JFK’s Other Boat
wartime heroics as captain of the doomed PT-109 are the stuff. of legend, but later in World War II reported. The construction project’s aim is to protect a subway station damaged in Hurricane Sandy in 2012. A historian of the hulk, retired schoolteacher Redmond Burke, bought the wooden-hulled vessel at salvage in the 70s, restoring the li le warship, below during the war, into a habitat he later abandoned. A student of his claimed to have connected the hull number to Kennedy’s Navy days, and Burke worked with a Kennedy biographer to pin down details regarding its design and fittings. PT-59’s status as Kennedyana may never be definitive, but there is enough detail to charm visitors to the area and generate talk of dividing the pieces of the wreck between the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and a display in New York City.
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