Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [19]
Jack Kennedy, being a man of his times, felt the patriotic pull of service. His older brother had experienced the pull, too. Though Joe Jr., as in all things, had previously followed his father’s lead, identifying with the isolationist America First movement, by the summer of 1941 he was training to be a navy pilot. It was truly a time of testing for such elite young men, suddenly having to square their belief systems with their consciences.
I talked to one of Joe’s Choate classmates, Paul Ferber, then in his nineties, who’d never forgotten being at naval aviation school in Jacksonville, Florida, and running into young Joe there. He was deeply taken with his words. “I want to go over there and bomb the hell out of those Nazis!” Ferber, after all, was familiar with the antiwar sentiments of Joe’s dad.
In July, Jack transferred to midshipman’s school at Northwestern University, and from there applied to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island. The essential conditions being looked for in the Melville recruits were exactly the ones he possessed, he told Lem. “I have applied for torpedo boat school under Lt. Bulkeley. The requirements are very strict physically. You have to be young, healthy and unmarried. As I am young, healthy and unmarried, I’m trying to get in.”
Bulkeley was looking for hotshot junior officers used to handling high-powered speedboats and to the rigors of long sailing races. Fast thinking, teamwork, and endurance were everything. What this meant, then, was a group disproportionately Ivy League, ones who’d grown up summering in such places as coastal Maine or on Long Island Sound, where their families and friends belonged to yacht clubs. In other words, young men like Jack Kennedy.
Joining the PTs gave Jack the chance, finally, to command his own boat. His love of the sea is one of those things most people associate with him. Jack was proud of the Nantucket Sound sailing championship he’d earned. He and Joe had even been together on a victorious Harvard intercollegiate sailing team in ’38, but now he was ready to be the skipper.
There in Rhode Island, he shared a Quonset hut with Torby Macdonald, who, with a little help from Jack’s father, happily arrived to keep him company. After they completed their training and had their sights on the South Pacific, a snag arose when Jack received orders to stay stateside as an instructor. This time, political rescue came from on high in the person of Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts, chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs.
Yet barely was that issue resolved when another crimp appeared in Jack’s plans. It was his bad back and the pounding it could expect to suffer aboard a PT boat. While he got past muster, his health condition was precarious. No one knew this as well as Jack himself. Even going at half-speed, standing upright on these boats was as tough as riding a bucking bronco. One person this worried was Jack’s father.
“Jack came home,” he wrote Joe Jr., after Jack stopped for some R & R at Hyannis Port while at Melville, “and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back.” His son, ignoring all the danger signs, chose to make the best of it, preferring to get into the action rather than worry over its certain consequences for him.
He feared as much for what his sensitive gut would have to take. “I’m rather glad to be on my way,” he wrote Lem, “although I understand that this South Pacific is not a place where you lie on a white beach with a cool breeze, while those native girls who aren’t out hunting for your daily supply of bananas are busy popping grapes in your mouth. It would seem to consist of heat and rain and dysentery + cold beans, all of which won’t of course bother anyone with a good stomach. If it’s as bad as they say it is, I imagine I’ll be voting Republican in ’44.”
Kennedy’s first taste of the hazards of war came even before he reached his assigned PT base in the Solomon Islands, when his