The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (62 page)

The relationship between Joe and Rose was as proper as that between a king and queen. “She was super-concerned with her looks, her body, and her clothes were really an obsession with her,” Des Rosiers reflected. “But there was no depth to her, no womanly sexuality. But she presented a very nice picture. She believed that every minute of your life had to be a learning experience. She brought up her children and grandchildren that way. She tried to bring me up that way because she would often say, ‘Well, you should do this, you should do that.’ And I felt like saying, ‘Well, I’m doing the thing I shouldn’t do.’”

J
oe was a vibrant vital man in his sixties with a mistress less than half his age. It was his son whom he had groomed for the highest of offices who had an old man’s gait, hobbling around like a cripple. Jack was not a man to broadcast his discomfort, but his back pain had become so overwhelming that he had become increasingly irritable. He could hardly make it over to the floor of the Senate.

To Jack, life on crutches was no life at all, and he set out to find a remedy so that he could live as he felt he must live. In the summer of 1954, he traveled to Boston to consult with Dr. Elmer C. Bartels and other specialists at
the Lahey Clinic about an operation. Dr. Bartels had been treating Jack for seven years. The doctor had a realistic, if disheartening, appraisal of his patient’s prospects. Bartels believed that Jack had been born with an unstable back and that his Addison’s disease made an operation even less feasible. Bartels was eminently aware of the limitations of his profession and believed that Jack would simply have to exercise carefully and live a sedentary life.

“I don’t know if the words ‘back pain’ follow,” Dr. Bartels reflected, emphasizing that Jack could have lived with his condition. “I think discomfort. He never took care of his back. He’d come up to Boston and go scrimmage with the Boston College football team. It just wasn’t his temperament to take care of himself. He played touch football, and you can certainly injure your back playing that.”

Jack went shopping in New York for a doctor willing to attempt the dangerous, radical surgery. The physicians who agreed to perform the surgery were proposing to break the bone and then reset it, hoping that it would grow back properly. The doctors realized, as they wrote later, that it was “deemed dangerous to proceed with these operations.”

Jack was thirty-seven years old. He had a dazzling political career, a beautiful young wife, and a fortune. The operation would probably improve his back only marginally; it was also possible that the operation would not improve it at all, or would kill him. Weighing all these factors, another man would have turned away and limped back to Washington. That Jack did not do so suggests the magnitude of his ambition, the strength of his identity as a vibrant sexual being, and the magnitude of his pain. For all those reasons, he was willing to roll the dice marked “life” and “death.”

Jack wanted the whole business put behind him. He insisted that the two fusions be done the same day, rather than taking the more conservative approach of having two separate operations. The operation, performed on October 21, 1954, by Dr. Philip D. Wilson at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery, with Ephraim Shorr there in an advisory capacity, was deemed a success. Three days later, however, Jack was stricken with a urinary tract infection and slipped into a coma.

The priests arrived and administered the last rites. The deathwatch began. Jack’s father was devastated. Joe’s sons were the last half-drained reservoir of his faith, and that day Krock saw Joe cry as he had not cried since the death of Joe Jr. He had hardly wiped away his tears when Jack began slowly to revive, but with horrifying setbacks. Jackie was sitting beside the bed when he received a blood transfusion to which he reacted adversely, his whole face puffing up.

Jack suffered weeks of what only a resolute optimist would have called
convalescence. He lay there with a draining, open, eight-inch wound on his back. “So I was just sitting really in bed with a lot of acute discomfort,” he recalled. “I didn’t read much because it was God-damned uncomfortable, and then I was being woken up every half hour for the first two weeks to do this test on my blood.”

It wasn’t just his back that was troubling Jack, but a recurrence of the nonspecific prostatitis that probably was a venereal infection he had picked up at Harvard and that had periodically plagued him ever since. He had been blessedly free of the problem during his honeymoon with Jackie, but upon returning to Washington he had begun to suffer again. On occasion he had a large number of “pus cells” in his secretion. When he entered the hospital, he had what his physician specialist, Dr. Thomas A. Morrissey, called an apparent “acute attack of mild prostatitis … the prostate was tender, somewhat swollen and there was a moderate urinary urgency.” The sitz baths and Pyridium, a urinary tract analgesic prescribed by the physician’s brother and partner, Dr. John H. Morrissey, seemed to have worked, but in the aftermath of the operation, the problem and all its pain were back again.

