Bob's Briefing A Saturday note from Bob, for readers who brought a friend. | Issue 6 August 8, 2026 |
FROM BOB
Eighty-three years ago this morning, a torpedo boat skipper with a wrecked back was picked up off a beach in the Solomon Islands, six days after his boat was cut in half beneath him. He was twenty-six. The coconut shell that carried his rescue message stayed with him for the rest of his life, and it was sitting on his desk in the Oval Office on the day he died.
That is where this week's quiz begins, though it spends most of its time on the thousand days he spent as president. The rest of the issue roams: a flier who vanished over the Pacific, a Lakota war leader who sat for no photograph, and one night in France when centuries of privilege ended before dawn. Pour the second cup.
Bob
THIS WEEK'S TOP STORY
The message on the coconut
On the moonless night of August 1, 1943, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri came out of the dark in Blackett Strait and ran straight through PT-109, cutting the boat in half. Two of the thirteen men aboard were killed instantly. The skipper, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant named John F. Kennedy, got the survivors to a speck of an island, towing a badly burned engineer by the strap of his life jacket clenched in his teeth. They lived on coconuts and rainwater while the Navy wrote them off as lost. Then two Solomon Islander scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, found them, and Gasa showed Kennedy how to scratch a message into the husk of a green coconut: NAURO ISL, NATIVE KNOWS POS'IT, HE CAN PILOT, 11 ALIVE, NEED SMALL BOAT, KENNEDY. The canoe got through. On August 8, eighty-three years ago today, the PT boats came and took them off.
Kennedy's father had the coconut sealed in plastic, and it followed his son through every office he ever held. Between that rescue and the day it sat on the Oval Office desk for the last time lay a presidency of 1,036 days: the Bay of Pigs and the blame he took for it in public, the Berlin Wall going up in August 1961, the thirteen days in October 1962 when things ran closer to the edge than the country was told, the Peace Corps, the pledge to reach the Moon before the decade was out, and the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963, three days shy of the twentieth anniversary of the day he was pulled out of the water. This week's quiz covers the whole run.
THREE MORE STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME
STORY 2
The flight that never landed
On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan lifted off from Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island, a flat scrap of coral about two miles long in a very large stretch of empty Pacific. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited offshore, listening. Her voice came through strong, then strained, then not at all. The search that followed was the largest the Navy had ever mounted for a single aircraft, and it turned up nothing. Worth remembering that she was already the most famous woman in aviation five years before she disappeared. Fifteen questions on the pilot, not just the mystery.
STORY 3
The face no one photographed
Crazy Horse led Lakota and Cheyenne fighters at the Rosebud and then at the Little Bighorn in the space of eight days in June 1876. He surrendered the following May with his people starving, and he was dead by that September, bayoneted during a struggle as soldiers tried to walk him into a guardhouse cell. He was somewhere in his mid-thirties; nobody is certain. No authenticated photograph of him is known to exist, which leaves one of the most recognized names in American history with no verified face attached to it. Fifteen questions on the man and the campaign that made him.
STORY 4
The night that ended a thousand years
On the night of August 4, 1789, two hundred and thirty-seven years ago this week, the French National Assembly sat down and took the feudal order apart in a single session. Nobles rose one after another to renounce their own hunting rights, their manorial dues, their exemptions from tax, in a cascade that astonished the men taking part in it. Centuries of privilege were gone before morning. What came after proved harder: a constitution, a king's execution, the Terror, and eventually a young artillery officer from Corsica. Thirty questions on the decade that rearranged Europe.
THIS WEEK'S TRIVIA QUESTION
Which American president was the first one born in the twentieth century?
John F. Kennedy, born May 29, 1917. He was also the youngest man ever elected to the office, at forty-three. Theodore Roosevelt was younger still when he took the oath at forty-two, but he arrived there by way of an assassination rather than an election, which is the distinction the question turns on.
WHAT I'M READING THIS WEEK
The Dungeon Crawler Carl report, for those keeping score at home: I am on book five, The Butcher's Masquerade, and it just keeps getting better. Five books deep, that should not still be true, and yet here we are. Jeff Hays is still doing the work of a full voice cast by himself, and I am still inventing errands that require driving. If you started at book one on my say-so, you know exactly where I am right now. If you have not started, I remain envious of the whole road you have ahead of you.
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YOUR QUIZ THIS WEEK
The Presidency of John F. Kennedy
A thousand and thirty-six days, and almost none of them quiet. This one runs from the campaign and the televised debates through the Bay of Pigs, Berlin, the missile crisis, the Moon pledge, civil rights, and the test ban treaty. If you lived through those years, some of these will come back faster than you expect. If you did not, this is the stretch of the century your parents kept trying to explain to you.
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