by Ted Sorensen
And to a friend he wrote:
Joe’s loss has been a great shock to us all. He did everything well and with a great enthusiasm, and even in a family as large as ours, his place can’t ever be filled.
It never was, but in some ways brother Bob came closest to filling it for both Jack and his father. Bob, nine years younger than Jack, was not so close to him in their youth. “The first time I remember meeting Bobby,” his older brother said, “was when he was three and a half, one summer on the Cape.” The first time I remember meeting Bob, in 1953, he had not yet developed the degree of patience and perspective which would later make him so valuable a member of the Cabinet. At the invitation of his friend, Staff Director Francis Flanagan, he had accepted a position on the staff of the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, then about to run rampant under the fanatical chairmanship of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Senator Kennedy told me he opposed his brother’s acceptance but would not stand in his way. It was not long before Bob left McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who, he said, paid scant attention to the facts.
In those days Bob, when crossed, could be as rough and rugged as his physique (and as his brother Joe had apparently been before him). He also tended then toward the more militant views that endeared him to his father. But his absolute loyalty and hardheaded judgment made him a valuable confidant of his less argumentative older brother. In Jack’s 1952 race for the Senate, as in the 1960 race for the Presidency, Bobby was the logical choice for campaign manager. He could be trusted more implicitly, say “no” more emphatically and speak for the candidate more authoritatively than any professional politician. “Just as I went into politics when Joe died,” said the Senator to an interviewer, “if anything happened to me tomorrow my brother Bobby would run for my seat.” Bob’s unique role is implicit in nearly every chapter that follows.
Another brother, Teddy, showed increasing signs of possessing Jack’s warmhearted popular appeal and natural political instincts. In September, 1957, a Saturday Evening Postarticle concluded:
Fervent admirers of the Kennedys…confidently look forward to the day when Jack will be in the White House, Bobby will serve in the Cabinet as Attorney General and Teddy will be the Senator from Massachusetts.
But even fervent admirers thought that day, if it ever came, was still far away.
Jack had replaced brother Joe as leader of the Kennedy offspring, a source of advice and assistance and an object of their affection. He, in turn, cared more deeply about the approval of his parents and siblings than that of anyone except his wife. He took a genuine interest in their travels, their spouses, their schooling, their careers, their appearance, antics and ideas, even taking time out in the White House, for example, to talk with sister Pat’s husband Peter Lawford about his acting career and unknown to Peter making some efforts on his behalf.
Family gatherings at Hyannis Port or Palm Beach—to which I was an infrequent visitor—were occasions of great merriment, athletic and intellectual competition, exchanges of banter and bouquets, and relaxation in sailing, swimming, softball, football, tennis, golf, reading and the nightly movie. One afternoon, playing softball despite a sore back, the Senator hit safely in each appearance at bat, but sent his cousin Ann Gargan to run for him. On another occasion Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy were induced by the others to put on a fashion show of their latest Paris purchases.
Despite many similarities, each of the Kennedys differed from the Senator and from each other. But they were bound by ties of genuine filial and fraternal affection, ties that were strengthened by family tragedy and pride. They were all intensely competitive and at home vied with each other. But when it came to competing with the rest of the world, the warmth of their solidarity strengthened Jack and awed his adversaries.
Most of their wealthy neighbors in Republican Hyannis Port—for Nixon three to two in 1960—had little to do with the Kennedys. (“They never showed such interest,” Eunice observed to me sardonically the day after the 1960 election as we watched the friendly waves of one family that lived nearby.) But the Kennedys were content with their own company. Outside companionship, when desired, was imported from among their own circle of friends. Jack’s friends and those of the family were largely indistinguishable to an outsider—some had known one first and some another. Others had known Joe, Jr. or Kathleen.
