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

by William Doyle

“Everything” about JFK, wrote journalist Robert T. Hartmann in 1960 of Kennedy’s PT 109 experience, “dates from that adventure,” “the only time Kennedy ever was wholly on his own, where the $1 million his father gave him wouldn’t buy one cup of water.” Kennedy’s mettle and leadership had been proven, and yet his brush with death marked him. The tragic episode haunted Kennedy, and triggered the little-known story of his 1951 journey to American-occupied Tokyo to try to find the Japanese man who had nearly killed him, and who did take the lives of two men in his command. But when he got to Japan, disaster stalked Kennedy, and he was once again thrown upon the gates of death.

In short, the PT 109 incident made John F. Kennedy—both the man and the myth. It is therefore, a critical “ripple point” in our national story.

The precise origins and nature of his lifelong back pains still are uncertain based on the available medical records, but Kennedy appears to have been born with a slightly malformed and unstable back, which, according to private conversations Kennedy had with his Navy doctors, was strained by a 1938 car trip through rough roads in Europe and a 1940 tennis injury. These conditions periodically required him to wear back braces and crutches and eventually necessitated two spinal surgeries.

Late in his twenties he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a deterioration of the adrenal glands that can trigger symptoms including fatigue, dizziness, muscle weakness, weight loss, difficulty standing up, nausea, sweating, and changes in personality and mood. He remained underweight well into adulthood. Navy doctor Lee Mandel, who examined Kennedy’s medical records years after Kennedy’s death, speculated that Kennedy’s Addison’s disease was probably caused by a rare condition, called autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2, or APS 2, which also likely caused Kennedy’s hypothyroidism, diagnosed in 1955, according to Mandel’s report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2009.

Kennedy also often fell victim to abuse from his older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr., a relentless bully. Younger brother Bobby Kennedy recalled lying in bed at night as a boy and hearing “the sound of Joe banging Jack’s head against the wall.”

“My mother never hugged me, not once,” he once recalled. A family friend explained of the Kennedy children, “They really didn’t have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available.” A youthful John Kennedy would ask his mother, Rose, “Which room do I have this time?”

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.”

Describing the “debonair and brilliant and brave” English noble Raymond Asquith, who died in World War I, Buchan wrote a passage John F. Kennedy recited from memory for the rest of his life, perhaps because it reminded him of himself on the eve of World War II: “The War which found the measure of so many never got to the bottom of him. . . . He went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.” One of Kennedy’s best British friends, David Ormsby-Gore, who served as ambassador to the United States during Kennedy’s presidential years, theorized, “Whether Jack realized it or not, I think he paralleled himself after Asquith all the way, I really do.”

Before the war, as well as after, Kennedy’s dreams of adventure and conquest found an outlet in sex, a sport he appeared to pursue with obsessive devotion. In the spring of 1943 Kennedy was only twenty-five years old, but he had already conducted affairs with a seeming multitude of women—so far their numbers included a fashion model, an actress, an heiress, students, and members of the European aristocracy. His adventures have variously been interpreted as evidence of compulsive risk taking and an obsessive search for the maternal intimacy that was withheld from him as a boy, or they may have simply been routine male promiscuity sharply magnified by near-unlimited wealth and mobility, and striking personal seductiveness. Kennedy’s physical magnetism was so powerful it led one female reporter to remember that Kennedy “didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.” Kennedy’s own father, whose influence on his life was near supreme, likely also inspired and encouraged his promiscuity. JFK once explained to Clare Boothe Luce, “Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.” And he asserted, “I can’t get to sleep unless I’ve had a lay.”

Given his lifelong connection to the sea, it was natural for Kennedy to be drawn to the Navy, and in September 1941, with the help of behind-the-scenes string-pulling by his father, he was appointed as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve and put on the staff of the Office of Naval Intelligence at the Pentagon in October.

