An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (33 page)

Jack came to regret his decision. His failure to join all his fellow Democrats and a majority of the Senate in condemning McCarthy’s disgraceful behavior became an enduring political problem. Jack gave a number of unconvincing explanations for his non-vote. “I never said I was perfect,” he began one defense of himself in 1960. “I’ve made the usual quota of mistakes. The Joe McCarthy thing? I was caught in a bad situation. My brother was working for Joe. I was against it, I didn’t want him to work for Joe, but he wanted to. And how the hell could I get up there and denounce Joe McCarthy when my own brother was working for him? So it wasn’t so much a thing of political liability as it was a personal problem.” It was a weak and, if believed, selfish excuse.

His father, Kennedy also claimed, exerted pressure. “He liked McCarthy,” Jack said in the same interview. “He still has a good word to say for McCarthy if you were sitting around with him in the evening. Contribute money to support McCarthy? I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

In addition, Jack’s non-vote rested on a detached view of the people McCarthy attacked. “I had never known the sort of people who were called before the McCarthy committee,” Jack later told a journalist. “I agree that many of them were seriously manhandled, but they all represented a different world to me. What I mean is, I did not identify with them, and so I did not get as worked up as other liberals did.” Unquestionably, former Communist Party members, 1930s radicals hoping Marxism might rescue America from the Depression, were not part of any circle Jack frequented. But intellectuals and foreign service officers? They were objects of McCarthy’s public attacks as well, and Jack knew and admired some of these people.

In the final analysis, Jack offered a legalistic explanation for his non-vote. Reminding critics that he was in the hospital for back surgery during the Senate’s final deliberations on McCarthy, Jack said he was like an absent member of a jury who had not heard all the evidence and was not entitled to vote. This is, to say the least, not very convincing. The matter was more a moral issue than a legal or technical one, and it had not come out of the blue but after years of McCarthy’s misbehavior. Jack may have been more candid when he told a journalist in 1960, “I went into the hospital and I heard nothing about it and cared less and I didn’t have any contact with anyone at my office and maybe Ted [Sorensen] should have paired me [i.e., joined someone with an opposite vote in abstaining], but at the time I didn’t care about the thing. I couldn’t care less. I was in bad shape and I had other things on my mind.” His preoccupation with his health is no doubt true. Yet it seems inconceivable that Joe, Bobby, and others attentive to Jack’s political future would have let the vote on McCarthy slide by without a decision on what he should do. For someone who admired courage of any kind—physical, emotional, political—Kennedy failed the test by ducking the vote, avoiding taking a stand for reasons of political expediency, and short-term political expediency at that.

Jack’s inaction would have negative political consequences for the next six years. He repeatedly had to explain his non-vote to political opponents. His caution also bothered his conscience and made him more attentive to matters of political independence and courage. The best one can say about his passive response to the Senate’s vote on McCarthy is that he subsequently questioned his own decision and publicly celebrated past examples of senators who had shown more political courage than he had.

PRIVATE CONCERNS PREOCCUPIED
Kennedy during the debate on condemning McCarthy’s behavior. In 1953, he had reluctantly decided to marry. Up till that time, he had seemed perfectly content to be the “Gay Young Bachelor,” as a
Saturday Evening Post
article then described him: a handsome, casual millionaire who dashed about Washington in “his long convertible, hatless, with the car’s top down,” and had the pick of the most beautiful, glamorous women in and out of town. But Jacqueline Bouvier, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old socialite, had entered his life, and political necessities dictated that he end his career as the “‘Senate’s Confirmed Bachelor.’” One close Kennedy friend doubted that Jack would have married if he had lost the senate race in 1952, but a wife was essential for a young senator intent on higher office.

This is not to suggest that he was marrying strictly for reasons of political expediency; he had, in fact, fallen in love with Jackie. In 1951, after they met at a dinner party given by their journalist friend Charlie Bartlett, they began a two-year courtship. From the first, Jackie seemed like an ideal mate, or as close to it as Jack was likely to find: physically attractive, bright and thoughtful, shy but charming, and from a prominent Catholic
Social Register
family. Jackie also added to Jack’s public aura, which partly satisfied the political side of the marriage. She helped legitimize Jack’s standing as an American Brahmin—a royal marrying another member of the country’s aristocracy.

