The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  Dr. George G. Burkley was the other day-to-day source of medical advice in the White House. Dr. Travell was so possessive of her access to the president that the assistant White House physician had been on staff for two months before Dr. Travell even introduced him to Kennedy. Dr. Travell had little choice but to let the rival doctor see the president eventually since the navy captain, soon to be named a rear admiral, always traveled with the presidential party.

  In Ottawa, Dr. Burkley told the president that he had aggravated his back by the way he held the shovel. The navy doctor suggested to Dr. Travell that the president see Dr. Hans Kraus, who believed in the efficacy of exercise and physical therapy in treating Kennedy’s pain. Dr. Burkley’s proposition was a subtle criticism of the now-celebrated White House physician. Dr. Burkley and his colleagues at Bethesda Naval Hospital were becoming increasingly worried by Dr. Travell’s promiscuous use of novocaine. It was not a drug to be injected two or three times daily, day after day. Eventually its effect would be deadened and the president might move on to employing narcotics to assuage his pain.

  Dr. Burkley and his Naval Hospital colleagues were not the only serious critics of Dr. Travell. Dr. Dorothea E. Hellman, a highly regarded doctor at Georgetown University and the National Institutes of Health, was growing dismayed. “I had the opportunity to see a great deal of Mr. Kennedy and was aware of the fact that he was not only pigmented but often ‘Cushingoid,’ “she recalled. “This meant that he was alternating between periods when he received too little cortisone and periods during which he received too much cortisone. Clearly he had chosen a physician [Dr. Janet Travell] who was an expert on his back but knew little or no endocrinology and simply did what she thought was best.”

  Travell’s ministrations to the president had also begun to worry Dr. Cohen, who was treating Kennedy’s adrenal problems. “Dr. Cohen got her the White House job,” reflects a former close colleague. “He liked to be a kingmaker but he didn’t always recognize the frailties of those he chose and he sometimes came to regret what he had done.”

  Dr. Cohen reluctantly concluded, as he wrote his colleague Dr. Burkley later, that Dr. Travell was “a deceiving, incompetent, publicity-mad physician who only had one consideration in mind and that was herself.” Dr. Cohen was not an argumentative man, but he was a passionate doctor whose main divertissements were his wife, Regina, his German shepherd, a white Cadillac convertible, and his dahlias. “He was totally devoted to his patients,” reflected Dr. David V. Becker, his former student at the Cornell University College of Medicine and later his colleague there. “As a teacher, he made major points about always listening to the patient and responding to the patient’s need.”

  Dr. Cohen looked on with growing concern as Dr. Travell refused to invite Dr. Kraus down to consult with the president. Instead, she agreed to call in another prominent physician, Dr. Preston Wade, who in 1957 had drained the soft-tissue abscesses in Kennedy’s back. Dr. Wade prescribed treatments that did not include Travell’s novocaine injections, but she continued nonetheless with her dangerous treatments. “Then, as you know,” Dr. Cohen wrote Dr. Burkley in 1964, “there were just repeated series of injections without any response—injections that were not to have been given as outlined by Doctor Wade.”

  Dr. Travell’s jealous hold over the president’s care was threatened even more ominously by the arrival in the White House of Dr. Max Jacobson. The New York doctor, who had first treated Kennedy during the campaign, was a kindred spirit to Dr. Travell. He too promised absolution from physical pain, traveling always with a magical syringe that contained not novocaine but a mixture of amphetamine, vitamins, and other drugs. Kennedy had called Dr. Jacobson when Jackie was suffering from depression and headaches before his Canadian trip. His beautiful, young, outwardly healthy wife continued to be so disheartened with her life as first lady that she might not be able to accompany her husband on his European trip. Dr. Jacobson flew down to Palm Beach, where he spent four days, and gave Jackie injections that miraculously perked her up.

  Kennedy fooled his constituents, and he fooled many of the women he slept with, rarely playing the invalid. Now he would have to play the healthy man on the largest stage in the world, and he had only a few days to effect this transformation. The president invited Dr. Jacobson to Washington. Dr. Jacobson’s visits to the Kennedys were not going unnoticed. “Does JFK have a new personal physician?” a gossip columnist asked in the New York Daily News on May 12. “Dr. Max Jacobson, with offices at 155 E. 72nd St., has been making frequent phone calls to the White House.”

