A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  But the Irish Mafia did not possess Kennedy any more than anyone else did. They were his instruments in politics, as Ted Sorensen was his instrument on issues. He admired them all because he admired virtuosity in performance—“the ability,” as he once put it, “to do things well, and to do them with precision and with modesty.” The techniques by which people did things fascinated him, whether in politics or statecraft, writing or painting, sailing or touch football. He had an instinctive appreciation of excellence. He liked to cite Aristotle’s definition of happiness: “The good of man is in the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or, if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect of them.”

  But, if there were several human excellences, faith in virtuosity per se could not be enough. Which would take precedence over the others? Profiles in Courage celebrated “grace under pressure” without regard to purpose; obviously Webster, Benton and Houston could not all have been right about the Compromise of 1850. The Kennedy of these years was still undefined. He was a Harvard man, a naval hero, an Irishman, a politician, a bon vivant, a man of unusual intelligence, charm, wit and ambition, “debonair and brilliant and brave,” but his deeper meaning was still in process of crystallization.

  5. MARRIAGE

  Then he met Jacqueline Bouvier and leaned across the asparagus at Charles Bartlett’s house in Washington to ask her for a date. She was a girl of great beauty, at once wistful and luminous, and also of acute intelligence and exacting expectation. In an essay which won Vogue’s Prix de Paris in 1951, she wrote that the three men she would most like to have known were Baudelaire, Wilde and Diaghilev. Her natural habitat was the international world of society and art, though Bernard Berenson admonished her in 1952, “American girls should marry American boys. They wear better.” She was a Catholic, but from a securely established French-American family; childhood on Park Avenue and in East Hampton had exposed her to none of the social discrimination visited on the Boston Irish. Her father and mother were divorced, and she had grown up in a rather lonely way. Her loneliness and teachers she had encountered at Miss Porter’s and Vassar had given her the capacity to care deeply about life, as the rest of her upbringing had given her the skill to disguise her caring. Her response to life was aesthetic rather than intellectual or moralistic. The intensity of this response attracted Kennedy and perhaps alarmed him; their courtship, Jacqueline said later, was “spasmodic.” But they shared the gospel of excellence, and this, as well as more youthful emotions, bound them together.

  Kennedy was a new experience for Jacqueline Bouvier. He pursued her with penetrating questions of a sort she had not heard before and, in self-defense, she began to ask questions back. One day she inquired how he would define himself. He said, “An idealist without illusions.” And the week before they were married in September 1953 she asked him what he considered his best and worst qualities. He thought his best quality was curiosity, and his worst quality irritability. By irritability he meant impatience with the boring, the commonplace and the mediocre. And by curiosity he meant a good deal more than the purely intellectual trait; he meant that hunger for experience which caused him to demand that life be concentrated, vivid and full. “He lived at such a pace,” Jacqueline Kennedy said later, “because he wished to know it all.” It was all somehow connected with the precariousness of his health: this seemed to give his life its peculiar intensity, its determination to savor everything, its urgent sense that there was no time to waste.

  The shadow had never left him. The shock of the collision with the Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands had torn his back, already weakened by the football injury at Harvard half a dozen years before. In his exhaustion after the rescue he came down with malaria. When he returned to the United States, he weighed 127 pounds and was in agony from sciatica. He had a lumbar disc operation at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, relieving the pressure on the nerve fibers. But his spine did not cease to torment him. “At least one half of the days that he spent on this earth,” his brother has written, “were days of intense physical pain.”

  Then he was told that he had Addison’s disease—a degeneration of the adrenal glands—and between 1946 and 1949 he went on a regimen of cortisone. One day when Joseph Alsop asked about the occasional greenness of his complexion, Kennedy replied matter-of-factly, ‘‘The doctors say I’ve got a sort of slow-motion leukemia, but they tell me I’ll probably last until I’m forty-five. So I seldom think about it except when I have the shots.” It developed later that he did not have Addison’s disease in the classic sense—that is, as caused by tuberculosis of the adrenal glands—that he had not had tuberculosis in any form and that, with modern methods of treatment, his adrenal insufficiency, evidently induced by the physical strain of the long night of swimming and the subsequent malaria, presented no serious problem. He stopped the cortisone shots, though he continued to take corticosteroid tablets from time to time to assure the best possible protection against excessive physical stress or exertion. During these years, except when his back stopped him, he lived, between politics and athletics, a life of marked and exuberant physical activity.

