There was also the question of Pappy McMahon, with his terribly seared flesh. And half the crew members couldn’t swim. Their skipper’s solution was to order nine of them to hang on to a floating eight-foot plank they luckily found nearby. Not only would this keep them together, but it would increase the nonswimmers’ chances.
Lieutenant Kennedy then calmly pulled out his knife, cutting loose a strap of McMahon’s life jacket and taking it between his teeth. He intended to tow him that way. The engineer never forgot his matter-of-fact manner. To him, the skipper seemed almost casual, as if he did it all the time. “I’ll take McMahon with me,” Jack told them. Next, he issued the order “The rest of you can swim together on this plank.” Lenny Thom was put in charge.
When one seaman expressed aloud the fear that they’d never get out of this, Kennedy disagreed. “It can be done!”
For four hours they were out there in the water, their skipper pulling his engineer by his teeth and all the while keeping watch on his crew. Fortunately, the Pacific water was warm. For four hours Jack Kennedy plowed on, halting his breaststroke only occasionally to rest. The man he was pulling, meanwhile, hadn’t a clue his rescuer suffered from a bad back, slept on a sheet of plywood, and wore a corset for support. As McMahon floated on his back, he had nothing to do but look up at the sky. He was always aware of the rhythmic tugs of the skipper’s arm strokes. He would remember most the sound of Jack’s hard breathing.
Plum Pudding Island, named for its shape, was the length of a football field and two thirds as wide at the middle. It had a few palm trees on it, like an island in a New Yorker cartoon. When he finally made it, Jack could only lie panting on the sand. And when he went to stand, he vomited from swallowing so much seawater. Soon his crew also reached the beach, all clutching the plank.
Back at base, a very sad Red Fay was writing his sister: “George Ross has lost his life for a cause that he believed in stronger than any one of us, because he was an idealist in the purest sense. Jack Kennedy, the Ambassador’s son, was on the same boat. The man who said that the cream of a nation is lost in war can never be accused of making an overstatement of a very cruel fact.”
Jim Reed would recall: “The next morning we heard that PT 109 hadn’t returned and they’d seen an explosion and a fire. I was very sad. I couldn’t believe it.” Of Kennedy, he said, “He had many friends here, almost everybody knew him. He was very well liked.”
Meanwhile, on Plum Pudding Island, Kennedy was conferring with Thom and Ross. “How are we going to get out of here?” he wanted to know. But, in fact, he already had a plan. What he intended to do, Jack told them, was to swim out on his own into Ferguson Passage that night to try to signal a ship.
Hanging his .38 pistol on a lanyard around his neck, he wrapped a flashlight in a life jacket to keep it afloat and headed off at sundown, knowing the PT boats went out on patrol then. Since no one had yet come to get them, he was thinking aggressively and taking matters into his own hands.
There was little point in just camping out there on that island, waiting for the Japanese to butcher them. If and when he spotted a PT boat, he’d try to draw attention by firing three shots in the air and signaling with the flashlight. There was no other choice.
Kennedy reached his destination at eight o’clock and stayed in place four hours. When no PT boats had appeared, he began the long swim back to the island. Unfortunately, he was caught in a powerful current that swept him past Plum Pudding. Drifting south, and after passing out several times, he stopped to sleep on a sandbar. The next morning he awoke and found his way back to his men. He arrived at noontime, looking scrawny and exhausted, with yellow skin and bloodshot eyes. He vomited again, and passed out.
Opening his eyes, he saw Barney Ross. He managed to say only, “Barney, you try it tonight,” before, a second later, conking out.
The next day, Kennedy decided they needed to move to a nearby, larger island. Again, he assembled his men on that eight-foot plank. Again, he swam on, dragging the badly burned Pappy by the strap held in his teeth. Still there was no sign of rescue, and all they had to drink was the rainfall they captured in their mouths as they lay in a storm. The day after that, Kennedy and Ross swam to yet another island, Nauru.
There, they came upon some very welcome surprises—a dugout canoe, a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with freshwater, and a crate of crackers and candy. Exhausted, Ross fell asleep for the night, while Kennedy took the dugout back in the dark with the water and candy, supplies presumably left by the Japanese, to his crew.
This time he was greeted not just by his men but by two islanders who’d unexpectedly arrived and had gotten a fire going. They were helping the Americans. Jack used his pocketknife to scratch a message on a coconut shell: NAURO ISL NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY. Handing it to them, he told the islanders where they must take it. “Rendova . . . Rendova,” he repeated.
When the PT 109 crewmen awoke the next morning, a large canoe was just arriving on the beach. From it stepped eight islanders, who presented Lieutenant Kennedy with a letter that read: “On His Majesty’s Service / To the Senior Officer / Nauru Island / I have learned of your presence on Nauru Island. I am in command of a New Zealand infantry operating in conjunction with US Army troops on New Georgia. I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Lt. Winscote.”
Their friends waiting for them on the base at Rendova were so happy to see them they cried. Jack became angry when a fellow officer said he’d had a mass said for his soul.