For the most part the Senator’s “social” friends had little to do with the serious side of his life, and his working associates and staff were not involved in his social life. He liked the companionship of such men as K. Lemoyne “Lem” Billings, Charles F. “Chuck” Spalding and Paul B. “Red” Fay, Jr., not because of their success in the world of business, but because they were amusing, easygoing companions. His college roommates Torby Macdonald and Ben Smith, newsmen Charlie Bartlett and Ben Bradlee, writer-artist Bill Walton and Congressional chum George Smathers could all discuss politics with the Senator from their own experiences, but they were rarely invited on a trip or a holiday for that purpose. Even as President, while boating with his old friend the British Ambassador, Kennedy was more likely to discuss raising children than NATO.
His closest friends differed from him and from each other in background and interests—and not all of them liked each other. But they were all normal, healthy, intelligent and affable men, and they were all loyal to Jack Kennedy. He in turn was loyal to them—one expressed surprise to me after the Presidential election that “Jack still has time to bother with me.” But the President said later at a news conference, “The Presidency is not a very good place to make new friends. I’m going to keep my old friends.”
Both friends and family volunteered (or were drafted) for Jack’s political campaigns. Sisters Eunice, Pat and Jean helped organize the famous 1952 tea parties. But at those gatherings the star attraction, next to the candidate, was the articulate, intelligent and elegant Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., always looking amazingly younger than her years.
Although her father, Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, had been a more ebullient and colorful politician than Patrick J. Kennedy, her husband’s father, Rose Kennedy was more quietly devout and less outwardly combative than her husband and sons. From her the latter inherited much of their shy but appealing warmth and spiritual depth. But the mother was no less proud of their success and no less determined to help. Often after she had watched her son on television she would telephone me with a suggestion about some word he had misused or mispronounced. “She’s a natural politician,” the President remarked to me in 1957 with mingled pride and astonishment, after a long-distance call from his mother. “She wanted to know the political situation and nationalities in each of the states she’s visiting this fall.”
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, on the other hand, was not a natural politician—but, exquisitely beautiful, highly intelligent and irresistibly charming, she was a natural political asset. She had been an apolitical newspaper girl when they met at the home of their friends, the Charles Bartletts, “who had been shamelessly matchmaking for a year,” she said. On her first visit to the Senator’s office (as his fiancée) in the summer of 1953 she seemed awestruck by the complexities of his work. After their marriage in Newport on September 12 of that year, she interested him slightly in art and he interested her slightly in politics.
Reared in a world of social graces far from the clamor of political wars, she at first found little to attract her in either the profession or its practitioners. Politics kept her husband away too much. Politicians invaded their privacy too often. “It was like being married to a whirlwind,” she was quoted by one reporter in speaking about their early life. “Politics was sort of my enemy as far as seeing Jack was concerned.” She had no desire to write speeches or right wrongs, though her interest in her husband’s concerns gradually grew. She had been, she admitted in a brief 1960 talk, “born and reared a Republican. But you have to be a Republican to realize how nice it is to be a Democrat.”
Campaigning, moreo
ver, was a fatiguing experience. She was an active horsewoman, water skier and swimmer, but in some ways as delicate in health as in manner. Touch football on the Kennedy Hyannis Port lawn was a novel undertaking (in one huddle she said to me, “Just tell me one thing: when I get the ball, which way do I run?”), and she once broke her ankle while being pursued across the goal by two of Teddy Kennedy’s “giant” Harvard teammates. Of greater concern to both the Senator and Jacqueline (as she preferred being known, or Jackie, as everyone called her) was the fact that she suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth before Caroline’s birth in 1957.
Understandably, she was slow to accept, and he was reluctant to impose, the rigors of campaigning and handshaking. Her shy beauty and smile intensified crowd interest in the candidate whenever she could travel with him. But in the early years of their marriage she preferred to find quieter ways to assist the husband who was twelve years her senior: translating French works on Indochina, learning history to keep up with his reading (“He’s much more serious than I thought he was before I married him,” she said) and, above all, providing him with a relaxing home life in which he could shed the worries of the world.
