MAKICHUK: PT-109 and a US president who died for us

"Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."— John F. Kennedy We all know what happened sixty years ago today, on November 22 1963, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, TX.They blamed it on Lee Harvey Oswald, the "patsy." But as most of us know today, Oswald never killed anybody. Not a chance in hell. He was the fall guy.This was a professional hit, a coup. The “big show,” as Howard Hunt described it to his son, on his death bed... The taking out of US President John F. Kennedy. And it would give the American military the war they wanted. The Vietnam War.LBJ was only too happy to give it to them. It would also destroy him, politically and otherwise.A month ago, I stood and prayed by JFK's gravesite, the eternal flame, at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC. I also walked by the wall … the Vietnam Memorial.It takes about 10 minutes, to walk past 50,000 names. Imagine, 50,000 dead. My God.Imagine, all those men died for the war Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy tried to stop.He tried to turn that ship around and it cost him his life.Check out his American University speech, just months before his death. The extension of the olive branch, to the then Soviets, would seal his fate.He had to go.And those who ordered it and financed it, the shooters, those who covered it up, the CIA, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles and everyone else, got away with it.The crime of the century.But that is not what I want to talk about today, on the 60th anniversary of Dallas. I want to talk about a hero. A leader of men. The kind you don’t find anymore.Let me take you back to August 1 1943.On a dark, moonless night in the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific.PT-109, an 80-ft., 40-ton Elco motor torpedo boat (MTB), was commanded by young lieutenant, Jack Kennedy.Without warning, it was cut in two by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri in Blackett Strait— the waterway that connects Vella and Kula gulfs.Two of Kennedy’s dozen-member crew were killed instantly and the back half of the craft sank immediately. The survivors, many of them badly burned, clung to the drifting bow for hours.At daybreak, they embarked on a gruelling five-hour-long, three-mile swim to a nearby deserted island. The stronger swimmers, including Kennedy, towed the injured, sometimes using their teeth to pull their life-preservers. A hellish ordeal, but Jack was on the Harvard swim team.He knew what he had to do and got it done.But after two days on the small island without food and water, Kennedy realized they needed to swim to a larger island, Olasana, if they were to survive.It was there that two local scouts found them. One carried a coconut that Kennedy carved with a message to a lookout, who radioed the PT base to send a rescue boat. It read: "ELEVEN ALIVE NATIVE KNOWS POSIT AND REEFS NAURU ISLAND KENNEDY." For his courage and leadership Kennedy was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal and injuries suffered during the incident qualified him for the Purple Heart.When asked to explain how he had come to be a hero, Kennedy replied laconically, "It was involuntary. They sank my boat."But the consequences of the event for JFK were more far-reaching than simple decorations.The story was picked up by the writer John Hersey, who told it to the readers of The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest and it followed Kennedy into politics, where it was a strong foundation of his appeal.For here was a war hero who had not won battles but who had shown courage and dogged will, responsibility for those he led and the ability to inspire them — and it would be hard to better this as a short list of qualifications for a political leader.PT-109, a film dramatizing this story, starring Cliff Robertson as Kennedy, opened in 1963.True to form … on a White House recording, Kennedy called the film a “good product,” but worried about the 2 hour, 20 minute length. “It’s just a question of whether there’s too much of it,” the president determined.The president had actually warned Robertson, he didn't want someone trying to imitate his distinctive New England accent. “That was fine with me,” the actor said. “I think it would have been a mistake for me to say 'Hahvahd' or try to reproduce gestures."The film grossed about US$5.5 million at the worldwide box office, respectable for the time.Jack Kennedy knew what war was about.He was horrified by the thought of a Cold War nuclear Armageddon, with the Soviet Union.It is said President Kennedy stormed out of the White House conference room a different man after a nuclear discussion with America’s top military men, including the infamous hawk, Gen. Curtis LeMay.According to declassified documents, the US Joint Chiefs had presented JFK with a plan for a pre-emptive, surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.US forces (with 185 ICBMs and more than 3,400 deliverable nuclear bombs) were vastly superior to those of the Soviets at the time — and the Pentagon knew it.The July 20 1961 meeting took place under conditions of unusual tension. Only three months before, Kennedy had suffered the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and his loss of confidence in the CIA.“Those sons of bitches with all the fruit salad just sat there nodding, saying it would work,” Kennedy later said of the chiefs.In a sobering memo to the president in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, special assistant Arthur Schlesinger had warned that “an agency dedicated to clandestine activity can afford damn few visible errors,” and the CIA “has about used up its quota. Its margin for future error is practically non-existent."JFK would famously describe his desire to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."Words that would not be forgotten in the halls of Langley, VA.Kennedy felt the CIA was trying to not only treat him like a fool, but also as a puppet on strings. He wasn't having any of that.While the official record of this meeting, remains classified to this day, Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times gives this account:“Kennedy received the Net Evaluation, an annual doomsday briefing analyzing the chances of nuclear war. An Air Force General presented it, said Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy secretary of defense, “as though it were for a kindergarten class . . . Finally Kennedy got up and walked right out in the middle of it and that was the end of it. We never had another one.”As Kennedy walked from the cabinet room to the Oval Office for a private meeting, he told Dean Rusk: “And we call ourselves the human race.”Clearly, Kennedy understood what war meant and was appalled by it.He tried to stop it and it would cost him his life.A mercury tipped bullet, shot from the grassy knoll, by Lucien Sarti, a Corsican assassin hired for the job (one of three killers — six months later, each would receive $70,000 in heroin in a Buenos Aires apartment), would blow a hole in Jack Kennedy’s head.It would change the course of history. It would change my life, your life, your parents and many others.And there’s no going back.All I can say is God bless you, Jack. They sure don’t make ‘em like you anymore.

MAKICHUK: PT-109 and a US president who died for us

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