“Kennedy’s Son Is Hero in Pacific as Destroyer Splits His PT Boat,” read the New York Times headline on August 20, 1943. The New York Herald Tribune told its readers that John F. Kennedy had written a “blazing new saga in PT boat annals.”
A more personal commendation would come from a fellow officer, Dick Keresey, writing years later. “As a captain, Jack Kennedy was a man of courage, a good PT-boat man, and he was good company. Ranking the virtue of good company on a level with the other two may have been peculiar to those on PT boats. We were almost always on the front lines. We knew it was time to pack when the base got showers. When the movies showed up, we were long gone. So we were highly dependent on conversation to divert ourselves, and Kennedy was a good listener and an amusing talker. Our conversation was seldom deep and never about future plans, for this brought bad luck.”
Jack had his own account, which he mailed to Inga, and it wasn’t what made it into the headlines and news stories. It’s a testament to his writing ability—but also to his heart.
He typed it in block letters on a navy typewriter:
The war goes slowly here, slower than you can ever imagine from reading the papers at home. The only way you can get the proper perspective on its progress is put away the headlines for a month and watch us move on the map. It’s deathly slow. The Japs have dug deep, and with the possible exception of a couple of Marine divisions are the greatest jungle fighters in the world. Their willingness to die for a place like Munda gives them a tremendous advantage over us. We, in aggregate, just don’t have the willingness. Of course, at times, an individual will rise up to it, but in total, no . . . Munda or any of those spots are just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope to never see again.
We are at a great disadvantage—the Russians could see their country invaded, the Chinese the same. The British were bombed, but we are fighting on some islands belonging to the Lever Company, a British concern making soap. I suppose if we were stockholders we would perhaps be doing better, but to see that by dying at Munda you are helping to secure peace in our time takes a larger imagination than most possess . . . The Japs have this advantage: because of their feeling about Hirohito, they merely wish to kill. An American’s energies are divided: he wants to kill but he also is trying desperately to prevent himself from being killed.
The war is a dirty business. It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating
the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars, and millions of soldiers, that thousands of casualties sound like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal, and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it, for if it isn’t, the whole thing will turn to ashes, and we will face great trouble in the years to come after the war.
I received a letter today from the wife of my engineer, who was so badly burnt that his face and hands were just flesh, and he was that way for six days. He couldn’t swim, and I was able to help him, and his wife thanked me, and in her letter she said, “I suppose to you it was just part of your job, but Mr. McMahon was part of my life and if he had died I don’t think I would have wanted to go on living.”
There are many McMahons that don’t come through. There was a boy on my boat, only twenty-four, had three kids, one night, two bombs straddled our boat and two of the men were hit, one standing right next to me. He never got over it. He hardly ever spoke after that. He told me one night he thought he was going to be killed. I wanted to put him ashore to work. I wish I had. He was in the forward gun turret where the destroyer hit us.
I don’t know what it all adds up to, nothing I guess, but you said that you figured I’d go to Texas and write my experiences. I wouldn’t go near a book like that. This thing is so stupid, that while it has a sickening fascination for some of us, myself included, I want to leave it far behind when I go.
Inga Binga, I’ll be glad to see you again. I’m tired now. We were riding every night, and the sleeping is tough in the daytime but I’ve been told they are sending some of us home to form a new squadron in a couple of months. I’ve had a great time here, everything considered, but I’ll be just as glad to get away from it for a while. I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through. It’s a funny thing that as long as you have that feeling you seem to get through. I’ve lost that feeling lately but as a matter of fact I don’t feel badly about it. If anything happens to me I have this knowledge that if I had lived to be a hundred I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell. I’ll cut it. You are the only person I’m saying it to. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an already bright twenty-six years.
“Now that I look back,” he ended, “it has been a hell of a letter.” He promised to visit her in L.A. when he got relieved of duty.
Jack Kennedy had endured an extraordinary rite of passage. Now there was a kinship with those he admired that went beyond just reading about them on the printed page—Churchill, for example, as a young man had escaped from the Boers, and then there was Hemingway, who’d been badly wounded driving an ambulance for the Italians—and so, in a real way, this linked him with them.
He was a young man who’d “proven himself on foreign soil,” as an excited booster would soon declare. But for all that his courage and fortitude came to mean to others, it counted most with Jack himself. No other challenge he might face, he knew, would ever be as hard as had getting his men back to safety. He had met fear head-on, and it had changed him.
“On the bright side of an otherwise completely black time,” he wrote his parents, “was the way that everyone stood up to it. Previous to that I had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and layout out here. But with the chips down—that all faded away. I can now believe—which I never would have before—the stories of Bataan and Wake. For an American it’s got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it’s in the middle, then there’s the trouble.”
And in a letter to Lem that downplayed his individual heroism, he said: “We have been having a difficult time for the past two months—lost our boat a month ago when a Jap cut us in two + lost some of our boys. We had a bad time—a week on a Jap island—but finally got picked up—and have got another boat. It really makes me wonder if most success is merely a great deal of fortuitous accidents. I imagine I would agree with you that it was lucky the whole thing happened—if the two fellows had not been killed which rather spoils the whole thing for me.”
