One survivor of the crash was surprised when he read the New Yorker article. Speaking for himself and his fellow survivors, George “Barney” Ross recalled, “Our reaction to the 109 thing had always been that we were kind of ashamed of our performance. I guess you always like to see your name in print and that Hersey article made us think maybe we weren’t so bad after all. We’d never gone around saying, hey, did you hear about us? But suddenly your name’s in print and Hersey made you sound like some kind of hero because you saved your own life. So I suppose my reaction to the article was to be pleased with myself. I had always thought it was a disaster, but he made it sound pretty heroic, like Dunkirk.”
The condensed version of the article, the editing of which further sharpened Kennedy’s role, appeared in the August 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest, reaching millions of readers. At the age of twenty-seven, John Kennedy was a budding pop culture icon.
Until the PT 109 incident, John Kennedy had lived in the shadow of his high-achieving older brother, Joseph Jr., the obvious leader of the pack of eight children and dynastic heir apparent to the larger-than-life father, who was already grooming Joe Jr. for a future in national politics. With the flurries of attention that John’s adventures generated in August 1943, in January 1944, and then in the summer of 1944 with the New Yorker and Reader’s Digest articles, this family calculus was thoroughly scrambled, as John was now both a decorated war hero and a bestselling author, as well as a media star.
“What I really want to know,” wrote Joe Jr. peevishly to his brother John after reading the New Yorker piece, “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?” (The PT 109 of course had no radar.) The intensely competitive Joe Jr., a naval aviator based in England, had already piloted thirty-five missions; as his brother later wrote, “he had completed probably more combat missions in heavy bombers than any other pilot of his rank in the Navy.”
Having done more than his duty, Joe, Jr. was eligible to return to the United States. But in August 1944 he volunteered for an exquisitely complex and dangerous operation to bail out of a PB4Y Liberator aircraft stuffed with 12 tons of explosives that would be guided by radio signals to crash into a German rocket complex. If successful, the assault could help slow the onslaught of German rockets on London, and earn Joe, Jr. medals and fame to rival those of his younger brother. He took off from an RAF base in England on August 12, 1944. Eighteen minutes into the mission, his aircraft blew up over Newdelight Wood near the Suffolk hamlet of Blytheburgh, instantly killing Kennedy and his single crew member, Lieutenant Wilford John “Bud” Willy. “Driven by a hunger to redeem the Kennedy name from his father’s errors of political and moral judgment,” noted historian Alan Axelrod, “by lifelong competitiveness with his younger brother, Lieutenant (jg) John F. Kennedy, hero of PT 109, and, more selflessly, by a passionate desire to spare London further V-weapon devastation, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. answered the call.”
The heavy mantle of Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s political ambitions now landed squarely on the fragile shoulders of a sickly John F. Kennedy. “I’m now shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” John despaired to a friend. Through 1944 and 1945, John suffered through continuing health crises and was detached honorably from the U.S. Navy in December 1944, after which he briefly pursued an inconsequential stint as a war correspondent for the Hearst News Service in 1945, and spent months in the Arizona sun trying to rebuild his strength and health. During this time, Joe Sr. and John Kennedy appear to have reached an understanding that John was the family’s ‘anointed one’ and that politics would be his destiny.
“I can feel Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” John said to a friend during the Christmas holiday of 1944, adding, “I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage. I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t all engines ahead full.”
Years later, John told a reporter, “It was like being drafted. My father wanted his oldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father.” On another occasion, Kennedy explained: “My brother Joe was the logical one in the family to be in politics, and if he had lived, I’d have kept on being a writer.”
Joseph Kennedy Sr. confirmed John’s account of the succession, asserting matter-of-factly to a journalist in 1957, “I got Jack into politics. I was the one. I told him Joe was dead and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress. He didn’t want to. He felt he didn’t have the ability and he still feels that way. But I told him he had to.” Another time he said simply, “I thought everyone knows about that. Jack went into politics because young Joe died. Young Joe was going to be the politician in the family. When he died, Jack took his place.”
