MATT PORTER: This week, you'll learn the story of two men who played a critical role in President John F Kennedy's life. These men, who lived in almost completely different circumstances from JFK, in villages with no electricity, running water, or even a paved road, ultimately helped a young John F Kennedy survive one of the most dangerous moments of his life.
Settle in as we take you to the other side of the globe to the Solomon Islands to learn about the man who saved the future 35th president of the United States on this episode of JFK35.
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MATT PORTER: Welcome to this week's episode of JFK35. I'm Matt Porter. I'm hosting solo this week, but my co-host Jamie Richardson will be back next episode. In our season opener, we told you about JFK's experience in World War II, and his struggle for survival after his boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer. This episode, we're revisiting that same time period, but looking at the two men, fishermen from the Solomon Islands, who played an important role in saving JFK's and his crew's lives.
To recap, 75 years ago on August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer crashed into Lieutenant Kennedy's boat, the PT 109. Over the course of the next several days, JFK and the other survivors were stranded on small islands in the South Pacific. The crew survived by drinking the milk and eating the meat of coconuts, and JFK spent each night swimming for hours over sharp corals and shark infested waters, searching for friendly boats.
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Kennedy's luck changed on the fourth day, when he met two native Solomon islanders, Eroni Kumana and Biaku Gasa. They worked with the Australians stationed in the area to patrol the waters of the Solomon Sea. Later accounts of the incident save the two islanders communicated with Kennedy in sign language. Kumana and Gasa showed Kennedy how to write a message on the husk of a coconut that they would deliver to the Allies.
While Kennedy and his crew remained on the island, the two islanders paddled through miles of ocean seas filled with Japanese patrols. If the two men had ever been caught, they certainly would have been captured, and the worst may have happened for Kennedy and his stranded crew. After delivering the message, Kumana and Gasa paddled back to the island to bring Kennedy to safety, and to work on the rescue mission for the rest of his crew.
Kumana and Gasa hid him under a pile of palm fronds in their canoe to prevent the Japanese from seeing him. Kennedy never saw the two men after the rescue, although Gasa later wrote to him after his inauguration in 1961, a letter that is now here in the archives in the JFK Library. A Methodist minister from New Zealand forwarded Gasa's letter to JFK, translating what he wrote.
In it, Gasa said "it is my joy that you are now president of the United States of America. It was not in my strength that I and my friends were able to rescue you in the time of war, but in the strength of God we were able to help you. It is good I say thank you but your farewell words to me were those printed on the dime, in God we trust.
God is our hiding place and our Savior in the time of trouble and calm. I am your friend, Biaku Gasa." Gasa passed away in 2005. Three years later, in 2008, the other rescuer, Eroni Kumana asked to place a highly prized family heirloom at JFK grave. The item, Kumana said, was always given to the chief and the family.
It was a traditional form of currency made out of a giant clamshell known as custom money, or shell money. And so on November 1, 2008, the Kennedy family held a ceremony where they received the tribute, and placed it on the grave site in Arlington National Cemetery. The family relic also now lives here at the JFK Library. Kumana died four years ago on August 2, 2014, 71 years ago to the day when JFK's patrol boat crashed in the South Pacific.
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Eroni Kumana and Biaku Gasa are both survived by numerous children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and now someone who met many of the family members of both Gasa and Kumana, his name is John Kulewicz John is a lawyer from Columbus, Ohio. This year he and five others honored the 75th anniversary of President Kennedy's rescue by swimming the exact same 4.2-mile route JFK swam in the Solomon Islands.
John was a graduate of Ohio State University, where he wrote his senior thesis on President Kennedy and the McCarthy Era. He also then went to Yale Law School, and has now been a lawyer in Columbus for almost 40 years. John, thank you for being here today.
JOHN KULEWICZ: Thank you, Matt.
MATT PORTER: John, this was a major undertaking to organize this swim to actually complete the 4.2-mile route in open water. That's an amazing achievement, especially for me. I'm a non-swimmer. How did you get this idea to do the swim? And where did it all start?
JOHN KULEWICZ: PT 109 has been in the back of my mind since I was a child. John F Kennedy was elected president in 1960, and I was in the first grade at Saint Mathias Elementary School in Columbus. The first fact that impressed me about President Kennedy, in addition to the fact that he was Catholic like me, was the fact that he had swum three miles after PT 109 was sunk to the nearest island. That set a standard for me, even from childhood. And it's since President Kennedy is somebody who I've admired throughout my life, it's been an inspiration to me ever since.
MATT PORTER: So tell me about this team that you assembled you and five other gentlemen, how did you get these guys together? And tell me about who they were.
