JFK and PT-109: the tale still stirs

As a World War II warship, PT-109 was not destined to be much remembered. It was sunk ingloriously in a misbegotten South Pacific mission in which nothing went right and nary a blow was struck at the enemy.

But the commanding officer -- an adventuresome rich kid from Harvard -- later was elected president of the United States, and the tale of PT-109 and the guts and leadership shown by the young Navy lieutenant in saving his crew became part of American lore.

It’s a story that has been told innumerable times, but a marvelous National Geographic documentary, “The Search for Kennedy’s PT-109” (Sunday at 8 p.m. on MSNBC), brings it alive with strong narration and vivid photography.

The frame of “Search” is the attempt by underwater explorer Robert D. Ballard to find the boat’s wreckage in 1,300 feet of water in the Solomon Sea. It was there, on the foggy night of Aug. 2, 1943, that a patrol torpedo boat commanded by 26-year-old Lt. j.g. John F. Kennedy was sliced in twain by a Japanese destroyer running at 30 knots without lights.

For six days, Kennedy tended his crew, some badly injured, as they avoided capture and prayed for rescue.

The Navy declared the crew dead and held a memorial. But two Solomon Island natives, sent out in their canoe by an Australian coast-watcher, found Kennedy and the 10 other survivors. (Two crew members had been killed.)

Some of the most emotional moments of “Search” involve Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, the son of Robert Kennedy, who went to the Solomons for the filming. He meets the two natives, one of whom named one of his children John F. Kennedy and keeps a jungle shrine to JFK.

Kennedy, an environmental studies professor at Boston College, asks Dick Keresey, who commanded PT-105 in the same squadron, why the PT-109 was so quickly forgotten and its crew presumed dead. The answer is matter of fact but chilling: Death was a common commodity.

After the rescue, Kennedy wrote archly to his parents that the officials who presumed he was dead “fortunately ... misjudged the durability of the Kennedys.”

The hunt for the sunken boat is interesting, but the examination of that Kennedy durability is what gives “Search” its power.