An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (79 page)

No rational person faced with possible responsibility for a nuclear war, in which tens of millions of people would die, could live without substantial tension. Yet that tension was never evident from what Kennedy said to friends, all of whom, with the exception of Bobby, he kept at arms’ length. There was no one who could readily describe himself as a close Kennedy friend—not any of the White House insiders, not Sorensen or Schlesinger, nor any of the three members of the Irish mafia, O’Brien, O’Donnell, and Powers. “He and I continued to be close in a peculiarly impersonal way,” Sorensen said later. And pre-presidential friends like Billings, Paul Fay, Torby Macdonald, Smathers, and Walton were less close than before.

Although he kept his counsel about his innermost feelings, people around the president detected signs of stress. “He was tired and a little cranky,” Evelyn Lincoln recorded in a diary entry describing one instance of the president’s response to his burdens. “So much depends on my actions, so I am seeing fewer people, simplifying my life, organizing it so that I am not always on the edge of irritability,” he told Dave Powers. In the summer of 1961, after a meeting with the president, Averell Harriman thought Kennedy was “less tense than when I saw him last, but his hands are still constantly in motion.” In October 1961, when reporters asked Bobby, “Do you think your brother can handle the Presidency without harming his health?” he replied that the demands on him were no greater than what he had faced during the presidential campaign. But he acknowledged that “the responsibilities are so great and weigh so heavily that it is bound” to have an impact.

Personal problems added to the strains of office, testing Kennedy’s physical and emotional endurance. His health troubles were a constant strain on his ability to meet presidential responsibilities. The records of his maladies for August 1961 provide a window into his struggle to remain effectively attentive to the public’s business. His stomach and urinary ailments were a daily distraction. On August 9, for example, he complained of “gut” problems, “loose stool,” and “cramps.” On the morning of the eleventh, he woke up at 5:00
A.M.
with abdominal discomfort. On August 23, tests showed an “
E. coli”
urinary tract infection at the same time he was suffering “acute diarrhea” and the usual back miseries. Codeine sulfate and procaine injections for his pain, penicillin for his infection, cortisone for his Addison’s, Bentyl, Lomotil, Transentine, and paregoric for his colitis, testosterone to counter weight loss, and Ritalin for night rest gave him some relief, but they caused him to complain of feeling “tired,” “groggy,” and “sleepy.” “He was being treated with narcotics all the time,” Dr. Jeffrey Kelman, a physician who reviewed JFK’s medical records said. “He was tired because he was being doped up.”

Kennedy’s back pain was his greatest physical distraction, not simply because it made it harder to focus his attention but because it was more difficult to hide from a public that thought of him as athletic and robust. Something as simple as bending over a lectern to read a speech caused him terrible pain. Out of sight of the press, he went up and down helicopter stairs one step at a time. Janet Travell worked with engineers to design a reading stand that would reduce the strain, but solving the lectern problem was no cure-all. (His friend Charlie Bartlett thought that diet was at the root of JFK’s difficulties. Bartlett saw the richness of the White House food and all that wine and “those damned daiquiris” he was consuming as the culprits.) In June 1961, after the administration’s food for peace program director George McGovern had expressed sympathy to Bobby about JFK’s suffering, Bobby acknowledged the seriousness of the difficulty. If it were not for Travell’s care during the last several years, Bobby wrote, his brother “would not presently be President of the United States.” To relieve his suffering, which in the spring and summer of 1961 had become almost unbearable, Travell injected him with procaine two or three times a day. On August 27 she noted in her records that Kennedy’s cries of pain in response to the injections brought Jackie in from another room to see what was wrong. Travell’s shots were in addition to the concoction of painkillers and amphetamines that Max Jacobson was administering.

White House physician Admiral George Burkley believed that the injections as well as the back braces and positioning devices that immobilized Kennedy were doing more harm than good. Burkley and some Secret Service men who observed the president’s difficulties getting up from a chair and his reliance on crutches feared that he would soon be unable to walk and might end up in a wheelchair. During Kennedy’s meeting with Harold Macmillan in Bermuda in December, the prime minister recorded that, “in health, I thought the President
not
in good shape. His back is hurting. He cannot sit long without pain.” Burkley now insisted that Dr. Hans Kraus, a New York orthopedic surgeon, be consulted. Eugene Cohen, an endocrinologist who had been treating Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, directly urged him not to rely on Travell for the treatment of his back problems but instead to follow Burkley’s recommendations. When Travell resisted Burkley’s suggestion that they consult Kraus, Burkley threatened to go to the president.