  Still the shadow did not leave him. In 1948 his beloved sister Kathleen was killed in a plane crash. In 1951, traveling in the Far East, he came down with a fever in Japan and was rushed to the military hospital in Okinawa. His temperature rose to more than 106 degrees, and they did not think he would live. He recovered, but then his back troubled him again. Jacqueline remembers him in their courtship as on crutches more often than not. By 1954 the pain became so incessant that he decided to try another operation—this time a lumbar fusion with a steel plate inserted in his spine. The surgeons were not sure it would help and warned it would be risky, but Kennedy, drained by the unceasing torment, said, “I don’t care, I can’t go on like this.” If there were a reasonable chance, he was going to take it. The winter after the surgery was torture. The steel plate led to a staphylococcus infection. His condition grew worse. Last rites were pronounced, and death brushed him again. Finally a second operation removed the plate. He continued weak and in pain, lying miserably in bed, turned by nurses at regular intervals from one side to the other. After a time, he started to walk, but, just as he was beginning, one of his crutches broke, he fell and was back in bed again.

  The operations did not help. They left his back weaker than ever, and Kennedy later concluded without recrimination that they had been unnecessary. In the spring of 1955 he heard about Janet Travell, a New York physician who treated certain painful muscular conditions with Novocaine. He came to her deeply skeptical about doctors but more ready than ever to try anything. His infection had not healed; he now had anemia; and the pain was constant. Dr. Travell decided that what was causing the pain was not the spine itself or the discs but the old weakness in the back muscles leading to chronic spasm. Now her Novocaine relaxed the cramps in his spinal muscles and brought quick relief. But, when daily mechanical strain was a factor in spasm, Novocaine might have only a temporary effect. Then Dr. Travell discovered that his left leg was three-quarters of an inch shorter than his right—an obvious mechanical aggravation of the weakness along his spine, but, amazingly, unnoticed by doctors up to this point. Every step he had taken for years had caused a seesaw movement in his back and increased the strain on his spinal muscles. He procured shoes with a lift on the left foot and a lowered heel on the right. He also wore a small ‘brace’ or belt, and, finding relief in a rocking chair in Dr. Travell’s office, acquired one for himself. Various nutritional supplements ended his anemia. Dr. Travell’s treatment and gentle counsel changed his life. In a surprisingly short time, he regained his old vitality and strength.

  Kennedy endured all this with total stoicism. Dr. Travell found him a model patient—never resentful of his condition, always ready to follow any course which seemed reasonable to him. He once quoted Somerset Maugham—“suffering does not ennoble, it embitters”—b
ut, if he had been embittered, he hid it absolutely. He never liked anyone to ask how he was feeling. When he was in pain, others could tell only as his manner grew a little brusque and his face white and drawn. When the pain became intolerable, he would try to get his mind off it by having friends for dinner or going to a movie—anything not to let himself just sit there suffering. Soon he began to distract himself with a larger project. He had been interested for some time in Edmund G. Ross, the Senator whose vote saved Andrew Johnson at the risk of his own career, and he now started an article on political courage which turned in the next few months into a book.

  Some have compared Kennedy’s illness of 1954–55 with Franklin Roosevelt’s polio and suggested that these crises made them President. This is doubtful. After all, Roosevelt had helped run the Navy during a considerable war and had been a candidate for Vice-President before he came down with polio; and John Kennedy had been elected to House and Senate before he nearly died in 1955. In each case, the will and the ability were always there, and the evolution had been sure and steady. Yet Kennedy’s ordeal no doubt accelerated his private crisis of identity. Like Roosevelt, he emerged better focused, more purposeful, more formidable. He conveyed a growing impression of weight and power.

  It also increased a certain sense of fatalism about himself. Early in 1959 someone wrote an article—“Will the Spell Be Broken?”—pointing out that since 1840 no President elected in a year ending in zero had left the White House alive and sent a copy to everyone mentioned for the nomination the next year. Kennedy replied that he had never reflected on this bit of Americana; but if everyone took the phenomenon to heart 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would probably have a “for rent” sign from 1960 to 1964. As for the effect this numerological revelation might have on his own plans, Kennedy wrote, “I feel that the future will have to necessarily answer this for itself—both as to my aspirations and my fate should I have the privilege of occupying the White House.” On Cape Cod, in October 1953, when he returned from his wedding trip, he had read his young wife what he said was his favorite poem. She learned it for him by heart, and he used to love to have her say it. It was Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”

  It may be he shall take my hand

  And lead me into his dark land

  And close my eyes and quench my breath . . .

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

  At midnight in some flaming town,

  When Spring trips north again this year,

  And I to my pledged word am true,

  I shall not fail that rendezvous.

  6. POLITICS AND PRIVACY

  “No congressional leader of the very first rank save James Madison has been elected Pres.,” Kennedy wrote in a notebook he kept during his sickness, “—and apart from Polk, Garfield, McKinley & Truman no parliamentarians of the 2nd rank.”