  The Manhattan physician flew down to Washington on May 23, only a week before the beginning of Kennedy’s European trip. The doctor once again gave Jackie an injection that immediately cured her migraine and ended her pouting uncertainty about whether she would accompany Kennedy. Then Dr. Jacobson saw the president, whose condition, to his eyes, appeared to have worsened: Dr. Travell had sprayed freezing ethyl chloride on his back, numbing it for a few minutes, but causing longer-term problems.

  Dr. Jacobson was a German Jew who had fled Berlin before the war and had a thick accent, a comforting manner, and a mystical, knowing aura. He applied to the president the same psychologically astute approach he took to all his patients. He first talked to Kennedy about scrubbing away all the detritus of his life—giving up alcohol (though that was hardly the president’s vice) and taking no opiates or dangerous drugs. He then lectured Kennedy on various exercises he should do to help his back. Only then did he administer what his patients had come to him for, a treatment that after all this worthy advice seemed just some more healthy business.

  Dr. Jacobson injected his own medical cocktail into the buttocks of his patients, talking about it as if it were no more than a laying on of hands. The treatment varied from patient to patient, but what Dr. Jacobson said he gave his patients was a mixture of hormones, vitamin B complex, vitamins A, C, D, and E, novocaine, enzymes, steroids, and amphetamines. Dr. Jacobson later claimed that he gave twenty milligrams of amphetamines to his patients. Most doctors prescribed only five milligrams for legitimate medical reasons, but Dr. Jacobson argued that his dosage was too small to be addictive and was made not toxic by its interaction with the other ingredients.

  The reality is that amphetamines cause extreme psychological dependency and a craving for larger and larger amounts in order to obtain the shortlived burst of euphoria. “That dosage would have made Kennedy very energetic for three or four hours,” says Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale, a world-renowned expert on steroids. “That begs the question of how often he was given these injections—often enough to make him an addict, say at least a few times a day, or just intermittently to give him that boost?”

  For his preferred patients, Dr. Jacobson mixed up batches of individualized dosages that they could inject themselves with when he was not there. Kennedy had long been adept at giving himself injections. If he did give himself the treatment, there were no markings on the vials to suggest just what he was shooting into his system or how the ingredients may have been changing. The doctor may have been particularly generous with the leader of the Free World, for whatever it was in the magical cocktail, the president stood up and pranced around the room like a Harvard quarterback ready to be called into the game.

  The next morning after treating Kennedy, Dr. Jacobson returned to the White House. He was becoming a familiar face to the Secret Service agents, who saw him walking in and out of the private quarters with his black bag in his hand. Dr. Jacobson recalled that Jackie showed him a vial of Demerol that she had found in Kennedy’s bathroom. The drug is a narcotic analgesic; while it would have deadened his pain, it was nothing that the president should have been taking without medical direction. The fact that Jackie showed Dr. Jacobson a vial suggests not only that the president was injecting the drug into his own body, but that Dr. Burkley and his colleagues were justified in their fear that Dr. Travell’s promiscuous use of novocaine would drive the president to try narcotics.

&nbs
p; Dr. Jacobson wrote in his unpublished autobiography that he told the president that this was a dangerous step he was taking. The drug was addicting and might affect his performance in the White House. If Kennedy did not throw the drug away, the doctor would no longer treat him. Dr. Jacobson’s ultimatum was doubly important, for not only was it the kind of admonishment that Kennedy rarely heard, but it surely suggested that in taking Dr. Jacobson’s own injections, the president ran no such risk. As it was, Kennedy was being treated by several doctors—Dr. Travell, Dr. Burkley, Dr. Wade, Dr. Cohen, and Dr. Jacobson—who were not all on good terms with one another and may not have informed one another about just what drugs they were administering to the president.

  While Kennedy created the illusion of health, Bobby was assuming burdens of authority he might not have had if his brother had been healthy. At nine o’clock on the evening of May 9, the attorney general walked along the dark empty space of the Washington Mall. Alongside him walked Georgi Bolshakov, a gregarious intelligence agent of the Red Army posing as a Russian journalist.