Kraus confirmed Burkley’s worst concerns. A brusque Austrian émigré, Kraus told Kennedy that if he continued the injections and did not begin regular exercise therapy to strengthen his back and abdominal muscles, he would become a cripple. Fearful that Kraus’s visits to the White House might trigger press inquiries and unwanted speculation about his health, Kennedy was reluctant to accept his recommendation. The lost medical kit and apparent attempts to steal his medical records during the 1960 campaign had put Kennedy on edge about the potential political harm from opponents armed with information about his health problems.

Kennedy’s ailments were not life threatening, unlike those faced by several earlier presidents, principally Cleveland, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. But because ignoring Kraus’s advice might have eventually confined him to a wheelchair, Kennedy accepted that something had to be done. He and Kraus agreed to describe the therapy as exercises improving the president’s condition from very good to excellent. He began a regimen of three exercise sessions a week in a small White House gymnasium next to the basement swimming pool. Barring Travell from treating Kennedy, Burkley and Kraus used exercises, massages, and heat therapy to ease his back spasms. A telephone in Kraus’s car gave the president immediate access to him. Becoming part of Kennedy’s daily routine, the exercises reduced his pain and increased his mobility. Performed against a backdrop of his favorite country-and-western and show tunes, the exercise therapy became a pleasant respite from the pressures of daily meetings and demands that crowded Kennedy’s schedule. By January 1962, Burkley and Kraus saw him having a better month than at any time in 1961. At the end of February, they described the past four weeks, “medically speaking,” as the “most uneventful month since the inauguration; since the 1960 campaign, for that matter.” And in April they pronounced his “general condition excellent.” Nevertheless, Kennedy remained so concerned to hide the truth about his health that on April 10 O’Donnell ordered Travell and Burkley to “have all medical records, including all notes relating to the health of the President . . . stored in the vault maintained by Mrs. Lincoln.”

Jacqueline Kennedy both eased and added to her husband’s burdens. Her distaste for politics and the obligations of being First Lady irritated Kennedy. During the presidential campaign, she told Johnson’s secretary that she felt “so totally inadequate, so totally at a loss, and I’m pregnant; and I don’t know how to do anything.” Early in the presidency, Kennedy asked Angier Biddle Duke, White House chief of protocol, to discuss the First Lady’s role with Jackie. When Duke explained the usual ceremonial duties of the job and asked her what else she might like to do, she replied, “As little as possible. I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I’m not a public official.” Cass Canfield, the editor of
Harper’s,
recalled a visit with Jackie at the White House: “I don’t think she enjoyed political life much, although she forced herself to become accustomed to it. . . . It was perfectly evident to me that Jackie K was looking forward to a long weekend in Middleburg [Virginia, at the Kennedy’s Glen Ora estate] and was more interested in what she was doing there than in the White House.” A Secret Service agent, who spoke to journalist Seymour Hersh about his two-year assignment at the Kennedy White House, recalled feeling “sorry for Jackie. She was real lonesome. She seemed sad—just a sad lady.”

There is testimony from Jackie’s own hand of her initial unhappiness as First Lady. In a June 1962 eleven-page letter to Bill Walton, she asked him to become head of her Fine Arts Commission. She acknowledged that “it would be cruel to put all the ritual and paperwork into your life—Like me—you hate it and 9/10 of it is unnecessary. . . . Before you cringe completely from what looks like a big headache—just let me tell you what I did—I was tired—and I wanted to see my children—so I just told Tish [Baldrige, the White House social secretary]—who nearly died from the shock—that I would NEVER go out—lunches, teas, degrees, speeches, etc. For 2 months it was a flap. Now it is a precedent established. . . . I have learned one thing—and now my life here which I dreaded—and which at first overwhelmed me—is now all under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family—the last thing I expected to find in the W. House. . . . And now my life is the way I want it—though deadly little details always do crop up.”