When Jack had spent weeks in bed as a teenager at the Mayo Clinic, he had been able to weave a sexual fantasy for his friend Billings that projected him away from his wounded body. As he lay in a hospital bed this time, he attempted to distance himself as best he could from his broken body and constant pain. He had an upside-down picture of Marilyn Monroe pinned to the door as if to remind himself of what lay out there in the world beyond his hospital bed. He had stacks of books on the floor to remind him of other aspects of the world outside. He was often on the phone, even talking when the nurses changed his dressing or yet another doctor poked at his dormant form. He had many guests too, especially young women. One of them, Priscilla Johnson, was a student of Russian affairs at Columbia University who had worked for a few weeks in Jack’s Senate office. He had not managed to bed the twenty-three-year-old student, but he called her periodically and had met her several times in New York. “Tell them you’re my sister,” Jack told her on the phone. “You got to be a relative to get in here.” Johnson did as she was told. “I’ve never seen a man with so many sisters,” the receptionist said as she pointed the attractive young woman down the hall.

Jack thought at times of Gunilla, especially when a dark-haired Swedish nurse entered his room. He was terribly sick, but he fantasized about driving up to that house high above the Riviera and meeting Gunilla there. “We stay in session in Washington until the end of July and then I return to the mountains of Cagnes,” he wrote her in December.

Most of the time there was no respite from his pain. “You could see that
he [was in pain] by the look in his eyes,” said Janet Auchincloss, his mother-in-law. “He still would always talk about the world you were in and not tell you about his operation, which is unusual.”

While he lay in bed, the conflict over McCarthy rose to a dramatic call for a censure vote in the Senate. Several years afterward Jack scoffed at those who had attempted to turn the conflict over Joe McCarthy into an important moral issue. “I think your attitude toward this [McCarthy] thing right through was you seemed to want to divest it of any great moral, ethical [dimension] to a literal specific thing,” Jack’s authorized biographer, James MacGregor Burns, told him.

“That’s right,” Jack replied. “Well, I think that’s right…. Hell, if you get into the question of just disapproving of senators, you’re going to be in some difficulty…. I don’t think, Jim, you could probably tell me very well what McCarthy ultimately was censured for.”

Jack only had to look among his New England colleagues to find senators who would have told the junior senator from Massachusetts why McCarthy was being censured. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, was spending most of her term in a lone crusade against McCarthy. Ralph Flanders, a gritty, taciturn Vermonter, was another unlikely hero of the anti-McCarthy crusade. Jack had only to look in Boston at his onetime campaign manager and former friend, Mark Dalton, to see a citizen rising up against McCarthy. Dalton had been sitting in the front row when McCarthy had brought his investigative hearings to Boston. He had been so appalled at what he saw that he ended up running for the Senate himself in 1954. He got nowhere, however, on his anti-McCarthy platform and believed that the Kennedy family was behind much of the negative press he received.

Earlier that year the television networks broadcast the Army-McCarthy hearings with Bobby sitting there as minority counsel. Americans watched mesmerized as attorney Joseph Welch told McCarthy in a voice nearly breaking with emotion: “Until this moment, Senator, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Neither had most Americans. Although at the beginning of the year a majority had supported McCarthy, by the end of the hearings most Americans opposed him.

In Congress, the toughest votes are often delayed by tacit agreement long enough so that what once would have been a heroic stance becomes merely expedient. That was decidedly the case for most of Jack’s Democratic colleagues when, on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, 67—22. Jack shared the distinction of not voting with only one other senator, Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin. The moderate Republican wangled an invitation to an economic conference in Brazil because “it would be a nice way to get out of the McCarthy business.”

