After a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation in Florida, Jack flew to New York on February 5. He secured a date with Florence “Flo” Pritchett, a bright and peppy ex-model who was the fashion editor of the New York Journal-American and who had recently divorced her wealthy Catholic husband. The two went out with writer John Hersey and his wife (and former Jack Kennedy girlfriend), Frances Ann Cannon, seeing a play and then repairing to the Café Society nightclub, where they had the good fortune—as it turned out—to bump into William Shawn from The New Yorker. Inevitably, Jack’s PT 109 episode came up, and Hersey asked if he could write about it, in an article he’d try to place in Life magazine. Jack was reluctant but eventually agreed, though he insisted that Hersey first interview those crew members who were now back on U.S. soil. Hersey assented and was soon on the road to the PT base at Melville, Rhode Island, to speak at length with four of the men, first individually, then collectively.19
From New York, Jack went on to Boston for his grandfather Honey Fitz’s eighty-first birthday party, a luncheon with three hundred guests at the Parker House Hotel. Delayed in arriving on account of a snowstorm, Jack entered the hall to a rapturous welcome. Honey Fitz was thrilled, and The Boston Globe ran a photograph of the ex-mayor and his grandson the following day, February 12. That evening, Jack was the featured speaker at a Lincoln’s Birthday War Bond rally presided over by Governor Leverett Saltonstall and Mayor Maurice J. Tobin. More than nine hundred people heard him expound on the sobering theme that the Pacific war seemed likely to last a long time. “The boys [would] like to know they won’t have to pay for the war they have to fight,” he declared, and the message evidently hit home—the rally raised a remarkable half million dollars in war bond purchases.20
With Jack’s thirty-day leave about to expire, he now asked to delay reporting for duty until March 1, in order to undergo medical tests at New England Baptist Hospital. At issue were his continuing stomach troubles and back pain. X-rays were taken and the surgeons made a determination: if Jack wanted to walk properly again, he should undergo the surgery that had been recommended a year earlier while he was stationed in South Carolina.
While weighing whether to go under the knife, he sat for a long interview with Hersey. They talked in Jack’s small and nondescript hospital room, with him propped up on the bed. From press accounts and the interviews in Rhode Island, Hersey had pieced together the basic chronology of the harrowing episode in the Blackett Strait, which he now took Jack through, step by step. Gradually, a fuller picture emerged. At one point Jack drew a map of the area in Ferguson Passage where he got off the reef and was in the water throughout the night, carried off by the current. Mesmerized by the image of that night and its dreamlike quality, Hersey asked for details; Jack did his best to provide them. For hours they talked as the afternoon disappeared and twilight bathed the room. Hersey came away impressed. “He had a kind of diffidence about himself that seemed to be genuine,” he later said. “So in a joking way he wondered how he looked to [the crew]. They were wildly devoted to him, all of them. Absolutely clear devotion to him by the crew. No reservation about it. They really did like him.”21
Jack opted to hold off on the surgery and managed instead to be reassigned to the Submarine Chaser Training Center, in Miami, near the family home. The relocation allowed him to spend some time with little brother Teddy, now twelve. One night, he took the young boy to another nearby naval base and, under the cover of darkness, smuggled him onto a PT boat. He also introduced Teddy to some of his favorite writings, including Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem “John Brown’s Body,” which the two took turns reading aloud. Teddy, reveling in his brother’s presence, listened with rapt attention as Jack talked about the key developments in the Civil War. “Never be without a book in your hand,” Jack told him.22
The work requirements in Miami were not exactly arduous. “In regard to conditions here,” he wrote Hersey, who was now at work drafting the article, “may I say that I am playing it slow and deep—with no strain or pain. Once you get your feet up on the desk in the morning the heavy work of the day is done.”23 In fact, though, the strain and pain soon returned, more intense than before. By May he realized he could put the surgery off no longer and, having secured permission from the Navy, entered Chelsea Naval Hospital on June 11. The following day, in a simple service at the hospital, Jack received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for “extremely heroic conduct as Commanding Officer of Motor Torpedo Boat 109 following the collision and sinking of that vessel in the Pacific War Area on August 1–2, 1943.” On June 22 Jack was transferred to New England Baptist, and a team of surgeons performed the serious operation the following day. They found not a ruptured or herniated disk, as anticipated, but, perhaps more alarmingly, “abnormally soft” cartilage, which they removed. They also reported “fibrocartilage with degeneration.”24
Captain Frederick Conklin congratulates Kennedy on the awarding of the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, Chelsea Naval Hospital, Chelsea, Massachusetts, June 11, 1944.