In a brilliantly prescient financial maneuver, Kennedy cashed out most of his stock market holdings shortly before the Crash of 1929, protecting his family’s wealth through the Great Depression. “From the beginning, Joe knew what he wanted—money and status for his family,” said a close friend. “He had the progenitor’s sense; to him, his children were an extension of himself. Therefore, what he did, he did with them always in mind. He played the game differently than if he had been after something entirely for himself.” The elder Kennedy was capable of tremendous charm, with a confident, quick smile, a firm handshake, and a meticulous personal presentation, which featured a wardrobe that was hand-tailored (down to his underwear) in London and Paris.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Kennedy was well on his way toward amassing a personal fortune that the New York Times valued at $500 million at the time of his death in 1969. He earned his money through banking, real estate, corporate takeovers and consulting, liquor importing, and movie production, displaying a Machiavellian flair that left a trail of broken companies and smashed careers in his wake. Movie superstar Gloria Swanson, who was Kennedy’s mistress and management client before he double-crossed and abandoned her, recalled that Kennedy “operated just like Joe Stalin”; “their system was to write a letter to the files and then order the exact reverse on the phone.” When she met Kennedy, Frances Marion, America’s highest-paid screenwriter at the time, thought, “He’s a charmer. A typical Irish charmer. But he’s a rascal.” In a stunning four-year raid on Hollywood, Kennedy took over three movie studios and ran them each simultaneously, launched the talking-picture revolution, established the prototype of the modern motion-picture conglomerate, and cashed out with millions of dollars in his pocket. Betty Lasky, daughter of Paramount founder Jesse Lasky, observed, “Kennedy was the first and only outsider to fleece Hollywood.”

in 1934, he tapped notorious inside trader and stock manipulator Kennedy to be the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, making him in effect the top cop of Wall Street. In private, FDR wisecracked, “It takes a thief to catch a thief!”

This impulse for shaping his family’s outward image through public relations was typical of Joe Kennedy, a shrewd student of the emerging business arts of advertising and media promotion. Among the mantras he ingrained in his children were “It’s not who you are that counts, it’s who they think you are,” and “Things don’t happen, they are made to happen in the public-relations field.”

Joe Kennedy wanted to know if Bulkeley had “the clout to get Jack into PT boats.” Bulkeley assured Kennedy he did, and, if the son measured up, he said he would recommend his acceptance into the service. Kennedy was delighted, though asked that his son not be sent someplace “too deadly.”

He did not have to take a physical for PTs.” Also in Kennedy’s favor were the stellar marks he had earned at naval officer-training school. Even if he hadn’t been the son of powerful man, Kennedy appeared to be an excellent candidate to command a PT boat, given his intellect and experience piloting small craft. What almost no one else knew was that by now Kennedy’s back troubles were so severe he had spent almost two months earlier that year in hospitals. His doctors recommended corrective surgery. He was sleeping on top of a hard plywood board to try to relieve the pain. Bulkeley later said he had “no idea Kennedy had any trouble with his back. And if I had known, it wouldn’t probably have made a blind bit of difference, ’cause I had no idea what a dislocation of the spine was. I was looking for men who would fight!”

Lieutenant Harllee was surprised to hear Kennedy was being sent to the combat zone, and assumed powerful strings had been pulled. “This suspicion was later confirmed when I had occasion to review his record in the Bureau of Naval Personnel in 1947,” remembered Harllee years later. He uncovered a paper trail revealing that “tremendous effort had been brought to get him into the combat zone.” Spotting a “smoking gun” letter signed by Kennedy family crony and U.S. senator from Massachusetts David I. Walsh, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee and the most powerful member of Congress on naval affairs, Harllee realized an invisible hand had indeed been at work.

In fact, John F. Kennedy had bypassed his own father and instead contacted Walsh through his maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, former mayor of Boston. Having later learned of Kennedy’s debilitating health problems, Harllee remembered, “Jack Kennedy’s pulling strings to get into combat, was, of course, one of the most vivid examples of his stubborn, indomitable courage. But the military’s standards of physical fitness for men going into combat are set not so much for the sake of the man himself as for others who might depend on his physical capabilities in a tight situation. It could be said, then, that he was also reckless and irresponsible and somewhat selfish in this act. It must also be said that he was not alone in taking such an action, and that that sort of action was generally admired in that war.”

The PT 109’s skipper grasped the strap of McMahon’s kapok in his teeth, and at about 2 P.M. began towing him in the direction of the small island, swimming in intervals of fifteen minutes or so, then stopping to rest. “The skipper swam the breaststroke,” remembered McMahon, “carrying me on his back, with the leather strap of my kapok clenched between his teeth.”