For all his intellectual detachment, Jack was not a man to retreat into narrow, self-serving legalisms to defend his actions. But this time retreat he did, running away from the great moral issue of the decade into a thicket of justifications. “So I was rather in ill grace personally to be around hollering about what McCarthy had done in 1952 or 1951 when my brother had been on the staff in 1953,” he rationalized to Burns. “That is really the guts of the matter.” If Jack could not make a distinction between Bobby’s well-documented investigation of shipping to China and McCarthy’s egregious excesses, then he suffered from a political myopia of disastrous proportions. Beyond that, his brother had managed to change sides in the midst of battle and by his actions had helped push the Senate toward this historic vote.

If Jack had gone along with all the other Democratic senators, his vote would not have been long remembered, and he would surely not have been saluted for courage the way his critics condemned him now for cowardice. He bristled at the charge, though only in an unpublished interview with Burns could he display the full volcanic range of his displeasure:

Am I going to vote in the hospital when I was God damn sick on how he treated the censure committee and how he treated Arthur Watkins on the floor of the Senate? They say McCarthy was an obvious son of a bitch, and we all should have been up making speeches against him … but who did it…. [Hubert] Humphrey never made a single speech, nor did [Stuart] Symington until the gun was put at his head … when it actually got to a personal dispute with he and Joe, but it wasn’t on moral grounds. Nor did any other senators, except [Mike] Monroney and [Herbert] Lehman and [Thomas] Hennings and [J. William] Fulbright…. Now I think that anybody who is deathly against McCarthy in the beginning has a right to say that my sensitivity in regard to the abuse of the civil rights and liberties of people were not sufficiently attuned to recognize the real menace of McCarthy. That’s a reasonable indictment, and I don’t mind accepting it … though I would put myself with 90 percent of the senators, which is no excuse, but which at least puts it in proportion. But they have moved beyond that in their criticism. They almost associate me with McCarthy.

Just before Christmas, Jack was wrapped up in a plaid blanket, placed on a stretcher, and taken by ambulance to La Guardia Airport to be flown down to Palm Beach. A nurse flew with him, along with Jackie and Bobby, who hoped that he would be able to recuperate in the Florida sun. The gaping, open wound in Jack’s back was not closing. Not only was he in pain, but his
body remained vulnerable. He limped along the beach beside his old friend Chuck Spalding. “How is it now?” he asked. “Is any stuff running out of it?”

Spalding had an astute sense of Jack’s emotional condition, and he tried to change the subject, playing the buffoon, or the wit, whatever worked to get Jack thinking about something else. Jack just wasn’t getting better, and in February he was flown up once again to New York. He was so sick that the last rites were administered once again over his dormant form. And while surgeons operated, removing the metal plate in his back and doing a bone graft, his family huddled outside united in prayer.

This time the operation seemed successful and Jack was able to walk out of the hospital and return to Palm Beach for more months of recovery. By mid-February, he was able to go through his mail and dictate a lengthy memorandum to his Washington staff. He was already focused on his reelection campaign three years hence. He told his staff that for “anybody we did a favor for … take their name for our political file so that we will have … it in 1958 when we need it for the campaign … and go back through all the letters since we started in Congress and see the people from the correspondence … that would help us in future campaigns.”

Jack was not a man of natural solicitousness, but he recognized that politics was a matter of relationships. The cheapest and best way to win votes was often through letters or cards or the baby books that he sent out to new parents in Massachusetts. He told his staff how to answer each letter and whether to address the person by his or her first name. He told his aides how to handle journalists: “I don’t know Raymond Lajoie … and I don’t know really what sort of story he wants to write—definitely can’t use any pictures from here—no quotes— … I don’t think there is anything in it so that Ted can turn him off tactfully.”

Jackie was there with Jack in Florida. Marriages are tested in the bad times, not the good. And the bad times always come, though usually not as early as they did in Jack and Jackie’s marriage. Jackie had hardly said her wedding vows before her new and much older husband became seriously ill. In that dreadful fall of 1954, she not only saw her husband almost die but miscarried what would have been their first child. In the months since then, she had spent most of her time succoring him. She changed the dressing on his open, draining wound. She put his slippers and socks on his feet and sat with him for hours. She took dictation and helped him research a book he was writing. She flew to Washington and in Virginia found a white Georgian mansion known as Hickory Hill where she and Jack would move once he recuperated. Jackie proved herself a devoted wife without a hint of the sulkiness that previously had so perturbed her husband.