In Osaka, schoolchildren mobbed the couple, calling “Kennedy-san, shake hands!” At a Matsushita Electrical Industrial Company factory, Time magazine reported, “the Attorney General sat down at a workers table and chatted about Communism while munching manfully on a whale steak.” In Kyoto, Kennedy sipped sake in a small back-alley bar and chatted about world affairs with university professors. He sought out audiences with ordinary Japanese, especially students and labor representatives.
“The Kennedys had such a disarming way; they really charmed people, and were so genuine,” remembered the journalist Susie Wilson, who joined her friend Ethel on the trip, during in a 2014 interview. The thirty-three-year-old Ethel Kennedy proved enormously popular, projecting an attractive aura of informality, enthusiasm, and friendly fascination with Japanese culture. “Ethel loved people,” recalled Wilson. “She chatted with any and all of them, and they responded to her genuineness, and her concern for them and their cares.”
Few people realized at the time that Ethel Kennedy had her own intimate personal family connection with Japan, through her father, industrialist George Skakel, the founder of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of the largest privately held companies in America. In a 2015 interview for this book, Mrs. Kennedy explained, “My dad had a business association with Mitsubishi, for which during the war he had a terrible guilt trip, because he supplied tankers to the Japanese before the war.” The giant Mitsubishi group of companies was a bedrock of the modern Japanese economy, and also of Japan’s economic and military expansion during World War II.
After the war was over, Ethel Kennedy recounted, “Daddy called the head of Mitsubishi and said, ‘Well, we passed through this terrible stage. But now it’s only right that we turn things around. So let’s go about our business together.’ The head of Mitsubishi said, ‘No, George, I can’t do that. We are destroyed. We have no factories, we have nothing.’ Dad said, ‘I’ll send a tanker over tomorrow. That’s my present to you to help you get back on your feet again.’ And that was really the start of Mitsubishi’s return.”
Fifty-three years after her triumph in Tokyo with her husband, Ethel Kennedy’s memories of their visit to Japan were vivid and powerful. “What was wonderful, I think, about Bobby on that trip was he wasn’t afraid to hold back. He talked about the differences in our country, and how Americans were free to state their beliefs. What’s very fascinating is that despite the language barrier, it seemed to me that the philosophy that Bobby represented and talked about, such as about labor unions and how much they helped the people, really left their mark. It seemed to me it was a concept they hadn’t believed in before. You could see them thinking about what he was saying. They just were stunned. Because I think he felt he did in fact get through about our labor policies, which were totally almost unknown territory for them. When he brought up minimum wage and decent circumstances, everything that American labor unions stand for, I do think he affected what would later be tremendous change.”
For his part, Robert F. Kennedy recalled, “We left Japan with a certain sadness. We had eaten snails and seaweed for breakfast and whale meat for lunch. We had slept on floors, lived through an earthquake, been thrown to the ground by judo experts and had gone ice-skating before breakfast. We had had meetings at 6:30 in the morning and at 11:30 at night. We had visited farms and factories and sake houses. We had met government officials and factory workers. We had learned a great deal and enjoyed ourselves tremendously in the process.”
The visit’s ultimate aim, of course, was to pave the way for what Robert Kennedy and his brother John had hoped would be an even greater triumph: a presidential visit to Japan to occur early in the election year of 1964, a voyage that would culminate in an emotional reunion between JFK and his fellow survivors of the PT 109 disaster, and the surviving veterans of the Japanese warship that attacked her. But in reality RFK achieved something far greater and more lasting than a fleeting photo op.
Through their travels in Japan, Robert and Ethel helped transform the previously troubled postwar embrace of Japan and the United States into a new relationship defined by youth, energy, dialogue, and mutual respect and equality.
As Dartmouth professor of government Jennifer Lind wrote, “Robert Kennedy’s visit, and the networks and institutions it created, helped knit the U.S. and Japanese societies closer together. Two countries once dismissed as impossible allies forged, through careful and persistent diplomacy, a durable and warm relationship.” The trip, she added, “heralded a new era in U.S.-Japanese relations.”
On February 7, 1962, the third day of RFK’s visit to Japan, the attorney general was greeted by a special visitor.
In a reception room at the Japanese Institute for Foreign Affairs in Tokyo, a door slid open and a distinguished middle-aged man was ushered in to greet Kennedy. He was the mayor of a small town in the Japanese countryside. His name was Kohei Hanami, and during World War II, RFK learned, he was commander of a destroyer called the Amagiri.
He was, Robert Kennedy realized, the man who had nearly killed his brother. Kennedy unhooked his own PT 109 tie clasp and gave it to Hanami, and Hanami gave Kennedy a painting of Mount Fuji. Like few others, the two men would have understood how strange the currents of history were that brought them together at that moment.
As commander in chief, John Kennedy forged bonds of intense affection with many of those who served in his administration, a connection that evoked the powerful ties felt by his PT 109 crewmen.