In a series of private father-and-son conversations held through 1945, Joseph P. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy agreed that in 1946, the initially reluctant son would take up the family mission for national political office, and run for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Eleventh Congressional District in Massachusetts.
Evidently, they also agreed, at least tacitly, that the PT 109 story and the veteran’s angle would be front and center in the campaign’s marketing and publicity. It was a strategy born of obvious necessity, as the young Kennedy’s war record was about all he had to run on, but in the context of a campaign set in the immediate aftermath of the war, and against primary and general election opponents with little combat experience, it proved decisive.
In December 1945 Kennedy founded a new Veterans of Foreign Wars post named for his brother Joe. Bankrolled as always by his father’s vast supply of cash, he began building a campaign staff that was packed with young war veterans. Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. arranged for his son to be made president of the upcoming national VFW convention, which would host twenty thousand veterans, and arranged for the appointment to be widely publicized.
On April 22, 1946, John Kennedy made the formal announcement he was running for the U.S. Congress. The first press release anchored his campaign firmly in his war record, dramatically claiming that Kennedy’s inspiration for entering politics stemmed from a promise he made aboard the combat-tossed PT 109 itself. The press release read: “In the Solomon Islands, when ships were sinking and young Americans were dying all around him, John F. Kennedy made a solemn pledge to himself aboard the battle-scarred PT he commanded. The pledge was to serve his country in peace as well as in war—no matter what the cost to his own ambitions in private fields or the discomfort that might be his at the hands of any who are politically ambitious in a strictly mercenary way.”
In the 1946 campaign, Kennedy honed a stump speech that focused on the heroics of his PT 109 crew, while shyly downplaying his own role. It was a humble, yet clever, strategy that Kennedy pursued for the rest of his career: he approved the widespread use of the PT 109 story and imagery in his campaigns and interviews; but assuming the part of “bashful American hero,” he maintained a reserved, “aw shucks,” “I’m not a hero” attitude toward his own exploits. This air of modesty, combined with his own increasing fame, made audiences love Kennedy even more, especially since they already knew the essentials of the PT 109 story thanks to his father’s marketing and publicity muscle. His 1946 campaign ads showed a picture of a war veteran father gesturing toward a picture of Kennedy and saying proudly, “There’s our man, son.”
Campaign worker John Galvin recalled, “No one was ever unaware of [Jack] Kennedy’s war record and injury, it was played up all the time.”
In 2014, former Kennedy White House aide Dan Fenn recalled of Kennedy, “He wasn’t much of a braggart, he wasn’t much for self-psychoanalyzing either. He didn’t like campaigning so much. The Hersey article was a hell of a story that became well known thanks to the efforts of his father.” Fenn noted the 1946 contest “was a real fight, because there were a lot of local pols that seemed to have the edge” i
n the campaign, and while Kennedy was already “a pretty appealing candidate,” his war service and the fact that his brother was killed in the war “added a sheen, a luster that was important right after the war.”
Another Kennedy campaign aide, William J. Sutton, recalled the powerful effect the PT 109 story had on voters, even before the formal announcement. “I remember the New England Hardware Banquet at the Statler,” he said in an oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library. “He gave his first speech there on the PT 109 incident, which was an extremely well-delivered speech for a newcomer. But, at that time, I knew he was captivating people with the story of his episode in the Pacific. That was his speech that day and at the end of the speech practically everybody in the hall, mostly a male attendance, came up and shook his hand. Even then, I heard that they wanted to do something for him, although he hadn’t announced for Congress, at that time.” At an American Legion hall event once the campaign was under way, Kennedy said, “I think I know how all you mothers feel because my mother is a Gold Star mother [of a fallen serviceman], too.” He was met with a wave of approval and affection.
