I subscribe to the New Yorker (I took over my late Mother's subscription and she had been a subscriber since the 1930s) and each Sunday they send you an email with articles from the past. One of the ones happened to be about JFK. This is how they described it in the email:
"John F. Kennedy, the ex-Ambassador’s son" -- that’s how John Hersey describes the future President in “Survival,” a piece published in 1944, when Kennedy was just twenty-seven. “Survival” tells how, as the captain of a patrol boat in the Second World War, Kennedy fought to keep his crew alive after their ship was destroyed. (At one point, he pulled a wounded sailor along by loosening a strap from the man’s life jacket, then swimming for miles while clenching it in his teeth.) For most readers, Hersey’s story was their first close look at J.F.K. Retold in many books (and, eventually, a film), the piece transformed him into a war hero and helped lay the groundwork for his political career.
