Kennedy administered a crushing defeat to Humphrey, winning 60.8 percent of the West Virginia primary vote. That night, Humphrey pulled out of the race. The showdown proved a Roman Catholic could win in a bastion of Protestant voters. It was a landmark victory for Kennedy, as it cleared his path to the Democratic presidential nomination, which he would win on June 13, 1960. It was also victory for religious tolerance in America, as it proved that a non-Protestant, a Catholic, could make a legitimate claim to the White House.
In the fall general-election campaign against Republican nominee and sitting vice president Richard M. Nixon, the PT 109 saga served as a vivid counterpoint to Nixon’s experience in World War II. Like Kennedy, Nixon was also an officer in the U.S. Navy who served honorably in the South Pacific, but Nixon’s service became better known for his poker-playing skills and management of a hamburger stand rather than any combat heroics. The backdrop of PT 109 was so powerfully reinforced in Kennedy’s campaign materials that Kennedy had little need to refer to it himself, in keeping with his “bashful hero” image.
One day during the 1960 campaign, U.S. Navy veteran Lawrence Ogilvie squeezed into an elevator in Spokane, Washington, came face-to-face with candidate John F. Kennedy, and introduced himself as a veteran of the PT 162, which was the boat closest to the PT 109 when it was hit by the Amagiri.
Years later, Ogilvie recalled, “The Jap destroyer, later known as the Amagiri, came from our starboard side about 250 feet in front of our 162 boat, and hit the 109 on the starboard side, looked like right in the center. Gas tanks on the 109 exploded, lighting up the whole area. The can sliced through the 109 and never slowed down at all, then disappeared into the night. We were stunned and never fired a shot, trying to realize what had happened. We didn’t think anyone from the crew could live through that and Lt. Lowrey took us out of there. The crew wanted our Skipper to go back, but we couldn’t see the 109 any longer out there, and we never did go back.”
When John F. Kennedy learned he was talking to a man who was on the PT 162 that night, he briefly stepped out of his supremely cool, confident, and poised image and revealed a glimpse of how, for all the value the PT 109 episode provided him as a candidate for the nation’s highest office, the ordeal in the Blackett Strait still haunted him somewhere within.
“Where in the hell did you guys go?” Kennedy snapped. It was all he had to say to Ogilvie.
On October 10, 1960, in the thick of the extremely hard-fought presidential contest, an eighteen-year-old man named Jack Kirksey stood outside the late Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia.
He was waiting to meet John F. Kennedy, the skipper of the boat on which his father, Andrew Jackson Kirksey, was killed seventeen years earlier. The only memories of his father Jack had were from photos and stories told by family members. Beside him was his mother, Kloye, Kirksey’s widow.
The two had never met John F. Kennedy before, but Kennedy had been a guiding force in their lives ever since the tragedy. Shortly after the loss of the PT 109, Kennedy had warmly written to Kloye, “If a boat captain is fortunate, he finds one man in his crew who contributes more than his share and through his leadership, builds morale and esprit up throughout the boat. With us, Jack Kirksey was that man—and he did a superb job.” Kennedy told the widow of her husband’s final days. “During the last weeks when the going was tough,” he wrote, “Jack never lost his courage or his cheerfulness. Yet the thought of you and your son was always with him. He talked of you often and he frequently showed me the pictures that you sent of your son—with tremendous pride.” Of the tragic events in Blackett Strait, Kennedy recounted to Mrs. Kirksey that “we could find no trace” of her husband “and no one reported seeing him.” Kennedy acknowledged he was “truly sorry that I cannot offer you hope that he survived that night.”
In March 1944, when Kennedy was back in the States and posted in Miami, he again wrote Kloye, who had a son with Kirksey and two sons from her previous marriage, to ask how she was doing. He enclosed a copy of a group photograph of Kennedy and part of the PT 109 crew on the boat’s deck, taken off Guadalcanal in early July 1943—just prior to their move to Rendova. “The picture, unfortunately, is poor—the heat spoiled the negative but it is good of Jack.” Kennedy explained he had “been wondering if all Jack’s affairs with the Navy have been worked out satisfactorily and if there is anything that I can do in this regard. I hope that you will write me and let me know if things aren’t going well for you. Your husband was a great friend of mine, and I will feel it a privilege if there is something I could do.”