The longest Olympic swimming event ever staged before then, the men’s 4,000-meter freestyle race, was held only once, in 1900. Fourteen of the twenty eight competitors registered a result of “did not finish,” and the distance was promptly retired. On the afternoon of August 2, 1943, John F. Kennedy covered that same distance, plus a mile more, over open water, behind enemy lines in broad daylight, fully exposed for four hours to any Japanese lookouts or pilots who happened to look his way. All the while, he bit on to a strap and towed a badly burned sailor along with him. Simultaneously he was charged with leading nine other men, including several injured and several non-swimmers, toward safety. It was a performance Kennedy would rarely talk about publicly, but it was an astonishing feat that his crewmen never forgot. On this day, his leadership and example delivered them the hope, however slim, that salvation may be on the horizon.

Hugh Barr Miller was hiding in the jungle, living off the land and waging a one-man war against vastly superior Japanese forces. After his destroyer, the Strong, was torpedoed a month earlier, on July 4, 1943, Miller scavenged among Japanese barge wrecks for weapons and supplies. He ambushed and wiped out a Japanese patrol with grenades, collected valuable intelligence by observing Japanese movements on nearby Kolombangara, and gathered a satchel full of Japanese documents. A U.S. Marine Corps pilot finally spotted him on the beach on August 16 and realized his red beard marked him as an American. Soon a seaplane landed to pick up Miller, who had lost forty pounds to malnutrition. Under the noses of Japanese forces a mere 2,000 yards away on Kolombangara, Miller struggled out to meet the rubber boat sent over by his rescuers. As he was being evacuated, his arms clutched a cache of Japanese intelligence materials he had captured during his forty-three-day ordeal.

Nash and his fellow Coastwatcher, “Reg” Evans, a slightly built, thirty-eight-year-old former steamship accountant and native of Sydney, Australia, had one of the loneliest and riskiest jobs of the Pacific War. Armed only with a few small arms, binoculars, a telescope, a compass, logbook, and canned rations, they and several hundred other Coastwatchers lived behind enemy lines in a network of tiny isolated outposts scattered across a 2,500-mile arc from the west of New Guinea, through the New Hebrides and the Solomons, which alone had twenty-three outposts.

The previous fall Coastwatchers had secured their reputation by delivering critical intelligence that turned the tide of the Battle of Guadalcanal, inspiring U.S. Navy Admiral of the Fleet William “Bull” Halsey to declare, “The Coastwatchers saved Guadalcanal and Guadalcanal saved the Pacific.” Halsey added, “I could get down on my knees every night and thank God for [Australian Coastwatchers] Commander Eric Feldt.”

Before the war, relations between the British colonial authorities and settlers and local people in the Solomons were often correct but distant, and marred by white attitudes of racial superiority. But the arrival of frequently heavy-handed and abusive Japanese troops to the islands in 1942 strengthened the natives’ loyalty to the Allies, and when American forces began retaking the islands, these attitudes were cemented further. Overall, the Americans seemed relatively less hierarchical or class-and-color conscious than the British, and they made a strong positive impression on the Solomon Islanders, with black and white U.S. troops working, eating, and relaxing side by side with the islanders. One local scout, John Kari, said the Americans “really went inside the local people,” and another Solomon Islander, David Welchman Gegeo, who helped conduct a wide range of oral histories with islanders who lived through the war, observed that the Americans cultivated a mythic image as “generous, egalitarian, wealthy, audacious and rescuers of the Solomon Islands.” As a result, Solomon Island natives were highly disposed to help American servicemen in peril.

As Kennedy approached, a voice called out, “Hey, Jack!” In a bitter outburst born of the frustrations of past six days, Kennedy’s supposed reply was, “Where the hell you been?” Lieutenant Art Berndtson, who was in the nearby PT 171, recalled that Kennedy’s question was hardly welcome: “It was an unfortunate thing to say, I thought. I know it irked a lot of people on the two PTs. There was a war on. The guys were going out every night, getting killed and wounded. We were busy as hell. I had a patrol to lead that night and I was taking time from it. And then he hit us with that comment, like he was the only guy around!” Liebenow, however, recalled that the PT 171 was nowhere to be seen, and that a different exchange occurred, one more typical of two junior naval officers exchanging wisecracks in the midst of extreme pressure. “Hey, Jack: we’ve got some food for you!” said Liebenow. “Just what I need,” said Kennedy, “No thanks. I just had a coconut.” “You’re probably eating better that we are,” joked Liebenow, in a swipe at the monotonous cuisine available at the Rendova base.

