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GIVE ME A FAST SHIP
I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast for I intend to go in harm’s way.
—COMMANDER JOHN PAUL JONES, 1780
John F. Kennedy loved the sea as “a child, boy, and man,” observed his widow Jacqueline.
“I have been interested in the sea from my earliest boyhood,” Kennedy himself once wrote. “My earliest recollections of the United States Navy go back to the days when as a small boy, I used to be taken to the USS Constitution in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The sight of that historic frigate, with its tall spars and black guns, stirred my imagination and made American history come alive for me.”
Growing up as one of nine children of the fabulously wealthy financier Joseph P. Kennedy, young “Jack” Kennedy learned to pilot small sailboats with the help of a family sailing instructor at their oceanside vacation estate in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and later at their winter mansion in semitropical Palm Beach, Florida.
In his teens, Kennedy became a keen swimmer and a highly skilled, competitive sailboat racer. He preferred to command a boat rather than serve in the crew, and he took racing very seriously, firmly chastising crew members who didn’t measure up. In 1936, at the age of twenty, Kennedy won the Nantucket Sound championship in the Star boat category and represented the sound in the Atlantic Coast championships. As a student at Harvard University, he was on the crew that won the McMillan Cup in the annual collegiate competition at Annapolis, Maryland. When he was fifteen, Kennedy’s parents gave him his own wooden 26-foot Wianno Senior sailboat, called the Victura, which he would enjoy as a young man, congressman, senator, and as president.
While he occupied the White House, Kennedy speculated that humanity was drawn to the ocean because it was our primordial home. “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea,” he told an audience gathered in Newport, Rhode Island, for the 1962 America’s Cup race. “And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.”
For himself, Kennedy may also have seen the open water as an escape from a life of frequent physical agony inflicted by a progression of illnesses that plagued him from birth. The precise origins and nature of his lifelong back pains still are uncertain based on the available medical records, but Kennedy appears to have been born with a slightly malformed and unstable back, which, according to private conversations Kennedy had with his Navy doctors, was strained by a 1938 car trip through rough roads in Europe and a 1940 tennis injury. These conditions periodically required him to wear back braces and crutches and eventually necessitated two spinal surgeries.
Family patriarch and financial mogul Joseph P. Kennedy had a master plan to engineer his eldest sons Joseph Jr. and John into national politics. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
From boyhood, John F. Kennedy had a passion for the sea—seen here aboard the Victura. (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)
Although he once recalled his childhood as “an easy, prosperous life, supervised by maids and nurses, with more and more younger sisters to boss and play with,” Kennedy’s frequent illnesses as a child and adolescent included chicken pox, ear infections, appendicitis, fatigue, mumps, a near-fatal case of scarlet fever at the age of two and a half, whooping cough, bronchitis, and German measles. Late in his twenties he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a deterioration of the adrenal glands that can trigger symptoms including fatigue, dizziness, muscle weakness, weight loss, difficulty standing up, nausea, sweating, and changes in personality and mood. He remained underweight well into adulthood. Navy doctor Lee Mandel, who examined Kennedy’s medical records years after Kennedy’s death, speculated that Kennedy’s Addison’s disease was probably caused by a rare condition, called autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2, or APS 2, which also likely caused Kennedy’s hypothyroidism, diagnosed in 1955, according to Mandel’s report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2009.
Kennedy also often fell victim to abuse from his older brother Joseph Kennedy Jr., a relentless bully. Younger brother Bobby Kennedy recalled lying in bed at night as a boy and hearing “the sound of Joe banging Jack’s head against the wall.”
“It is said that famous men are usually the product of unhappy childhood,” wrote Winston Churchill in his biography of John Churchill, Marlborough, one of Kennedy’s favorite books. “The stern compression of circumstances, the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in the early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.” John Kennedy’s boyhood suffering was cushioned somewhat by his father’s increasingly spectacular wealth, which funded large family homes, chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, and trips in private railway cars. But amid the privilege, Kennedy also seemed to have felt a lack of maternal warmth. “My mother never hugged me, not once,” he once recalled. A family friend explained of the Kennedy children, “They really didn’t have a real home with their own rooms where they had pictures on the walls or memorabilia on the shelves but would rather come home for holidays from their boarding schools and find whatever room was available.” A youthful John Kennedy would ask his mother, Rose, “Which room do I have this time?”