When John Hersey’s Reader’s Digest article appeared, Kennedy arranged for two thousand dollars to be sent to Kloye Kirksey, and the same amount to be forwarded to Harold Marney’s family. In the months and years that followed, Kennedy personally advised Kloye on how to apply for, maximize, and manage her veteran survivors’ benefits, in a way, explained her son Jack, that she “was taken care of for the rest of her life.”
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy stopped in Warm Springs, Georgia. There, for the first time, he met the widow (center) of his lost PT 109 crewman Andrew Kirksey and their son Jack (right). She described the encounter as the greatest day of her life. After the picture was taken, they went to a private room and had a conversation that changed Jack Kirksey’s life. (Andrew Jackson Kirksey Family Collection)
Hoyt Grant, Kloye’s son from her previous marriage, recalled, “Kennedy wrote Mother several letters and kept in touch with her to make sure all of her affairs with the Veterans Department were taken care of, and even made a ‘hot line’ call to the Director of the Veterans Administrations, asking him to call Mother to make sure she knew all of her benefits. Jack was listed as missing in action for a year, before my Mother received her checks, and it was slim pickings there for a while. My brother and I both worked and helped her. She was sent $2,000 by the author of the article that was published in the Reader’s Digest, and she purchased a home out on Warm Springs highway.”
For all of Kennedy’s help, explained Jack Kirksey in 2014, his mother “was in total awe of” JFK, and when Kennedy invited her to meet him at a campaign stop at Warm Springs, not far from her home, Kloye was “totally, utterly excited and elated about meeting him” for the first time.
Ever opportunistic and eager to sell their Yankee candidate to southern constituents, the Kennedy campaign saw a publicity opportunity in the admiring PT 109 widow. An article about her appeared in the Atlanta Constitution with the headline “War Widow Tells of Kennedy’s Help.” In the article, Kloye was quoted as saying of Kennedy, “My husband always said he was the kind of person that you wouldn’t know had a dime in his pocket.” She added, “He’s just a down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness person and I think he’d make us a fine president.”
When Kennedy and his entourage swept into the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, where Franklin D. Roosevelt had held court decades earlier while recovering from polio, JFK was mobbed by well-wishers who were gathered to hear him make a speech from the front steps of the house.
Kennedy was ushered to meet Kloye and Jack Kirksey. “I couldn’t hardly talk to him,” the younger Kirksey remembered, dazzled by the moment.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Kennedy told Kloye, “and I’m very glad to meet your son.” She gave Kennedy a present of a small hand-carved sculpture of a Democratic donkey braying at a Republican elephant. The three went to a private room and Kennedy put them at ease.
“It was almost like a family member asking what you’d been doing and how you’d been doing in school,” Jack Kirksey remembered. “He was mostly interested in asking questions about my schooling and my life. He wanted to know if anyone had contacted me about veterans’ education benefits, which they had not. He was interested in my mom and how she was doing and if everything was OK. He just was extremely interested in people. He was an extremely compassionate man. He was such a caring guy. If you had any personal contact with h
im, you couldn’t help but be bowled over. He was bigger than life.” A photograph taken of the meeting captures a haunted look on Kennedy’s face as he shook the hand of the son of his lost crewman, as an emotional Kloye Kirksey looks on adoringly.
On November 8, 1960, after an epic campaign clash the New York Times called “one of the closest and most contentious elections in American history,” John F. Kennedy beat his fellow naval veteran of the South Pacific and Republican presidential nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon, by a margin of just 0.1 percent of the popular vote.