III
From his hospital bed before and after the surgery, Kennedy kept up with war developments and family affairs. He worried about Joe Junior, who for the previous ten months had been stationed in England with the Fleet Airwing Seven squadron, the first American unit attached to the RAF Coastal Command. In that capacity, Joe flew radar-equipped B-24 Liberators on round-the-clock antisubmarine missions over the Channel and the North Sea. It was dangerous work, and Jack found ominous the growing number of airmen on Joe’s unit who were being shot down. “Heard from Joe a while back—they have had heavy casualties in his squadron—I hope to hell he gets through O.K.,” he wrote to Lem Billings. The riskiness convinced him that Bobby should not follow in Joe’s path. “I really think that Bobby shouldn’t go into aviation,” he wrote. “I don’t see where it is any more fun than P.T.’s or D.D.’s [destroyers], or any other small ship—especially as Bobby has spent so much of his life on small boats. I’m going to write him to that effect + I wish you would advise the same thing. It would be just his luck to get hit when old worn out bastards like you + me get through this with nothing more than a completely shattered constitution.”25
On his furloughs, Joe Junior often visited his sister Kathleen, who had given up her newspaper job in Washington and moved to London to work for the American Red Cross. With her older brothers involved in the fighting, Kick wanted to be part of the action, to be, her mother recalled, “involved in the war and to make her own contribution that would be constructive.”26 She also wanted to be near her first love, Billy Cavendish, the tall and elfin-faced heir to the Duke of Devonshire. Cavendish, having been defeated in a bid to win election to Parliament for West Derbyshire, had become an officer in the Coldstream Guards, a venerable regiment of the army, and was in uniform.
Kick wrote openly to her siblings of the romance. “I’m sure I would make a most efficient Duchess of Devonshire in the postwar world,” she told Jack, “and as I’d have a castle in Ireland, one in Scotland, one in Yorkshire, and one in Sussex I could keep my old nautical brothers in their old age….I can’t really understand why I like Englishmen so much, as they treat one in quite an offhand manner and aren’t as nice to women as are Americans, but I suppose it’s just that sort of treatment that women really like. That’s your technique, isn’t it?”27
Yet she knew that the relationship was a star-crossed affair. Billy knew it, too. The Cavendishes, one of England’s oldest and most prominent families, with an impeccable lineage dating back to the seventeenth century, were devoutly and militantly Protestant—the first duke, William, fought the Catholic king James II in a bloody rebellion—while the Kennedys were no less staunchly Catholic. Kick could not be married in the Church of England, as that would mean excommunication, while for Billy conversion to Catholicism was a nonstarter, as it would constitute a betrayal of three centuries of family history. Still, their love persevered. Ultimately,
tormented by guilt and uncertainty, and urged on by the steadfast support of Joe Junior, Kick agreed to a civil ceremony, which, though not a legitimate marriage in the eyes of the Catholic Church, was also not grounds for excommunication. On May 6, 1944, she became the Marchioness of Hartington in a brief service in London. Billy’s parents were present, while the Kennedys were represented by Joe Junior. Kick’s father, though disappointed by his daughter’s decision, never thought of forbidding the marriage, and cabled her that “with your faith in God you can’t make a mistake. Remember you are still and always will be tops with me.” Rose, disconsolate and bereft at having “lost” a daughter, sent no message.28
