President Kennedy, PT 109 and the US government

I was 13 when Kennedy defeated Nixon in 1960 by a very narrow 0.1 percent margin in the popular vote. My mother voted for Kennedy; my father voted for Nixon.

"PT 109, An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy" by William Doyle makes a strong case that without Joe Kennedy and the PT 109 incident that John Kennedy wouldn't have been elected president. The sinking of PT 109 was not heroic; it was a classic example of the "fog of war", in which the real fog was only part of the problem. Privately Kennedy himself characterized the collision with the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, the other PT boat captains in his unit on August 2, 1943, his commanding officer and the US Navy itself as "f****d up".

The book makes a strong case that what happened after the sinking was heroic--Kennedy's actions between the boat's sinking and his and his surviving crewmates' eventual rescue. I agree.

Some things never change. Would Kennedy be surprised to know that the US government is as "f****d up" today, or even more so, as it was during WWII? Probably not--he'd probably use a couple of old Navy acronyms to describe today's US government: SNAFU and FUBAR.