In the early morning of August 2, 1943, in Blackett Strait in the Solomon islands, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed and sank an American PT boat, leaving its crew for dead in a sea covered with flaming gasoline. The skipper of the PT boat was a skinny, handsome boyish lieutenant (jg) from Boston named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Lieutenant Kennedy spent thirty of the next thirty-six hours in the water. Ten other men on PT 109 survived to tell of...