The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (34 page)

Bulkeley had won his hero’s appellation by rescuing General Douglas MacArthur from the besieged beaches of Bataan and carrying him through 560 miles of enemy waters to safety. Now he told his enthralled audiences that all he needed were five hundred PT boats, and he and his colleagues could almost singlehandedly defeat the Japanese navy.

It was an irresistible idea. Brave Americans would skim across the seas with speed and daring, slashing at their dull-witted, sneaky, evil enemy, and then zigzag away, each day closer to victory. They would vanquish their foe, not with steel and fire and might and blood but with wit and daring.

Joe wanted to make sure that his son was among the chosen few. He might have attempted to dissuade Jack, for he, more than anyone, knew of Jack’s back problems and the punishment he would take in an eighty-foot armed vessel hurtling away from the enemy, planing along the top of the water. Joe, however, played this high-stakes game as if he had a marked deck and knew that he could not lose. In New York, he went to see Bulkeley and promoted Jack’s candidacy, suggesting that it would be good for his son’s future political career.

Even without his father’s efforts, Jack probably would have been chosen for the Melville Motor Torpedo Boat School in Rhode Island. He was a superb sailor and had all the attributes of a PT skipper except one: good health. In this deception lay a moral conundrum of immense importance. Was it a willful, selfish, dangerous act for this man to attempt to brace himself on a deck where only an officer in good health could stand firmly? By
doing so, was he risking not only himself but also his men in an impetuous attempt to prove himself a true man? Or did Jack have a spiritual fortitude that would help him stand up to trials of combat that might send a more physically fit officer crumbling to the deck?

I
n the Quonset huts at Melville, Jack was cheek by jowl with men of backgrounds as diverse as the country itself. His old friend and new mate at Melville, Torby Macdonald, had wryly commented on the spectacle of his snooty friend among the unwashed and the unlettered. “I swear to God Jack I thought I’d die of exhaustion from laughing—I’d laugh going to bed and wake up at it having dreamt of you in camp with Moe Sidelburg and Joe Louis as bunkmates.”

Now, however, when Jack popped off with an anti-Semitic aside, accusing the Jews of sneaking out of danger’s way by “going into the Quartermaster Corps,” he not only had Torby presumably nodding his agreement—and perhaps adding a few more ugly insinuations—but a Jewish classmate, Fred Rosen, standing there to confront him. Rosen knew how to count, an ability that Torby would most likely have attributed to race. Rosen added up the number of Catholic and Jewish volunteers at Melville ready to risk their lives. When he showed Jack his tabulation, Jack had little choice but to apologize.

After graduating from Melville, Jack served as an instructor for five weeks before he received orders in January 1943 to take a convoy of four of the squadron’s boats to Jacksonville, Florida. It was a tedious journey, the only heartening aspect being that the farther south they traveled the warmer it became.

On the third day, one of the boats ran aground. Jack wanted to throw a towline to the beached boat and yank it out, but as he attempted to do so, not only did his own boat run aground, but the towline managed to snarl itself around the propeller. Someone was going to have to dive into the frigid waters and free the rope. By any measure, including health, seniority, or simple logic, Jack was the last person who should have been designated to strip down and jump overboard.

“It was wintertime, and it was goddamn miserable in those boats in the wintertime,” recalled Holton Wood, who attended Melville with Jack. “Because if you were going at any kind of speed, you got cut by this cold wind and spray and so forth. And he ran aground, and it was cold. It was sufficiently aground so that they couldn’t back it off. If you hit rocks, you could grind up the propellers.

“And so he decided that somebody had to go over the side. Now, he could have designated anybody else, but he did not. He went over himself. He could
have been badly injured. He went under the boat to see what the bottom was like. And he then came up, and as he was getting up on the slippery, icy deck, he slipped and fell and injured his back again.”

Jack was successful, but the following day, when the boats stopped in Morehead City, North Carolina, he was so sick that he ended up in a sick bay with what was diagnosed as “gastroenteritis acute.” Jack had performed an act as brave as it was foolhardy, and the boats had to sail the rest of the way to Florida without him. Jack’s conduct had not answered the question of whether he should have been there, but he had displayed one of his psychological paradoxes.