Early in the campaign, Kennedy sometimes seemed to be a nervous, hesitant, and generally poor public speaker. But telling the PT 109 story was his touchstone, and he later traced his confidence in his own political future to these speeches and to how well audiences responded. Privately, Kennedy wisecracked to a friend about the story’s universal appeal, “My story about the collision is getting better all the time. Now I’ve got a Jew and a nigger in the story and with me being a Catholic, that’s great.”
Late in the campaign, mastermind Joe Kennedy administered a coup de grâce. He blanketed key election neighborhoods with thousands of copies of the John Hersey Reader’s Digest article in pamphlet form, along with a press release of support signed by PT 109 crewman William Johnston, now a truck driver in the Dorchester section of Boston. One source placed the distribution at 15,000 copies in East Boston, another widely quoted estimate was at least 100,000 copies in total, and yet another account put a copy in the hands or mailbox of every single voter in the district. “Christ!” exclaimed campaign worker John Galvin. “We had millions of them!”
Kennedy insiders Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell later wrote of the marketing significance of the PT 109 story in launching Kennedy’s political career. “Blanketing the district with copies of Hersey’s account of Kennedy’s wartime heroism was an obvious but highly effective promotional move,” they wrote. “His well-known display of incredible courage in the South Pacific gave him an aura of glamour that overshadowed his political inexperience and the charges that he was a carpetbagger whose father was buying him a seat in Congress.”
Kennedy easily won the primary and coasted to victory in the November 1946 general election, securing nearly 72% of votes. In January 1947, John F. Kennedy headed to Washington, D.C., to be sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Finally, it seemed Joseph Kennedy’s burning desire for national political prominence for his family would be fulfilled.
Over the next six years though, John Kennedy compiled an undistinguished record as a carefree bachelor-playboy congressman. His health was a greater concern. He was sometimes mistaken for a skinny young Senate page or elevator operator. In 1947 he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a collapse of the adrenal glands that could trigger fevers, weight loss, weakness, and death if not correctly treated. From 1950 on Kennedy relied on cortisone treatments for relief, and he hid the diagnosis from the public for the rest of his life. His congenitally malformed back, aggravated by PT boat life and possible football and tennis injuries, greatly troubled him as well.
At first, John Kennedy seemed destined to languish in Congress as a backbench-warming bit player. The path to higher office was blocked by Kennedy family archrival U.S. senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a liberal Republican mandarin, decorated World War II veteran, and grandson of a man who had beat Kennedy’s own maternal grandfather in a clash for the U.S. Senate in 1916. Lodge was at the peak of his power and popularity, and was looking forward to an easy election win in 1952 for a third term. To outside observers, Kennedy had hit a brick ceiling surprisingly early in his career; at the same time, his ever-fragile health was on the rocks. The Kennedy’s father-and-son ambitions appeared doomed to disappointment.
But as usual, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. had an idea, and it was a big one. He believed his son could beat Lodge. In 1950, he began quietly launching polls, opposition research, and long-range planning for John F. Kennedy to capture a seat in the United States Senate. Following his own adage that “things don’t just happen, they are made to happen by the public relations field,” Joe Kennedy decided his son should boost his credentials as an expert on global affairs and foreign relations as befitting a Senate contender, so he sent John on an around-the-world fact-finding trip, accompanied by two of his siblings.
The trip would climax, the elder Kennedy decided, in Japan, for a startling photo opportunity designed to generate headlines and attach his son’s name and face to a historic image of grace, humility, and mature diplomacy.
John F. Kennedy would go to Japan, track down the former commanding officer of the Japanese Imperial Navy destroyer Amagiri—and embrace the man who nearly killed him.
13
MISSION TO TOKYO
JAPAN
NOVEMBER 2, 1951
John F. Kennedy stepped off a plane at Haneda Airport just outside Tokyo, a dusty traveler on the last leg of a three-week trip that had taken him to Pakistan, India, Thailand, Malaya, Indochina, and Hong Kong.
