On August 8, after enduring six days in enemy territory, Jack and the crew reach the US base at Rendova.
Nearly two decades later, that crucial dried coconut husk is displayed on President Kennedy’s desk in the Oval Office, and he remains in correspondence with Gasa and Kumana, even inviting them to his inauguration.
The machinist McMahon, whose burns covered 70 percent of his body, eventually recovers from his injuries. The onboard collision ruptured a disk in Jack’s back. He will require surgery, but his psychological wounds run even deeper.
Elevated to full lieutenant and now in command of PT-59, Jack sees further action in the Solomon Islands until November 16, 1943, when the mentally and physically exhausted officer is ordered to the naval hospital at Tulagi Island, where he relinquishes his command. Jack returns to the United States on December 21, already having been declared a “Hero in the Pacific” by the New York Times.
To Rose, “he [Jack] is just the same,” she declares in a family letter. “Wears his oldest clothes, still late for meals, still no money. He has even overflowed the bathtub, as was his boyhood custom.”
Although many military insiders view the sinking of PT-109 as an accident at sea, Joe Sr. works the press, convincing Reader’s Digest to reprint for a mass readership John Hersey’s rousing account originally published in The New Yorker. His tactics work, bringing Jack’s story to a much larger readership, and fueling interest in the handsome homecoming hero.
Among the journalists now jostling for exclusive interviews is none other than Inga Arvad, Jack’s Danish dream girl.
While they had ended their relationship almost two years earlier, they had continued their correspondence. “As long as you have that feeling” for survival, Jack had written Arvad during his convalescence, “you seem to get through.” He confesses, “I’ve lost that feeling lately.” He adds with heartfelt declaration, “Knowing you has been the brightest part of an extremely bright 26 years.”
In January 1944, she interviews him for the Boston Globe. “Real heroes,” he says, “are not the men who return, but those who stay out there like plenty of them do, two of my men included.”
In June 1944, while in the hospital recovering from back surgery, Jack is awarded the Navy Marine Corps Medal and the Purple Heart. In March 1945, he receives a medical discharge from the navy, then signs on with the Hearst newspapers as a special correspondent.
Politics “is Joe’s business,” Jack would tell his cousin Joe Kane, Joe Sr.’s nephew and political adviser. “I want to go into the news business.”
But with Joe Jr.’s death in August of 1944, the political mantle is passed to Jack, or as Jack put it, “[The] burden falls to me.” Joe Sr. has issued his latest orders, and Jack would not be destined for journalism. “It was like being drafted.”
By the Fourth of July, 1945, the entire family has fallen into line. At the holiday gathering in Hyannis Port, Grandfather Honey Fitz makes a toast. In 1915, when Joe Jr. was born, Honey Fitz had brashly predicted, “[Joe] is going to be the President of the United States,” the first among America’s Irish Catholics. But on that night during the final days of the war in the Pacific, James A. Reed, Jack’s friend from the navy, sees the former mayor look right at Joe and Rose’s second born when he raises a glass to the future president of the United States.
Chapter 14
On May 8, 1952, at an exclusive Washington dinner on Q Street NW hosted by the journalist Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha, a statuesque brunette catches the eye of thirty-four-year-old Congressman Jack Kennedy.
For the second time.
The Bartletts made the initial introduction at a small garden party at their home in May 1951, but it failed to spark. The then twenty-one-year-old George Washington University student Jacqueline Bouvier had had a foreboding reaction to the thirty-three-year-old, third-term Democratic representative from Massachusetts.
Jackie “had an absolutely unfailing antenna for the fake and fraud in people,” the art critic John Russell later says of his longtime friend, and at first meeting, she sensed that Jack was a man who “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence on her life.”
Time magazine notes, “legend claims that Jack Kennedy ‘leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date.’ Jackie denies the story; asparagus, she says, was not on the menu.” Either way, Jack fails to get the date.
By Christmastime 1951, Jackie has instead become engaged to John G. W. Husted Jr., whose prominent family connections in part fueled his success on Wall Street. But the life Husted offered Jackie, while financially secure, is emotionally limited. In March 1952, Jackie cancels their plans for a June wedding.
Instead, she pursues her work as the “Inquiring Camera Girl” at the Washington Times-Herald, where “Can you spot a married man?” is just one of the provocative questions she asks passersby on the streets of Washington, the population of which, at just over eight hundred thousand—over one hundred thousand larger than today—nevertheless has a small-town feel. As she is working at the same paper where, a decade earlier, Kick Kennedy and Inga Arvad had been on staff, it’s impossible not to be drawn into the Kennedy orbit. Jackie adds Jack’s book, Why England Slept, to her reading list.
Although Jackie would call the Bartletts “shameless in their match-making,” she accepts their second invitation to dinner with a man who “looked a little lonesome and in need of a haircut and perhaps a square meal”—as Jackie’s sister, Lee Bouvier, would later describe the Senate hopeful.
This latest meeting takes root, and Jackie later says she determined of their relationship, “Such heartbreak would be worth the pain.” On Jack’s part, Lem Billings suggests he found Jackie “a challenge,” and “there was nothing Jack liked better than a challenge.”
Not only is Jackie beautiful and her manners impeccable—courtesy of the esteemed Miss Porter’s School—she’s sharp and entertaining. In Jackie, Jack finds an equal adopter of humor as a survival tactic. “She had such a wit,” her future White House social secretary, Letitia Baldridge, would observe. “She would have been terrible if she wasn’t so funny.” Jackie also has an enviable equestrian-set social status, inherited from her father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, to whom she bears a striking physical resemblance.
As they begin to spend time together, exchanging gifts of books on history, poetry, and art, the new couple is quick to confide parental difficulties on both sides. While many would later name her father as the only man Jackie ever truly loved, despite his philandering, “Jackie really didn’t like her mother,” recalls Bouvier cousin and family biographer John Davis. Jack could cut even deeper on the subject of Rose. “My mother was a nothing.” And he chafes against Joe Sr.’s control. “I think my destiny is what my father wants it to be.”
Jack struggles even more deeply with the numbing grief that comes from the loss of two siblings in less than five years. He bleakly describes Joe Jr.’s death in 1944 as having “a completeness…the completeness of perfection.” He keeps Joe Sr.’s 1935 letter that tells of beloved younger sister Kick who “thinks you are quite the grandest fellow who ever lived and your letters furnish most of her laughs.”