From the War in the Pacific to the White House: The Coconut That Saved
JOHN F. KENNEDY
BARBARA A. PERRY
the white house contains numerous memorable historic objects, most notably the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. First Lady Dolley Madison and her enslaved staff saved the painting just before the invading British Army ransacked and burned the house in 1814.1 Oval Office visitors likely focus on the famous Resolute Desk, freed from obscurity when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy discovered it in the White House Broadcast Room and placed it in the West Wing. It represents another rescue story, for it is constructed from the oak timbers of a British ship, HMS Resolute, salvaged, repaired, and returned to England by Americans after its abandonment in an Arctic ice jam. In 1880, after the ship’s decommissioning, Queen Victoria returned the favor by sending the desk to President Rutherford B. Hayes.2 Both the Washington portrait and Resolute Desk are burnished by compelling tales of recovery. But one White House memento that held a place of honor on the Resolute Desk during John F. Kennedy’s presidency literally played a major role in saving his life, and that of his crew, during World War II. Although Kennedy’s poor health (including undiagnosed Addison’s disease) and chronic back pain could have precluded his military service,3 or at least confined him to desk duty after Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for combat in the South Pacific and arrived in the Solomon Islands in April 1943. On a moonless night, in early August of that year, Lieutenant Junior Grade Kennedy and his twelve-man patrol torpedo boat crew were plying the waters of Blackett Strait, searching for enemy supply convoys.4 Kennedy’s boat, PT-109, lacked radar, experienced spotty radio communications, and was engaging only one of its three engines to reduce noise and wake that might alert the enemy. As Kennedy piloted from the cockpit, he heard a panicked shout from a crew member, “Ship at 2 o’clock!” A giant hull was bearing down on Kennedy’s 80-foot mahogany and steel cruiser, just off the bow’s starboard side. With no time for maneuvering into position to fire his torpedoes and the boat sluggish on one engine, Kennedy watched in horror as the Japanese destroyer, Amagiri , “broke out of the mist.” “He turned into us, going like hell,” Kennedy later remembered.5
A thunderous explosion rocked the 109, shooting flames in orange plumes above the wreck and out into the water. The enemy ship had struck Kennedy’s craft, sliced it in half, and ignited its fuel tanks. The collision slammed the young skipper
against the cockpit bulkhead, exacerbating his painful back. When he righted himself, he saw his crew scattered yards away by the destroyer’s wake, struggling amid waves and fire.6
Two men had been killed instantly by the collision and were lost in the dark water. Several survivors suffered severe burns and injuries. Summers spent in the waters off his family’s Cape Cod compound and years on the Harvard swim team now prepared Kennedy for the test of a lifetime. He and his uninjured mates swam to the wounded crew, towing them back to the portion of his craft that remained afloat.7
As daylight broke over the battered sailors holding onto the listing hulk of their boat, they hoped the navy would send rescuers, but none appeared. They were surrounded by enemy-held islands. If
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In 1944, while at home on leave in Palm Beach, future President John F. Kennedy examines the coconut on which he had scratched a message that led rescuers to him and surviving crew members. Encouraged by his mother to preserve it, he later displayed the coconut on the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
Some of the members of the PT-109 crew gather for a photo in the Solomon Islands:
Back row, left to right: Allan Webb, Leon Drawdy, Edgar Mauer, Edmund Drewitch, John Maguire, and John F. Kennedy.
Front row, left to right: Charles Harris, Maurice Kowal, Andrew Kirksey, and Lenny Thom.