Jack’s health was so bad, and his denial so extreme, that he was attempting to will himself not only into some semblance of normality but also into a veritable superman. He had such a need to test his manhood and his courage that he telephoned Senator David Walsh for help in getting reassigned to a PT-boat squadron in the South Pacific.

11
A Brothers’ War

O
n the troop ship sailing eastward, Jack told a new friend, James Reed, about his favorite book,
Pilgrim’s Way
by John Buchan. The book tells the story of the generation of upper-class British who fought and died in World War I. Buchan knew the dread realities of the trenches, but the stench of rude death does not hang over the book. Young men die, but there is perfect beauty in their deaths. “For the chosen few … there is no disillusionment, they march on in life with a boyish grace,” Buchan writes of one fallen hero. “Death to him was less a setting forth than a returning,” he writes of another.

There is no sentimentalist like a cynic in his moments of vulnerability, and as Jack sailed toward combat,
Pilgrim’s Way
was among his bibles of life. Jack was skittish when it came to blood. So were Buchan and Teddy Roosevelt and other philosophers of true manhood.

When Jack arrived in the New Hebrides, there were no philosophers present to explain the unexplainable, no eloquent memoirists to take away death’s sting. He saw life and death and combat not through another’s lens but through his own clear eyes. In April 1943, Jack was ferried on a small transport ship to Guadalcanal. The young men crowded on the deck knew that death might face them out there over the horizon, but few of them realized as intimately as Jack did that death resided within their own bodies. He had already cheated mortality even before he saw the enemy and was carrying into combat a body that in some ways was already wounded.

All his life Jack had been a rich boy among rich boys, but now he was among young men who ridiculed his strange accent and his seemingly affected ways. These men figured they knew life the way a rich boy never could, and he became the butt of their jokes. One of them, Ted Guthrie, a
poor boy from the hills of South Carolina, joined in the merriment. “We made fun and called you a sissy,” he wrote Jack later. “This due to the fact you were a rich man’s son.”

Then they sailed into the midst of an air attack on other boats and the joking ended. Jack’s boat was so loaded with fuel oil and bombs that it risked exploding in instant conflagration. Those on board were no longer rich and poor, northerner and southerner, but men who knew that they might soon die together. “I was only sixteen years old and scared to death,” Guthrie remembered. “Our ship had just been straddled by bombs and our gun tub was knee deep in water. I wanted to run but gained strength by the courage shown by Mr. Kennedy.”

Jack figured the captain would hightail it out of the battle zone. Instead, in a pause in the attack, Jack’s boat sailed over to pick up a Japanese pilot who had parachuted into the water. “He suddenly threw aside his life-jacket + pulled out a revolver and fired two shots at our bridge,” Jack wrote Lem. “I had been praising the Lord + passing the ammunition right alongside—but that slowed me a bit—the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship. We returned the fire with everything we had—the water boiled around him—but everyone was too surprised to shoot straight. Finally an old soldier standing next to me—picked up his rifle—fired once—and blew the top of his head off.”

Jack was startled to discover that what Americans considered mindless fanaticism was the common code of the Japanese officers. In
Why England Slept,
he had described how hard it is for democracies to come together in peacetime on difficult issues. Now he observed why democracies find it so hard to fight a war with the narrow will and focus of totalitarian regimes. The Americans had the finest planes, the newest ships, and equipment beyond measure. Their weakness was human lassitude. He was appalled by the “lackadaisical way [the swabs] handle the unloading of the ships,” as if they were Stateside with nothing more at stake than filling a warehouse, not the lives of men. “Don’t let any one sell the idea that everyone out here is hustling with the old American energy,” he wrote his parents in May. “They may be ready to give their blood but not their sweat, if they can help it, and usually they fix it so they can help it.”

Back at Northwestern, Jack had heard John D. Bulkeley tell the awestruck midshipmen that a mere five hundred PT boats would defeat the Japanese in the naval war. Out in the South Pacific, life was a little different. On the Blackett Strait, the men had much to fear from their own planes shooting at them, and many of them died from shelling by their comrades. Jack had a sense of life stripped of all the literary pretense, all the philosophical garnishes, all the propaganda and cant.

