PT 109

by William Doyle

  Before long, the clerks struck gold: the object of Kennedy’s hunt was Kohei Hanami, a retired commander of the Japanese Imperial Navy. In 1943 he was the thirty-four-year-old commander of the destroyer Amagiri, or Heavenly Mist, which reported colliding with and destroying a small American vessel. His listed address was a family farm at Shiokawa, a remote hamlet in Fukushima Prefecture more than two hundred miles northeast of Tokyo. This was unfortunate for the purposes of a reunion with John Kennedy, since it would take some time to set up a meeting and Kennedy was due to leave Tokyo in a matter of days. Hosono considered trying to call Hanami on Kennedy’s behalf, but Japan’s telephone service to rural areas was too rudimentary at the time.

  Suddenly, however, matters took a dire turn.

  The precise details of what occurred next are shrouded in mystery, as Kennedy never talked publicly about the event, and the files at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library are strangely devoid of almost all records of the Tokyo portion of his trip. But key parts of the story can be reconstructed from fragments that survive in the files at Kennedy Library and in clues identified by researchers over the years.

  John F. Kennedy abruptly experienced a severe medical crisis at some point between his lunch with Professor Gunji Hosono and his departure from Tokyo on November 8, 1951, when he returned to the United States via San Francisco. According to Kennedy’s doctor at the time, Dr. Elmer Bartels, the crisis was triggered by his Addison’s disease and exacerbated by the strains of his long voyage. Bartels claimed that Kennedy “had not been properly taking care of himself on the trip.”

  In Tokyo, Kennedy collapsed with a fever so alarming that his brother Robert arranged for his emergency air evacuation to a U.S. Army hospital on Okinawa for treatment. There, Robert sat by John’s bedside as the fever spiked to over 106 degrees, the point at which hallucinations and convulsions can appear, followed by coma, brain damage, and death if the fever has not broken. A priest was brought in to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church to John F. Kennedy. In the only public reference Robert Kennedy ever made to the event, he noted, “They didn’t think he would live.”

  Contacted by phone in the United States, Dr. Bartels prescribed penicillin and adrenal hormones, and eventually, the fever receded. Kennedy recovered in time to leave on a flight out of Tokyo on November 8. Likely guided by Kennedy family spin control, Boston newspapers announced Kennedy “cut short” his trip “after being taken ill in Okinawa,” with a condition that “may have been malaria”—once again a calculated nod to his wartime service in the Pacific, where he had first contracted the disease.

  Kennedy returned to the United States in time to make a nationwide half-hour radio broadcast report on the trip from New York on November 14, 1951. He made little mention of Japan. Photos taken of him around this the time reveal his almost skeletal frame.

  Since John Kennedy would disguise the details of his Addison’s disease for the rest of his life, it is possible that those Kennedy family members with knowledge of his Tokyo crisis chose not to talk about it—other than Robert Kennedy’s brief comments about the fever’s climax in Okinawa, which omitted any mention of Addison’s disease. John Kennedy’s detailed personal diary of the trip contains no mention of his experience in Tokyo, as he may have been too tired, busy, or sick by then to make notes.

  Kennedy’s hasty departure from Tokyo dashed any hopes of a reunion photo with Kohei Hanami, and the matter lay dormant for the next nine months. Then in the late summer of 1952, Hosono read in Time magazine that John F. Kennedy was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate to defeat Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Hosono, who had dropped the PT 109 project when Kennedy abruptly left Tokyo in November 1951, had a brainstorm. Why not, Hosono thought, see if he could help Kennedy become a senator? He probably couldn’t get Kennedy and Hanami physically together on such notice, but why not introduce them by telegram and letter? Hosono immediately tracked down Kohei Hanami’s address again and sent a message to Hanami at his remote farming village. He asked Hanami to write Kennedy a note endorsing his Senate bid.

  When Kohei Hanami began reading the message, he was, in his word, “flabbergasted.”

  He clearly recalled the moment of impact that occurred eight years earlier when he ran over a small American craft after departing from Kolombangara. But ever since then, he had assumed all the Americans were killed in the crash.

