PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy

by William Doyle

For Joe Kennedy’s campaign of family self-promotion, the Hersey feature was a perfect instrument. The article was not a typical propaganda piece of combat derring-do, but an authentic meditation on human endurance against the primal forces of nature: darkness, the ocean, hunger, and thirst. “Hersey’s ‘Survival’ produces John F. Kennedy as a hero, but not in the sense of a model person seen as a performing great exploits; the hero of Hersey’s narrative is rather a youth who has enormous bravery and energy but who is transformed by chastening experience,” wrote Ohio State University’s John Hellmann, author of The Kennedy Obsession. “More complexly, the production of Kennedy as hero begins in his transformation into the narrative sense of that term, the protagonist or main character of the story with whom the reader is positioned to identify. As a true-life ‘character,’ Kennedy then walks off the page into the text of a political production in the media age.”