When John Kennedy died, then U.S. ambassador Edwin Reischauer reported, “The Japanese response to the assassination was overwhelming.” The U.S. embassy in Tokyo was deluged with condolence letters, and thousands of people flocked to a memorial mass for the fallen friend of Japan.
In a small Japanese town early on the morning of November 23, 1963, Kohei Hanami, the former captain of the Amagiri, was awakened by a phone call. “I have terrible news,” cried a neighbor. “Your friend, the American president, has been assassinated.”
“Nonsense,” replied Hanami. “How do you know?”
“I stayed up to watch the first television program from the United States relayed by satellite. The program was interrupted for a news flash.”
“I don’t believe it,” Hanami retorted. “Assassinations may occur in some countries, but not in the United States.” Soon after, a reporter called Hanami and confirmed the terrible news.
Warner Bros. poster announcing special screenings of PT 109 following Kennedy’s assassination. (Warner Bros.)
Hanami was devastated. “Who will lead the world to peace?” he wondered. “What will happen to all of us?” He felt sympathy for Kennedy’s wife and little children. If only Kennedy had come to Japan instead of going to Dallas, Hanami thought, his life might have been spared.
Hanami was seized with a feeling of zannen—a Japanese word that describes emotions of melancholy, pity, and disappointment—over the idea that Kennedy escaped death in war by a few inches, but fell victim to a violent death in peacetime. Hanami’s neighbors called upon his home offering condolences as if one of his family members had died. A few days later he traveled to Tokyo by train, attended memorial ceremonies, and paid his respects at the American embassy.
In the decades following Kennedy’s assassination, his popularity steadily soared in the wake of the largely broken and failed presidencies of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, but the cultural memory of JFK’s moment of destiny, the PT 109 episode, gradually faded.
In 2002, Robert F. Kennedy’s son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy journeyed to the Solomon Islands to meet and thank the native men who rescued his uncle John and the survivors of the PT 109. He was invited to join a National Geographic Society expedition to find the wreckage of the boat led by oceanographer Robert Ballard, and he jumped at the chance.
In an interview for this book in 2015, Max Kennedy reflected, “PT 109 was really etched in my life since I was a small child. We were raised in Virginia, but grew up on Cape Cod. Whenever there was some kind of dangerous situation or difficulty or challenge on the water, I would always think of President Kennedy on the PT 109 and the extraordinary bravery that he showed. And then we’d just kind of suck it up and do our best to get through whatever storm or difficulty we were facing when we were children.”
Over the years, Max had talked to his cousin John F. Kennedy Jr. about the possibility of trying to find the PT 109. The president’s son “was a great scuba diver, and he had scuba-dived all over the Pacific Ocean,” remembered his cousin, but he died in a plane crash in 1999, before he was able to search for the wreck. Now Max Kennedy would make the trip, representing the whole Kennedy family.
When Max Kennedy arrived in the Solomon Islands, he linked up with Richard Keresey, JFK’s wartime friend and former skipper of the PT 105.
Wondering about his uncle’s repeated nocturnal attempts to hail passing PT boats in Ferguson Passage, Max Kennedy asked Keresey, “What would you have done if you had seen the lantern or heard the pistol?”
Keresey replied, “We would have fired every gun and made sure anybody there was dead.”
“Did Jack know that?” asked a surprised Kennedy.
“He absolutely knew that,” acknowledged Keresey. “But we also would have checked, and then we would have found his body. And we’d know that he did it because his crew was still alive, and we’d go find them.” It was then that Max Kennedy absorbed the full impact of his uncle’s struggles, and he realized the “extraordinary sacrifice” he was willing to make for his crew.
When Max Kennedy was finally brought face-to-face with the now-elderly Eroni Kumana, one of JFK’s two initial rescuers, on a remote island in the South Pacific, he was not prepared for the wave of emotion that overcame himself and Kumana, nearly sixty years after the rescue triggered by Kumana and his partner Biuku Gasa. “It had been way, way, way too long,” Kennedy recalled. “It had just been too much time for them to have gone without meeting Jack, or my father, or some member of my family.”