  As he read the letter, former commander Kohei Hanami was stunned to learn that not only did some of the enemy sailors survive, but one of them, the captain of the boat, was a member of the United States House of Representatives. Hanami’s mind, which had until now been preocupied with the welfare of his crops, was swept back in time.

  “It had been years since I had even thought of the incident involving my ship in the Solomons,” he explained. “I could recall every detail, the sound of the collision as my ship raced over the PT boat, the feel of the damp night air and the smell of the gasoline flames that leapt higher than the deck, scorching the Amagiri’s paint. It had seemed impossible that anyone aboard the other ship had survived. Mr. Hosono’s letter filled me with relief and gratitude that so many Americans had come through that engagement of so long ago.”

  After reading Hosono’s message, which felt to Hanami like “a ghostly visitor from the past,” he sat down and wrote Kennedy a letter of friendship, in which he recalled the war and the PT 109 incident from his point of view. He ended the note by endorsing Kennedy’s U.S. Senate candidacy.

  Hanami sent the letter to Hosono in Tokyo, along with a wartime picture of himself and a photo of the Amagiri. On September 26, 1952, Hosono relayed the letter to Jack Gardiner, the former State Department official in Tokyo who had attended the November 1951 lunch in Tokyo with Kennedy and Hosono. Hosono instructed Gardiner, now living outside Boston, to give Hosono’s message to Kennedy “immediately.” The purpose of the letter, wrote Hosono, was to help Kennedy’s election campaign in November. Hosono added, “our friend will be sure to win against Senator Lodge,” and “Kennedy must be the hope of the Democratic Party in [the] future.”

  Almost two weeks later, Gardiner hand-delivered the letter to Robert F. Kennedy at the Kennedy campaign headquarters in Boston. The younger Kennedy was now acting as campaign director for his brother’s race, under the close direction of their father. Grasping the potential significance of the note, Robert told Gardiner he would take immediate action. When informed of the development, Joe Kennedy realized it was a story that could shore up his son’s foreign-affairs credentials against the experienced incumbent Lodge, by projecting the narrative that John Kennedy was a seasoned war hero, world traveler, and international-affairs expert.

  On October 19, 1952, in the thick of the Kennedy-Lodge electoral clash, the Kennedy campaign issued a press release that reprinted the full text of the Kohei Hanami letter, leading with the passages that supported Kennedy’s bid for the U.S. Senate. The campaign simultaneously released the photos of a smiling Hanami and his destroyer. The press release added, “Soon after the war, recovered from serious injuries he suffered in the sea battle, Kennedy toured most of the world, including Japan, where he took the trouble to find out who commanded the destroyer and almost succeeded in meeting him. Kennedy thought a hand of friendship to a former enemy might win a staunch Japanese spokesman for the United States. The gesture was instinctively understood by Hanami.”

  The story was picked up in the Boston newspapers and by Time magazine in its November 3, 1952, issue. The impact of the campaign, according to John F. Kennedy was “very beneficial.” It was a “rather unusual” endorsement, remembered Robert F. Kennedy, “but it helped.”

  Photograph of Kohei Hanami, sent by Hanami to John F. Kennedy in 1952 and subsequently released to American media during JFK’s senate campaign. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

  Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who had won four straight national election victories since 1932, originally thought he would crush John F. Kennedy by 300,000 votes. But he ran a weak cam
paign, stumbled in a debate with Kennedy, and ultimately lost the November general election by a narrow margin of 70,737 votes out of 2,353,231 votes cast.

  “I felt,” Lodge remembered, “rather like a man who has just been hit by a truck.”

  On February 18, 1953, John F. Kennedy sent a warm letter of thanks to his former enemy Hanami, the man who had been responsible for the greatest trial of his life. Kennedy’s letter was written on the stationery of a newly inaugurated United States senator. In the years that followed, Kennedy and Hanami maintained a friendly personal correspondence, exchanging greetings at Christmastime and special occasions. In 1953, when he heard of Kennedy’s marriage at age thirty-six to twenty-four-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, Hanami offered his best wishes. After Kennedy entered the hospital for back surgery, Hanami penned a message of encouragement. Kennedy wrote back affectionate notes to thank Hanami. In an interesting parallel, like Kennedy, Kohei Hanami entered elective politics. In 1954 Hanami was elected councilman of Shiokawa, a group of villages totaling thirteen thousand people. He was elected mayor in 1962.

