In addition to being Memorial Day, today is also the eighty-ninth anniversary of the birth of President John Kennedy. During World War Two, Kennedy was the commander of a Navy PT-boat in the south Pacific. The boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and in spite of sustaining a broken back when that happened, JFK saved the lives of several of his crew and then, along with them, endured a wait to be rescued.
Kennedy rightly arouses more than a little ambivalence as a political figure. But there can be no doubt that he was a hero of the Second World War, like so many others who were killed or who survived.
There is an irony to his violent death here at home eighteen years after the end of the war in which he was nearly killed.
(See this piece written on the anniversary of Kennedy's assassination last November.)
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