VI

On October 8, 1943, Jack received promotion to full lieutenant, and on the sixteenth his Gunboat No. 1, along with the rest of the squadron, moved to Lambu Lambu, the new forward base on the island of Vella Lavella, west of New Georgia. There followed numerous missions through the end of October and into November, many of them aimed at intercepting Japanese barges at the western and southern approaches to Choiseul Bay. On November 2, Jack rescued wounded Marines trapped on Choiseul Island, then endured seeing several of the men suffer on board his boat, including one who died in his own bunk. On the night of November 5–6, with his friend Byron “Whizzer” White on board, No. 1 opened fire and destroyed three Japanese barges at Moli Island.65

Jack volunteered for many of these missions, and seemed unfazed by risk. “He had guts,” said one crewman. “No matter how dangerous the mission was, he’d always volunteer.” At one point, senior commanders wanted to send a boat through Blackett Strait to draw enemy shell fire so that American aircraft could identify the guns. Jack offered to do it. “He said he’d go if they could find somebody else to go with him,” the crewman remembered. Since no one else came forward, the mission was scrapped. But through his leadership and calm friendliness in these autumn weeks, Jack won respect and affection. “He was a good officer in that he knew how to handle men,” related Chief Petty Officer Glen Christiansen.66

His health, however, was spiraling downward. His back troubles and stomach pains intensified in the weeks after the PT 109 ordeal, and his weight, already worryingly low, dropped still further. He suffered headaches and fever. The precise cause was not clear, but the long hours and lack of sleep didn’t help. On November 18, a doctor at the base in Lambu Lambu ordered Jack to shore and he returned to Tulagi. Additional tests there, including X-rays, identified an “early duodenal ulcer” and the presence of malaria.67 Barred from further duty, he bided his time in Tulagi, penning letters and waiting for his orders home. To brother Bobby, who had joined the Navy Reserve while in his final months at Milton Academy, he wrote:

The folks sent me a clipping of you taking the oath. The sight of you up there, just as a boy, was really moving, particularly as a close examination showed that you had my checked London coat on. I’d like to know what the hell I’m doing out here, while you go stroking around in my drape coat, but I suppose that what we are out here for—or so they tell us—is so that our sisters and younger brothers will be safe and secure. Frankly, I don’t see it quite that way—at least if you’re going to be safe and secure, that’s fine with me, but not in my coat, brother, not in my coat. In that picture you look as if you are going to step outside the room, grab your gun, and knock off several of the house-boys before lunch.68

Jack spent abundant time with Red Fay, who tried every method to get Jack interested in playing cards. Results were poor. Instead Fay and a few others would descend on Jack’s tent, where he would lead informal group discussions on the topics of the day—on wartime strategy, politics, military leadership, education, and, inevitably, girls. Ideas interested him, the others could see—he kept a loose-leaf notebook to record thoughts—and he was stimulated by debate. “There was no question in my mind or the minds of Barney Ross, Jim Reed, and Byron White that Jack Kennedy was an exceptional man,” Fay, an admitted devotee, later said. Making book on who among them could become president of the United States, Fay and Ross set Jack’s odds at ten thousand to one (“because he was still out in the war zone, his health was poor, he was young and unforeseen circumstances could make it impossible for him to reach the White House”), and their own odds at between one million and two million to one. “Jack Kennedy’s greatness was so apparent to me,” Fay added, “that I did something unusual for a man. I saved every letter or note that he ever sent to me, beginning during the war years.”69

The orders home came through on December 14, 1943. By then the great campaign of which he had been a part was well on the way to success, with Allied forces mopping up the central Solomons to claim Vella Lavella and Bougainville and put themselves in a position to cut off and neutralize Rabaul, key to the entire Japanese position in the South Pacific. By the end of the month they would capture Cape Gloucester, at the western end of New Britain. And days after that, a major air offensive would render Rabaul more or less useless to enemy aircraft and ships, leaving its 100,000-strong garrison bereft and strategically irrelevant.70

Jack was granted thirty days’ leave starting upon arrival in the United States, and he would then report to Melville for his next assignment. He left Tulagi on the twenty-first, bound first for Espiritu Santo and then—aboard the USS Breton—San Francisco. He arrived on U.S. soil on January 7 and the following day headed south to Los Angeles, where he met with Inga Arvad, who had relocated there some months prior to write a gossip column called “Hollywood Today” for a national newspaper syndicate. (The FBI, having found no evidence she was engaged in espionage activities, had ceased its surveillance of her.)

Any hopes Jack had of rekindling the romance were immediately dashed. Life had moved on, and so had Inga. In her son’s recollection, “she’d been through the thing about the old man’s violent objections and just didn’t want to go through it again.” She loved Jack, and when she saw his cadaverously thin frame in her doorway she felt a rush of maternal compassion; some part of her thought she would never feel the same way about any man ever again. But she knew that sooner or later Jack, if he had designs on a political career, would again conclude—as he had almost two years before—that he could not marry her. What’s more, Inga found she liked her new life as a Hollywood columnist and had no desire to give it up. To punctuate the new reality, she even introduced Jack to her new beau, William Cahan, a naval doctor. Jack got the message. At Inga’s apartment, he chatted amicably with Cahan about Harvard, football, and show business, but after a while it became clear that one of them would have to leave. Exit Jack.71

But Inga had one parting gift for her love, in the form of a high-profile newspaper article that did much to cement the legend of Jack’s heroics in the Solomons. Based on an interview they conducted during his visit, the article—a puff piece that would be ethically problematic today—appeared in dozens of papers, including on page 1 of The Boston Globe on January 11, 1944, under the heading JFK TELLS STORY OF PT EPIC: KENNEDY LAUDS MEN, DISDAINS HERO STUFF. “This is the story of the 13 American men on PT Boat 109 who got closer than any others to a Japanese destroyer and of the 11 men who lived to tell about it,” Inga began. She heaped praise on the skipper for swimming “long hours through shark-infested waters to rescue his men” and quoted his description of the moment of impact on the night of August 2: “I can best compare it to the onrushing trains in the old-time movies. They seemed to come right over you. Well, the feeling was the same, only the destroyer did not come over us, it went right through us.”

Inga emphasized Jack’s reluctance to talk about himself and his preference for heaping praise on his crew. But there was also acclaim for him. Inga wrote of meeting Patrick McMahon’s wife, a resident of Los Angeles who “with tears in her eyes and a shaky voice…said, ‘When my husband wrote home, he told me that Lieutenant Kennedy was wonderful, that he saved the lives of all the men and everybody at the base admired him greatly.’ ”72

Jack, however, rejected the hero label that Inga tried to pin on him. “None of that hero stuff about me,” the article quoted him as saying. “The real heroes are not the men who return, but those who stay out there, like plenty of them do—two of my men included.”73

On the evening of January 10, just a few hours before the story ran, Jack Kennedy boarded an airplane in L.A., bound for points east. He was only on a thirty-day leave, but in his mind he had already made his determination: if he never saw another day of combat in his life, it would be too soon.