Seventy-five years ago today – on August 1, 1943 – in the darkest hours of a starless, moonless night, a Japanese destroyer cut in half the patrol torpedo boat PT 109, commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy. The resulting explosion was so thunderous that the sailors aboard two other PT boats on station with JFK’s were sure all hands had been lost, and in fact the Navy held a memorial service for the entire crew.
In the event, only two were dead, and Kennedy famously swam three and a half miles to shore with the ten other survivors. He carried a badly burned crewman much of the way, with the man’s life jacket clamped in his teeth. The rest is literally history.
The irony was that he was never supposed to be a hero – much less president of the United States. That was the role assigned to his elder brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. But Joe would be killed almost a year to the day later, flying a harebrained bombing mission that he needn’t have taken on – perhaps desperate to reclaim his proper place as the family’s heroic, White House-bound scion.
I am of that generation of young people, born during World War II, who saw in JFK and his glittering wife a beacon, leading us brilliantly toward the possibilities in our own nascent adulthood. With Joan, I wept without surcease for three days when he died.
And then the truths began to emerge. That all the assurances he had given about his health had been lies; that he’d turned his purportedly loving marriage into a sham. We began to think that maybe it was just as well that he’d died when he did. In a second term, his terribly damaged back might well have given out permanently, or his diseased adrenal system might have collapsed. The press (if not the Republicans) might have stopped looking the other way with regard to his reckless womanizing. And how can one be really sure he would have extricated us from Vietnam?
Then a little while longer, and we could begin to see that both views had their merits; that this deep, flawed and complex man had died even as he was groping toward becoming the president, the husband and the father he was always meant to be – especially after he and his wife lost their two-day-old son.
That is the theme of Thurston Clarke’s magnificent 2013 book, JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President. Among all the books about JFK published in this century, Clarke’s has always stood out, to me, as the fullest and best exposition of what was lost on that sun-drenched afternoon in Dallas.
Though best remembered as an orator for his importantly wrongheaded and even bombastic inaugural address, John F. Kennedy actually gave the speech of his life on October 26, 1963, at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. In part a eulogy for Frost, it was in the main a subtle, insightful meditation on the arts in the life of a great nation. No other president could have given it. Twenty-seven days later, he was dead.
I’m told one can listen to and even watch the speech these days, and that’s as may be. For me, it’s enough to read it, as I do annually. I don’t have any difficulty remembering his voice. I suppose I never will.
© 2018 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings for advisors in his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. His most recent book is Around the Year with Nick Murray: Daily Readings for Financial Advisors.