The two men embraced each other in a long, close hug, and Eroni Kumana began to cry, loudly and freely. “It was so unbelievably moving,” recalled Kennedy. “We very quickly had a connection at an extraordinarily deep level. My God, he was so sweet.”
Kennedy remembered, “I had read all the World War Two books as a kid, and I heard all the stories about what the Japanese army had done to people who helped the United States in the Pacific and the terrible atrocities these guys faced. They cut off their private parts and did terrible, terrible things. That’s what these guys [scouts like Kumana and Gasa] faced and they knew that’s what they faced. They knew that if they were caught they would be tortured horribly for two or three days until they were dead. And yet they did this! They risked their lives, they risked everything. There’s no reason that they had to do that. And they truly saved the lives of all of the men who survived that sinking.”
When the two men first met, Max Kennedy recounted, “I started moving my right hand slowly toward his stomach. And he immediately knew I was going to try to tickle him. Which nobody would know! It wouldn’t even occur to somebody that they were going to get tickled at a moment like that. He and I tickled each other constantly for the next week. Sneaking up on each other. It sounds like such a silly thing, but having a physical connection, as well as having such a beyond-belief, genetic and spiritual connection was one of the most moving things that’s ever happened to me. I knew it would be incredible to meet them. But I’ve met so many people who knew Jack and my father, and I’m somewhat jaded at that kind of thing. I really wasn’t ready for the outpouring of emotion that came for me personally, as well as them. And it was really shared in a way that doesn’t usually happen.”
Max Kennedy was delighted to see Kumana wearing a T-shirt reading “I Rescued JFK.” The shirt design was popular in the Solomons, said Kennedy, “but in his case—it’s true!”
Kennedy held a reunion with both Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, who hadn’t seen each other in years, and presented each with a bust of his uncle. He read aloud to them a letter written by JFK’s last surviving brother, U.S. senator from Massachusetts Edward M. Kennedy. The note read, “President Kennedy often spoke of the great courage of those who came to his aid and he never forgot them. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of him and miss him. And it means a great deal to know that my brother is still remembered with affection in the Solomon Islands.”
Meeting the two men had a moving personal impact on Max Kennedy, who recalled the encounter as a pinnacle of his life. “I’ve just never seen people with so much heart, so much honesty. They were completely incapable of even making an effort to hide their feelings or their emotions. It was just a remarkable outpouring of emotion when we finally met. They really lived a biblical life, because they had no electricity, no refrigerators. They ate fish and rice and beans and coconuts. So when they go out fishing they only catch enough fish for one day because they have no way to preserve them. They never worry that they’re going to run out of food. There’s not even a hint of worry about it. Every day they go out and they catch the fish they need. More than any other people I’ve ever met in my life, and I’ve met people all over the world, they do not worry about the next day. They live completely in the moment, and I think that’s why you see that extraordinary outpouring of emotion when we met because everything is moment to moment for them. They were able to concentrate one hundred percent on where they were, with me.”
Max Kenne
dy spent days visiting with Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, as they explored the islands, shared food and laughter, and told each other stories about their lives.
“God, we had so much fun together,” Kennedy remembered wistfully in 2015. “They were just incredible men.”
Robert Ballard’s 2002 National Geographic expedition used photos and sonar to identify a PT boat’s port forward torpedo and launch tube on the ocean floor of Blackett Strait that the U.S. Navy concluded was “probably” from the PT 109, but the expedition was unable to recover any of the wreckage. It is still not known exactly which pieces sank at what times after the crash, and what the precise pattern of impact and damage was on the boat.
Today, the wreckage of the PT 109, if any still exists, still lies somewhere more than a thousand feet below the waves at the bottom of the ocean in Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands.