At Tulagi, Kennedy continued his habit of organizing discussions on politics, history, and current events. One sailor remembered seeing Kennedy wading through back issues of the New York Times piled up in his bunk. Using copies of popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Collier’s as discussion guides, Kennedy and his friends debated world affairs in his tent, as Kennedy exhorted his colleagues to read, to form opinions, and to understand, in the words of Red Fay, “why the hell we’re out here.” Fay added, “He made us all very aware of our obligation as citizens of the United States to do something, to be involved in the process. Yet side by side with this seriousness he had a great sense of humor—that laugh of his: the laugh was so contagious that it made everybody laugh. You’d tell a story or a joke and then that laugh would come out, he just had everybody laughing.”

Kennedy’s health, however, was increasingly precarious. His weight was plunging toward 150 pounds, his chronic back trouble was intensifying, and he was limping around with a cane. The Navy needed live bodies in action, and he qualified, just barely. After a routine medical exam required for promotion to full lieutenant on October 20, he wrote to a friend: “I looked as bad as I could look . . . [but] I passed with flying colors, ready ‘for active duty ashore or at sea’ anywhere, and by anywhere they mean no place else but here. They’d give you twenty-twenty with no strain. Everyone is in such lousy shape here that the only way they can tell if he is fit to fight is to see if he can breathe. That’s about the only grounds on which I can pass these days.” The following month, the Tulagi medical officer conducted X-rays of Kennedy and diagnosed an “early duodenal ulcer.”

According to Cluster, “Jack got very wild.” Some of Kennedy’s men, he related, “said he was crazy and would get them killed.” Cluster squashed Kennedy’s plan for a daylight gunboat raid up the Warrior River. But Custer observed that the Warrior River rescue on November 1–2, 1943 was a turning point in JFK’s life, signaling a “change of seriousness” that that made him “grow up emotionally.” Previously, according to Cluster, “We were kind of a happy-go-lucky bunch down there in the Solomons, ‘knights of the sea’ and all that crap, going out and attacking these large ships with all that glamour: whereas in reality it had become a dirty, minor war in which you just had to do the best you could.” Now, after the PT 109 crash and the rescue of the marines, Kennedy was a seasoned warrior.

Physically, Kennedy was a wreck by November 1943. His back was paining him, and he would soon be diagnosed with both malaria and colitis, or inflammatory bowel disease. He was severely underweight. On November 18, Lieutenant Al Cluster relieved Kennedy of command of PT 59 and sent him to the hospital at Tulagi. Bidding an emotional farewell to his sailors, Kennedy shook each of their hands and told them, “If there is ever anything I can do for you, ask me. You will always know where you can get in touch with me.” At Tulagi, X-rays were given and “chronic disc disease of the lower back” was added to his medical record, as well as the diagnosis of an ulcer. (A year later he would be given a medical discharge from the Navy for physical disability and placed on the retirement list, which was finally made official on March 1, 1945. The reason for his discharge was colitis.) In late December, 1943 it was clear Kennedy would not recover, and Cluster officially detached him from duty with his PT squadron: JFK’s war was over.

John Kennedy had begun the war as a pampered, globe-trotting young man barely out of college. But now, after seven months in the combat zone, the PT 109 crash and the rescues of his crewmen and the marines at Warrior River, Kennedy had proven to himself and to others that he was capable of leadership and command, and possessed considerable courage under fire.

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.”

The Hersey article conjured the classic dramaturgy of myth-telling later described by Joseph Campbell as “the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero”: the rites of passage of separation (the PT 109 sinking), initiation (the ordeal on the islands and abandonment to death), and return (the rescue). Campbell outlined the basic elements of heroic mythology in terms that closely evoke the structure of the saga unveiled in “Survival”: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder,” “fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won,” and “the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Hersey’s “Survival” parallels the “Hero’s Journey” described by Campbell in other key ways, including the “threshold crossing,” the “night-sea journey,” the “rescue” and “resurrection,” and even the “helper,” who can be seen as Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, and the “elixir,” which can be interpreted as the symbolic coconuts that nourished the crew (just barely) and bore the message that delivered them from the underworld back to the world of the living. In short, Hersey’s article became the founding document of the John F. Kennedy mythology, helping firmly establish him as a hero in twentieth-century American political culture.

The condensed version of the article, the editing of which further sharpened Kennedy’s role, appeared in the August 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest, reaching millions of readers. At the age of twenty-seven, John Kennedy was a budding pop culture icon.