JOHN KULEWICZ: I mean, it was a terrific team. In alphabetical, it consisted of one of my best friends from law school, Peter Canfield, who's a lawyer in Atlanta now. Rich Lovering, a lawyer from Columbus, with whom I've done other open water swims as I've done with Peter Canfield. Jack Lundberg, the spouse of my colleague, Eve Stratton, who started out as a professional triathlete, and rides mountain bikes up in Montana now, and is a builder out there.
Jay Madigan, an environmental consultant in Florida, with whom I used to swim in Columbus. And we are fortunate at the end to be joined by a young man named Adrian Mula, who is the first mate on a yacht that was docked nearby the hotel where we were staying.
MATT PORTER: Did he plan to do the swim, or is this sort of a spur of the moment, since he was just there at the time?
JOHN KULEWICZ: It was an overnight decision on his part. We were we had dinner on several evenings with Adrian and his crewmates. And we were telling them about what we were getting ready to do, and Adrian was very fascinated with it, and decided to accompany us. We were very lucky that he did.
MATT PORTER: Well, that's really amazing. And pardon me that I don't know this. But did you do this personally to raise awareness for anything, or to raise money for something? Or was this purely for the anniversary?
JOHN KULEWICZ: It was the 75th anniversary of the sinking of PT 109. But for all of us, it was a perfect combination of love of country, love of family, love of swimming, and love of challenge. It was love of country, because PT 109 was America at its finest. When the boat went down, all the crew had going for them really was their own courage and perseverance.
And the leadership of then-Lieutenant Kennedy. That's what got them through and that was, and as one historian said, that was the epitome of the World War II experience of that entire generation. Love of family because, four of us had fathers who had served in the South Pacific during World War II, and one of us had an uncle. None of us had been there before, and it meant a whole lot to us to be able to spend time where they each had had what had to have been formative experience of their lives.
And then love us swimming, because the water over there is great. It's clear. It's warm. It's one of the most beautiful spots on the face of the Earth. And finally, a love of challenge, because of the distance of the swim, the current, the wind, and the sharks.
MATT PORTER: Definitely a challenge. Why don't you tell me a little bit about some of the challenges you faced on the swim?
JOHN KULEWICZ: At that time of the year, and this is in August, there's a pretty stiff Southeast Trade Winds, that's blowing up from the southeast. And the first half of the swim was due southeast, so we were swimming right into the trade wind, which added that challenge on that leg. Then on the way back, there's a pretty forceful current that we had to deal with, when we were going back to Kennedy Island.
The night before the swim, we had all read about sharks in the water there, but you tend to dismiss it unless you actually see it. But the night before the swim, the kitchen crew at the hotel where we were staying they came out on the deck and they were chumming the water. They threw some of the leftovers from dinner into the water, and these sharks came out of nowhere to go glom onto them. So it let us know that they were there, and then one of my teammates Peter saw a shark. It was a grey-tipped reef shark during the swim, and two spectators saw a couple of sharks as well.
MATT PORTER: Oh my god. I don't know what I would do if I saw a shark in the water. But I don't think my first instinct would be to go in the water.
JOHN KULEWICZ: We were assured bite by the spear fisherman that the grey-tipped reef sharks will not attack humans on their own initiative, only if they're provoked. So we made sure to be very respectful of their presence.
MATT PORTER: So with all these challenges that you were facing, and I mean this is 2018, you guys have boats, and obviously it's a prepared situation. Thinking about how President Kennedy, when this happened, and his ship had wrecked, and people were injured, and he had to make these swims, particularly overnight in order to not be seen by the Japanese, how would you compare the challenge you had compared to how challenging it must have been for President Kennedy's, considering you're a swimmer, and you know what it takes?
JOHN KULEWICZ: Well, I can tell you that we all came out of the water with even greater respect for the adversity that President Kennedy and the crew overcame. We were swimming under the best of conditions. It was a nice day. We didn't have to worry about enemy aircraft, or vessels firing at us. We were swimming of our own volition.
There were dug out canoes beside us with water, and papaya, and bananas. And even under those conditions, it was a tough swim. So by the time-- and we were all experienced swimmers. By the time we got out of the water, though, it occurred to all of us was a grueling experience that had to have been for then-Lieutenant Kennedy and the crew.
MATT PORTER: Yeah. A grueling situation absolutely. One of the things that I thought was really cool about your story is that besides just swimming this 4.2 miles, which is an amazing thing to do on its own, you guys went to see the two Solomon Islanders who were crucial in helping President Kennedy get a message to the Navy. That was Biaku Gasa and Eroni Kumana. Tell me a little bit about that. And did you know when you planned this that you we're going to be meeting them? Or was this something that sort of developed?
JOHN KULEWICZ: We had asked to do the possible and understood that at some point, we might be able to meet them. But we were overnighting on Guadalcanal on the way out to the place of the swim, and three members of the Kumana family paid a surprise visit to us at our hotel on Sunday morning. It was wonderful to meet them.