In August 2007, Eroni Kumana was invited aboard the USS Peleliu, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier that was visiting the Solomon Islands on a humanitarian and diplomatic mission in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed more than fifty people and damaged Kumana’s house. The Peleliu’s commanding officer, Captain Ed Rhoades, presented Kumana with an American flag and an assortment of gifts. “I mourned for a whole week upon hearing of my friend’s [John Kennedy’s] death,” Kumana said. “I can now be at peace since through my friend’s legacy, people have come to know me, my people and my country, the Solomon Islands.” According to Kumana’s friend and local businessman Danny Kennedy (no relation), “The family was absolutely ecstatic and Aaron [Eroni] was running on adrenaline the whole time” during his 2007 encounter with the U.S. Navy. “It was probably the happiest day of his life.” Kumana stayed overnight on the ship, and met U.S. Navy secretary Donald Winter, who was visiting Gizo. “This is an individual who has had a very significant role in the history of our nation and the world,” said Winter. “It was an honor to meet the man who rescued the future thirty-fifth American president.” The Peleliu’s crew collected $1,500 to help repair Kumana’s house.
The following year, Eroni Kumana asked Mark Roche, a visiting American, to place a prized family heirloom “on the grave of his chief,” his onetime friend and brother-in-arms John F. Kennedy. It was a white circular piece of “shell money” or “kustom money,” fashioned out of a giant clamshell. At a private family ceremony that was held on November 1, 2008, at Arlington National Cemetery and arranged by Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, Roche placed the tribute on President Kennedy’s grave. In attendance at the ceremony were JFK’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, her son Tim Shriver, and Sydney Lawford McKelvy, daughter of JFK’s other sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford.
Biuku Gasa died in 2005, and Eroni Kumana passed away at the age of ninety-three on August 2, 2014, the seventy-first anniversary of the sinking of PT 109. Kumana was believed to have had nine children, including a son he named John Fitzgerald Kennedy Kumana.
John F. Kennedy was never able to meet Gasa or Kumana after the rescue. The two men were supposed to travel to the United States to visit Kennedy at the White House, but colonial officials stopped them at the airport and canceled their trip, apparently concerned at their lack of English-language skill and unsophisticated appearance. Instead, they sent the native leader of the second stage of the rescue, Benjamin Kevu, who spoke English with a courtly accent. Kevu appeared on Jack Paar’s television show along with Reg Evans, the former Australian Coastwatcher, and met with John F. Kennedy and Barney Ross in the Oval Office.
The previous year, on May 1, 1961, Reg Evans also met with JFK in the Oval Office. Kennedy quipped, “I am sorry I never returned the Japanese rifle you loaned me.” Evans replied, “It didn’t take me long to get another.” Evans died in Australia in 1989.
PT 109 veterans George “Barney” Ross and John F. Kennedy welcome former Solomon Islands Scout Benjamin Kevu to the Oval Office, September 25, 1962. Kevu organized a critical stage of the rescue, smuggling Kennedy over an ocean passage at the bottom of a canoe covered with leaves to meet with Coastwatcher Reginald Evans. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
Kennedy in 1961 with Reginald Evans, the Australian Coastwatcher who helped engineer his rescue in 1943. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
After World War II, Kennedy’s fellow survivors of the PT 109 incident went on to live largely quiet private lives, periodically resurfacing when the PT 109 story made the news.
Lenny Thom survived the war and became an insurance representative with a young child, only to die when his car was hit by a train in 1946.
In 1961, Kennedy rewarded several of his crewmen with federal patronage and political appointments. He named George Ross to a minor position on the staff of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime; appointed John Maguire United States marshal for the Southern District of Florida; and signed an executive order appointing PT 109 precrash crewman and later PT 59 crewman Maurice Kowal to a National Park Service job. Additionally, he arranged for his PT service friends Paul Fay to be undersecretary of the Navy, William Battle to be U.S. ambassador to Australia, and Byron White to be deputy attorney general to Robert F. Kennedy. JFK appointed White to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1962.
Both Gerard Zinser and Pat McMahon became mail carriers, in Florida and California, respectively.
During the same 1962 episode of the Jack Paar show that Ben Kevu and Reg Evans appeared on, the host asked all the surviving PT 109 survivors to stand up in the audience and be applauded. The camera slowly panned the faces of John Maguire, Gerard Zinser, Barney Ross, Ed Mauer, Raymond Starkey, Pat McMahon, William Johnston, Charles Harris, as well as Ed Drewitch and Maurice Kowal, who left the boat in the weeks before the crash. They looked to be modest, shy, middle-aged men, eager to rejoin their families and the postwar brotherhood of anonymity shared by millions of other members of the World War II generation.