Joe Junior tried to reassure his mother, cabling on the wedding day, EVERYTHING WONDERFUL DON’T WORRY. SHE IS VERY HAPPY WISH YOU COULD HAVE BEEN HERE. LOVE, JOE. But Rose was unmoved, for reasons her husband laid out in a letter to his eldest son, after restating that he personally was not that bothered by the marriage. “But of course with Mother, it’s different. Mother just feels that [Kathleen] couldn’t be happy outside of the Church, but I think the thing that gave her the greatest concern is the fact that she thought she was setting a very grave example to other Catholic girls who might properly say…‘If Kathleen Kennedy did it why can’t I?’ and I think that is the thing that upset her most, along with the fact that she felt she had given her life to bringing up her children as good Catholics and that her job was not very well done.”29
“Never did anyone have such a pillar of strength as I had in Joe [Junior] in those difficult days before my marriage,” Kick wrote afterwards. “From the beginning, he gave me wise, helpful advice. When he felt that I had made up my mind, he stood by me always. He constantly reassured me and gave me renewed confidence in my own decision. Moral courage he had in abundance and once he felt that a step was right for me, he never faltered, although he might be held largely responsible for my decision.”30
Happy newlyweds: Billy and Kick tie the knot, with the groom’s mother and the bride’s brother in the background, London, May 6, 1944.
As for Jack, he was happy for his sister, and not much impressed with his mother’s objections. “Your plaintive howl at not being let in on Kathleen’s nuptials reached me this morning,” he wrote to Lem Billings. “You might as well take it in stride and as sister Eunice from the depth of her Catholic wrath so truly said, ‘It’s a horrible thing—but it will be nice visiting her after the war, so we might as well face it.’ At family dinners at the Cape, when you don’t pass Hartington the muffins, we’ll know how you feel.”31
The newlyweds had only a month together before Billy joined his Coldstream Guards regiment for the long-awaited Allied invasion of Normandy, initiated on June 6 under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kick soon made preparations to return to the United States to ride out the rest of the war with her family. There would be tensions with her mother, she knew, but she delighted at the prospect of seeing her siblings, not least Jack, whom she knew to be in sorry shape. His surgery, it turned out, had failed—he experienced acute back spasms when he tried to get up and about, the pain also shooting down one leg; he suffered severe abdominal pain; he lost weight. (“The doc should have read one more book before picking up the saw,” Jack remarked.)32 Upon transfer back to Chelsea Naval Hospital, where he would remain until August, physicians predicted it would be at least six months before he could return to active duty.
On the flip side, Jack could take satisfaction in the appearance of John Hersey’s long article on PT 109. Life had rejected the piece—the editors had already published one Hersey article on the PT boats and moreover did not want to give so much space to a feature story that would limit their ability to cover fast-breaking military developments—but Hersey remembered that The New Yorker’s William Shawn had indicated interest in the story during their chance encounter at Café Society; he now pitched the article to him. Shawn and editor in chief Harold Ross responded quickly: they would publish.33 Jack had been shown an early draft and liked what he saw (“Even I was wondering how it would all end!”), though he offered two suggestions: that crew members Lennie Thom and Barney Ross be given more recognition; and that Hersey omit allusions to an unnamed crew member (in actuality Raymond Albert) who’d lost his nerve during the ordeal and had subsequently been killed in the war. “I feel…that our group was too small, that his fate is so well-known both to the men and in the boats and to his family and friends that the finger would be put too definitely on his memory—and after all he was in my crew.” Hersey agreed and omitted the mention.34
The article appeared on June 17, under the title “Survival.” That was indeed its principal theme: Hersey, writing in the vivid and evocative yet spare style for which he would become known—two years later, the same magazine would devote an entire issue to his gripping 31,000-word account of the Hiroshima bombing—sought to explore the nature of human endurance in conditions of extreme adversity.