One of those “little details” that incensed JFK was Jackie’s extravagance. She spent without regard for cost, and Kennedy complained that she was reducing his capital. The official White House entertainment budget could not begin to cover her outlays, which Kennedy then had to pay himself. The overruns bothered him so much that he asked a prominent accountant to help rein in Jackie’s spending on ceremonial functions. According to one historian, Jackie’s personal expenses in 1961 and 1962 exceeded her husband’s annual $100,000 salary; nearly half went for clothing. One day, when a congressman entered the Oval Office for a meeting, an agitated Kennedy showed him $40,000 worth of bills for Jackie’s clothes. ”What would you do if your wife did that?” JFK asked. That evening Kennedy confronted Jackie in front of Ben Bradlee and his wife. “What about this?” he asked. Jackie lamely countered that she knew nothing about it. After all, she said, it was not as if she had bought a sable coat or anything like it.

Far more distressing, in December 1961 Joe Kennedy suffered a stroke. Although urged by doctors to counter warning signs of such an event by taking anticoagulants, Joe, who disliked being out of control and refused to acknowledge any vulnerability, had rejected the advice. While playing golf at his Palm Beach club during Christmas week 1961, he became ill and was rushed to a local hospital, where a priest administered last rites. When informed that a life-threatening stroke had felled his father, Kennedy flew to his bedside. Although conscious, Joe could not recognize his son for two days. The stroke left Joe paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak clearly. For the remaining eight years of his life, he struggled to talk and walk. His immobility was complicated by two later heart attacks. One can only imagine how much Joe’s impaired, barely coherent speech and loss of physical vigor upset his son. A family premium on athleticism, physical beauty, and self-control must have made Joe’s dependency on others for his most basic human needs a painful reminder to JFK of his own vulnerability.

One response to all the difficulties crowding in on Kennedy was a more frenetic pace of womanizing than ever. The sources of his pre-presidential affinity for philandering—the examples set by the English aristocrats he admired, like Lord Melbourne, and his father, together with his sense of mortality engendered by health problems and the premature deaths of his brother and sister—still shaped his behavior. His knowledge of how close the world might be to a nuclear war only heightened Kennedy’s impulse to live life to the fullest—or with as much private self-indulgence as possible. Truman and Eisenhower, of course, shouldered the same burden without this sort of behavior. But with Kennedy’s womanizing an already well-developed habit, the doomsday prospect may have added to his rationalization for what he probably would have been doing anyway.

Kennedy’s womanizing had, of course, always been a form of amusement, but it now also gave him a release from unprecedented daily tensions. Kennedy had affairs with several women, including Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law; two White House secretaries playfully dubbed Fiddle and Faddle; Judith Campbell Exner, whose connections to mob figures like Sam Giancana made her the object of FBI scrutiny; and a “tall, slender, beautiful” nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern, who worked in the press office during two summers. (She “had no skills,” a member of the press staff recalled. “She couldn’t type.”) There were also Hollywood stars and starlets and call girls paid by Dave Powers, the court jester and facilitator of Kennedy’s indulgences, who arranged trysts in hotels and swimming pools in California, Florida, and at the White House.

There was something almost madcap about Kennedy’s behavior. He told Harold Macmillan during their Bermuda meeting in December 1961 that if he did not have a woman every three days, he would have a terrible headache. But sometimes his trysts involved more than sex. Tensions in his marriage and his public position, which barred a divorce, may have made his affair with Mary Meyer understandable. Meyer was a beautiful, intelligent, and sophisticated woman from the politically prominent Pinchot family. More important, she was a source of comfort to him. “He could enjoy life with her,” JFK biographer Herbert Parmet has written. “He could talk in ways she understood, and their trust was mutual. . . . She was an important support. She understood all about the pompous asses he had to put up with. When he was with her, the rest of the world could go to hell. He could laugh with her at the absurdity of the things he saw all around his center of power.” Meyer believed that Kennedy loved her and that were it not for uncontrollable circumstances they would have been permanently together. Kennedy apparently thought otherwise, saying more than once to Ben Bradlee, “Mary would be rough to live with.” But there was no doubt that Meyer meant something more to him than many of the other women did.