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

by William Doyle

In Tokyo, Kennedy collapsed with a fever so alarming that his brother Robert arranged for his emergency air evacuation to a U.S. Army hospital on Okinawa for treatment. There, Robert sat by John’s bedside as the fever spiked to over 106 degrees, the point at which hallucinations and convulsions can appear, followed by coma, brain damage, and death if the fever has not broken. A priest was brought in to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church to John F. Kennedy. In the only public reference Robert Kennedy ever made to the event, he noted, “They didn’t think he would live.” Contacted by phone in the United States, Dr. Bartels prescribed penicillin and adrenal hormones, and eventually, the fever receded. Kennedy recovered in time to leave on a flight out of Tokyo on November 8. Likely guided by Kennedy family spin control, Boston newspapers announced Kennedy “cut short” his trip “after being taken ill in Okinawa,” with a condition that “may have been malaria”—once again a calculated nod to his wartime service in the Pacific, where he had first contracted the disease.