But the navy is a step ahead, ordering a precautionary transfer to the Charleston Naval Shipyard, where Jack lectures factory munitions workers on safety procedures. The FBI comes, too, all the way to South Carolina.
Bugs in a Charleston hotel room reveal Arvad was never a spy, and Hoover closes his file on her. In March 1942, Jack does the same. (But the wartime confidences Jack exchanged with Arvad would never leave him. When Jack is elected president, Hoover reveals that he’s preserved the intimate wiretap recordings. The master spy’s hint at blackmail keeps him atop the ranks of the FBI.)
The breakup, in the end, is mutual, as their relationship seems doomed. As Arvad writes, her love for Jack overshadows her “reason. It took the FBI, the US Navy, nasty gossip, envy, hatred and big Joe” before she could see past it. “There is one thing I don’t want to do, and that is harm you,” she tells Jack. “You belong so whole-heartedly to the Kennedy clan, and I don’t want you to ever get into an argument with your father on account of me.”
Jack’s friend Torbert MacDonald observes, “The breakup with Inga helped install a certain, ‘I don’t give a damn’ mentality that made Jack want to go to the Pacific.” It was the kind of attitude that could end in a serviceman sacrificing his life for his country.
Jack enrolls in an officer training course in Chicago. Having spent his childhood racing sailboats for the Kennedy “Cape Cod Navy,” Jack honed his competitive instincts on the water.
Thomas Bilodeau, a frequent guest at the three-acre Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, recalls the extreme measures Jack would take to win a race. “We were coming down to the finish line, and the winds let up…the boat was slowing down with my weight [215 pounds],” Bilodeau says, “and Jack turned to me and said, ‘Over the side, boy. We’ve got to relieve ourselves of some weight.’ So right out there in open water, I proceeded to just go over the side and he ran on to win the race.”
Lem Billings also commented about his old friend, “Jack always had something to prove, physically.” Given his lifelong poor health, he would “overcompensate and prove he was fit when he really wasn’t. So, he turns into this killer football player and he turns into a voracious womanizer, a stud. Then what’s next? Well, of course he turns into a voracious warrior, hungry for a fight. It was the logical next step given the times.”
Jack’s wartime hero is Lieutenant John Duncan “Sea Wolf” Bulkeley, winner of the Medal of Honor. Bulkeley, who from PT-41 led Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, performed a daring two-day rescue in March 1942, bringing to safety General Douglas MacArthur, commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East safely from Corregidor Island in the Philippines in advance of the nearby island of Bataan’s fall to the Japanese.
Bulkeley embarks on a promotional tour touting the success of the PT boat program. More than five hundred vessels—forty-three PT squadrons each with twelve boats—would be commissioned for the war effort. A fleet of two hundred is soon to be dispatched to the Pacific theater.
In the sumptuous privacy of Kennedy’s suite at the Plaza Hotel, Joe Sr. meets with the newly ranked lieutenant commander. The patriarch pitches the decorated veteran “Sea Wolf” on the navy neophyte Jack and his qualifications as skipper. Although Joe’s motivations on behalf of his son—the postwar veterans’ vote—are transparent to Bulkeley, he moves Jack into active duty in the Pacific.
In April 1943, Jack is in command of a PT boat.
“Without PT-109,” presidential aide Dave Powers boldly declares, “you have no President John F. Kennedy.”
Chapter 13
Ship at two o’clock!” the lookout shouts to Lieutenant Junior Grade Jack Kennedy, skipper of PT-109. He’s silenced the radios and powered down the eighty-foot craft to a single, idling engine to avoid detection by the advancing Japanese fleet.
Light, fast, and heavily armed but not heavily armored, PT boats are designed to attack in great numbers as the “Mosquito Fleet.” On August 2, 1943, there are only three—PT-109, PT-162, and PT-169, in picket formation—on the Blackett Strait, south of Kolombangara in the Solomon Islands.
At 2:30 a.m., the ships are patrolling in total darkness. It’s impossible for Jack to get his bearings on the open water, and his vessel is not equipped with radar. He doesn’t have time to turn the boat, with its diminished thrust, out of the line of attack. At a speed of over thirty knots, a 1,750-ton Fubuki-class Japanese destroyer called the Amagiri collides with them, severing the fifty-ton PT-109 in half.
On impact, Jack smashes into the helm. And the gas tank ruptures.
The crew sustains immediate and widespread casualties. Motor Machinist Mate Second Class (MM2) Harold William Marney and Torpedoman’s Mate Second Class (TM2) Andrew Jackson Kirksey are killed instantly. The water’s surface is coated with a slick of engine oil and fuel. The eleven survivors’ eyes are burning as they choke on the fumes—all the while clinging to pieces of wreckage floating in the shark-infested waters.
Motor Machinist’s Mate First Class (MM1) Patrick Henry “Pappy” McMahon is blasted from his post in the engine room. He’s severely burned and struggling to swim. Acting on instinct, Jack supports the injured man across his own back and uses the strap of the machinist’s life preserver as a towline, pulling McMahon’s weight with his teeth.
McMahon’s stepson, William H. Kelly, later tells the Associated Press, “Dad was burnt so bad. He thought he was holding [Kennedy] up, so he asked the [future] president, ‘Just leave me. I’ll be all right by myself.’ But of course, he would not think of it.”
Hoping for rescue, the crew clings to the hull of the boat for a dozen hours, but it begins to take on water. Creating a makeshift flotilla from the debris of PT-109 and loading it with salvaged supplies, the strongest among the surviving crew push the injured for three or four miles toward the closest safe land they can find, Kasolo Island, nicknamed Plum Pudding Island.
Though Kick later writes home from England, “The news about Jack is the most exciting I’ve ever heard,” only Joe Sr. knew—and he kept the message from Rose—that Jack is declared “missing in action” by the Navy Department.
Plum Pudding Island is uninhabited and without food or drinkable water, so after two days, Kennedy braves his injuries and leads the search for help, assisted by Ensign George H. R. “Barney” Ross. The two of them swim between Olasana Island and Nauro Island, where they startle “Coastwatchers”—Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana—aiding the Allied forces. The native Pacific islanders don’t initially trust the men, but upon discovering the stranded survivors of PT-109, they decide it’s safe to help Kennedy.
The islander scout Gasa helps Jack use a jackknife to scratch a distress message onto a green coconut—“NAURO ISL…COMMANDER…NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT…HE CAN PILOT…11 ALIVE…NEED SMALL BOAT…KENNEDY”—that Gasa and Kumana deliver to Australian Lieutenant Arthur Reginald Evans, a fellow Coastwatcher on yet another island, who sends rescue.
The next morning, Jack awakens to four islanders looking down at him and the crew. One of them says, in a perfect British accent, “I have a letter for you, sir.” Lieutenant Wincote, a New Zealander who is working with the US Army, writes, “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me.”