Having done more than his duty, Joe, Jr. was eligible to return to the United States. But in August 1944 he volunteered for an exquisitely complex and dangerous operation to bail out of a PB4Y Liberator aircraft stuffed with 12 tons of explosives that would be guided by radio signals to crash into a German rocket complex. If successful, the assault could help slow the onslaught of German rockets on London, and earn Joe, Jr. medals and fame to rival those of his younger brother. He took off from an RAF base in England on August 12, 1944. Eighteen minutes into the mission, his aircraft blew up over Newdelight Wood near the Suffolk hamlet of Blytheburgh, instantly killing Kennedy and his single crew member, Lieutenant Wilford John “Bud” Willy. “Driven by a hunger to redeem the Kennedy name from his father’s errors of political and moral judgment,” noted historian Alan Axelrod, “by lifelong competitiveness with his younger brother, Lieutenant (jg) John F. Kennedy, hero of PT 109, and, more selflessly, by a passionate desire to spare London further V-weapon devastation, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. answered the call.”

The heavy mantle of Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s political ambitions now landed squarely on the fragile shoulders of a sickly John F. Kennedy. “I’m now shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” John despaired to a friend. Through 1944 and 1945, John suffered through continuing health crises and was detached honorably from the U.S. Navy in December 1944, after which he briefly pursued an inconsequential stint as a war correspondent for the Hearst News Service in 1945, and spent months in the Arizona sun trying to rebuild his strength and health. During this time, Joe Sr. and John Kennedy appear to have reached an understanding that John was the family’s ‘anointed one’ and that politics would be his destiny. “I can feel Pappy’s eyes on the back of my neck,” John said to a friend during the Christmas holiday of 1944, adding, “I’ll be back here with Dad trying to parlay a lost PT boat and a bad back into a political advantage. I tell you, Dad is ready right now and can’t understand why Johnny boy isn’t all engines ahead full.” Years later, John told a reporter, “It was like being drafted. My father wanted his oldest son in politics. ‘Wanted’ isn’t the right word. He demanded it. You know my father.” On another occasion, Kennedy explained: “My brother Joe was the logical one in the family to be in politics, and if he had lived, I’d have kept on being a writer.” Joseph Kennedy Sr. confirmed John’s account of the succession, asserting matter-of-factly to a journalist in...

Early in the campaign, Kennedy sometimes seemed to be a nervous, hesitant, and generally poor public speaker. But telling the PT 109 story was his touchstone, and he later traced his confidence in his own political future to these speeches and to how well audiences responded. Privately, Kennedy wisecracked to a friend about the story’s universal appeal, “My story about the collision is getting better all the time. Now I’ve got a Jew and a nigger in the story and with me being a Catholic, that’s great.”

Over the next six years though, John Kennedy compiled an undistinguished record as a carefree bachelor-playboy congressman. His health was a greater concern. He was sometimes mistaken for a skinny young Senate page or elevator operator. In 1947 he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a collapse of the adrenal glands that could trigger fevers, weight loss, weakness, and death if not correctly treated. From 1950 on Kennedy relied on cortisone treatments for relief, and he hid the diagnosis from the public for the rest of his life. His congenitally malformed back, aggravated by PT boat life and possible football and tennis injuries, greatly troubled him as well.

The trip would climax, the elder Kennedy decided, in Japan, for a startling photo opportunity designed to generate headlines and attach his son’s name and face to a historic image of grace, humility, and mature diplomacy. John F. Kennedy would go to Japan, track down the former commanding officer of the Japanese Imperial Navy destroyer Amagiri—and embrace the man who nearly killed him.

The precise details of what occurred next are shrouded in mystery, as Kennedy never talked publicly about the event, and the files at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library are strangely devoid of almost all records of the Tokyo portion of his trip. But key parts of the story can be reconstructed from fragments that survive in the files at Kennedy Library and in clues identified by researchers over the years. John F. Kennedy abruptly experienced a severe medical crisis at some point between his lunch with Professor Gunji Hosono and his departure from Tokyo on November 8, 1951, when he returned to the United States via San Francisco. According to Kennedy’s doctor at the time, Dr. Elmer Bartels, the crisis was triggered by his Addison’s disease and exacerbated by the strains of his long voyage. Bartels claimed that Kennedy “had not been properly taking care of himself on the trip.”

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.

Since John Kennedy would disguise the details of his Addison’s disease for the rest of his life, it is possible that those Kennedy family members with knowledge of his Tokyo crisis chose not to talk about it—other than Robert Kennedy’s brief comments about the fever’s climax in Okinawa, which omitted any mention of Addison’s disease. John Kennedy’s detailed personal diary of the trip contains no mention of his experience in Tokyo, as he may have been too tired, busy, or sick by then to make notes.