they waited for currents to determine their fate, they might drift right into Japanese hands, where torture and death were possible outcomes for POWs. Even that frightening option presumed the wreckage would remain afloat—increasingly unlikely as it threatened to sink.8
After studying navigation charts, the skipper decided to swim for Plum Pudding Island, so small that it was unlikely to be occupied. Yet it was more than 3 miles away, and some of the men were poor swimmers or too injured to make the journey. Machinist Mate Patrick (“Pappy”) McMahon had suffered burns over 70 percent of his body and could barely move. Kennedy ordered his executive officer, Ensign Leonard Thom, to prepare a plank so the men could hold on and not scatter. They tied their shoes and lanterns to the slat. Kennedy
slipped into the buoyant saltwater and began swimming breaststroke, towing McMahon by clamping the man’s life-preserver strap between his teeth.9
The agonizing journey took four hours. Despite towing McMahon, Kennedy arrived at Plum Pudding first, staggering up to the beach with his burned crewman before collapsing behind some bushes. Soon the other men joined them and began to forage for food and water. They found only coconuts that were unreachable in tall palms.10
Hoping that American ships might move through Ferguson Passage that night on their way to patrol Blackett Strait, Kennedy swam out into the dark ocean carrying a lantern and pistol to signal them. He treaded water for hours, afraid that sharks and barracuda might attack him. No predatory fish approached, but the U.S. Navy was
also absent. Back at Kennedy’s base, his colleagues, believing that all souls on the 109 had perished, held a memorial service for them.11
Near daybreak, Kennedy had to retrace his long swim back to Plum Pudding, where he fell ill from fatigue and ingested saltwater. He instructed his friend, Ensign Barney Ross, to make the same journey the next night—unfortunately, with the same disappointing results.12
Nearly three days had passed since the accident, and, without potable water and food, Kennedy developed a new plan, ordering everyone back into the water for another three-hour swim, this time to Olasana Island, where he hoped to find provisions. Here coconuts on the ground could provide some food, but rescue now became crucial. Knowing that time was running short, the skipper and Ross swam to Naru Island; there they discovered an abandoned canoe with rations and water. In the canoe, Kennedy went back to Olasana, where he found two native Solomon Islanders, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana. The young teens, who served as scouts for the Americans, had discovered the castaways. In their canoe, the teens returned Kennedy to Naru, as he again hoped to flag down a U.S. patrol. The Solomon Islanders spoke only broken English but comprehended Kennedy’s request to deliver a message. Gasa indicated a coconut might be inscribed with the message, and Kumana shinnied up a palm tree and plucked one. They showed Kennedy how to use the smooth husk like paper. Kennedy took out his service knife and carved letters on the shell telegram style:
NAURO ISL COMMANDER NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT 11 ALIVE HE CAN PILOT NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY13
Handing the SOS message to Gasa and Kumana, Kennedy watched the young islanders paddle away. Could they elude the surrounding enemy to summon help? After traveling 7 miles, the teens arrived at Wana Wana Island and passed the coconut to Benjamin Kevu, another Solomon Island scout who spoke fluent English. In turn, he relayed Kennedy’s SOS to an Australian coast watcher, Lieutenant A. Reginald Evans, who contacted the U.S. Navy base at Rendova with Kennedy’s request for rescue. Kevu found Kennedy and Ross on Naru and took
Kennedy to meet Evans. It was another treacherous journey through enemy territory for the exhausted skipper. He hid under foliage, as Japanese planes buzzed the canoe.14
Evans greeted Kennedy warmly. Fifteen years later, with Kennedy now president, the Australian remembered how “a very tired, a very haggard and very, very sunburnt young man,” had declared, “Hello. I’m Kennedy,” upon meeting his rescuer. Evans offered the welcome news that an American PT boat was preparing to rendezvous with Kennedy and have him guide it through the enemy waters and coral reefs to where his crew remained hidden. After a harrowing week spent dodging the enemy and searching for sustenance, the eleven survivors of PT-109 headed back to their base.15
Meriting a leave because of the incident, Kennedy opted to stay a few more months in the Solomons and took command of another PT boat, but his health deteriorated further from malaria, an ulcer, and his painful back. In 1944, he headed home for a visit with his family at their Palm Beach estate. On its vast lawn, dotted with palms, he held up for a photograph the coconut husk that was responsible for his rescue.16
Kennedy’s mother, Rose Kennedy, the family archivist, encouraged her son to preserve the husk as a meaningful souvenir of his wartime exploits. Kennedy had the coconut, with his carved message visible, placed under plastic on a wooden base. His father, Joe Kennedy, already contemplating his son’s political future, arranged for a reporter to write a story about PT-109 in the New Yorker magazine.17 The reporter was the well-known journalist John Hersey.
