Doyle William - PT 109: an American epic of war, survival, and the destiny of John F. Kennedy

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast for I intend to go in harms way.

COMMANDER JOHN PAUL JONES, 1780

John F. Kennedy loved the sea as a child, boy, and man, observed his widow Jacqueline.

I have been interested in the sea from my earliest boyhood, Kennedy himself once wrote. My earliest recollections of the United States Navy go back to the days when as a small boy, I used to be taken to the USS Constitution in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The sight of that historic frigate, with its tall spars and black guns, stirred my imagination and made American history come alive for me.

Growing up as one of nine children of the fabulously wealthy financier Joseph P. Kennedy, young Jack Kennedy learned to pilot small sailboats with the help of a family sailing instructor at their oceanside vacation estate in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and later at their winter mansion in semitropical Palm Beach, Florida.

In his teens, Kennedy became a keen swimmer and a highly skilled, competitive sailboat racer. He preferred to command a boat rather than serve in the crew, and he took racing very seriously, firmly chastising crew members who didnt measure up. In 1936, at the age of twenty, Kennedy won the Nantucket Sound championship in the Star boat category and represented the sound in the Atlantic Coast championships. As a student at Harvard University, he was on the crew that won the McMillan Cup in the annual collegiate competition at Annapolis, Maryland. When he was fifteen, Kennedys parents gave him his own wooden 26-foot Wianno Senior sailboat, called the Victura, which he would enjoy as a young man, congressman, senator, and as president.

While he occupied the White House, Kennedy speculated that humanity was drawn to the ocean because it was our primordial home. I really dont know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think its because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, its because we all came from the sea, he told an audience gathered in Newport, Rhode Island, for the 1962 Americas Cup race. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the seawhether it is to sail or to watch itwe are going back from whence we came.

For himself, Kennedy may also have seen the open water as an escape from a life of frequent physical agony inflicted by a progression of illnesses that plagued him from birth. The precise origins and nature of his lifelong back pains still are uncertain based on the available medical records, but Kennedy appears to have been born with a slightly malformed and unstable back, which, according to private conversations Kennedy had with his Navy doctors, was strained by a 1938 car trip through rough roads in Europe and a 1940 tennis injury. These conditions periodically required him to wear back braces and crutches and eventually necessitated two spinal surgeries.

Family patriarch and financial mogul Joseph P. Kennedy had a master plan to engineer his eldest sons Joseph Jr. and John into national politics. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

From boyhood, John F. Kennedy had a passion for the seaseen here aboard the Victura. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

Although he once recalled his childhood as an easy, prosperous life, supervised by maids and nurses, with more and more younger sisters to boss and play with, Kennedys frequent illnesses as a child and adolescent included chicken pox, ear infections, appendicitis, fatigue, mumps, a near-fatal case of scarlet fever at the age of two and a half, whooping cough, bronchitis, and German measles. Late in his twenties he was diagnosed with Addisons disease, a deterioration of the adrenal glands that can trigger symptoms including fatigue, dizziness, muscle weakness, weight loss, difficulty standing up, nausea, sweating, and changes in personality and mood. He remained underweight well into adulthood. Navy doctor Lee Mandel, who examined Kennedys medical records years after Kennedys death, speculated that Kennedys Addisons disease was probably caused by a rare condition, called autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2, or APS 2, which also likely caused Kennedys hypothyroidism, diagnosed in 1955, according to Mandels report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2009.

Kennedy also often fell victim to abuse from his older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr., a relentless bully. Younger brother Bobby Kennedy recalled lying in bed at night as a boy and hearing the sound of Joe banging Jacks head against the wall.

It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood, wrote Winston Churchill in his biography of John Churchill, Marlborough, one of Kennedys favorite books. The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in the early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished. John Kennedys boyhood suffering was cushioned somewhat by his fathers increasingly spectacular wealth, which funded large family homes, chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, and trips in private railway cars. But amid the privilege, Kennedy also seemed to have felt a lack of maternal warmth. My mother never hugged me, not once, he once recalled. A family friend explained of the Kennedy children, They really didnt have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available. A youthful John Kennedy would ask his mother, Rose, Which room do I have this time?

While immobilized for endless days in hospitals and sick beds for tests, treatment, and recuperation, the young Kennedy escaped his physical torments by reading multitudes of books, through which he conjured up dreamscapes of adventure, heroism, history, and fantasy. As a boy he read tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the stories of Sir Walter Scott, the Billy Whiskers childrens book series about a globe-trotting goat, Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lays of Ancient Rome, Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Coopers stories of the American frontier, Rudyard Kiplings The Jungle Book,Peter Pan,Black Beauty,Pilgrims Progress, Arabian Nights, and Wonder Tales from East and West.

Family friend Kay Halle had a vivid memory of seeing a very pale fifteen-year-old Kennedy lying in a Palm Beach hospital bed so surrounded by books I could hardly see him. I was very impressed because at this point this very young child was reading The World Crisis by Winston Churchill. Kennedys wife, Jacqueline, recalled, History made him what he was. You must think of this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading