap over the glistening pavement,” wrote author Ralph Blumenthal. One then descended to the seventy foot long by thirty foot wide barroom, topped by a full length mirror, which “allowed Billingsley to look up and keep an eye on everything and patrons to admire themselves and one another under softly flattering lights—the ultimate entertainment at the Stork Club.”

  Ahead, the velvet-draped, crystal-chandeliered main ballroom echoed with rattling ice, popping champagne corks, and rhumba music, as telephones we
re whisked to V.I.P. tables by waiters in white jackets and Billingsley’s photographers fired off publicity shots to be rushed to the society columns. Finally, through a far door, was the holiest of inner sanctums, the Cub Room (some called it the “Snub Room”), where tables were reserved for only the most fabulous guests. The head waiter there was nicknamed Saint Peter. As society columnist Lucius Morris Beebe explained, “To millions and millions of people all over the world, the Stork symbolizes and epitomizes the deluxe upholstery of quintessentially urban existence. It means fame, it means wealth; it means an elegant way of life among celebrated folk. The Stork is the dream of suburbia, a shrine of sophistication in the minds of thousands who have never seen it, the fabric and pattern of legend.” For all its remove from the events that unfolded 8,500 miles away in Blackett Strait, it was here in this unlikely setting that the PT 109 saga would take a decisive turn.

  One night in early February 1944, John F. Kennedy took Flo Pritchett to the Stork Club on a double date with the Time-Life correspondent John Hersey, whose World War II novel A Bell for Adano would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and his wife, Frances Ann Cannon, herself a former Kennedy girlfriend. In the course of the evening, Kennedy, remembered Hersey, “began to give an account of this adventure he’d had” in the Solomon Islands. Instantly, the writer was intrigued. The tale seemed to have all the elements of a great magazine feature.

  “What appealed to me about the Kennedy story was the night in the water, his account of floating in the current, being brought back to the same point from which he’d drifted off,” recalled Hersey. “It was the same kind of theme that has fascinated me always about human survival, as manifested in the [eventual] title of the piece [‘Survival’]. It was really that aspect of it that interested me, rather than his heroics. The aspect of fate that threw him into a current and brought him back again. And that sort of dreamlike quality. His account of it is very strange. A nightmarish thing altogether.”

  Kennedy said he’d think over the possibility of cooperating with Hersey in recording an account of the PT 109. The next day, Kennedy telephoned his father and told him of the idea. Joseph Kennedy, who had failed to interest Reader’s Digest in the story the previous August during the brief flurry of attention generated by the United Press and Associated Press bulletins, naturally was delighted by the idea. A piece in Life magazine, the biggest media showcase in America at the time, could work magic for his son’s career. John Kennedy told Hersey he would cooperate, provided Hersey speak first with several PT 109 crewmen who by now were posted back at the Melville, Rhode Island, PT base, so he could get their account of events. Hersey set up the assignment with Life magazine and got to work.

  On February 23, according to Hersey, he interviewed Kennedy in New England Baptist Hospital in Boston, where Kennedy was being examined for back pain. “His insistence that I see the crew first struck me very favorably,” Hersey remembered. “It didn’t seem to me to be self-serving. There was a real kind of officer modesty about it. He had a kind of diffidence about himself that seemed to be genuine at that time. So in a joking way he wondered how he looked to them. They were wildly devoted to him, all of them. Absolutely clear devotion to him by the crew. No reservation about it. They really did like him.” Hersey recalled spending all afternoon and part of the evening interviewing Kennedy in his hospital bed, adding, “He drew me a map of the area particularly to illustrate the night he got off the reef and was in the water all night long and was carried out by the current. And also to illustrate the actual collision that took place.”

  The story gave Hersey a perfect opportunity to pursue his emerging creative goal of “using novelistic techniques in journalism.” When Kennedy first reviewed Hersey’s draft, however, he spotted a delicate problem. After their rescue PT 109 crewmen Raymond Albert had been killed in a separate incident later in the war. Evidently, Hersey referred to a moment when Albert lost his nerve during the ordeal. “I realize, of course, that his fate is ironic and dramatic and that his lack of guts is an integral part of war—and one that probably is not mentioned enough,” wrote Kennedy to Hersey. “I feel, however, that our group was too small, that his fate is so well-known both to the men in the boats and to his family and friends that the finger would be put too definitely on his memory, and after all he was in my crew. To see whether or not I was being oversensitive on this I asked two officers to read the story, and they both, independently of me, brought up the matter.” Kennedy advised, “it should be omitted.” Hersey cut out the reference in the final version.

  Kennedy also insisted the phrase “Kennedy saw a shape and spun the wheel to turn for an attack” be kept intact. It was clearly important to Kennedy that he be portrayed as a man of action who was hit in the course of attempting to attack, rather than as a completely helpless victim. Heeding Kennedy’s request, Hersey kept the line in.