At the same time he got off a letter to Lem’s mother. He expressed his pride in what her son was doing with the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in North Africa.
Before leaving the South Pacific, Jack Kennedy made it his final task to ensure that all his crew members got back to the States. When he arrived there, too, he quickly found himself in familiar surroundings: another hospital room. The physical harm that had been done to him was immeasurable. Not only had he contracted tropical malaria, but the orthopedic diagnosis of “chronic disc disease of the lumbar area” was followed by the first of what would be many back operations. There was a second back surgery also that year, but neither that nor any subsequent one would provide the relief he sought.
Those who visited Chelsea Naval Hospital in Boston saw him lying there wracked, alternately, by chills and fever. Torby Macdonald offered his impression of Jack’s case: “His skin had turned yellow. His weight had dropped from 160 pounds to about 125 pounds. When I came into his room, he raised a bony hand and gave me a shaky wave.” Jack insisted he felt “great.” When Torby refused to believe him, the patient amended it to, “Great, considering the shape I’m in.”
In June 1944, while still in Chelsea Naval Hospital, Jack was awarded the Navy and Marine Medal for “extremely heroic conduct.” But medals don’t mend bodies. Chuck Spalding, who visited him a little later after he’d gone down to Palm Beach to rest in the sunshine, gave this graphic account: “That wound was a savage wound, a big wound. It went maybe eight inches or so down his back. It would never heal and it was open and painful. He had to fight to get his back healed and I would walk up and down the beach with him with the back still open and he’d say ‘How is it now?’ or ‘Is any stuff running out of it?’ It was severe pain.”
Spalding, who was himself a navy pilot, said, “I’ll never forget Jack sitting at our table watching the ‘home front.’ All he felt was cynicism—everybody dancing, the lights, the women. It was the only time I ever saw him reacting like a real soldier. It was the rapidity of his move from the Pacific to Palm Beach, the juxtaposition.”
That August, Joe Jr. was killed. He and his copilot had accepted a mission to fly a plane packed with 20,000 pounds of TNT toward a V3 site on the French coast, then parachute out before reaching the target. The idea was to create a guided missile, but before the two men could bail to safety, the deadly cargo detonated.
Jack, up at Hyannis Port when the telegram came, went out walking alone on the beach right after he heard. His brother had been the family standard-bearer and, in matters of politics, the prospective heir. The rivalry between the brothers, especially for the father’s colors, had always been a part of their lives and endured right to the end.
There was a revealing story Jack heard about a farewell dinner for Joe, occurring just before Joe was sent to Britain as a naval aviator. It had taken place soon after accounts of Jack’s Pacific ordeal were splashed across the front pages. One of the guests at the party, trying to do the right thing, had raised a glass to toast “Ambassador Joe Kennedy, the father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” However, Jack was absent. Joe was very much there.
Later that night, as it was reported to Jack, Joe was seen on his cot “clenching and unclenching his fists,” saying to himself aloud, “By God, I’ll show them.” Jack understood that it had been his brother’s desire to match, or even top, his own courage in the South Pacific that drove him to volunteer for the high-risk mission over Europe. In fact, when Joe Jr. perished in the line of duty, he’d already flown twenty-five combat missions, enough to permit him, honorably, to fly no more, but his fraternal competitive
spirit was too deeply rooted: he simply couldn’t stop trying to beat the younger brother who’d managed to pull ahead of him.
A month later, another terrible blow was dealt the Kennedys. In the spring, Jack’s sister Kathleen, his beloved Kick, had married Billy Hartington, the elder son of the Duke of Devonshire and a major in the Coldstream Guards. Now he was declared a casualty in Belgium, causing Jack to write his grieving sister that Billy’s death reminded him of Raymond Asquith, that other privileged Englishman whose promise was cut short on the battlefield.
Despite Jack’s own triumph, the loss of a brother and a brother-in-law, each an aspirant to a career in the public arena, of necessity pushed his celebrated heroism into the background, at least for a time. It would soon be again prominent, however, for Joe’s and Billy’s deaths left him a legacy he was ready now to accept and the public would be ready to endorse. As one of Jack’s supporters, himself a veteran, would later observe, World War II was Kennedy’s “greatest campaign manager.”
Jack fixed his sights on the 1946 U.S. congressional election. In this race, as in the British “khaki election” of 1900, civilians got the chance to reward the gallant service of the returning soldiers and sailors with their votes. The man who’d made his reputation saving men in wartime was about to test his mettle in a different theater—equally demanding but entirely different, one that would call on all the democratizing experience he’d gained in uniform.
The fun-loving Jack and the serious Jack would now find a mutual pursuit: politics.
13
Billy Sutton
14
Charlie Bartlett
15
Bunker Hill Day, 1946, with Dave Powers
CHAPTER FOUR
Jack Kennedy Page 6