Description:

Kennedy John

A Very Rare Anti-Semitic Remark from Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, Months after the Destruction of PT 109, and Humorous Reflections on His Younger Sister’s Marriage

JOHN F. KENNEDY, Autograph Letter Signed, to Richard Flood, ca. May 1944, Miami, Florida. 2 pp., 8" x 10.5" Expected folds; very good.

Lieutenant John F. Kennedy wrote this fascinating letter to his former Harvard friend Ensign Richard R. Flood in Newport, Rhode Island. Only ten months after the destruction of his boat PT-109 in the Pacific, Kennedy is angry with Bill Rome for failing to help out some of Kennedy’s former PT crew. He lampoons his older brother Joseph Kennedy at his younger sister’s wedding in England. Both Joseph Kennedy Jr. and their new brother-in-law would be dead within a few months.

Complete Transcript

NAVY DEPARTMENT

SUBMARINE CHASER TRAINING CENTER

miami, florida

Dear Dick Dick:

            Thanks for your letter Saw the pictures of Brother Joe, fatter than ever, craning his size 17½ to get in the pic. as Kick crowded him out. That should cost him about 200,000 Irish Catholic votes.

            If what you said about Bill Rome is true, he is showing a typically Jewish memory, remembering only what he wants to, because, by God, I told him about it clearly enough. I will now try and get him, the only trouble is that there are about five hundred ahead of me.

            Things here go the same as ever. Once you’ve got your feet up on the table the tough work of the day is done. I wrote Max asking him to give you a hand, and I told him you were very strong in Lowell.

            Many must have been the bejabbers and the begorrahs in Boston at Kick’s wedding a “heathen British Bastard” and an occasional bejesus from South Boston which is a very tough district.

            Saw Killefer the other day, he is ready to dig in for the rest of his days, but then aren’t we all?

                                                                        Best

                                                                        Jack.

 

Historical Background

John F. Kennedy used his father Joseph P. Kennedy’s influence to get a position in United States Naval Reserve. Commissioned an ensign in October 1941, he joined the staff of the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. In January 1942, he was transferred to the field office in Charleston, South Carolina. After attending Naval Reserve Officer Training School in Chicago and Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center in Rhode Island, Kennedy received a commission as a lieutenant junior grade. He commanded a patrol torpedo (PT) boat in Jacksonville, Florida, and the Panama Canal until he was assigned to duty in the south Pacific theater.

 

On April 24, 1943, Kennedy took command of PT-109, based in the Solomon Islands. On the night of August 1-2, 1943, he commanded PT-109 in a group of fourteen other PTs sent to block four Japanese destroyers. During the resulting engagement, the PTs failed to inflict any damage, but PT-109 was cut in half by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Two crew members were killed, but Kennedy and ten others survived in the wreckage and managed to swim more than three miles to a deserted island. Kennedy clenched the strap of a badly burned crew member’s life jacket between his teeth and towed him to safety. Over the next week, Kennedy or the entire crew swam to additional islands looking for food and fresh water. On one, Kennedy found packages of crackers and a fifty-gallon drum of drinkable water left by the Japanese and a small canoe, which he paddled back to his starving crew. After native scouts found the crew and took a message scratched on a coconut shell to allied authorities, another PT boat rescued them on August 8. Kennedy later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism for his actions in saving the crew.

 

He returned to duty for several months in the Solomon Islands before a doctor relieved him of command because of his back injuries. He was sent back to the United States in January 1944, and he wrote this letter to Flood from Miami, where he was stationed at the Submarine Chaser Training Center. From May to December 1944, Kennedy was hospitalized at the Chelsea Naval Hospital in Massachusetts for back surgery and recuperation, then released from active duty. While Kennedy was at the hospital, Flood visited him from Newport. After more therapy at a military hospital in Arizona, Kennedy retired from the Naval Reserve on physical disability and was honorably discharged with the full rank of lieutenant.

 

In a 1964 interview, Flood recalled this period in Kennedy’s life, “I think he left Chelsea and went for further rest to Florida, and he wrote me from Florida keenly interested in some of his old crew that had been with him and whether they were still on the boats or not. As a matter of fact, he was writing some of his officers that he knew in Melville [PT Training School in Melville, Rhode Island] to see that some of his crew who had been on the boat too long would be taken off and given a little change.... I can’t think of the names of the men, but I know there was one officer down there named Bill Rome and he thought he could do something to help these crewmen out.”

 

In a very rare outburst of racial stereotyping, Kennedy writes that Bill Rome “is showing a typically Jewish memory, remembering only what he wants to.” In a letter he wrote six weeks earlier, Kennedy had asked Flood, “If you see Bill Rome, ask him to check & make sure that they have taken my old gunners mate Shirley King off the boats, and that he is assigned to Base work.” Apparently, Rome did not remember Kennedy’s request.

 

Shirley King had been a member of the crew of PT 59, the boat Kennedy commanded after being rescued and which he helped convert into a gunboat. King was from Kentucky, and “the boys” liked him because he kept a still on the boat. He took torpedo propulsion fuel and ran it through his still. “What came out would make you slap your grandma,” King remembered, but it made a “smooth drink” mixed with pineapple juice. Kennedy and King preferred it straight.

 

Kennedy is bemused at the outrage he suspects Irish Catholic Bostonians are having over the marriage of his younger sister Kathleen Agnes “Kick” Kennedy (1920-1948) to William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington (1917-1944) on May 6, 1944. They were married in the Chelsea Town Hall in London, and her oldest brother Joseph Kennedy Jr. signed the marriage register. Although family matriarch Rose Kennedy opposed her daughter Kick’s marriage to an Anglican, Jack Kennedy pokes fun at his older brother’s involvement, saying it may cost him “about 200,000 Irish Catholic votes.” This picture of the newlyweds with Joseph Kennedy Jr. “craning” in the back is likely the one Kennedy had seen.

 

 

Tragically, Joseph Kennedy Jr. was killed three months later when his plane exploded prematurely, and Cavendish was killed in action in Belgium one month after Joseph Kennedy’s death. Kick Kennedy Cavendish, the widowed Marchioness of Hartington, died in a plane crash in May 1948.

 

Tom Killefer (1917-1996), mentioned in the last paragraph, served as a pilot in the United States Navy with carrier and land-based fighter squadrons in the Southwest Pacific and European theaters during World War II. Although Killefer may have been ready to “dig in for the rest of his days,” he did not marry until 1948, when he wed Carolyn Clothier (1922-2017), who had served in the U.S. Marines during the war. Killefer was a friend of Joseph Kennedy Jr. at law school and frequently visited the Kennedy family. In 1962, President Kennedy appointed Killefer, by then a Republican lawyer in Virginia, as director of the Inter-American Development Bank.

 

Richard R. Flood (1914-1969) was born in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard College in 1939 and from its law school in 1946 as of 1942. Flood served as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War II. He received a master’s degree from the Harvard Business School cum laude in 1947. Admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1948, he established a practice in Lowell, Massachusetts, and was a partner in the firm of Flood, Valentine, and Foisy until his death.

 

 

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