“He was an incendiary man who set most of the people around him on fire,” remembered Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk. “It was really fun to work with him.” Rusk identified one of Kennedy’s strongest executive strengths: a personality enriched by immense personal charm, intellectual integrity, and often self-deprecating humor, traits that forged his staff into a Shakespearean band of brothers. Budget director David Bell explained that inside the Oval Office, “Kennedy was a magnificent natural leader. He was like a red-haired Irish sea-raider. Everyone had the natural feeling they’d follow him anywhere. He was quick and funny, and committed to all the right purposes. He was the guy you’d want to follow into the machine-gun fire.” State Department official Pedro Sanjuan remembered simply, “When he came into the room he was like the sun: he radiated confidence and victory.”
Kennedy’s special counsel and longtime speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, first among equals in the band JFK brought into the White House from the Senate, recalled Kennedy’s tactics for building an effective team, instincts Kennedy may have first developed during his wartime service: “He treated us more as colleagues or associates than employees. He made clear that we were there to give advice as well as take orders.” Domestic affairs assistant Myer Feldman said, “I can’t imagine a better boss. He gave you enough discretion, but at the same time you knew you were going to have his support even if you did something a little bit wrong. He wouldn’t criticize you in front of anybody else.” Staff assistant Ralph Dungan recalled, “Everybody on the staff really liked and respected him. You’d really knock yourself out doing anything you could for him. He was terrific.”
A story was told of Kennedy, working late in the Oval Office on a freezing-cold night, looking out and seeing a Secret Service officer shivering at his post in the garden just outside the windows. He opened the door and called out, “I don’t want you out there in that terrible cold,” and ordered him to “come in and get warm.” The officer refused, saying such was his job. Kennedy soon came out with a heavy coat and announced, “I want you to put this on. You’re not warm enough, I can tell. ‘A few minutes later the president came out again, this time with a couple of cups of hot chocolate, and persuaded the agent to join him. The two sat down on the cold steps outside the Oval Office and sipped their mugs together. Years later the agent wept as he told the story.
For much of his presidency, John F. Kennedy lurched from emergency to emergency as simmering domestic and international crises began detonating around him. An embolden
ed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, after smelling blood at Kennedy’s poor performance in the Bay of Pigs disaster and after bullying him at a summit meeting in Vienna, geared up for showdowns in Berlin, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba.
The civil rights movement, excited by Kennedy’s sympathetic rhetoric, entered a new phase of action, and major crises erupted in Mississippi, Alabama, and elsewhere as black Americans asserted their rights as citizens. One of these crises, over the attempt by James Meredith to enter the segregated University of Mississippi in October 1962, required John and Robert Kennedy to micromanage the emergency deployment of more than 10,000 federal combat troops to rapidly stage what amounted to a lightning invasion of northern Mississippi to rescue Meredith and stop an extremely dangerous riot from spreading.
When the operation proceeded slower than JFK liked, he muttered a complaint that echoed his observations of military inefficiency during the war: “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.”
Beyond the campaign dividends it paid, the PT 109 incident may have critically shaped Kennedy’s attitude toward the military and the projection of military force, and shaped the way he made decisions during his brief, tumultuous time in the White House. Like many men who had served as junior officers in World War II, he developed a sharp skepticism toward military bureaucracy, and a seasoned view of the fallibility and periodic incompetence of “the brass”: the commanders, generals, and admirals whose arrogance and mistakes were often paid for in blood by younger men, and who now were reporting to him as commander in chief. Kennedy White House assistant Dan Fenn said, “My own feeling is that the wartime experience had a terrific impact on his view of military leadership and that played a major role in a lot of decisions.”
Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent on the Kennedy detail from 1960 to 1963, agreed that JFK’s wartime experience was a crucial influence on his presidency. In a 2015 interview, he recalled, “I am sure that wartime experience had a great deal to do with decisions he made as president, especially decisions relating to foreign relations and the United States military. I don’t think there’s any question about that. It gave him an understanding of the military, but also about how things can go wrong, how at a moment’s notice, things can go from better to worse. It really made him understand how a group that big has to work together to be successful at whatever they’re doing. It helped him form a better basis for being president; he had that experience behind him that many people didn’t have. He knew what it was like to be in combat, and under fire, and I’m sure that made him apprehensive about putting anybody else in that position.”
John Kennedy’s youngest brother, Edward Kennedy, saw the PT 109 episode as a defining event in JFK’s perception of himself, as he passed through an extreme test of physical endurance and survival. The younger Kennedy said, “It really made an impression on himself about his own steel and his inner toughness. I think it had a really important impact in terms of how he perceived himself for the rest of his life. I think he was a different individual. It made a very important mark on his character.”
While president, Kennedy presided over a booming economy, a steel crisis, the launch of the Peace Corps and NASA’s quest for the moon, the projection of a positive, inspiring image of America around the world, and a secret war against Cuba that saw his brother the attorney general receive at least one personal briefing on sabotage attacks and multiple assassination attempts against Cuban head of state Fidel Castro.