HIS HEALTH
For much of their first two years of married life, home to John Kennedy meant a sickbed, and through most of the years of his life with Jacqueline he suffered sharp physical pain. The chief cause of his hospitalization and discomfort was his back; but the cause of his near death in the fall of 1954 was the shock of a spinal operation upon his inadequate adrenal system.
It was this same adrenal insufficiency that gave rise to all the health rumors that plagued him for years. Before his nomination politicians whispered about it—at least one, Governor Pat Brown of California, asked him about it. In my liaison role between reporters and doctors, I realized how concerned he was that the public not consider him too sickly for the burdens of the campaign and the Presidency or too unlikely to live out his first term if elected. Aside from his 1954-1955 spinal surgery, his confinements in the hospital for any cause, however minor, were never publicized during his career as Senator, even though it often meant my offering other excuses for canceling or rearranging speaking dates (one of the tasks I disliked the most). On one occasion he checked into the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston simply as “Mr. K.”—although his special back-supporting mattress was later carried by an easily recognizable brother Teddy through the crowded hospital lobby.
The Senator had no wish to falsify the facts concerning his adrenals, but he did insist that whatever had to be published be precise. Thus he avoided the term Addison’s disease, which, though it was no longer a barrier to a full life, had a frightening sound to most laymen and was interpreted differently by different physicians. Originally, before the newer adrenal hormones were available, Addison’s disease carried implications wholly absent in the Senator’s case—including tubercular glands, a brownish pallor, progressive anemia and, in most cases, progressive deterioration and death. (The year-round sun tan which he maintained through visits to Palm Beach and use of a sun lamp caused one suspicious reporter to question whether this wasn’t a symptom, whereupon the usually modest Senator exposed a part of his anatomy that had not been browned by the sun.)
Instead of the term Addison’s disease, he preferred to refer to the “partial mild insufficiency” or “malfunctioning” of the adrenal glands which had accompanied the malaria, water exposure, shock and stress he had undergone during his wartime ordeal. He also preferred, rather than giving the impression that his life depended on cortisone (which he had taken in earlier years and to which his later drugs were related), to refer to the fact that the insufficiency was completely compensated for and controlled through “simple medication taken by mouth.”
Though he was troubled for a time by high fevers, and any major operation was a risk, the insufficiency caused no other illness, and was regularly and routinely checked. In fact a December, 1958, examination (ACTH stimulation test) showed satisfactory adrenal function. In 1960, however, the rumors were rampant; and two lieutenants of his chief rival for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson—Mrs. India Edwards and John Connally, later Governor of Texas—chose to highlight a convention press conference with doubts about Kennedy’s life expectancy based on the assertion that he had Addison’s disease. Their subsequent explanation was that Kennedy’s spirited defense of his youth and vigor on television that day (in reply to a Truman attack) had by implication cast doubt on the health of other candidates, including heart patient Johnson. Johnson disowned the attack, and a‘subsequent explicit statement from Kennedy headquarters and a full exposition in the press put an end to all rumors and doubts—although the Republicans, not surprisingly, raised the issue again forty-eight hours before the election, with Congressman Walter Judd (a physician) attempting to cast doubt on Addisonians’, and thus Kennedy’s, “physical and mental health.”
Addison’s disease sounds ominous, but a bad back is commonplace. Consequently Kennedy’s chronically painful back caused him less trouble politically, though it continued to cause him more trouble physically. Injured in 1939 playing football at Harvard, and reinjured when his PT boat was rammed, his back underwent a disc operation by Naval surgeons in 1944 which had no lasting benefit. He frequently needed crutches to ease the pain during the 1952 campaign. When the crutches reappeared in the summer of 1954, he complained to me about their awkwardness but not about his agonizing pain. When he then decided that an extremely dangerous double spinal fusion operation in October would be better than life as a cripple, he did not hint at the risks of which he had been warned and made plans with me for resuming work in November.
