But his overarching view of the war had not changed. Upon learning that his seventeen-year-old brother Bobby was clamoring to get into a PT boat, Jack insisted that he was “too young to be out here,” and that “the fun goes out of the war in a fairly short time and I don’t think that Bobby is ready yet to come out.”59 In September, he assumed command of a new boat, the former PT 59, which had been retrofitted—the torpedoes were removed and replaced with guns—to become Gunboat No. 1, making Jack the first gunboat commander in the Pacific. Later that month he remarked to Inga Arvad on how slowly the fighting was progressing.

This war here is a dirty business. It’s very easy to talk about the war and beating the Japs if it takes years and a million men, but anyone who talks like that should consider well his words. We get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers that thousands of casualties sounds like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten that I saw, the people deciding the whys and wherefores had better make mighty sure that all this effort is headed for some definite goal and that when we reach that goal we may say it was worth it….

I received a letter from the wife of my engineer, who was so badly burnt that his face and hands and arms were just flesh and he was that way for six days. He couldn’t swim and I was able to help him and his wife thanked me, and in her letter she said, “I suppose to you it was just part of your job, but Mr. McMahon was part of my life and if he had died I don’t think I would have wanted to go on living.”

At the end he turned personal, and showed his depth: “I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through….It’s a funny thing that as long as you have that feeling you seem to get through. I’ve lost that feeling lately, but as a matter of fact, I don’t feel badly about it. If anything happens to me, I have this knowledge that if I lived to be a hundred, I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell, [but] you are the only person I’d say it to anyway. As a matter of fact knowing you has been the brightest point in an extremely bright twenty-six years.”60

He still had feelings for Inga, strong feelings, even though the relationship was over. He loved everything about her—her looks, her sexiness, her sophistication, her sense of humor, her warmth. She had awakened something in him he didn’t know he had, had believed in him, had encouraged him to reach for the stars and to cultivate his interests in a potential political career. Even before meeting her, he had begun to move out of his older brother’s shadow, but there’s little doubt that her bullish and indefatigable advocacy was further incentive for him to see himself as coequal—at least—with Joe. Now, with his wartime exploits capturing headlines at home, some part of him understood the process was complete.

Joe Junior sensed it, too. Testy and irritable that summer of 1943, he agitated to get into combat, and seemed to his fellow fliers to have a giant chip on his shoulder. In July he seized on the chance to volunteer for a highly dangerous mission patrolling the English Channel in order to hunt down German U-boats near where they lived, in the Bay of Biscay and along the French coast south of Brest. As he waited for the order to ship out, Joe learned to fly the new B-24 Liberator and soon found himself flying them across the country, from the factory in San Diego to Norfolk, Virginia. On one of the San Diego stops a family friend showed him a letter indicating that Jack was missing in action. “I read this about three hours before I saw the papers [indicating the rescue],” Joe wrote to his family, “and got quite a fright.” But it seems he did not call his parents at the time, because some days later his father wrote to say he and Rose “were considerably upset that during those few days after the news of Jack’s rescue we had no word from you. I thought that you would very likely call up to see whether we had any news as to how Jack was.”61

Young Joe’s reply bespoke his frustration about having a younger brother who had allowed his boat to be lost to the enemy and yet somehow still came out looking every bit the conqueror. “With the great quantity of reading material coming in on the actions of the Kennedys in the various parts of the world, and the countless number of paper clippings about our young hero, the battler of the wars of Banana River, San Juan, Virginia Beach, New Orleans, San Antonio, and San Diego, will now step to the microphone and give out a few words of his own activities,” the letter began. Only once did it mention his brother’s name.62

Granted a few days’ leave at the start of September, Joe returned to Cape Cod in time for his father’s fifty-fifth birthday celebration. During a festive dinner, Judge John J. Burns, a longtime acquaintance of Joe Senior’s, rose to offer a toast “to Ambassador Joe Kennedy, father of our hero, our own hero, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy of the United States Navy.” That was it. No mention of the older son, who was seated right next to his father and who in a few days would be heading to England to go against the thrust of the ferocious Nazi war machine. As the judge sat down, Joe Junior lifted his glass and smiled stiffly. But another guest, Boston police commissioner Joe Timilty, said that that night he could hear Young Joe sobbing in the bed next to his and muttering, “By God, I’ll show them.”63

Decades later, his mother would acknowledge the import of the PT 109 episode: “In their long brotherly, friendly rivalry, I expect this was the first time Jack had won such an ‘advantage’ by such a clear margin. And I daresay it cheered Jack and must have rankled Joe Jr.”64 This seems half-right: yes, Jack had indeed gained the “advantage” over his brother, but it rings false to suggest that the fraternal competition was a zero-sum game that still mattered equally to both of them. The drive to be supreme among the nine Kennedy children had always been an all-out obsession for Joe more than for Jack. And especially in recent years, as Jack scored impressive accomplishments of his own, he had become less mired in the rivalry than his brother was.