I came home yesterday and Dad gave me your letter with the gold coin. The coin is now fastened to my identification tag and will be there, I hope, for the duration. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Good luck is a commodity in rather large demand these days and I feel you have given me a particularly potent bit of it.

AceHistoryDesk – Today in History: After entering the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant (junior grade) in October 1942, and shortly thereafter ordered to report for duty as commanding officer of a motor torpedo boat in Panama. Prior to his departure, playwright Clare Boothe Luce, a close friend of the Kennedy family, sent the young naval officer a good luck coin that once belonged to her mother. On September 29, 1942, Kennedy wrote to Luce thanking her for sharing such an important token with him.

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Sept.29: 2023: History Today News: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Lieutenant John F. Kennedy

I came home yesterday and Dad gave me your letter with the gold coin. The coin is now fastened to my identification tag and will be there, I hope, for the duration. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Good luck is a commodity in rather large demand these days and I feel you have given me a particularly potent bit of it.

Kennedy transferred to the Pacific theater in February 1943 and became commanding officer of PT109 in April, operating against the Japanese near the island of New Georgia in the Solomon Islands.

On the night of August 1-2, Kennedy’s boat was rammed and cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. Although he was injured during the attack, Kennedy managed to locate one of his injured crew and lead him to safety; most of his crew survived. He later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his heroism.

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 his message with a word of thanks for Luce’s earlier gift:

With it goes my sincere thanks for your good-luck piece, which did service above and beyond its routine duties during a rather busy period.

John F. Kennedy to Clare Boothe Luce, October 20, 1943.Clare Boothe Luce Papers (correspondence, box 116). Manuscript Divisionnone

No stranger to the front line herself, Luce covered World War II as a journalist. She published Europe in the Spring, an anti-isolationist account of her experiences in embattled Europe, in 1940—in the early days of World War II.

Learn More

• Search across the Today in History collection on John F. Kennedy to read more about his life.
• Learn more about Clare Boothe Luce. Visit Women Come to the Front, a Library of Congress online exhibition highlighting the work of eight female journalists, photographers, and broadcasters during World War II. Search the Finding Aid for the Clare Boothe Luce Papers, 1862-1997 to find documentation about her life as a journalist, playwright, magazine editor, United States representative from Connecticut, and United States ambassador to Italy.
• Consult World War II: A Resource Guide to locate resources about WWII on the Library of Congress website and other places.
• Search the Library’s online resources on the term World War II or on the names of significant battles and other events of the war, to learn more about that conflict. Some examples include the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of North Africa, and D-Day.
• View the posters National Letter Writing Week, Oct. 1-7 That Letter Will Be Appreciated and “Censored” Let’s censor our conversation about the war, presented in the collection Posters: WPA Posters. The Collection Highlights include a section on posters from World War II.

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