Joseph Kennedy’s dream had finally come true: a Kennedy would be president. It was the culmination of an eighteen-year quest that started with the father’s summit meeting at the Plaza hotel in 1942 with Commander Bulkeley to maneuver John into the PT boat service, followed by the sinking of the PT 109, a brief burst of national publicity in the weeks that followed, the publication of Hersey’s landmark New Yorker article the following year, and the deployment of massive amounts of the father’s cash to support JFK’s campaigns for the House of Representatives in 1946, the Senate in 1952, and the White House in 1960. In each of the campaigns, the mythology of PT 109 played a central, and possibly decisive, role. As longtime aide Dave Powers, who served as JFK’s “Special Assistant” once they reached the White House, put it, “Without PT 109, there never would have been a President John F. Kennedy.”
JFK invited his surviving PT 109 crew members to Washington, D.C., to attend the inaugural festivities on January 20, 1961. The former sailors climbed aboard a float that featured a replica of their now-famous lost torpedo boat. In fact, it was the PT 796, a Higgins PT boat painted to represent PT 109. (This boat has been restored and is now housed in Battleship Cove, Fall River, Massachusetts.) “All the crew rode on the PT 109 float in the parade as a surprise to the skipper,” recalled Pat McMahon. “As we passed by the presidential reviewing stand, Kennedy stood up, grinned, whipped off his silk top hat, and gave us the skipper’s signal: ‘Wind ’em up, rev ’em up, let’s go!’” A delighted Kloye Kirksey and her son Hoyt came up from Georgia to attend the inauguration as JFK’s guests.
One day not long after the inauguration, the director of the Atlanta, Georgia, office of the U.S. Veterans Administration was shocked to hear his secretary tell him, “The White House is calling!”
John F. Kennedy was on the line, ordering him to send a car to the Kirkseys’ home, bring Jack to his office, and explain his educational benefits to him. When Jack got there, it looked like the director “almost had a stroke” in the wake of a direct call from the president of the United States. Benefits were arranged and Jack attended college accounting courses that launched his career. In late April 1961, Kennedy sent Kloye Kirksey an aerial photograph of the American cemetery in Manila, where the name of her late husband was inscribed on a memorial wall. If she ever came to Washington, the president wrote, he “would like very much to have the White House and other public places here shown to you.”
When John Kennedy was planning his inaugural celebrations, he remembered Professor Gunji Hosono and the quiet, behind-the-scenes role the Japanese man played in his political ascension, and so he invited his Japanese friend to the inauguration.
As the parade passed by the White House reviewing stand, Kennedy spotted Hosono and his daughter Haruko, and beckoned them to join him and Robert Kennedy at the seat of power. President Kennedy placed the professor directly behind himself, his wife, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson to watch the parade.
Few if any of the onlookers would have had the slightest idea what a white-haired elderly Japanese man and his attractive daughter were doing standing with the president of the United States on the day of his inauguration.
On January 25, 1961, Gunji and Haruko Hosono entered the Oval Office as Kennedy’s first foreign visitors in the White House. Sitting beside the president’s desk with his daughter, Professor Hosono presented Kennedy with a message of congratulations from Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda. He also gave Kennedy an ornate, ceremonial scroll that wished the new president success. It was signed by seventeen Japanese men. They were veterans of the Amagiri, the Japanese Imperial Navy destroyer that destroyed PT 109.
At 8:50 A.M. on his first full day as president, John Kennedy sat alone in the empty Oval Office, flinching at the freshly painted green walls, pressing buzzers, and inspecting his desk drawers, which were empty except for a printed instruction sheet detailing a plan of action in case of a nuclear attack.
Soon he called in an aide and said, “What the hell do I do now?”
The Oval Office soon filled up with mementoes of the PT 109, talismans from the event that paved his path to power: the SOS coconut from the PT 109 rescue refurbished as a paperweight, a ten-inch glass ornament etched with a likeness of PT 109, and his navy ID card encased in a glass ashtray. On his desk there appeared a plaque from Admiral Hyman Rickover given to commanders of Polaris nuclear submarines bearing a Breton fisherman’s prayer: OH GOD, THY SEA IS SO GREAT AND MY BOAT IS SO SMALL.
Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey watched the early transformation of the room: “There were the marks of a navy vet: on the walls flanking the fireplace hung two naval pictures showing the 1812 battle between the Constitution and the British frigate Guerriere, and on the mantel was a model of the Constitution.”
