A Clear and Moving 'Danger'

Robert F. Kennedy was obsessed with the ideal of courage. The worst thing he could say about someone was that he was "a coward" (a slur he reserved for his archenemy, Lyndon Johnson). At a reception for Medal of Honor winners at the White House in 1963, RFK stood off to the side. His eyes were "full of fascination," according to his friend and top presidential aide Kenneth O'Donnell. Kennedy, who missed combat in World War II, had a worshipful admiration of war heroes. Asked once at a party what he would be if he could do it all over, Kennedy answered, "A paratrooper." He idolized the commander of the 101st Airborne at D-Day, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, and was thrilled when Taylor told him that he, RFK, would have made it in Taylor's old unit.

RFK named one of his sons Maxwell Taylor Kennedy in the general's honor, and now Max Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and historian, has written "Danger's Hour," a taut, carefully wrought book about a kamikaze attack on the carrier USS Bunker Hill in May 1945. (Disclosure: Max helped me gain access to his father's records for my biography "Robert Kennedy.") "Danger's Hour" is very revealing about the nature of courage, on both the Japanese and American sides.

Lacking enough oil, steel and manpower, the Japanese substituted spirit. The kamikaze units were composed of volunteers, but in a peculiarly Japanese sense of the word. Writes Kennedy, "Perhaps the best explanation of how Kiyoshi [the pilot who struck the Bunker Hill] became a kamikaze pilot was offered, without a hint of sarcasm, by his Waseda classmate Maseo Kunimine: 'He was volunteered for it.'" The Japanese soldiers were duty-bound to the point of passivity. Kennedy talked to one naval officer in charge of choosing kamikaze pilots who proudly told him that no one refused to volunteer. As Kennedy dryly notes, "when every single person volunteers, perhaps the situation is not really voluntary." Many of the Japanese kamikaze pilots came to feel an overwhelming sense of serenity; they no longer had to face Japan's national death struggle, knowing they would not suffer a drawn-out agony in a trench but would die quickly in an airplane. They also knew that if they refused to go, they would be quickly demoted from officer to pilot and sent to the front, where they would still be killed. Even worse in a nation where face was all-important, their families would be shamed as "unpatriotic."

Kennedy has many examples of physical courage, but he has even more impressive examples of moral courage. The engineering officer aboard the Bunker Hill, Joe Carmichael, had to order his men to remain in the smoke-filled engine and boiler rooms in order to save the ship, even though he knew many would die. Carmichael looks appallingly young in a photo—he grew a little red mustache to make himself look older—though he likely aged considerably in the 20 hours he remained below while his shipmates struggled, successfully, against fire and flooding. "Danger's Hour" movingly tells the stories of how the survivors returned home from the carnage to raise families and lead normal lives, managing not to obsess about what they had achieved or endured. That, too, takes a kind of moral courage.

© 2008