The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (63 page)

As Jackie watched over her husband, Jack kept up a correspondence with
Gunilla, trying to arrange an assignation with her in the summer when he hoped to be recovered. The Swedish woman knew that Jack was married, but she believed that “he needed someone to love. It was all about love, unconditional, passionate love. I knew in the depths of my being that this was exactly the kind of love I could give him, and that he would give back to me.” Jack had already found a trusting, caring love in Jackie, as her conduct these last months should have told him. The problem was not that he had a wife incapable of deep love, but that he was apparently incapable of returning that emotion for more than a few days in a distant clime.

“I am anxious to see you,” Jack wrote Gunilla that spring. “Is it not strange after all these months? Perhaps at first it shall be a little difficult as we shall be strangers—but not strangers—and I am sure it will all work out and I still think that though it is a long way to Gunilla—it is worth it.”

In April, Jack was ready to fly back to Washington when his crutch collapsed, and he reinjured himself. Five weeks later, on May 24, 1955, Jack walked back into the Senate chamber and received a hearty round of applause. He appeared to be fully recuperated, yet his back and neck troubled him so much that he could not turn to one side without moving his entire body. He looked tanned and fit, although he was severely anemic. His cholesterol level was about 350. His left leg was supposedly slightly shorter than the right, another potential source of back pain. He had set aside his crutches for these public moments, but they were never far from him. He had used them so long that he had developed calluses under his armpits.

F
or two decades now, Jack had been prodded and probed by an endless series of doctors, some of whom had made faulty diagnoses while others had prescribed treatments that only exacerbated his problems. Jack was like many chronic pain sufferers, wandering from one specialist to the next, one promise to the next, his pain traveling with him. Like the rest of his family, Jack was a believer in credentials, always asking who was best and going to them for counsel.

In this instance, Dr. Ephraim Shorr, a leading expert on adrenal insufficiency, felt that he could contribute no more to Jack’s treatment. So the doctor introduced Jack to Dr. Janet Travell, a well-known expert in pain management. Only three days after his return to the Senate, he flew up to New York to meet with her.

Dr. Travell thought his condition was serious enough that she had him admitted immediately to New York Hospital, where his weeklong stay was publicly described as “routine therapy.” One of his first directives to Travell
was to keep his condition from his young bride. “I don’t want her to think she married either an old man or a cripple,” Jack told the doctor. Jack had found some momentary respite from his pain sitting in an old-fashioned cane-bottomed rocking chair in the doctor’s office. Travell wrestled the chair into her big sedan and delivered it to her new patient in the hospital.

Jack had less than sanguine opinions of women who entered what he considered manly professions, but the New York physician inordinately impressed him. She combined a woman’s gentle touch with an authoritative voice backed by ample credentials, and Jack felt that finally he had found a doctor who could help him. Travell was no miracle worker. In July, Jack was back in the hospital twice, for a week at New England Baptist Hospital, and later in the month for five days in New York at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

Jack became so dependent on Dr. Travell that he sometimes flew up weekly to see her. The specialist measured Jack, and when she diagnosed that one leg was shorter than the other, she prescribed lifts for his left shoes. She firmed up the seating on the upholstered chairs in Palm Beach and did what she could to make the rest of the furniture tolerable for the Massachusetts senator. Most important, though, Dr. Travell was a militant proponent of the wide efficacy of procaine injections, known more commonly as novocaine or Novocain (its trade name), a drug Jack had first used in 1944.

Novocaine is used primarily as an anesthetic in minor surgeries and dental procedures. For a person of Jack’s medical history, especially with his periodic asthma attacks, the drug could cause drowsiness or tremors. Dr. Travell injected novocaine in what she called “trigger areas.” It was a technique that Jack could learn to do by himself, shooting the painkiller into areas that troubled him.

“She began to really fix me up by this business of novocaine,” Jack said in 1959, when he was still her patient. “I think it’s so outrageous these doctors—if I had met her fifteen years ago, I probably wouldn’t have any trouble…. She’s been this pioneer in this business of muscular spasms, and of putting novocaine in, which relaxes the spasm, which eases and permits blood to flow and, therefore, she does that enough and then the muscle relaxes. Otherwise, muscles stay in spasms for years, and they gradually get so you get a stiffening.”

