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

by William Doyle

Family friend Kay Halle had a vivid memory of seeing a “very pale” fifteen-year-old Kennedy lying in a Palm Beach hospital bed “so surrounded by books I could hardly see him. I was very impressed because at this point this very young child was reading The World Crisis by Winston Churchill.” Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, recalled, “History made him what he was. You must think of this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.” She described JFK’s adult reading habits vividly: “He’d read in the strangest way. He’d read walking, he’d read at the table, at meals, he’d read after dinner; he’s read in the bathtub . . . he’d really read all times you don’t think you have time to read. He was always reading—practically while driving a car.” Jim Reed, a wartime buddy of Kennedy in the South Pacific, recalled, “He had read almost every book on the American presidents. He had read every word that Winston Churchill had ever published. He’d read T. E. Lawrence and was a devotee of Lord David Cecil’s racy account of Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb in The Young Melbourne.” JFK biographer Nigel Hamilton speculated that Kennedy was attracted to combat on the eve of World War II by “the wayward urge to cut a figure—and be seen to do so—that would bind him to his latest hero, Lord Byron, the roguish star of David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne.”