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

by William Doyle

Shortly after John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, journalist I. F. Stone wrote, “He died in time to be remembered as he would like to be remembered, as ever young, still victorious, stuck down undefeated, with almost all the potentates and rulers of mankind, friend and foe, come to mourn at the bier. For somehow one has the feeling that in the tangled dramaturgy of events, this sudden assassination was the only way out. The Kennedy administration was approaching an impasse, certainly at home, quite possibly abroad, from which there appeared to be no escape.” The following year, the New York Times’ James Reston mused, “He always seemed to be striding through doors into the center of some startling triumph or disaster. He never reached his meridian: we saw him only as a rising sun.”

Even if he had somehow dodged potentially catastrophic personal scandals like the Ellen Rometsch affair, a tabloid-style alleged-hooker-and-spy story that may have been on the verge of detonating publicly at the moment he died, it is obviously impossible to know if Kennedy would have managed the blossoming crises of the 1960s any better than his successors did.

Wondering about his uncle’s repeated nocturnal attempts to hail passing PT boats in Ferguson Passage, Max Kennedy asked Keresey, “What would you have done if you had seen the lantern or heard the pistol?” Keresey replied, “We would have fired every gun and made sure anybody there was dead.” “Did Jack know that?” asked a surprised Kennedy. “He absolutely knew that,” acknowledged Keresey. “But we also would have checked, and then we would have found his body. And we’d know that he did it because his crew was still alive, and we’d go find them.” It was then that Max Kennedy absorbed the full impact of his uncle’s struggles, and he realized the “extraordinary sacrifice” he was willing to make for his crew.