Some later commentators on the accident took a skeptical view, questioning Kennedy’s seamanship in noting that his PT boat was the only one in the entire war involved in a collision with an enemy ship. Kennedy himself advised fellow skippers immediately after the event to keep all engines engaged whenever enemy ships were in striking distance.18 Yet those who were there that night in Blackett Strait, including Kennedy’s squadron mate, Bill Battle, believed that the future president was not at fault in the freak accident. And no one could question Kennedy’s character in fighting for his crew’s survival against immense odds. His physical courage, admirable leadership, unshakable optimism, creative resourcefulness, and staunch perseverance earned him the Navy and Marine
Surviving crew members from PT-109 ride atop a replica of the boat in President John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Parade, January 20, 1961.
Corps Medal.
From the moment of their rescue, PT-109’s crew declared their skipper a hero for saving their lives. Bill Johnston, the doomed boat’s engineer, observed, “Lieutenant Kennedy was one hell of a man. . . . I didn’t pick him for my skipper, but I kept thanking God that the Navy picked him for me.”19
When Congressman John F. Kennedy visited Japan in 1951, he tried unsuccessfully to locate Kohei Hanami, who had commanded the Amagiri. But the next year, Hanami wrote to Kennedy and wished him well on his campaign for the U.S. Senate. The Japanese naval veteran had seen a Time magazine reference to Kennedy’s exploits in the Solomon Islands during the Pacific war and realized that his destroyer, Amagiri, had collided with Kennedy’s PT boat. Congressman Kennedy responded graciously to Hanami’s 1952 letter, which praised the young lieutenant’s heroism in saving the balance of his crew. Kennedy’s response enclosed a photo of himself, inscribed to Hanami “late enemy and present friend.”20
The compelling story of his saving PT-109’s crew would draw voters to Kennedy as he ran successfully for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946, the U.S. Senate in 1952, and the presidency in 1960. His campaign had the Hersey article republished in Reader’s Digest and distributed souvenir tie-clasps shaped like a PT boat.21
Kennedy, with typical self-effacement, would comment that his heroism was “involuntary. They
sank my boat.” For the rest of his life he mourned the deaths of his two crew members, Harold Marney and Andrew Kirksey. While campaigning in Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1960, Kennedy visited for the first time with Kirksey’s widow and her son Jack. Kennedy made sure they received all the veterans’ benefits due them, along with $2,000 from the Reader’s Digest article profits.22
Kennedy made lifelong friends in the service. Bill Battle, Paul B. (“Red”) Fay, and James Reed were his closest buddies from the Solomon Islands’ posting. Fay and Reed served as ushers when Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. Once elected president, Kennedy appointed Battle as ambassador to Australia, Fay as navy undersecretary, and Reed as treasury under secretary. The president awarded more minor positions to several crew members.
Survivors of PT-109 rode atop a replica of it in Kennedy’s Inaugural Parade. From the reviewing stand, the new president saluted his comrades, and they returned the gesture. Kennedy invited Gasa and Kumana to the Inauguration (though they could not attend); posed for photos with a model of the 109, which he kept nearby on an Oval Office shelf; welcomed to the White House his rescuers who had received the SOS coconut, Kevu and Evans; and assisted producers of the movie PT 109, based on a 1961 book of the same title by Robert J. Donovan. The president chose Cliff Robertson to play him in the film.23
opposite clockwise from top left
President Kennedy sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. The coconut, preserved for display, is seen on the front corner of the desk, November 1961.
President Kennedy meets in the Oval Office with Benjamin Kevu, a native of the Solomon Islands who took part in the rescue of then-Lieutenant Kennedy and his PT-109 crew, September 1962.
Replicas of the famous SOS coconut can now be found in the gift shop at the Kennedy Library.
In each government office where Kennedy served, from Capitol Hill to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the SOS coconut occupied a place of honor. In his congressional office, it sat on the mantel, but it was most prominent in every photo of his Oval Office desk, at the front right, as he looked across the room from behind it.