Early in 1961, Kennedy met in the Oval Office with journalist Robert J. Donovan, who wished to write a book about PT 109. Recalling the chaos of the incident, Kennedy tried to talk him out of it. “Oh, Bob,” he said, “don’t get into that. You’ll be flogging a dead horse.” Referring to the article by John Hersey, he recalled: “Every time I ran for office after the war, we made a million copies of that article to throw around.” He added, “That operation was more fucked up than Cuba.” The recent failed CIA-backed exile invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs had delivered a body blow to Kennedy’s young presidency, and he must have seen parallels between that fiasco and the Battle of Blackett Strait seventeen years earlier, both of which were plagued by poor planning, communications, and coordination.
As president, Kennedy filled the Oval Office with nautical items, including a replica of the PT 109 in a glass case on his desk (foreground of photo), and the famous distress coconut enclosed in a case (far right of photo). (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
President John F. Kennedy accepts a model of PT 109 from a young Luke Flaherty as he greets the crowd gathered at Great Falls High School Memorial Stadium, Great Falls Montana, September 26, 1963. Kennedy had less than 2 months to live. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
Donovan persisted, and obtained Kennedy’s cooperation in hastily writing PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II, an essential account of many of the basic facts of the PT 109 incident, published in the fall of 1961. Donovan traveled to the Solomon Islands and Japan to interview participants, and he spoke with several of the surviving PT 109 crewmen. As an “authorized” account produced in cooperation with a sitting president, the book was highly favorable to John F. Kennedy. According to Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, JFK was pleased with the Donovan work, which became a major bestseller. Joseph P. Kennedy himself couldn’t have better crafted the opening line of the New York Times review: “This is a book that should be read by any American who is worried how John Fitzgerald Kennedy will react in time of deep, terrifying crisis.”
A Hollywood film adaption of the Donovan book was fast-tracked into production by legendary mogul and Warner Bros. studios co-founder Jack Warner. From the start of the movie’s development in 1961, John F. Kennedy and his father, the former movie studio czar, tightly controlled key aspects of the project, demanding (and obtaining) veto power for approval of script, director, and cast. Joe Kennedy personally negotiated Donovan’s book option contract with Warner Bros. and stayed involved in the movie’s development until a December 19, 1961, stroke incapacitated him for the rest of his life. It was an unprecedented level of White House involvement in a movie production, and it wa
s the first time a major studio had made a feature film about a sitting president. JFK went so far as to make suggestions to star Cliff Robertson on how he should comb and color his hair. Jackie Kennedy wanted Warren Beatty to play Kennedy, but Beatty correctly sensed the project was doomed.
Indeed the PT 109 movie was dogged by script problems, production delays, and directorial turmoil. At one point, while auditioning director candidates by screening films in the White House movie theater, a disgusted President Kennedy ordered the projector stopped, saying to his press secretary, “Tell Jack Warner to go fuck himself.” The original director was fired while shooting was under way in Florida (standing in for the Solomon Islands), and his successor, noted TV veteran Leslie Martinson, had never helmed a movie before. No PT boats similar to Kennedy’s survived, so standing in for them were several 85-foot U.S. Air Force crash rescue boats, converted to resemble PTs. Operating within the iron grip of both Jack Warner and the White House, Martinson did an admirable job in finishing the picture under difficult conditions.
Released in 1963 and starring Cliff Robertson as JFK, the movie flopped, earning only $5.5 million in worldwide revenue versus a $6.5 million production budget, for a net loss of $1 million. Studio chief Warner, who thought he had a blockbuster classic on his hands, was baffled, and wrote, “I don’t understand why it missed.” At a Hollywood party, Kennedy said to Warren Beatty, “You were right about that movie.” Author Robert Donovan later agreed, telling a historian, “I didn’t think it was a good movie. I was disappointed.” Of the script, Cliff Robertson despaired: “I’m like a painter who is given three pots of paint and told to come up with twelve colors.” Newsweek pronounced the screenplay “agonizingly bad.” Look magazine dismissed the film as “just this side of the Bobbsey Twins.”
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