  14

  THE GREATEST ACTOR OF OUR TIME

  Kennedy’s most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.

  NORMAN MAILER, 1960

  In 1953, John F. Kennedy settled into the life of a United States senator and a rising star in American politics. The PT 109 episode assumed a central position in his press and campaign images. In his Senate office in Washington, D.C., he kept a model of PT 109 on a shelf directly behind his work desk, and a plastic memento case containing the now-famous “rescue coconut” on his desk.

  In 1956 Kennedy narrowly missed being selected to run for vice president on the ticket with Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. He had two serious operations on his back, and published Profiles in Courage, a book that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. His first child, Caroline, was born that year. Also that year, he was selected to serve on the prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and in 1958 he was easily reelected to a second term in the Senate.

  In 1957, Kennedy agreed to serve as “technical advisor” on an episode of a CBS TV show called Navy Log that reenacted the PT 109 incident. When Kennedy visited the set of the production at Santa Monica, California, he was spotted by a gossip columnist, who described him as “giddy” with excitement as the cameras rolled. The low-budget production, when aired, was laughably inaccurate, but it did serve to present the “war hero” senator to a television audience and helped build the ambitious politician’s national profile.

  When John Kennedy ran for the ultimate prize—the presidency—in 1960, the PT 109 story was again exploited as an essential piece of campaign biography. The tale formed a critical foundation of Kennedy’s appeal as a presidential candidate, and the details of Kennedy’s personal rescue of a fellow sailor and his leadership of the surviving crew in a combat zone gave him a credential that few other presidential candidates have enjoyed, that of a certified action hero. Thousands of “PT 109 tie clasps” were mass-produced and handed out as campaign talismans, the John Hersey article was again widely distributed by the Kennedy campaign, and some of Kennedy’s PT 109 comrades and other PT veterans pitched in to campaign with Kennedy.

  At a speech at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, on September 12, 1960, Kennedy welcomed a crewman from his PT 59 command: “it is a source of pride to me that my friend, Vivian Scribner, who served with me on a PT boat, who I have not seen since 1944, drove up the Rio Grande Valley 250 miles to be with us on this platform.” On October 3, 1960, Edman Mauer appeared with Senator Kennedy at a campaign rally at Augustine’s Restaurant in Belleville, Illinois. “We have the good fortune to have a member of my crew who was on my torpedo boat in World War II who lives in this area of East St. Louis,” said Kennedy. “I would like to have you meet my friend, Mauer. Would you stand up and take a bow?” The crowd enthusiastically applauded. “He was on a merchant ship that got sunk in the Solomon Islands and he had the bad fortune to then come on my boat which got sunk.” Kennedy paused while the crowd laughed. “I am glad to see him today. It is the first time I have seen him for 17 years. We are delighted he is here.” Appearing at the same event were Gerard Zinser’s mother and father, who also lived nearby. In Garden Grove, California, PT 109 survivor Ray Starkey, now an oil worker, acted as a local Kennedy campaign chairman.

  A PT boat pin from JFK’s presidential campaign, 1960. Through shrewd marketing and publicity, Joseph P. Kennedy turned the PT 109 incident into a chariot that carried his son to the White House. (Hubbard Collection)

  One Kennedy aide who served on JFK’s 1960 campaign, Richard Donahue, recalled in a 2015 interview that several of the PT 109 veterans asked Kennedy for help in looking for work, making themselves “a pain in the ass,” in Donahue’s words. Kennedy did recommend them for jobs, though they were rejected for various reasons according to Donahue.

  Despite the prominent use of PT 109 as a campaign marketing device, Kennedy “was neither a professional warrior nor a professional veteran,” wrote JFK aide Theodore Sorensen. “He never boasted or even reminisced about his wartime experiences. He never complained about his wounds.” During the Wisconsin primary, when a young man asked him how he came to be a war hero, Kennedy famously quipped, “It was easy—they sank my boat.”

