It was a night operation and PT 109 was almost dead in the water to minimize its wake.

How?

I haven’t studied this in depth, so if you know something I don’t, spill …

It’s not hard to imagine how. They had been sent out to intercept Japanese warships passing through Blackett Straits. They are hardly moving, because their wake could easily be seen. I don’t think the Japs had radar at the time. I know they didn’t in the early war.

The straits are very narrow and ships passing through them would be altering course frequently. The noise would be expected as they were waiting for noisy warships. So, in the last few seconds, too late to escape, the destroyer that hit them is seen to be on a collision course with them.

I don’t see reason for suspicion.

It was dark, obviously.

Maybe I’ve been infected by the Tin hat brigade.

Regardless of how PT-109 met its fate or who wrote PIC, Kennedy clearly earned the Navy Cross he was awarded in the aftermath. Old Joe was not above having JFK’s record embellished, But that’s not to say JFK was a total fake. After PT-109, JFK got another PT boat, and the fact his entire enlisted crew volunteered to serve under him again says something about his leadership, or at least the trust they placed in him.

JFK was in the right place at the right time to at least appear more seasoned and experienced than Obama. With his father as Ambassador, he got to meet key figures in British government, including Chamberlain, Churchill and future PM Harold Wilson. JFK took a British friend’s offer to pick up a car that had been left in Rome and drive it to Amsterdam for shipment beack to London. JFK actually drove the car through Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany in 1938, just before the Munich conference, and got to see first-hand the arrogance and belligerence of the Germans under Htiler, when he stopped for fuel in Germany in a British car.

After being awarded the Navy Cross, JFK was released from active duty and was hired by a magazine to produce articles on the San Francisco conference of 1945, from a “soldier’s perspective”. He wrote several articles on the talks that led to the formation of the UN.

He was in the House for six years, when the Marshall plan was enacted, the Berlin airlift occurred, Israel was created and when the Korean conflict began. He was in the Senate watching the Korean cease-fire, the Suez crisis, the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolt, the enactment of the intersate highway system and aftermath of Sputnik.

His personal role was peripheral to non-existent for much of what happened, but he was there, with a bit more information at hand than the average American had. The point Surber made was that Obama may be the same age, but has none of the experience or level of first-hand knowledge JFK had from merely being in the right place at the right time. Obama’s two years in the Senate and a couple years in a state legislature doesn’t even compare to JFK’s fourteen years in Congress, let alone the people he’d met and the ringside seat he had for some of the key events of the 20th century.

I agree with all of this, Lorenzo. And I said nothing that contradicted it.

I brought up the authorship issue, because everybody who knows about the issue (and who, unlike Sorenson, is being honest about it) knows Kennedy didn’t write that book, Sorenson did. And it bugs me to see the myth propagated.

That said, Sorenson’s loyalty is typical of Kennedy family retainers from the Camelot era. Its intensity borders on the religious.

To this day I am stunned by Sorenson’s closed-mouthedness. Could it really be loyalty? Or did they pay him a huge sum? Do they continue to pay him? Or, do they have some really juicy dirt that would destroy him if he fessed up?