While immobilized for endless days in hospitals and sick beds for tests, treatment, and recuperation, the young Kennedy escaped his physical torments by reading multitudes of books, through which he conjured up dreamscapes of adventure, heroism, history, and fantasy. As a boy he read tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the stories of Sir Walter Scott, the Billy Whiskers children’s book series about a globe-trotting goat, Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Lays of Ancient Rome, Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Cooper’s stories of the American frontier, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Black Beauty, Pilgrim’s Progress, Arabian Nights, and Wonder Tales from East and West.
Family friend Kay Halle had a vivid memory of seeing a “very pale” fifteen-year-old Kennedy lying in a Palm Beach hospital bed “so surrounded by books I could hardly see him. I was very impressed because at this point this very young child was reading The World Crisis by Winston Churchill.” Kennedy’s wife, Jacqueline, recalled, “History made him what he was. You must think of this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes.” She described JFK’s adult reading habits vividly: “He’d read in the strangest way. He’d read walking, he’d read at the table, at meals, he’d read after dinner; he’s read in the bathtub . . . he’d really read all times you don’t think you have time to read. He was always reading—practically while driving a car.” Jim Reed, a wartime buddy of Kennedy in the South Pacific, recalled, “He had read almost every book on the American presidents. He had read every word that Winston Churchill had ever published. He’d read T. E. Lawrence and was a devotee of Lord David Cecil’s racy account of Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb in The Young Melbourne.” JFK biographer Nigel Hamilton speculated that Kennedy was attracted to combat on the eve of World War II by “the wayward urge to cut a figure—and be seen to do so—that would bind him to his latest hero, Lord Byron, the roguish star of David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne.”
In a passage from Kennedy’s favorite book as an adult, Pilgrim’s Way (1940), the aristocratic British politician and adventure novelist John Buchan wrote that the sea “was a wholesome emancipation” that “seemed to slacken the bonds of destiny and enlarge the horizon.” Describing the “debonair and brilliant and brave” English noble Raymond Asquith, who died in World War I, Buchan wrote a passage John F. Kennedy recited from memory for the rest of his life, perhaps because it reminded him of himself on the eve of World War II: “The War which found the measure of so many never got to the bottom of him. . . . He went to his fate cool, poised, resolute, matter-of-fact, debonair.” One of Kennedy’s best British friends, David Ormsby-Gore, who served as ambassador to the United States during Kennedy’s presidential years, theorized, “Whether Jack realized it or not, I think he paralleled himself after Asquith all the way, I really do.”
On the pages of his personal copy of Pilgrim’s Way, Kennedy marked up passages describing the famed British Arabist, narcissist, and World War I guerrilla chief T.E. Lawrence, a figure who clearly fascinated him: “His character has been a quarry for the analysts, and I would not add to their number. It is simplest to say that he was a mixture of contradictories which never were—perhaps could never have been—harmonized. His qualities lacked integration. He had moods of vanity and moods of abasement; immense self-confidence and immense diffidence. He had a fastidious taste which was often faulty. The gentlest and most lovable of beings with his chivalry and considerateness, he could also be ruthless.” In Lawrence, Kennedy might have seen reflections of his own self-image: the refined rebel, the charismatic loner, the sensitive young officer ready for battle.
Before the war, as well as after, Kennedy’s dreams of adventure and conquest found an outlet in sex, a sport he appeared to pursue with obsessive devotion. In the spring of 1943 Kennedy was only twenty-five years old, but he had already conducted affairs with a seeming multitude of women—so far their numbers included a fashion model, an actress, an heiress, students, and members of the European aristocracy. His adventures have variously been interpreted as evidence of compulsive risk taking and an obsessive search for the maternal intimacy that was withheld from him as a boy, or they may have simply been routine male promiscuity sharply magnified by near-unlimited wealth and mobility, and striking personal seductiveness. Kennedy’s physical magnetism was so powerful it led one female reporter to remember that Kennedy “didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.”