  Being a Senator was another obstacle, like being a Catholic, but I suppose that for a man who had survived the Ferguson Passage form sheets were made to be ignored. In any case, he was not investing energy in the laborious process of infiltrating the inner ring of the Senate leadership. He preserved affable relations with the club, but he was not of them. He discharged his party duties with efficiency, indulged his own interests in matters like Indochina, Algeria and the electoral college, and wondered how to pursue larger goals. He had discussed the Vice-Presidency with his father as early as 1953; and after 1956 the Presidency itself no longer seemed so far away. When Joseph Alsop suggested to him in the summer of 1958 that the vice-presidential nomination was now his for the asking, Kennedy quickly replied, “Let’s not talk so much about vice. I’m against vice, in all forms.”

  On issues he showed himself a practical and moderate liberal, who made quiet progress on questions of labor and social welfare without trying to force the pace faster than he thought the times permitted. During the first Eisenhower term there was much discussion within the Stevenson group about national policy. I circulated a memorandum suggesting that our inherited liberalism was dominated by the special experience of the depression, that prosperity raised problems of its own and that, where the New Deal had been necessarily concerned with the stark issues of subsistence and employment, the new period called for not a ‘quantitative’ but a ‘qualitative’ liberalism, dedicated to enriching the lives people lived. The problems of qualitative liberalism, the memorandum argued, “have to do with education, medical care, civil rights, housing, civil liberties, city planning . . . with the issues which make the difference between opportunity and defeat, between frustration and fulfillment, in the everyday life of the average person.” Our country, the memorandum said, “is richer than ever before, and is getting even richer every moment—but is devoting a decreasing share of its wealth to the common welfare.”

  When I sent the memorandum to Kennedy, he replied a little pessimistically that “any attempts to put forward a very advanced program of social legislation would meet with the opposition of the [Democratic] leadership.” This was partly because “many members of the Democratic party in the House and Senate are in agreement on the general lines of Eisenhower’s middle-of-the-road program” and partly because of “the desire of the leadership to maintain a unified party on the assumption that the Democratic Party is the stronger political party of the two and that if Eisenhower does not run then victory will be almost assured for us.”

  He then moved on to the question of the Lodge-Gossett amendment, which proposed that in a presidential election each state’s electoral votes be divided in the proportion of the popular vote. While this proposal had a democratic ring, its effect, Kennedy thought, would be to reduce the influence of the large, urbanized states and “increase the influence of the one party states in both Democratic and Republican ranks.” Kennedy was far more perceptive than most historians and political scientists in seeing the defects of this amendment; his successful fight against it the next year marked his emergence as a significant figure in the Senate. He concluded his letter by mentioning “an article I am now working on in my spare time. It is on political courage. . . .”

  These were his years of concentration on politics, and he soon showed the toughness, adroitness and intuition of a master. Yet while he considered politics—in another phrase he cherished from Pilgrim’s Way—“the greatest and most honorable adventure,” took pride in his political skills, delighted in political maneuver and combat and never forgot political effects for a single second, he stood apart, in some fundamental sense, from the political game. When David Ormsby Gore visited him in the hospital, Kennedy remarked that he was not sure he was cut out to be a politician; he saw the strength of opposing arguments too well; it would be easier if he had divine certitude that he was right. In his preliminary notes for Profiles in Courage, he wrote of Robert A. Taft, “He was partisan in the sense that Harry Truman was—they both had the happy gift of seeing things in bright shades. It is the politicians who see things in similar shades that have a depressing and worrisome time of it.”

  The total politician instinctively assumed a continuum between means and ends. But it was the tension between means and ends which fascinated and bothered Kennedy. His sickness provided an unaccustomed chance to reflect on such questions; and Profiles in Courage represented his most sustained attempt to penetrate the moral dilemmas of the political life. “Politics is a jungle,” he wrote in his notes, “—torn between doing right thing & staying in office—between the local interest & the national interest—between the private good of the politician & the general good.” In addition, “we have always insisted academically on an unusually high—even unattainable—standard in our political life. We consider it graft to make sure a park or road, etc., be placed near property of friends—but what do we think of admitting friends to the favored list for securities about to be offered to the less favored at a higher price? . . . Private enterprise system . . . makes OK private action which would be considered dishonest if public action.”

  How could people surviv
e in the jungle? He thought the answer had something to do with that combination of toughness of fiber and courage which constituted character. In the cases of Taft and Walter George, for example, “it is not so much that they voted in a certain way that caused their influence because others voted the same way—or because of length of service—or because of areas of origin—though all had something to do with it. But mostly it was character—& the impression they gave—which all great and successful Pari, leaders have given—that they had something in their minds besides the next election. They were not cynical.” He concluded: “Everyone admires courage & the greenest garlands are for those who possess it.”