Along the way, his father had intercepted him with publicity suggestions in cables sent from the United States: “If possible try and get some news service to report your activities each location. Good for buildup here.” “Have interview National Hookup probably night of 15th. Write me names important people you talked with for newspaper publicity and air [radio] talks.”
At the request of local American officials, Kennedy was greeted in Tokyo by Gunji Hosono, a distinguished Japanese international-law professor and director of the Japan Institute of Foreign Affairs, who escorted the young congressman and his traveling companions, brother Robert Kennedy and sister Patricia, to the capital city. Hosono was a seasoned globe-trotter himself, having visited London during the same time the Kennedy family lived there in 1940, and having earned degrees at the University of Southern California and New York’s Columbia University.
Tokyo was in its sixth and final year of post-war U.S. military occupation. The city was rebuilding from the ashes of World War II, and it played host to a seething cauldron of ambitious merchants and businesspeople, fledgling democratic politicians and union activists, black market bosses, communist spies and gangster-paradise nightclubs, all very loosely overseen by Allied occupation authorities working out of the giant former Dai-Ichi [“Number One”] Insurance building overlooking the Imperial Palace grounds, now referred to as “GHQ,” or “General Headquarters.”
Earlier that year, General Douglas MacArthur left his post as Supreme Allied Commander and viceroy of the American occupation in a wave of popular emotion and gratitude, which he clumsily destroyed in testimony before the U.S. Congress when he described his Japanese subjects with a dismissive remark: “by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of twelve as compared with our development of 45 years.” The comment was widely viewed by Japanese as an insult and embarrassment, and the image of MacArthur quickly disintegrated from that of a demigod in the Japanese memory.
Once in Tokyo, Robert and Patricia Kennedy began sightseeing, while Professor Hosono took the likeable Congressman John Kennedy to lunch at Kacho, a restaurant in the Tsukjii district, home to the largest fish market in the world. As he surveyed his guest’s appearance, Hosono was struck by the thirty-four-year-old American’s height, a reaction no doubt accentuated by how thin Kennedy was after a lifetime plagued by injury and illness. But Hosono’s impression would also have been by colored by t
he inevitable comparison to how stunted the average Japanese adult’s stature was after decades of war and privation. As lunch was prepared, John Kennedy revealed a surprising wish—he wanted to seek out and meet the captain of the Japanese destroyer that sank the PT 109 in August 1943, killed two of his crewmen, and missed ending his own life by a few feet. He wanted to meet this captain, whoever he was, and pose for a picture with him.
The Ginza district, Tokyo, the capital of U.S. occupied Japan in 1951, the year John Kennedy came to the city in search of the man who nearly killed him in the war. Instead, Kennedy was hurled again upon the gates of death. (Werner Bischof, Magnum Photos)
“Can you help me find him?” Kennedy asked Hosono.
Kennedy had no information to go on, other than a time, a date, and the names of the Solomon Islands near the crash site. It was a needle-in-a-haystack request. Finding someone in the chaotic landscape of postwar Japan would be hard enough under any circumstance. But the American war veteran didn’t know the name of the man he was looking for, the name of his ship, or what part of Japan he lived in.
Despite the difficulty of the assignment, Hosono said he would try his best. As it happened, Kennedy picked the perfect man for such a daunting task. Hosono was so well connected, GHQ official John Gardiner, also a guest at the luncheon, considered him “the best ‘finger man’ in Japan,” who must have “a machine who can locate anyone in Japan.”
After lunch, Hosono rushed across the city to the office of the Fukuinkyoku, or Navy Demobilization Bureau, the Japanese government ministry that kept records of the Imperial Fleet and Japanese veterans. Officials there could not remember a case of a Japanese destroyer running over an American torpedo boat, but Hosono insisted that clerks rifle through the files and search with the few clues Kennedy gave him.
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