During the Wisconsin primary, when a young man asked him how he came to be a war hero, Kennedy famously quipped, “It was easy—they sank my boat.”

A low blow was delivered for Kennedy on April 27, two weeks before the final vote, when Kennedy’s friend Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., himself a decorated World War II Navy veteran, attacked Humphrey by saying, “I don’t know where he was in World War II,” and even handed out leaflets claiming Humphrey was a draft dodger. It inferred cowardice on the part of Humphrey, who did not serve in the war for medical reasons, despite trying to enlist. Roosevelt later said “of course, Jack knew,” referring to the smear.

When reporter David Broder asked John Kennedy if he thought Humphrey’s lack of military service was a legitimate campaign issue, Broder was struck by Kennedy’s “super-cool, almost cold-blooded reaction.” Kennedy replied, “Frank Roosevelt is here making his speeches, and I’m making mine.” For his part in the dirty trick, said FDR Jr., “I always regretted my role in the affair. Humphrey, an old ally, never forgave me for it. I did it because of Bobby.” According to Roosevelt, “RFK was already a full-blown tyrant. You did what he told you to do, and you did it with a smile.”

When John F. Kennedy learned he was talking to a man who was on the PT 162 that night, he briefly stepped out of his supremely cool, confident, and poised image and revealed a glimpse of how, for all the value the PT 109 episode provided him as a candidate for the nation’s highest office, the ordeal in the Blackett Strait still haunted him somewhere within. “Where in the hell did you guys go?” Kennedy snapped. It was all he had to say to Ogilvie.

One day not long after the inauguration, the director of the Atlanta, Georgia, office of the U.S. Veterans Administration was shocked to hear his secretary tell him, “The White House is calling!” John F. Kennedy was on the line, ordering him to send a car to the Kirkseys’ home, bring Jack to his office, and explain his educational benefits to him. When Jack got there, it looked like the director “almost had a stroke” in the wake of a direct call from the president of the United States. Benefits were arranged and Jack attended college accounting courses that launched his career. In late April 1961, Kennedy sent Kloye Kirksey an aerial photograph of the American cemetery in Manila, where the name of her late husband was inscribed on a memorial wall. If she ever came to Washington, the president wrote, he “would like very much to have the White House and other public places here shown to you.”

A story was told of Kennedy, working late in the Oval Office on a freezing-cold night, looking out and seeing a Secret Service officer shivering at his post in the garden just outside the windows. He opened the door and called out, “I don’t want you out there in that terrible cold,” and ordered him to “come in and get warm.” The officer refused, saying such was his job. Kennedy soon came out with a heavy coat and announced, “I want you to put this on. You’re not warm enough, I can tell. ‘A few minutes later the president came out again, this time with a couple of cups of hot chocolate, and persuaded the agent to join him. The two sat down on the cold steps outside the Oval Office and sipped their mugs together. Years later the agent wept as he told the story.

From August to November 1963, John and Robert Kennedy also presided over a chaotic mélange of American involvement and noninvolvement with various coup plots in Saigon, a slow-motion nightmare that culminated, to JFK’s shock and dismay, in the gangland-style machine-gun rubout of American ally and South Vietnamese head of state Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. “He’s always said that it was a major mistake on his part,” said RFK in 1964 of JFK’s authorization of support for the coup plots. “The result is we started down a path we never really recovered from.” The final plunge of America into the abyss of Vietnam may have occurred under Lyndon Johnson at the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, but it started on Kennedy’s watch with the assassination of Diem the year before.

If some stories are to be believed, Kennedy, who continued to suffer from fragile health during his presidency, also is alleged to have conducted high-risk affairs with a large number of women other than his wife. His cabinet secretary Fred Dutton asserted that Kennedy behaved “like God, fucking anybody he wants to anytime he feels like it.” British prime minister Harold Macmillan famously quipped that Kennedy spent “half his time thinking about adultery, the other half about secondhand ideas passed on by his advisors.”

The zenith of Kennedy’s brief presidency was the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when he and his brother Robert stared down some of their own hawkish military and civilian advisors and found a way out that did not involve the catastrophic detonation of nuclear warheads. In JFK’s secret White House tapes of the crisis, Kennedy’s calm, rational discussion and decision-making style shines clearly through as that of a man who has, to use his own inaugural phrase, been “tempered by war,” a man whose character was forged in the cauldron of combat, military disaster, death, endurance, and survival.