But the effect of surgery on his adrenal shortage caused, as he had been told might happen, severe postoperative complications. Twice he was placed on the critical list and his family summoned. Twice the last rites of his church were administered. Twice he fought his way back to life, as he had once before in the Pacific.
But he obviously could do no work, in November or for weeks thereafter. He was totally out of touch with our office from mid-September, 1954 to mid-January, 1955, having in the meantime been taken by stretcher to Palm Beach for Christmas. In February, 1955, suffering from a nearly fatal infection, he underwent still another dangerous operation to remove a metal plate that had been inserted in the preceding surgery. Back in Palm Beach, he worked on Profiles in Courage, but was bedridden most of the time. He was finally able to return to Washington in May, 1955.
Even then he was required for some months to remain in bed as much as possible. And always thereafter he kept a rocking chair in his office, wore a cloth brace and corrective shoes, and slept with a bed board under his mattress, no matter where he traveled. In hotels where no board was available we would move his mattress onto the floor.
Still hobbled by pain until the Novocain injections and other treatments of Dr. Janet Travell gave him new hope for a life free from crutches if not from backache, he bitterly doubted the value of the operation which had nearly ended his life. With several individual exceptions—such as Dr. Travell and the Lahey Clinic’s Sara Jordan, who had treated him since he was eleven—he had never been impressed by the medical profession, remaining skeptical of its skills and critical of its fees. After his health had been shattered during the war, while still on duty in the South Pacific, he wrote his brother Bobby:
Keep in contact with your old broken down brother…. Out here, if you can breathe, you’re one A and “good for active duty anywhere”; and by anywhere they don’t mean El Morocco or the Bath and Tennis Club.
After his first back operation in 1944 he had written to an inquiring friend:
In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I should naturally like to go on for several pages…but will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.
After his 1954-1955 operations he once showed me the gaping hole in his back—not to complain about the pain but to curse a
job which he found wholly unsatisfactory.
When my own back went bad in the midst of the 1956 campaign, he recommended a series of steps to relieve and remedy the discomfort. And when I replied that I would do so as soon as a “medical back expert” so advised me, he said ruefully, “Let me tell you, on the basis of fourteen years’ experience, that there is no such thing!”
He knew the medical profession well. For all his vitality and endurance John Kennedy had suffered since childhood from a multitude of physical ailments. “We used to laugh,” his brother Bob has written, “about the great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy—with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die.” Never complaining about his pains or imagining new ones, he used (and carried with him about the country) more pills, potions, poultices and other paraphernalia than would be found in a small dispensary. As a boy he had required twenty-eight stitches after a bike collision with Joe. He had serious cases of scarlet fever and appendicitis and almost died of diphtheria. He had to stop school temporarily when he was fourteen on account of illness and underwent the same experience at Princeton and the London School of Economics. In the Navy he apparently suffered from malaria, and spent considerable time in the Chelsea, Massachusetts, Naval Hospital because of his back.
As a Congressman he was so pale and thin his colleagues feared for his life, and in a round-the-world trip in 1951 he was taken to a military hospital in Okinawa with a temperature of over 106 degrees and little hope for his survival. Looking back, it is impossible to say which of these bouts was due to his adrenals, which was jaundice, hepatitis or malaria, or which of these may have helped bring on the other.
His eyes required glasses for heavy reading, worn rarely for published pictures and never in public appearances. (In the fall of 1963, he told me his eyesight was weaker and that the use of large type for his prepared speech texts was all the more important.) The state of his hearing obliged him to ask me, during one debate on the Senate floor, to feed facts and figures into his right ear instead of his left. Years of injections were required to lessen his stomach’s allergic sensitivity to dogs, which he loved. A variety of other allergies remained. A youthful football injury to his right knee brought him pain from time to time and often caused a slight limp even in the White House.