1 Kennedy Confidence Asked in 1959 how he had come to be a war hero, Senator John F. Kennedy quipped ironically: "It was easy--they sank my boat." Several years later, referring to the tale of PT 109 as related in the film starring Cliff Robertson, President Kennedy told a friend that the popularly accepted account of his heroics in the Solomons was more screwed-up than Cuba. Still, those who studied Kennedy closely understood that his time in the service always remained an important part of him, regardless of how glibly he sometimes appraised it. "Everything," wrote Los Angeles Times journalist Robert T. Hartmann, "dates from that adventure." Hartmann perceptively added that Jack's several days of pure survival after the loss of PT 109 were "the only time Kennedy ever was wholly on his own, where the $1 million his father gave him wouldn't buy one cup of water." Likewise Hartmann noted that "Kennedy's superabundant charm is never more engaging than when he leaps back to wartime reminiscence with a receptive veteran of the Solomon campaign.
" Of course, Jack Kennedy's war record provided a great practical political benefit. Every campaign he ever ran emphasized his status as a warrior and a hero. He displayed his Purple Heart and his Navy and Marine Corps medal in each of his several offices. He kept on his desk, preserved in plastic, the coconut shell on which he had scratched his dramatic--if redundant--rescue plea after the sinking of PT 109. A float in his inaugural parade featured a full-size replica of the vessel he'd made famous (or was it the other way around?). And male visitors to the Kennedy White House routinely received PT-boat tiepins as souvenirs. But it would be a mistake to believe Kennedy looked back on his experience of the war cynically, or viewed it as little more than a useful PR tool. Quite the contrary.
He considered World War II to have been the seminal, defining event in his life. "I firmly believe," he once wrote, "that as much as I was shaped by anything, so was I shaped by the hand of fate moving in World War II. Of course, the same can be said of almost any American or British or Australian man of my generation. The war made us. It was and is our single greatest moment. The memory of the war is a key to our characters. It serves as a breakwall between the indolence of our youths and earnestness of our manhoods. No school or parent could have shaped us the way that fight shaped us.
No other experience could have brought forth in us the same fortitude and resilience. We were much shrewder and sadder when that long battle finally finished. The war made us get serious for the first time in our lives. We've been serious ever since, and we show no signs of stopping." Elsewhere Jack commented that though the war might have made him, it had "savaged" his family. "It turned my father and my brothers and sisters and I upside down and sucked all the oxygen out of our smug and comfortable assumptions. We still, with the old battles long over, have great confidence: great Kennedy confidence, which is the main strength of our tribe. But we sons and daughters no longer have that easy, witless, untested and meaningless confidence on which we'd been weaned before the war.
Our father had us pretty well trained to appear to ourselves and others as unbeatable and immortal--a little bit like Gods. Now that's over with. Now, after all that we experienced and lost in the war, we finally understand that there is nothing inevitable about us. And that's a healthy thing to know." Writing in 1999, Richard D. Mahoney said World War II breached the Kennedy family--and, most important, its patriarch--"like a wrecking ball." This book tells the story of that breach, an act of destruction that enabled the redefinition of a family and the making of a man. Who were the Kennedys before t.