The early 1940s marked a changing of the guard in the
Kennedy clan. Joseph Kennedy, Sr.'s political star was in eclipse–in
the country at large, because of his support for appeasement while
Ambassador to Great Britain, and in the Democratic party in specific,
because of his opposition, in 1940, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's nomination
to run for a historically-unprecedented third term as President
of the United States. His children, however, were on the rise.
Kathleen Kennedy, JFK's favorite sibling, was working for a newspaper
in Washington, and being romanced by the social elite of both the
U.S. and Great Britain. Joseph Kennedy, Jr. vigorously opposed
U.S. involvement in World War II while at Harvard Law School, but
once Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, he enlisted in the
Naval Aviation Cadet Program, and was soon flying missions over
Europe. Meanwhile, JFK (now "Ensign Kennedy") was working for
Naval Intelligence in Washington, and sleeping with a Danish beauty
named Inga Arvad, who worked as a columnist for the same paper
as Kathleen. An exotic, well-traveled woman, Inga had connections
to Nazi leaders, a circumstance which eventually got JFK in trouble
with his superior officers. The young ensign was reassigned to
a bureaucratic post in South Carolina, and his romance with the
Danish beauty fizzled.
JFK found South Carolina paralyzingly dull, and he begged
his father to pull strings to get him assigned to sea duty. Joseph Kennedy,
Sr. obliged, and in late 1942, JFK was given an assignment on
a Motor Torpedo Boat, or "PT boat," as it was informally known.
After six months of training, he and his crewmates shipped out
from San Francisco, bound for the South Pacific and combat with
the Japanese. Promoted to lieutenant early in 1943, he was given
command of a boat designated PT 109, and was the skipper of this
boat on the night of August 2, 1943, when it was rammed by the
Japanese destroyer Amigari. Two of JFK's crew
were killed outright, while the others tried to stay afloat amid
the wreckage. Under the young lieutenant's leadership, eleven
men, several badly wounded, managed to hang on to the half of
the PT boat that was still afloat and wait for help. None came,
and after nearly fifteen hours, JFK led the men on a grueling
swim to a nearby island. From there, he and his subordinate, Ensign
Ross, made various forays through the coral islands, searching
for help. It was days before they found a group of natives who
carried a message to a British base, some thirty-eight miles away.
Finally, on August 7, JFK and the other survivors were rescued
by a party of British scouts and carried to safety.
The ordeal made JFK a war hero. He received the Purple
Heart, as well as the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and for the
first time in his life, he began to outshine his brother Joe.
After the incident of PT 109, however, the rest of JFK's war experience
proved somewhat anticlimactic. JFK's frail health gave way: he
contracted malaria, and his old back problems flared up. He was
rotated back to duty in the U.S., and by spring of 1944, he found
himself laid up in Boston's Chelsea Naval Hospital, diagnosed
with a chronic lower back disease. That same spring, in London,
his sister Kathleen married an English nobleman, William Hartington,
the heir to the staunchly Protestant Duke of Devonshire. The difference
of religion made it a controversial match from both families'
perspectives–Rose Kennedy even went into seclusion for a while,
claiming that she had "lost" a daughter. But Kathleen had the
support of her brother Joe, who was then in London flying missions
against German submarines, and so the marriage went forward.
By this point, Joe Kennedy, Jr. had been flying missions
against the Nazis for some time, even turning down a chance to
return to the U.S. in order to keep flying. Later, some would
claim that JFK's sudden celebrity from the PT 109 incident rankled
his older brother, and drove him toward a reckless pursuit of heroism.
In any case, what became Joe Jr.'s final mission was an almost
suicidally dangerous operation that consisted of dropping ten tons
of high-explosive TNT on a German target in France. The mission
proved fatal, as Joe Jr.'s plane exploded in the air over southern
England on the evening of August 12, 1944. The devastating news
reached the Kennedy family's summer home, in Hyannis, Massachusetts,
a day later. The family was united in grief, and their sorrows
only increased in September, with the news that Kathleen's husband
had been killed in the war.
While JFK, now the eldest Kennedy son, worked to put
together a memorial book for Joe Jr., Joe Sr. became consumed by
bitterness. As World War II, in which he had opposed U.S. involvement, wound
to a victorious conclusion, Joe Sr. threatened to take out his frustrations
on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. He had
to be talked out of endorsing Roosevelt's Republican opponent in
the 1944 election, Thomas Dewey, and in a private interview, accused
the president of filling his cabinet with "Jews and Communists."
As his father's anger mounted, JFK's back trouble continued unabated,
and the hero of PT 109 received a medical discharge from the navy
on March 1, 1945. Returning to his family, JFK soon found himself
the focus of his father's thwarted ambitions. Joseph Kennedy,
Sr. had seen his eldest son die in a war that he himself had opposed,
and he now channeled all of his energies and ambitions into a political
career for his second-born son. "It was like being drafted,"
JFK later described it. "My father wanted his oldest son in politics.
'Wanted' isn't the right word. He demanded it." In JFK, the
Joe Sr. found a willing vehicle for his ambition.