They shared backgrounds of personal suffering. Jackie’s parents, John Vernou Bouvier III, a New York Stock Exchange member, and Janet Lee Bouvier, had divorced when Jackie was nine. Tensions with her mother and an absent father, whose drinking and womanizing further separated him from his family, had made Jackie distrustful of people and something of a loner. By contrast, Jack had countered his anguish about his health and parental strains by constant engagement with friends. Though outwardly opposites in their detachment from and affinity for people, beneath the skin they were not so different.

“He saw her as a kindred spirit,” Lem Billings said. “I think he understood that the two of them were alike. They had both taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and,” Billings emphasized, “learned to
make themselves up
as they went along. . . . They were so much alike. Even the names—Jack and Jackie: two halves of a single whole. They were both actors and I think they appreciated each other’s performances. It was unbelievable to watch them work a party. . . . Both of them had the ability to make you feel that there was no place on earth you’d rather be than sitting there in intimate conversation with them.” Chuck Spalding said that “Jack appreciated her. He really brightened when she appeared. You could see it in his eyes; he’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie
interested
him, which was not true of many women.”

But there were also frictions that threatened the potential union. Joe Kennedy worried that Jack might not want to give up his freedom. “I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married,” Joe wrote Jack’s friend Torb Macdonald six weeks before the wedding. “Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others.”

Jack’s reluctance expressed itself in a “spasmodic courtship” that bothered Jackie. She was in Europe for a while after they began dating, and when she returned, Jack’s campaign for the Senate took priority over the courtship. After that, Jack was often in Massachusetts, where he would call her “from some oyster bar . . . with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington.” Possibly more threatening to the relationship were rumors of Jack’s womanizing. But this, in fact, actually seemed to make him more attractive to Jackie. Chuck Spalding believed that “she wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like old Black Jack [Bouvier],” her father, whose philandering had destroyed his marriage to Jackie’s mother. “It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations,” Spalding said. “We all talked about it—even Jack, who didn’t particularly go for Freud, but said that Jackie had a ‘father crush.’ What was so surprising was that Jackie, who was so intelligent in other things, didn’t seem to have a clue about this one.”

They married at Jackie’s stepfather’s estate in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953. It was a celebrity affair attended by the rich and famous and numerous members of the press, who described it as the social event of the year—the marriage of “Queen Deb” to America’s most eligible bachelor. “At last I know the true meaning of rapture,” Jack wired his parents during his honeymoon in Acapulco. “Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart. Thanks mom and dad for making me worthy of her.”

This devotion did not last long. The first fifteen months of their marriage produced tensions that were some of the “other things” that were on Jack’s mind during McCarthy’s condemnation. Jackie was unhappy with the priority Jack gave his work over her; even when he was at home, she said, he seemed so preoccupied that she might “as well be in Alaska.” “I was alone almost every weekend,” she recalled. “It was all wrong. Politics was sort of my enemy and we had no home life whatsoever.” Jack complained that she spent money like water and redecorated their various residences so often that he felt “like a transient.” He tried to rein her in. “[Jack] insists that Jackie either travel or eat well,” Rose wrote daughter Pat, “so the week ends she spends money on traveling she has to practically starve at home.”

Since they had not lived together before marrying, Jackie was unprepared for what she called Jack’s “violent” independence—by which she meant not just his habit of going off with his male friends but, more important, his thinly disguised promiscuity. In theory, she may have been drawn to her husband’s bad side, but the practical result was painful. She was not, Lem Billings recalled, “prepared for the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.” Jackie rationalized Jack’s behavior by saying, “I don’t think there are any men who are faithful to their wives. Men are such a combination of good and evil.” But one of Jack’s friends recalled that “after the first year they were together, Jackie was wandering around looking like the survivor of an airplane crash.”