  The Bay of Pigs was hardly a month-old memory, and Bobby was not only taking a lead role in the entire Cuban issue but was also involving himself in secret contact with a Soviet agent. Bobby had set up the meeting through an American journalist, Frank Holeman, who had known the Russian for a number of years and had served as a conduit between the Soviets and the Eisenhower administration. Holeman had been the one originally to suggest the meeting, and both men had agreed.

  Bobby was entering into a chamber of echoes, where sounds bounced back and forth and words meant more than they seemed to mean, or less, or maybe nothing at all. He could not be sure just who it was he was talking to this spring evening, whether these words would reach Chairman Khrushchev, or if they did, whether they would be translated with all his nuance and intent. Nor could he know who might be secretly observing the two of them walking together, be it other Soviet agents or the CIA or the FBI. “We were appalled when Bobby had a [relationship with] known espionage agents who were in the Soviet embassy,” reflected the FBI’s former deputy director, Cartha DeLoach. “And it scared the hell out of us…. We knew about them because we were tailing those people. And we also had wiretaps on the Soviet embassy. It hurt us too, you know. Here we are breaking our butts working four and five hours a day overtime, and the attorney general of the United States, our proverbial boss, [is] going out and wining and dining these characters.”

  Bobby began by warning the Russian that his nation must not dare trifle with America. “If this underestimation of U.S. power takes hold,” he warned, “the American government will have to take corrective actions, changing the course of its policies.”

  The president did not need his brother to warn the Russians. Bobby was pushing forward an agenda for the summit, telling Bolshakov that the new administration was seeking a “new progressive policy … consistent with the national interest.” He said that the president had not lost hope for a test ban treaty and was willing to compromise so that the two leaders would have a document to sign at Vienna. He said that the two superpowers could sign an agreement on Laos as well, and that the new U.S. government would show a new face to the developing world, even borrowing “good ideas from Soviet aid programs.” America would reach out to the Third World. “Cuba is a dead issue,” he said. Bobby asked that Bolshakov tell his “friends” what he had said and let him know their reaction.

  After the debacle in Cuba, the president needed to fly out of Vienna with tangible agreements tucked under his arm. But in meeting with the mysterious Bolshakov, the Kennedys were taking risks that are rarely taken before such a crucial diplomatic encounter. They were letting the Soviets into their strategic thinking, allowing Khrushchev to know where the give was in the American positions. Beyond that, they were bypassing the entire government apparatus that dealt with the Soviet Union. The Soviet experts at the State Department were not pallid bureaucrats embedded in the past, hostile to the initiatives proposed by the administration, but some of the most deeply knowledgeable diplomats in government. Many of them were operating now without knowing that the Soviets had been given this unparalleled entree into the American positions.

  In the Soviet Union, paranoia was the higher sanity, and no one in the Kremlin would have thought to take Bobby at his word. They had their own rich dossier on his 1955 visit to their country, and if ever a man was an enemy of the people, it was Robert F. Kennedy. He had, as the KGB learned in dogging his every step, “mocked all Soviets” and pointedly managed “to expose only the negative facts in the USSR,” photographing “only the very bad things … crumbling clay factories, children who were poorly dressed, drunk Soviet officers, old buildings, lines at the market, fights, and the like.” He had “attempted to discover secret information” and asked about those in labor camps and prisons. And he had shown another decadent capitalist weakness by asking his Intourist guide to send a “woman of loose morals” to his room.

  When a man like this proffered an olive branch, either his arm was trembling in weakness or he held a pistol behind his back. The Soviets, however, prided themselves on not personalizing politics, and they saw Bobby as a representative of his class and time who was selling the latest American line. They instructed Bolshakov to meet with Bobby again, and rather than respond to the specific initiatives to offer him only the bland proclamations that were the tedious essence of their propaganda. He was to tell Bobby that on the crucial issue of Berlin, there would be no compromise: the Western powers would have to accept the fact that the Soviet Union was going to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, meaning in effect that West Berlin would be locked up within a sovereign state.

