In the summer of 1943, Lieutenant "Jack" Kennedy commanded a PT boat operating against the Japanese near the island of New Georgia in the Pacific. One night Kennedy's boat was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Although injured during the attack, Kennedy and most of his crew survived.
A few months later, Kennedy again wrote to Luce. With his note he enclosed a gadget, originally intended to be a letter opener, made "from a Jap 51 cal. bullet and the steel from a fitting on my boat, part of which drifted onto an island." He concluded the note with a word of thanks for Luce's earlier gift.
No stranger to the frontline herself, Luce covered World War II as a journalist. As early as 1940, she published Europe in the Spring, an anti-isolationist account of her experiences in embattled Europe.
- Learn more about Clare Boothe Luce. Visit Women Come to the Front, a Library of Congress exhibition highlighting the work of eight female journalists, photographers, and broadcasters during World War II.
- Search the Today in History Archive on Kennedy to read more about the lives of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Search on the term World War II to learn more about that conflict, for example, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of North Africa, and D-Day.
- Search across American Memory on the term letter to find a wide variety of images and documents related to the fine art of letter writing. See, for example, Letters of a Volunteer in the Spanish-American War from the collection Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age, and the 1857 The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility, in Manners, Dress, and Conversation ... Also a Useful Instructor in Letter Writing from An American Ballroom Companion, ca. 1490-1920.
- Enjoy the posters That Letter Will Be Appreciated and "Censored", presented in the collection By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA 1936-1943. The Collection Highlights includes a section on posters from World War II.