Jackie’s unhappiness was no inducement to Jack to restrain himself. In the summer of 1956, while she was in the late stages of a pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage, Jack went on a yachting trip with George Smathers in the Mediterranean, where he enjoyed “a bacchanal, with several young women getting on and off the boat at its ports of call.” He was especially drawn to “a stunning but not particularly intelligent blonde who . . . referred to herself as ‘Pooh.’” Even after getting the news that Jackie had lost their child, Jack did not decide to go home until Smathers warned him that a divorce would play havoc with his presidential ambitions. In 1958, when younger brother Ted got married, Jack was caught on tape whispering to him “that being married didn’t really mean that you had to be faithful to your wife.”

Health problems compounded Jack’s marital tensions. After the diagnosis of his Addison’s disease in September 1947, he continued to struggle with medical concerns. Over the next six years, headaches, upper respiratory infections, stomachaches, urinary tract discomfort, and almost constant back pain plagued him. He consulted an ear, nose, and throat specialist about his headaches, took medication and applied heat fifteen minutes a day to ease his stomach troubles, consulted urologists about his bladder and prostate discomfort, had DOCA pellets implanted and took daily oral doses of cortisone to control his Addison’s disease, and struggled unsuccessfully to find relief from his back miseries. “Senator Kennedy has been a patient of the Lahey Clinic at intervals since 1936, and has had quite a variety of conditions,” a Lahey Clinic urologist summed up Jack’s problems in March 1953. The physician described him as “doing well” in regard to his Addison’s disease. In 1951, however, while in Japan during his Far East trip, he had suffered a severe Addisonian crisis. He ran a temperature of 106 degrees and the doctors feared for his life. The episode convinced him to be more fastidious about taking his medicine, and over the next two years his back problems became his principal complaint.

In July 1953, Kennedy entered George Washington University Hospital for back treatment. By the following January, with no relief in sight, he consulted a specialist at New York Hospital, and then in April he entered the Lahey Clinic for further consultations. The pain had become almost unbearable. X rays showed that the fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, most likely a consequence of the corticosteroids he was taking for the Addison’s disease. He could not bend down to pull a sock on his left foot and he had to climb and descend stairs moving sideways. Beginning in May, he had to rely on crutches to get around, and his walks to the Senate from his office on hard marble floors for quorum and roll calls became daily ordeals. His discomfort made him so short-tempered that Evelyn Lincoln considered leaving her job. A brief stay in the Bethesda Naval Hospital in July provided no remedy. In August, a team of Lahey physicians visited him at the Cape, where they described a complicated surgery to achieve spinal and sacroiliac fusions. They explained that without the operation he might lose his ability to walk, but they warned that so difficult a surgery on someone with Addison’s disease posed a grave risk of a fatal infection.

Rose Kennedy said later, “Jack was determined to have the operation. He told his father that even if the risks were fifty-fifty, he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.” Joe tried to dissuade Jack from chancing the surgery, reminding him of FDR’s extraordinary achievements despite being confined to a wheelchair. But Jack assured him, “‘Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll make it through.’” After he entered New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery on October 10, the team of endocrinologists and surgeons postponed the operation three times until October 21 to ensure an “extended metabolic work-up prior to, during, and after surgery.”

The more-than-three-hour operation was a limited success. A metal plate was inserted to stabilize the lumbar spine. Afterward a urinary tract infection put Jack’s life in jeopardy. (Steroids are also immunosuppressives and make infection more likely and more serious.) He went into a coma, and a priest was called to administer the last rites. Fearful of losing his second son, Joe wept openly before Arthur Krock. “His entire body shook with anger and sorrow,” Rose recalled. But by December, Jack had shaken the infection and recovered sufficiently to be moved to the family’s Palm Beach home. It was clear, however, that he remained far from well; his doctors could not promise that he would ever walk again. Moreover, there was reason to believe that the plate itself was infected. Consequently, in February, another operation was performed at the same New York hospital to remove the plate. Extracting it meant removing three screws that had been drilled into the bone and replacing shattered cartilage with a bone graft. After another three months recuperating in Florida, Jack returned in May to Washington, where he received a warm welcome from Senate colleagues who admired his determination to maintain his career in the face of such debilitating medical problems.