Jack willed himself to health, dismissing his back pains with a twist of wit. He was not as good at disguising his problem, however, as he thought. Leonard “Lenny” Thom, his executive officer, wrote home to Kate, his fiancée, that Jack Kennedy, the new skipper of PT-109, was half sick but pretended he was healthy. Lenny, who had played football at Ohio State, knew what it meant to play hurt, and he admired the cantankerous disregard the man showed for his own well-being, refusing to sign in for sick bay.

Just as Jack believed he could will himself to good health, so too he believed that he could will himself to live. Back in the States in April 1942, he had spent a weekend at George Mead’s family plantation in South Carolina. George, an heir to the Mead paper fortune, had enlisted early and was already a marine corps officer. George had been afraid that his fear of dying might make a coward of him. That spring weekend Chuck Spalding had cheered up glum George with Jack’s philosophy: if you thought you were going to live, you’d live. It was that simple. George just had to get his head in the right place. George would go on to fight at Guadalcanal. He would be no coward, but he would die in those jungles, not that far from where Jack stood now. George Mead was the first of Jack’s friends to go, shot in the head with a Japanese bullet.

Jack figured that death had her own timetable and could take those who huddled in fear as easily as those who sailed intrepidly to meet her. Joe Jr. was talking about flying in the Pacific, but Jack told his parents that “he will want to be back the day after he arrives, if he runs true to the form of every one of us.” As for Bobby, if he enlisted, the family was foolish to think that they could fix it so that he would be out of harm’s way. “He ought to do what he wants,” Jack lectured them. “You can’t estimate risks, some cooks are in more danger out there than a lot of flyers.”

Jack and his fellow PT-boat captains were supposedly dashing cowboys of the sea who came sweeping down on the Japanese barges and destroyers, firing torpedoes and sweeping out again before the enemy could fire with accuracy at the small dark boats. That was the beau ideal, but as Jack was learning, this war had little place for romantic adventure but endless room for dark comedy and mishaps. He had come roaring back to base one day, trying to beat the other boats to be first in line to be refilled. He had gone charging into the dock, damaging his boat and earning himself the nickname “Crash Kennedy.”

On the night of August 1, 1943, Jack’s boat, PT-109, sailed out into Blackett Strait along with fourteen other torpedo boats to attempt to intercept the “Tokyo Express”—the Japanese vessels attempting to supply their forces. The U.S. Navy’s big ships had made life improbable and short for the Japanese destroyers and cruisers. The enemy had turned to self-propelled,
low-bottomed, armed barges. These were much more difficult targets, and at night they moved up the strait in droves.

On a moonless evening like this one, it was so dark that for Jack and the others it was if they were sailing through an underground cavern. Lookouts wearied of their watch. They looked everywhere and nowhere. It was so dark that men at times saw visions in the blackness. It was difficult to tell foe from friend, land from ship.

A strong searchlight punctured the darkness. Jack thought that a Japanese shore battery had latched on to his boat, and he guided the boat in a twisting pathway until he was once again in the embrace of darkness. The Japanese rarely had searchlights onshore, and the light probably came from a Japanese boat, not a shore battery. PT-109 should have attacked, not roared away from this ersatz island, but Jack hadn’t been briefed as well as he should have been, and he was playing a game knowing only some of the rules.

In the blackness the phosphorescence stirred up by the torpedo boat’s propeller left a shimmering white trail that risked exposing its position. Jack ordered the boat throttled down so that it would operate on only the center engine. As PT-109 idled in the black water, the men saw a ship looming toward them. They assumed it was one of the other PT boats and would soon veer off. The vessel continued its course, bearing down on them.

A Japanese destroyer pressed toward them only a hundred yards away. Jack frantically turned the wheel, but working on one engine, the PT boat responded with languid indifference. The destroyer cut through the PT boat as if it were no more than foam floating on the surface and moved on into the darkness. As Jack fell to the deck, he thought to himself that this was death, that this was what it felt like.