  In May 1960, Kennedy faced a critical point in his quest for the White House—the West Virginia Democratic presidential primary—for which his wartime service would play a crucial role in the outcome. His campaign once again was run by Robert F. Kennedy, with Joseph P. Kennedy pulling strings, writing checks, and offering strategic advice to his sons, as always. Kennedy’s main rival was Hubert Humphrey, the junior senator from Minnesota. Until then, Kennedy seemed to be emerging as the front-runner for the nomination, while Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, and Lyndon B. Johnson remained potent rivals.

  But Democratic Party bosses and political pundits were increasingly doubting whether a Roman Catholic could gain Protestant votes, especially in a heavily Protestant state like West Virginia, which some considered a bastion of anti-Catholic bigotry. Kennedy was the only Catholic in the race, and no Catholic had ever been elected president. A firestorm of questions was erupting over whether Kennedy’s loyalties would be split between America and the Vatican. If Kennedy lost in West Virginia, he might well have been perceived as unelectable because of his religion, and been knocked out of the race. He had to win, but his support was suddenly collapsing. Weeks before the primary, Kennedy trailed Humphrey, a Protestant, by 20 points in the West Virginia polls.

  The Kennedys’ solution was to double down on their trump card, the saga of PT 109. “The only thing we had was the 109,” recalled Richard Donahue, then a Kennedy campaign aide. “We used that.” West Virginia, recalled Donahue, was an intensely patriotic state that led the nation in the proportion of its population who were Gold Star Mothers, or mothers who had lost sons in the war. “And of course he [Kennedy] was a Gold Star Brother,” he noted, adding, “it was the only thing we could do to take the sting out” of the religious issue.

  PT 157’s Bud Liebenow helps JFK campaign for president in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1960. The two men were amused by how many people in campaign crowds shouted out that they were on the boat that rescued Kennedy. (William F. Liebenow)

  Charles Peters, then a county campaign manager for Kennedy in West Virginia, remembered in 2010, “The military experience, being a hero, in West Virginia, that just meant so much. Military service was highly honored, heroism even more. And so in my county alone we distributed 40,000 copies of that Reader’s Digest article about Kennedy’s war experience. Well, that had a big effect.”

  Kennedy regained his footing and launched an effective counterattack on the religious issue, framing it as a question of tolerance versus intolerance. He declared, “Nobody asked m
e if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy.” He noted, “Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or a Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber to fly his last mission.” On April 25, he told a statewide West Virginia audience, “I refuse to believe that I was denied the right to be president the day that I was baptized.”

  A low blow was delivered for Kennedy on April 27, two weeks before the final vote, when Kennedy’s friend Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., himself a decorated World War II Navy veteran, attacked Humphrey by saying, “I don’t know where he was in World War II,” and even handed out leaflets claiming Humphrey was a draft dodger. It inferred cowardice on the part of Humphrey, who did not serve in the war for medical reasons, despite trying to enlist. Roosevelt later said “of course, Jack knew,” referring to the smear.

  When reporter David Broder asked John Kennedy if he thought Humphrey’s lack of military service was a legitimate campaign issue, Broder was struck by Kennedy’s “super-cool, almost cold-blooded reaction.” Kennedy replied, “Frank Roosevelt is here making his speeches, and I’m making mine.” For his part in the dirty trick, said FDR Jr., “I always regretted my role in the affair. Humphrey, an old ally, never forgave me for it. I did it because of Bobby.” According to Roosevelt, “RFK was already a full-blown tyrant. You did what he told you to do, and you did it with a smile.”

  On the Sunday night before the vote, Kennedy delivered a speech that journalist Theodore H. White called “the finest TV broadcast I have ever heard any political candidate make.” In conclusion, Kennedy declared that when a president takes the oath of office, he swears on a Bible to support the separation of church and state. “And if he breaks his oath,” said Kennedy, “he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, for which the Congress can impeach him—and should impeach him—but he is committing a sin against God.”