And then on that Sunday evening, we had made it to where we were staying for the swim, just across the water from Kennedy Island. And we were having dinner, and looked out onto the water. And this boat came zipping across the water. It was overflowing with people, and there was a big United States flag waving in the back, flapping in the wind.
And it came closer and closer to us. It pulled up to our dock, and the boat, all these people came off the boat. It was the extended family of Eroni Kumana. Mr. Kumana is now deceased, but two of his sons, one of whom is named John F Kennedy Kumana and several of his grandchildren and their spouses, and extended families, came.
They paid us a visit. It was absolutely wonderful to meet them. They brought with them a bust to President Kennedy that's a treasure to their family. We spent an hour or two with them. And when they left, we all just stood there for a moment, just agog at what had happened.
Then, the day after the swim we were invited to visit the village of Biaku Gasa, and we got to meet his widow, who was very kind to spend time with us, and his extended family of children and grandchildren. And we visited his grave site as well. They too have a bust of President Kennedy, which is a prized possession of their family.
It amazed us, the reverence in which President Kennedy is held in that part of the world. Everybody there knows the story of PT 109, and they still think very fondly of President Kennedy, and of the United States.
MATT PORTER: What was it like meeting the widow and the family, and did they-- obviously we all have a deep appreciation for President Kennedy as Americans, as he was 35th president. But for Solomon Islanders way on the other side of the world, having a similar reverence, what was that like? And what kind of things that you talk about?
JOHN KULEWICZ: We were so deeply moved that they would spend time with us. The most wonderful realization that we had is that both of these families are wonderful families. But their circumstances of life are far different from those of what President Kennedy had, or almost any American. But when you think about it, these two men, just because they were in their dugout canoes, and they happened upon President Kennedy and the crew of PT 109.
And because they decided then and there that they would take a message to the US Navy, and to the Australian coastwatcher, which brought about their rescue. Because of what they did, that that one decision, it change the course of American political history. And so spending time with their families, these two people, literally the opposite end of the earth from us. And thinking, reflecting upon the impact that they, because of their dedication, had had on American political history, it overwhelmed us.
MATT PORTER: And it's-- we can't say for sure. But obviously, these two men, who were just us two Solomon Islanders in the islands found President Kennedy, who was then Lieutenant Kennedy, and had they not been there, had they not been able to help, who knows what would've happened?
JOHN KULEWICZ: Right. By the time they found them, actually, they were on the fifth day after the shipwreck. And they had gone largely without food and water. Several of them were severely injured. As each day went by, they had less and less hope of rescue. So it was literally a godsend that they came upon them.
MATT PORTER: Well, so after completing this journey for the 75th anniversary, how do you feel about it? And what will you take away? What have you taken away from this?
JOHN KULEWICZ: I took away an even greater appreciation for the leadership of President Kennedy. When you think about it, PT 109, in my opinion, it may have been the finest hour of his life. Because that was him, and just him. President Kennedy came to political life with a lot of the advantages of family prestige, and wealth, and privilege, which certainly, in addition to the fact that he worked very diligently every moment of his life, certainly helped him.
But with PT 109, the moment that the destroyer Amagiri struck and sunk PT 109, none of that mattered. All that President Kennedy had, and all that the crew had at that time was their own courage, their own perseverance, their own determination. That was all they had, and that was all that mattered.
And he, in the split second that that happened, it was obvious that he made up his mind that his responsibility was to lead the crew, to lead the crew to survival. It was under the most extreme of dangerous conditions. But he did it, and he did it exclusively by dint of his own courage and character. And nothing that he had in life that was there, it was just his courage and character that he had that brought the crew through.
MATT PORTER: Well John, thank you so much. It's been an absolute privilege to listen to you, and hear about this story. And the ability of you and the five others to go do this swim in honor of President Kennedy, I think that's a great thing. And I wish you well. And maybe another swim in the Solomon Islands is in your future?
JOHN KULEWICZ: It was wonderful to be there, and I'm sure we would all go back.
MATT PORTER: Well, thank you very much. Take care.
JOHN KULEWICZ: Thank you, Matt.
MATT PORTER: Well, thank you for listening to this week's episode of JFK 35. If you'd like to learn more about the man who saved JFK, check out our podcast page about this week's episode. On it, we include pictures of the two men, the letter from Biaku Gasa and also some pictures of John and his team with the extended families of both men.
We also have links to more information from the archives. If you have questions or story ideas, email us at JFK35pod@JFKlfoundation.Org, or tweet at us @JFKlibrary using the hashtag #JFK35. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And if you like what you heard today please consider subscribing to our podcast, or leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, we'll see you again in three weeks for another episode. Where taking one week off extra for Thanksgiving. We hope you enjoy the holiday with your families, wherever you are. And thank you for listening, and have a great week.
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