Before he ever ran for office, John F. Kennedy was a war hero, and this Veterans Day the events that first brought Kennedy to national attention 80 years ago are worth recalling for the emphasis they place on heroism as an extension of rather than a departure from the values governing our daily lives.
Kennedy’s World War II heroism did not consist of defying the odds to turn defeat into victory. Nothing like that happened on the summer night in 1943 that PT-109, the now-famous boat Kennedy commanded, encountered a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands’ Blackett Strait.
The torpedo boat on which Kennedy, a 26-year-old, Navy junior lieutenant, was the highest-ranking officer was not equipped with radar. As a result, neither he nor his crew saw the enemy destroyer in time to avoid being cut in two by it.
Kennedy’s heroism consisted of making the best of a bad situation. It was the grit he showed in getting himself and his surviving men (two of the crew were killed instantly) to a distant island and eventual rescue that made his story compelling.
For the crew of PT-109, it was never every man for himself. At one point Kennedy swam for five straight hours while towing his boat’s badly burned engineer, Patrick McMahon.
Years later Kennedy would, as his biographer Robert Dallek notes, downplay how he came to be looked on as a hero by observing, “It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half.”
It was the right note for Kennedy to strike. Even during World War II, when America had a constant need for success stories, journalists did not portray PT-109’s encounter with a Japanese destroyer as a military win. Kennedy’s story was always told in terms of comradeship.
The Associated Press account, which future Kennedy voters read in The Boston Globe and which appeared on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 20, 1943, brought the PT-109 story to the nation by sticking to the facts. In its lead paragraph, the Associated Press story described how a Japanese destroyer sliced Kennedy’s boat in half.
In the interview he gave to the Associated Press, Kennedy went out of his way to laud the oldest member of his crew, McMahon, a married man with a son. McMahon had enlisted in the Navy at 37, an age when he was exempt from the draft, and what Kennedy admired about him were the sacrifices he made in joining the Navy and remaining in it after recovering from the burns he suffered during the attack on PT-109.
In running for Congress in 1946, Kennedy spoke of McMahon in his campaign, but he never mentioned the role he had played in rescuing McMahon. Instead, he used McMahon to illustrate the larger point he put at the center of his campaign: the heroism he witnessed in the war had an overriding source — “men’s understanding of their interdependence on each another.”
For Kennedy that interdependence was, he told Boston voters, the essence of what life must be like in peacetime as well. “We forget that that dependence on other people is with us in civilian life just as it was in the war,” Kennedy declared. “We are dependent on other people nearly every minute of our lives.”
A decade later, Kennedy extended this same thinking to American history in his bestseller, “Profiles in Courage.” In his profiles of the senators he wrote about, Kennedy pointed out that the courage they showed in standing up for their beliefs often meant losing elections rather than winning them.
The men he profiled, Kennedy stressed, did not possess super powers. As he observed on the last page of “Profiles in Courage,”: “To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all.”
Small wonder then that Kennedy’s World War II heroism has continued to resonate over the years. This summer, when Caroline Kennedy, the president’s daughter, now America’s ambassador to Australia, went swimming in the same waters her father nearly died in, she invited others to join her. Her invitation captured the essence of her father’s heroism in a way no formal tribute could. She was doing as Kennedy had, treating his World War II deeds as within reach of us all at our best.
Mills is professor of American literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan” and “America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.”
Veterans Day and JFK’s war story
10
0
12.11.2023
Before he ever ran for office, John F. Kennedy was a war hero, and this Veterans Day the events that first brought Kennedy to national attention 80 years ago are worth recalling for the emphasis they place on heroism as an extension of rather than a departure from the values governing our daily lives.
Kennedy’s World War II heroism did not consist of defying the odds to turn defeat into victory. Nothing like that happened on the summer night in 1943 that PT-109, the now-famous boat Kennedy commanded, encountered a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands’ Blackett Strait.
The torpedo boat on which Kennedy, a 26-year-old, Navy junior lieutenant, was the highest-ranking officer was not equipped with radar. As a result, neither he nor his crew saw the enemy destroyer in time to avoid being cut in two by it.
Kennedy’s heroism consisted of making the best of a bad situation. It was the grit he showed in getting himself and his surviving men (two of the crew were killed instantly) to a distant island and eventual rescue that made his story compelling.
For the crew of PT-109, it was never every man for........
© NY Daily News
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