After the president’s tragic assassination in 1963, the Resolute Desk, its famous coconut memento, and other symbols of his presidency embarked on a world exhibition tour. Around the globe, Kennedy admirers, devasted by his senseless death, flocked to view the keepsakes that he had found most meaningful in his momentous but truncated life.24
Once Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum opened in 1979, the coconut and a reproduction of the Resolute Desk went on display.25 When Kennedy’s daughter Caroline Kennedy became U.S. ambassador to Japan in 2013, she wanted to share with the Japanese her father’s story in a special exhibition. Obtaining permission from the National Archives to send the coconut back to the Pacific whence it came, the Kennedy Library flew it in a passenger seat to Japan. Ambassador Kennedy also met with the widow of the Amagiri’s captain. As ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy met with the descendants of Gasa and Kumana on Naru, eighty years after they saved her father by delivering his coconut message.26
By the time of the centennial of Kennedy’s birth in 2017, the coconut had gained such fame that the Kennedy Library’s Gift Shop began selling reproductions. Now anyone can own a facsimile of this White House memento that saved a future president.
notes
1. Richard N. Côté, Strength and Honor: The Life of Dolley Madison (Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Corinthian Books, 2005), 295–97; William Seale, The White House: The History of An American Idea, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2001), 59; Betty C, Monkman, William G. Allman, Lydia S. Tederick, and Melissa C. Naulin, Furnishing the White House: The Decorative Arts Collection (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2023), 19.
2. “Ground Floor Broadcast Room,” White House Historical Association website, www.whitehousehistory.org; Monkman et al., Furnishing the White House, 157–59. See also Patrick Burr, “The Resolute Desk: A British Naval Ship Becomes an Oval Office Treasure,” White House History Quarterly, no. 71 (Fall 2023): 26–37.
3. Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century (New York: Random House, 2020), 51.
4. William C. Battle, oral history interview no. 1, February 17, 1965, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, available
online at www.jfklibrary.org.
5. Quoted in William Doyle, PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy (New York: William Morrow, 2015), 93–95, 295.
6. Robert J. Donovan, PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II, 40th anniversary ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 107–08.
7. James W. Graham, Victura: The Kennedys, a Sailboat, and the Sea (Lebanon, N.H. : ForeEdge, 2014), 3–7, 64–65.
8. Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Kennedys at War, 1937–1945 (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 264–65.
9. “Report on Loss of PT-109,” Commander Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons, South Pacific Force, January 13, 1944, Naval History and Heritage Command website, www.history.navy.mil.
10. Stephen Plotkin, “Sixty Years Later, the Story of PT 109 Still Captivates,” Prologue Magazine 35, no. 2 (Summer 2003), available online at National Archives website, www.archives.gov.
11. Robert D. Ballard, with Michael Hamilton Morgan, Collision with History: The Search for John F. Kennedy’s PT 109 (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2002), 100–101; Paul B. Fay Jr., The Pleasure of His Company (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 137–39.
12. Ballard, Collision with History, 105.
13. Quoted in Doyle, PT 109, 181.
14. Ibid., 156–59.
15. Ibid., 159.
16. Evan Bleier, “JFK’s Legacy as an American Hero Began 75 Years Ago Today,” Insidehook, posted August 1, 2018, www.insidehook. com.
17. Barbara A. Perry, Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 175. John Hersey, Of Men and War (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1963), includes a revised version of the narrative that Hersey originally wrote for the New Yorker
18. Doyle, PT 109, 295.
19. Quoted in Donovan, PT 109, ii.
20. Jennifer Lind, “When Camelot Went to Japan,” National Interest, June 25, 2013, see www.nationalinterest.org; “Commander Hamani’s Letter to JFK,” U.S. Embassy in Japan Official Magazine, April 5, 2015, see amview.japan.usembassy.gov.
21. Owen Edwards, “Remembering PT 109,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com.
22. Doyle, PT 109, 230–34.
23. Ballard, Collision with History, 122; Donovan, PT 109, photos before p. 271; Doyle, PT 109, photo before p. 71; PT 109, directed by Leslie H. Martinson and Lewis Milestone (Warner Bros., 1963); “PT 109: The Man JFK Picked to Play His Wartime Role, Cliff Robertson,” Look, June 18, 1963, 48–50.
24. “1964 Traveling Exhibit: Itinerary,” David F. Powers Personal Papers, Kennedy Library, available online at www.jfklibrary.org.
25. James Archer Abbott and Elaine Rice Bachmann, Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration and Its Legacy (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2021), 357.
26. “The JFK-Japan Connection: ‘Yesterday’s Enemy Is Today’s Friend,’” U.S. Embassy in Japan Official Magazine, April 6, 2015, see amview.japan.usembassy.gov; “Ambassador Commemorates Solomon Islander Scouts Legacy,” State Magazine, October 2023, www.statemag.gov.