One of the problems with the drug was that it quickly wore off, and the temptation was to inject it all over again. Although Dr. Travell was widely and positively known, she had her skeptics among the most esteemed leaders of her profession. “The use of novocaine in this way is of long standing and very widespread knowledge,” wrote Dr. Alexander Preston to Jack’s authorized biographer, James MacGregor Burns, in 1959.

For some reason or other Travell has developed a special reputation. [Dr.] Bayard Williams and [Dr.] Jim Leland whom I talked to about it, feel that there is a little more than goes through the needle or meets the eye in the results she obtains … in many medical procedures, there is an overlay of patient-doctor identification, hope, [and] confidence … which brings a success to many procedures that would fall short, of themselves. Apparently … she has this power whether it be psychological or mystic, which brings more than average success to an ordinary procedure…. Of course, anybody that can take an unsuccessful orthopedic operative casualty and reconstitute it by any means whatever deserves great credit. Apparently this is what she does to many and what she has done to Kennedy. Anyone after two unsuccessful major operations on the spine has to have something to hook onto and she apparently provided the fix.

W
hen the Senate adjourned early in August, Jack was on crutches, a condition that merited his spending the next couple of months at Hyannis Port recuperating. Instead, he sailed on the USS
United States
to Le Havre. From there he traveled to meet Gunilla at Skånegården, a hotel in Båstad, a charming Swedish resort town. His old friend Torby Macdonald, now a freshman congressman from Massachusetts, accompanied Jack. Torby was not only a boon companion but, as Joe had taught his sons, a defense against being compromised or blackmailed.

Gunilla rushed into Jack’s hotel room and soon fell into his arms. “Tender? Oh, he was tender,” Von Post recalled. “Very tender. He was really wonderful to me. He never talked about his brother who died. We didn’t have time. It was only love. It really was. He didn’t talk about Jackie. Only Torby talked about Jackie, how she had not been in the hospital as much as she should have. And his mother he never talked about either. It was his father he talked about. I think he looked up to his father very very much. And he wanted to please his father. He was pleasing him. He wanted to please everybody. And also, he was very witty and funny and amusing, and we laughed with him. Oh yes. He was on crutches and with all his suffering, he was always smiling. We drove around the south of Sweden, and he was singing ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime,’ and we sang together. Like a dream. And I think it was one of the few weeks in his life that he was free as a bird.”

Torby met a Swedish woman who became his lover, and the two couples drove around the country. Jack had once again traveled up that open road to freedom, but when the week was over, he flew to Nice and from there to Hotel du Cap. The last time he had been there he had sat in the moonlight
kissing Gunilla and telling her of his love. This time he waited in the daylight for Jackie to arrive. “I just got word today that my wife and sister are coming here,” he wrote Gunilla, addressing her as “Dearest,” a salutation he had not used before. “It will all be complicated by the way I feel now—my Swedish flicka [girl]. All I have done is sit in the sun and look at the ocean and think of Gunilla … All love, Jack.” He telephoned and wrote her trying to arrange another meeting in Capri, where he was staying with Jackie, or perhaps a few weeks later in Denmark. He sent her a picture postcard from Capri, being careful enough not to sign his name (“I
wish you
could have been here”).

Jack was like an actor playing theater in the round, turning toward one part of the audience to play one role, turning to another group to inhabit a whole different character, and then turning yet again to assume a different persona. To Gunilla, he played the dutiful young lover to whom their romance was the only universe. To Jackie, he played the deferential husband. To Pope Pius XII, who gave him an audience at his summer villa, Jack played the good Catholic concerned with the Church’s flock behind the Iron Curtain. To the Poles, whose land he visited for the first time since the war, he played the serious political observer.