  Bobby’s worst mistake was to say that Cuba was a “dead issue.” It was a dead issue to his brother around the White House; his aides had learned that the Bay of Pigs was “almost a taboo subject.” That was the Kennedy pattern, to move on and away from anything unpleasant or negative. But if the Soviets might risk placing nuclear missiles on the island, as Bobby had written his brother after the Bay of Pigs, then Cuba was one of the most crucial issues of all to be discussed at the summit. It was irresponsible and dangerous to exclude the Cuban issue primarily because it was painful, immediate, and raw. Bolshakov’s bosses told him that they did not “understand what Robert Kennedy had in mind when he said that Cuba was a dead issue.” He was told to tell Bobby “if by that he meant that the United States will henceforth desist from aggressive actions and from interfering in the internal affairs of Cuba, then, without question, the Soviet Union welcomes this decision.”

  Khrushchev had studied under the toughest of masters in his apprenticeship to power. As a Ukrainian miner, he had fought in the Russian Revolution when the armed might of the Soviets won the day. In World War II, it was neither diplomacy nor grand strategy that defeated Hitler, but a generation of Russian manhood throwing itself forward against Hitler’s lines. Khrushchev was righteously proud of the Soviet sacrifices, and his ideological suspicions of men like the Kennedys were only enhanced by a Russian mistrust of outsiders. Bobby’s meetings with Bolshakov may have reinforced Khrushchev’s conviction that this new young president was a man of weakness, not strength, a man who could be pushed and bullied and played.

  It was one of those malevolent New England nights when the wind rattled the most secure shutters and the rain slashed down hard enough to keep all but the intrepid and foolish indoors. Inside the big house at Hyannis Port, Joe’s mood was as foul as the weather. He had become terribly conscious of his age, and worried that he was being shunted aside.

  “Goddamn it!” the old man cursed in the half-light to Frank Saunders, the new chauffeur. “He’s the president of the United States! You’d think he could at least order somebody to make a telephone call and tell his family what goddamn time he’ll be home—wouldn’t you, Frank—goddamn it!”

  Kennedy was coming home to Hyannis Port for the first time since he had taken office, to celebrate his forty-fourth birthday and r
elax a bit before flying to Europe and the summit. Joe had never waited for anybody and was damned if he was going to begin now at the age of seventy-two for a son who did not value his counsel the way he had before he entered the White House. He had gone to the considerable trouble of placing nude and seminude pinups on the wall of Kennedy’s room, the bathroom, his pillow, and dresser, and his son wasn’t even here yet to see his efforts.

  “The weather be damned!” Joe fumed in a manic rage inexplicable to the chauffeur. “He’s the president. I came all the way back here from France just to see him.”

  The only reply was the rain beating in staccato rhythms against the old house. “The hell with him,” Joe said in disdain, “I’m going to bed.”

  Joe was long asleep when the first headlights appeared out of the haze, the procession of black vehicles making its way to the door. A light went on in the limousine, and Kennedy stepped out into the rain wearing a felt hat and overcoat. Saunders grabbed the luggage and followed. “Send in the broads,” he thought he heard someone say, but did not turn back to look.

  Kennedy walked into the guest bedroom on the ground floor, followed by Lem Billings, who bounced up and down on the bed, making excitable sounds. The chauffeur couldn’t understand, but this was the kind of moment for which good old Lem lived. Kennedy’s friends calibrated their time with him as if it were a precious elixir that could be bottled and sold. They cut their personalities to fit the role that he preferred. Lem had seen how the president-elect treated subordinates, and he was not going to accept anything so menial and time-consuming as a mere position, even as assistant secretary of Commerce. He much preferred the proud title that he had given himself of “first friend,” the perpetual guest who showed up each Friday, to Jackie’s dismay, to provide endless amusement. On weekends Lem happily donned a jester’s robes and spoke the fool’s lines rather than attempting one of life’s major roles. He was amenable, genial, charming, witty—whatever cartwheels of personality amused his friend. He was not a true court jester, though, who in rhyme and song and wit utters hard truths that none of the king’s men dare speak.