In the summer of 1963, seven veterans of the PT 109 crew went on a ten-day grand tour of Japan in conjunction with the Japanese premiere of the Hollywood movie PT 109. They held three separate reunions with former crew members of the Amagiri, toured Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, and Nikko, and met the mayor and governor of Tokyo. “We were hosted by dignitaries of manufacturing, business and financial Japan,” wrote Pat McMahon in an August 16, 1963, letter to President Kennedy. “We received medals, honors and presents galore. The friendships, courtesies and generosities extended us [were] simply overwhelming.”
McMahon regaled his beloved commander with a vision of the kind of reunion that Kennedy and his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., had yearned for over the past twelve years, the kind of moment that JFK was hoping to experience himself the following year with the planned first-ever U.S. presidential state visit to Japan. “Had you seen us, with the Amagiri crew,” wrote McMahon, “and many members of Japanese Navy, and Government officials, in a huge circle, hands joined, singing Auld Lang Syne, at conclusion of [a] garden party in [the Crown] Prince’s grounds one midnight in Tokyo, [I] am sure you would have been astounded.” According to McMahon, the former chief engineering officer of the Amagiri “held onto me like I was a long-lost brother.”
None of the survivors ever had an unkind public word to say about John F. Kennedy, and often praised him repeatedly whenever reporters came to call. When Kennedy died, recalled Gerard Zinser in 1998, “I felt that day like I’d lost the best friend of my life. That’s what John F. Kennedy meant to me.” He insisted on “setting the record straight” about the crash, declaring, “So many people who were not there have criticized him for being at fault in that collision. Well, I was there, and let me tell you, there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done to prevent it.”
“Lieutenant Kennedy was one hell of a man,” PT 109 survivor William Johnston once declared. “I didn’t pick him for my skipper, but I kept thanking God that the Navy had picked him for me.”
The final survivor of the PT 109, Gerard Zinser, died of Alzheimer’s disease in Florida in 2001. He was s
urvived by eight children, twenty-four grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. His ashes are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, not far from the grave of his former commander.
The man who is believed to be the last surviving PT boat veteran who served under the command of John F. Kennedy in the South Pacific, ninety-two-year-old John Klee, lives today in California with his wife of sixty-three years, Barbara. Klee served under JFK on the PT 59 for about a week in November 1943.
He still sings the praises of his old skipper. “He got along well with his officers,” said Klee, “he was fearless, and he was great with his crew. I only heard plaudits about Kennedy from our crew, many of whom were the remnants of the PT 109, and they were a great bunch. They admired him as a person and as a skipper.”
After he led the PT boat operation behind enemy lines to rescue John F. Kennedy and the PT 109 survivors on August 7–8, 1943, U.S. Navy Lieutenant (jg) William “Bud” Liebenow resumed his duties as the skipper of the PT 157. At the end of 1943 he was assigned to the war in Europe to serve under the famous PT commander John Bulkeley to assist the Office of Strategic Services to pick up and drop off agents on the coast of Nazi-held France.
The rescue of John F. Kennedy, it turned out, was not the only remarkable wartime episode in which Bud Liebenow played a part.
“The most notable event of my life and I suppose of the thousands who took part, was the Normandy Beach invasion, D-Day, June sixth, 1944,” Liebenow explained. “I was a special officer on board the PT 199 which was assigned patrol duty around the communications vessel controlling the landings near Cherbourg. Our first assignment was to escort the rocket launcher boats into the beach. This was at H-minus four hours. These were LCVP’s [Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel] modified to hold bank on bank of rockets. They were driven right into the beach and the rockets released. This added up to a lot of explosive power from a very small vessel. You got only one shot—all rockets were released at once—and then you had to get out. The shore battery fire was intense, many of these boats were destroyed. As daylight arrived you could grasp the vastness of the allied armada. There were ships and boats everywhere!” On D-Day, when the USS Corry was sinking from a German mine and shore fire, Liebenow and his men on the PT 199 pulled sixty American sailors aboard.
PT 109 Page 24