When Jack called Gunilla from Poland, he was no longer playing the ardent, impassioned young lover but the heart-sickened man struck down by all the demands of the world. He told Gunilla, as she remembered it, that he had talked to his father about divorcing Jackie and marrying her. Joe had yelled, “You’re out of your mind.” Jack’s father, like Torby and Lem and almost everyone else, was a convenient foil. His father, if he did talk to him, was only telling Jack what he surely must have known already.

There often comes a point in a romance when the participants evaluate each other as objectively as if they are weighing semiprecious stones. Gunilla would have made a fine wife but a better mistress, and Jack suggested that she move to New York where, if she lost some weight, he would make her a “top model.” Jack’s friend Billings, who had never met the Swedish woman, wrote her that he would certify that she would not become a public charge, since “Jack has called me to do this and I shall be glad to.”

Gunilla’s parents were willing to have their daughter involved in an adulterous affair as long as marriage was at least possibly in the offing. They would not, however, have Gunilla the lesser half of a mere arrangement. They talked to Jack on the telephone, ending the romance that had so consumed their daughter and had been such a perilous adventure to Jack.

Jack was not so willing to give up, even after he learned that Gunilla was engaged. He continued to write her a few more times, but he no longer penned his letters in bold, expansive strokes but in a smaller, cramped and
nervous style. “I had a wonderful time last summer with you,” he wrote her. “It is a bright memory of my life—you are
wonderful
and I miss you.”

Gunilla married a few months after Jack left, but he still hoped to meet her in Sweden the following summer, replicating the exquisite time he had had with her the previous August. Jack was not a man who sought to repeat sweet moments in his life, and he rarely looked back at past pleasures. But there was a certain melancholy in him now. “There must be a beach in Sweden,” he wrote her, knowing full well the sensuous warmth of the Scandinavian summer. He dreamed of returning. He was always careful not to pen words of overt romance that might come back to haunt him. But there was a poignant quality in Jack’s letter this time. He mentioned a friend of Gunilla whom he was hoping to meet. He ended his letter: “I am looking forward to asking her if she knows a beautiful Swedish girl with a quiet smile who lives on top of a mountain in the Cote d’Azur in August 1953.”

W
hen Jack was recuperating in Palm Beach, he spent much of his time working on a book project. Since his college days, Jack was used to having the sort of help on his literary efforts that few of his peers received. Now, as a convalescing senator, he engaged a team to foster his efforts. The book, eight studies of courageous senators bracketed by two thematic essays, lent itself to a largely collaborative effort. Jack solicited advice and suggestions from a group of academicians. Sorensen, a government employee, worked almost full-time drafting four of the profiles. Landis wrote the draft of another chapter and gave other help, including the overall theme. Jules David, a professor at Georgetown, also helped with the conception while writing drafts of four profiles and the closing essay. Jack and his associates did make dramatic changes; the final version of the essay on John Quincy Adams is a dramatic, novelistic rendering of Adams’s career, unlike the more scholarly tone of the first draft.

“When I’d finished my other work each day I’d dictate into the machine,” Jack told the
Boston Globe,
hardly the typical regimen for the serious writing of history. What Jack was doing essentially was taking these drafts prepared by others and working them over. He had no qualms about taking the writing of others, applying a few flourishes, and passing the work off as fully his own. Sorensen, with his gift for euphemism, says that the “opening and closing chapters, which are more personal and more reflections of his philosophy, probably were more heavily influenced by his literary style than those that were simply historical accounts.” Arthur Krock recalled Jack “lying on a board in his bed, absolutely flat, with one of those blocks of yellow
paper, and there he sat writing the introduction … and some of the biographical material.”

It is in the introduction and final chapter of
Profiles in Courage
that some of the intellectual themes of Jack’s life emerged, and they may be viewed largely as his own work. “This is a book about the most admirable of human virtues—courage,” he begins his book. Courage. Not faith. Not honor. Not honesty. Courage. It is how he judged other men, how he judged himself, and how ultimately he would choose to be judged. His father had taught him that courage was the king of all virtues in a true man’s life, and he showed that courage in his struggle against illness. He showed it when his PT-109 was sliced in two. The courage he spoke of now was political and intellectual. It was subtle, complicated, and contradictory.