Kennedy’s own father, whose influence on his life was near supreme, likely also inspired and encouraged his promiscuity. JFK once explained to Clare Boothe Luce, “Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.” And he asserted, “I can’t get to sleep unless I’ve had a lay.”
Among Kennedy’s conquests before he went overseas on his first combat assignment was the twice-married, Danish-born journalist Inga Arvad, who shared a VIP spectator box with Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, befriended other top Nazis like Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, and was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who put her under surveillance and authorized the bugging of her apartment and tapping of her telephone line. In early 1942, in the course of electronically surveilling Arvad, the FBI reportedly generated audiotapes of her lovemaking with John F. Kennedy, then a junior U.S. Navy officer.
While briefly attending Stanford University in 1940, Kennedy, who had previously attended mostly all-male classes at private eastern boarding schools and Harvard, wrote to a friend, “Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.” The actor Robert Stack, later star of The Untouchables TV series, witnessed Kennedy in action on the Stanford campus, and recalled, “I’ve known many of the great Hollywood stars, and only a few of them seemed to hold the attraction for women that JFK did, even before he entered the political arena. He’d just look at them and they’d tumble.” Kennedy himself wasn’t quite sure why this happened. He once wrote to a college friend, “I can’t help it. It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.”
That personality was highlighted by a relaxed, powerful charm, a genuine curiosity in other people and their opinions, a sharp, sardonic of humor, and a striking sense of confidence and optimism, all of which inspired powerful bonds of affection and loyalty with many of the people he met, female and male alike.
By his early-twenties, John F. Kennedy was living one of the most extraordinary young American lives of the twentieth century. He traveled in an orbit of unprecedented wealth, influence, global mobility, and power. As a student and as diplomatic assistant to his father, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940, Kennedy journeyed to England, Ireland, France, Moscow, Berlin, Beirut, Damascus, Athens, and Turkey, pausing briefly from a vacation on the French Riviera to sleep with the actress Marlene Dietrich. He met with top White House officials and traveled to Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Peru, and Ecuador. He gambled in a casino in Monte Carlo; visited Naples, Capri, Milan, Florence, Venice, and Rome; rode a camel at the Great Pyramid at Giza; attended the coronation of Pope Pius XII; and witnessed a rally for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He recalled of these momentous years, “It was a great opportunity to see a period of history which was one of the most significant.” In a visit to British-occupied Palestine, Kennedy recalled, “I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to heaven on a white horse.”
In 1939, in an encounter that could have been written into a Merchant Ivory script, Kennedy, dressed in silk knee breeches, met the king and queen of England at a court levee. Spotting their dark-haired, thirteen-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, Kennedy was soon chatting up the future queen over tea. “She is still pretty young but starting to look like a looker nonetheless,” he wrote to a friend. “I think she rather liked me and now I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a thing for me. The knee breeches are cut tight to show off my crotch at its best, and the uniform—worn by everyone but Dad at these court functions—seems to have caught the polite eye of the young heir.”
That summer, Kennedy attended a grand coming-out ball for seventeen-year-old Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill at the mammoth Blenheim Palace, which he told a friend was “nearly as big as Versailles.” British politician Sir Henry Channon described the dazzling scene: “I have seen much, traveled far and am accustomed to splendor, but there has never been anything like tonight. The palace was floodlit, and its grand baroque beauty could be seen for miles. The lakes were floodlit too and, better still, the famous terraces, they were blue and green and Tyroleans walked about singing.” He added, “it was gay, young, brilliant, in short, perfection,” with “literally rivers of champagne” flowing. On one of the grand terraces, John Kennedy could see Anthony Eden smoking cigars and gossiping with the great man himself, Winston Churchill. It was the culmination of what many remembered as a fairy-tale summer of 1939 in England, a spell that was shattered on September 1, when Germany invaded Poland and World War II descended upon Europe.
Kennedy even hit the bestseller lists in 1940 with Why England Slept, an analysis of the British appeasement at Munich and the path to World War II. Adapted from his senior thesis at Harvard, Kennedy’s book relied on his insider’s perspective of events in England to take the contrarian view that the chief culprit in failing to block Hitler’s expansion was not Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, but rather the system of British democracy itself, which was too slow to respond to the Nazi threat.
With American involvement in the conflicts in Europe and Asia growing increasingly inevitable, Kenned...