From August to November 1963, John and Robert Kennedy also presided over a chaotic mélange of American involvement and noninvolvement with various coup plots in Saigon, a slow-motion nightmare that culminated, to JFK’s shock and dismay, in the gangland-style machine-gun rubout of American ally and South Vietnamese head of state Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. “He’s always said that it was a major mistake on his part,” said RFK in 1964 of JFK’s authorization of support for the coup plots. “The result is we started down a path we never really recovered from.” The final plunge of America into the abyss of Vietnam may have occurred under Lyndon Johnson at the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, but it started on Kennedy’s watch with the assassination of Diem the year before.
If some stories are to be believed, Kennedy, who continued to suffer from fragile health during his presidency, also is alleged to have conducted high-risk affairs with a large number of women other than his wife. His cabinet secretary Fred Dutton asserted that Kennedy behaved “like God, fucking anybody he wants to anytime he feels like it.” British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously quipped that Kennedy spent “half his time thinking about adultery, the other half about secondhand ideas passed on by his advisors.”
In the weeks before Kennedy died, Congress had blocked most of his domestic program, and his popularity had plunged from 83 percent after the Bay of Pigs to 57 percent, due in part to growing southern resistance to civil rights. One victory was the Senate’s 1963 passage of the JFK-supported Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first arms control agreement of the nuclear age.
The zenith of Kennedy’s brief presidency was the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when he and his brother Robert stared down some of their own hawkish military and civilian advisors and found a way out that did not involve the catastrophic detonation of nuclear warheads. In JFK’s secret White House tapes of the crisis, Kennedy’s calm, rational discussion and decision-making style shines clearly through as that of a man who has, to use his own inaugural phrase, been “tempered by war,” a man whose character was forged in the cauldron of combat, military disaster, death, endurance, and survival.
The memories and the lessons of PT 109 may never have been far from Kennedy’s mind.
EPILOGUE: THE RISING SUN
Shortly after John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, journalist I. F. Stone wrote, “He died in time to be remembered as he would like to be remembered, as ever young, still victorious, stuck down undefeated, with almost all the potentates and rulers of mankind, friend and foe, come to mourn at the bier. For somehow one has the feeling that in the tangled dramaturgy of events, this sudden assassination was the only way out. The Kennedy administration was approaching an impasse, certainly at home, quite possibly abroad, from which there appeared to be no escape.” The following year, the New York Times’ James Reston mused, “He always seemed to be striding through doors into the center of some startling triumph or disaster. He never reached his meridian: we saw him only as a rising sun.”
As president, John Kennedy projected an incandescent image of a brilliant, funny, diligent young executive facing titanic crises with Hemingwayesque “grace under pressure,” confidence, wisecracks, and existential cool. One scholar, John Hellmann of Ohio State University, saw Kennedy’s imagery as that of a self-created bashful American war hero and sensitive rebel, striking chords of Lord Byron, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant, all powered by the foundation myth of PT 109. As Hugh Sidey wrote in 1983, “He was the greatest actor of our time, dimming those mere celluloid performers like Ronald Reagan.”
Even if he had somehow dodged potentially catastrophic personal scandals like the Ellen Rometsch affair, a tabloid-style alleged-hooker-and-spy story that may have been on the verge of detonating publicly at the moment he died, it is obviously impossible to know if Kennedy would have managed the blossoming crises of the 1960s any better than his successors did.
Whatever the judgments of historians and pundits, JFK towers above his competition with one crucial audience: the American people. He had the highest average Gallup approval ratings while in office of any president; his 70 percent beat his closest competitor, Dwight Eisenhower, by 5 percentage points. In 1996, after thirty-three years of posthumous criticism, revisionism, and alleged sex and mafia scandals, Kennedy won again, this time in a New York Times/CBS poll that asked which president Americans would pick to run the country today. K
ennedy’s winning 28 percent was more than double the number-two choice (Reagan at 13 percent), and he buried FDR, Truman, and even Abraham Lincoln, who shared a three-way tie at 8 percent.
Similar results were found by a Gallup poll published in November 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, in which American adults rated JFK higher than any other president who has held office after him. On November 15, 2013, Andrew Dugan and Frank Newport of Gallup reported: “Kennedy has usually appeared in the top group of presidents when Americans are asked in an open-ended format to name the greatest U.S. president in American history. That includes a 2000 measure, in which Kennedy was at the top of the list, eclipsing Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.”
Then, as now, many Americans may look at John F. Kennedy and see, despite his human failings and contradictions, images of what they would like themselves to be, and what their leaders should be as well: a man of action who was also intelligent, diplomatic, curious, compassionate, comfortable with himself and with criticism; an American who had a confident and ambitious vision for his country’s destiny yet understood the power of leading by example rather than by bluster; and a leader of immense charm who, as the men of the PT 109 repeatedly attested, possessed the strength to persevere through incredible trials.
PT 109 Page 23