“At about ten o’clock the hulk heaved a moist sigh and turned turtle,” Hersey wrote of the morning after the ramming, shortly before the epic four-hour swim. “McMahon and Johnston had to hang on as best they could. It was clear that the remains of the 109 would soon sink. When the sun had passed the meridian, Kennedy said, ‘We will swim to that small island,’ pointing to one of a group three miles to the southeast. ‘We have less chance of making it than some of these other islands here, but there’ll be less chance of Japs, too.’ ”35
But this theme of unyielding determination wasn’t what Joseph P. Kennedy was primarily interested in. Rather, he hoped to use the publication to exploit what he saw as his son’s unvarnished heroism, the better to advance Jack’s career and to reverse his own lingering reputation for cowardice. In this regard Kennedy was disappointed that Life, with its large circulation, had taken a pass, and he moved energetically to persuade The New Yorker’s Ross to allow a condensed version of the article to run in the massively popular Reader’s Digest. Ross, who hated the rival magazine, said no, but Kennedy persisted, convincing Digest publisher Paul Palmer to drop his customary stipulation that his magazine have the right to reprint the condensed version in perpetuity. Palmer agreed to purchase a single, one-time publication right. With the new terms, Ross relented. Hersey, for his part, agreed to donate his New Yorker author’s fee to Kloye Ann Kirksey, the widow of one of the two men who died on the boat.36
It’s hard to overestimate the long-term benefits of this masterstroke of public relations on Joe Kennedy’s part. Expert marketer that he was, he understood what few others did, namely, the crucial importance that the timely advertising of Jack’s performance could have going forward.37 In the years to come, Joe would ignore the contract and reprint the abridged version, without permission, in mass quantities to be distributed during Jack’s campaigns. The tale of wartime heroism played extremely well before these audiences—and, crucially, could be used to explain, and lionize, his various infirmities. Yes, voters would learn, the candidate suffered from ailments, but they could be attributed to the PT 109 ordeal or to the malaria he contracted while in the service. (Sometimes, for variation, the maladies were blamed on “old football injuries.”)
In the early months after publication, however, Jack himself was more hesitant. He wrote to Lem Billings, “What I said to you about the break I got when Hersey did the article is true I guess [but] it was such an accident that it rather 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.”38
IV
Try as he might, Joseph Kennedy could not control the speed and direction of events that fateful summer of 1944. He had stood by powerless as his daughter Kathleen married out of her faith. His son Bobby was now an ROTC cadet, likely to be in harm’s way before too much longer. Jack’s surgery had gone awry, and
he seemed destined for a long and difficult recovery at best. (He remained laid up in the naval hospital but was allowed to spend weekends in Hyannis Port.) And Joe Junior, though nearing the end of his second tour of duty and entitled to return home, continued to fly risky antisubmarine missions over the English Channel and the North Sea.
What fueled the eldest son’s dogged pursuit of dangerous gambits is not altogether clear, but certainly it had something to do with a desire to outdo Jack. Or at least keep pace with him—according to Angela Laycock, the wife of the commanding officer of the British Commandos, Joe confided to her one evening that “he was sure it was his brother Jack who would ultimately be President.” Laycock got the strong sense that “Joe was in awe of Jack’s intelligence and believed that his own was no match for it.”39 On August 10, Joe wrote Jack to say he had read Hersey’s article and was “much impressed with your intestinal fortitude.” But he couldn’t resist asking, “Where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and what exactly were your moves, and where the hell was your radar?” (Jack’s boat, it will be recalled, was not radar-equipped.) In other words: Some hero you are, allowing your boat to be sunk. Always conscious of who got which awards, Joe congratulated his brother on the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, then added, “To get anything out of the Navy is deserving of a campaign medal in itself. It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.”40
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