The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [118]
Jack left his father that weekend and flew north to begin medical treatment. He had become a medical kaleidoscope. Each doctor who looked at him saw something different and prescribed his own unique remedy. The doctors at Mayo and Lahey at least agreed that Jack needed a back operation, but the navy doctors said no, such a dramatic solution was uncalled for, and Jack returned to where he began—a quasi-invalid pretending to be a stalwart navy man.
Jack should have been relegated to a desk job for the duration of the war, but instead he applied to and was accepted for midshipmen’s school. “He has become disgusted with the desk jobs and all the Jews,” Joe wrote Joe Jr. on June 20, 1942, “and as an awful lot of the fellows that he knows are in active service, and particularly with you in the fleet service, he feels that at least he ought to be trying to do something. I quite understand his position, but I know his stomach and his back are real deterrents—but we’ll see what we can do.”
In July, on his way to the Chicago training facility, Jack stopped in Washington, where he saw Inga. He wanted to come to her apartment, but she preferred to keep her former lover just that. After chatting with Jack, she telephoned a friend and told her that the poor Jack she knew looked like a “limping monkey from behind. He can’t walk at all. That’s ridiculous, sending him off to sea duty.”
In the first months of the war the allies had suffered a series of humiliating defeats, from the capture of Singapore to the fall of the Philippines. The American public had little to celebrate but the saga of the PT boats and their skippers. These cowboys of the seas were a daring, dauntless lot, darting in and out of combat in their eighty-foot wooden boats. It was just the image Americans had of themselves—quick, smart, intrepid, and inventive.
The skippers, or many of them, came from upper-class backgrounds, having learned to sail as youths on sailboats or family yachts. The world of the PT boats was like that of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, gentlemen officers and roustabout sailors united in a gallant quest. For the men of Jack’s father’s generation, war was supposed to be an arena of heroism. This was the world that Joe had brought up his sons to believe still existed, a world where one day they would trade in their medals for their country’s highest political honors.
While Jack was going through the ten-week officer training program at Northwestern University, one of the war’s earliest heroes, John D. Bulkeley, arrived at the training facility to recruit officers to captain PT boats in the Pacific Theater. The young lieutenant commander’s exploits had just been chronicled in a bestseller, They Were Expendable, and he had even had a ticker tape parade down Broadway.
Bulkeley had won his hero’s appellation by rescuing General Douglas MacArthur from the besieged beaches of Bataan and carrying him through 560 miles of enemy waters to safety. Now he told his enthralled audiences that all he needed were five hundred PT boats, and he and his colleagues could almost singlehandedly defeat the Japanese navy.
It was an irresistible idea. Brave Americans would skim across the seas with speed and daring, slashing at their dull-witted, sneaky, evil enemy, and then zigzag away, each day closer to victory. They would vanquish their foe, not with steel and fire and might and blood but with wit and daring.
Joe wanted to make sure that his son was among the chosen few. He might have attempted to dissuade Jack, for he, more than anyone, knew of Jack’s back problems and the punishment he would take in