  To Hersey’s surprise, Life rejected the article, for reasons unknown. The magazine, which had been covering the war on a nearly real-time, weekly basis, may have considered the story too old. Undaunted, Hersey sold it to the literary weekly the New Yorker, which had a much smaller audience than Life. John Kennedy seemed only somewhat disappointed to Hersey, but his father was clearly highly dissatisfied. The New Yorker spoke to a slice of the American intelligentsia, not to the voting masses capable of propelling a Kennedy into political office, as the elder Kennedy foresaw.

  Then Joe Kennedy had an idea that proved to be a masterstroke. He proposed to the mass-audience monthly Reader’s Digest that they run an unprecedented condensation of the New Yorker piece, with Hersey agreeing to donate his author’s fee to Mrs. Andrew Kirksey, the widow of one of the two men who died in the PT 109 incident. Neither magazine had made such a deal before, and at first both publishers, the New Yorker’s Harold Ross and Reader’s Digest’s Paul Palmer, flatly refused. But after a sustained pressure-and-charm offensive by Joe Kennedy, they both relented and a deal was struck in June 1944 that would make John Kennedy a national hero.

  On June 17, 1944, less than two weeks after D-Day, John Hersey’s article on PT 109, simply titled “Survival,” appeared in the New Yorker. The long-form, five-thousand-word piece was a vivid, precise blend of narrative, dialogue, and scene-setting that put the reader at the center of the surreal experience along with Kennedy and his crew. It was a detailed sketch of the essential facts of the story, with some points collapsed and others obscured by wartime censors. The roles of Coastwatchers Reginald Evans and Ben Nash were eliminated for security reasons, as Coastwatchers were still on dangerous, highly secret duty in the Pacific. Evans’s identity was changed to a fictional New Zealand infantry officer named “Lieutenant Wincote.” The names of the natives who helped rescue Kennedy were not mentioned in the article, and neither were those of Kennedy’s American rescuer Lieutenant (jg) Liebenow of the PT 157 and his colleagues. The roles of Ensign Lenny Thom and other members of the crew seemed diminished in comparison to Kennedy’s, and no mention was made of either Thom’s written note that accompanied the coconut to Rendova, or the furtive efforts of Commander Warfield at Rendova to follow up on the Coastwatcher reports of the possible PT 109 wreckage. Instead, Hersey left the impression that Rendova had totally given up on the PT 109, writing “back at the base, after a couple of days, the squadron held services for the souls of the thirteen men,” a poignant scene for which no firm evidence has been found.

  For Joe Kennedy’s campaign of family self-promotion, the Hersey feature was a perfect instrument. The article was not a typical propaganda piece of combat derring-do, but an authentic meditation on human endurance against the primal forces of nature: darkness, the ocean, hunger, and thirst. “Hersey’s ‘Survival’ produces John F. Kennedy as a hero, but not in the sense of a model person seen as a performing great exploits; the hero of Hersey’s narrative is rather a youth who has enormous bravery and energy but who is transformed by chastening experience,” wrote Ohio State University’s John Hellmann, author of The Kennedy
Obsession. “More complexly, the production of Kennedy as hero begins in his transformation into the narrative sense of that term, the protagonist or main character of the story with whom the reader is positioned to identify. As a true-life ‘character,’ Kennedy then walks off the page into the text of a political production in the media age.”

  Kennedy, home from the war, on a date with fashion editor Florence Pritchett, at New York City’s swanky nightclub the Stork Club. Kennedy encountered writer John Hersey, who asked if he could write about the PT 109 incident. Immediately, Kennedy checked with his father, and soon, a classic piece of New Journalism was created, along with a heroic saga that helped propel Kennedy into the U.S. House of Representatives. (Photograph courtesy of Stork Club Enterprises LLC)

  The Hersey article conjured the classic dramaturgy of myth-telling later described by Joseph Campbell as “the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero”: the rites of passage of separation (the PT 109 sinking), initiation (the ordeal on the islands and abandonment to death), and return (the rescue). Campbell outlined the basic elements of heroic mythology in terms that closely evoke the structure of the saga unveiled in “Survival”: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” “fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won,” and “the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Hersey’s “Survival” parallels the “Hero’s Journey” described by Campbell in other key ways, including the “threshold crossing,” the “night-sea journey,” the “rescue” and “resurrection,” and even the “helper,” who can be seen as Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, and the “elixir,” which can be interpreted as the symbolic coconuts that nourished the crew (just barely) and bore the message that delivered them from the underworld back to the world of the living. In short, Hersey’s article became the founding document of the John F. Kennedy mythology, helping firmly establish him as a hero in twentieth-century American political culture.