The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (99 page)

When Cohen had finished lecturing Kennedy that he should turn over his medical treatment to a team headed by Dr. Burkley, he turned to an even larger problem:

You cannot be permitted to receive therapy from irresponsible doctors like M. J. [Dr. Max Jacobson] who by forms of stimulating injections offer some temporary help to neurotic or mentally ill individuals. I should state that these individuals are mesmerized to the extent that they believe they cannot perform without these injections. With such injections they may perform some temporary function in an exhilarated dream state. However, this therapy, [which] conditions one’s needs almost like a narcotic, is not for responsible individuals who at any split second may have to decide the fate of the universe.

This esteemed doctor accused Kennedy of risking the future of the world by indulging himself in drug use. The president was being put on the firmest notice of the risks he was taking. And he did nothing. Dr. Jacobson continued to come to the White House, and the president continued to get his treatments.

Dr. Jacobson was not a junkie’s doctor, writing out his prescriptions and giving injections with no thought of his patient’s well-being. Dr. Jacobson believed that what he was doing for Kennedy was good and noble. Over those many months he undoubtedly mixed a special brew of amphetamine, steroids, and other elements especially for his exalted patient, from whom he was taking no payment other than expenses. Dr. Cohen’s letter apparently had no impact on the president. He had the addict’s mindset that without his injections he could not go on.

Not only did Kennedy continue to see Dr. Jacobson, but his drug use apparently became enough of a problem that Bobby eventually felt obligated
to become involved. In June 1962, the attorney general’s assistant, Andrew Oehmann, left a vial of orange-colored liquid at the FBI for analysis. The bottle had Dr. Jacobson’s name and address on it and appeared to be the sort that he gave to patients so that they could inject themselves at home. Bobby had shown such “obvious intense personal interest” that Oehmann speculated that the medicine may have been for the attorney general’s father.

The FBI laboratory received not that one small vial but four vials containing probably between thirty-five and forty milligrams of liquids, far more than would have been in the original container. Moreover, the FBI technicians described the liquid
as yellow,
not the orange-colored liquid that Bobby’s assistant had delivered. Amphetamines were usually dispensed in brown-colored vials, and either an orange- or yellow-colored liquid would have been quite peculiar if these samples were indeed Dr. Jacobson’s injection. These may be meaningless anomalies, or they may suggest that the FBI did not analyze the sample originally given to its laboratory. In any case, the FBI analysis showed that the specimen contained a solution of vegetable oil and water and did not contain “any barbiturates or narcotics, such as Methadon, Demerol, or opium alkaloids.”

It is unclear whether the FBI tested the liquid for amphetamines, or if it did, whether the test was positive. The vial was undated, and in his memoir Dr. Jacobson wrote that when tested after two weeks, “there was no trace of amphetamine in the solution.”

Surely it was reckless of Kennedy to continue with Dr. Jacobson’s injections, which Dr. Cohen feared could have led to his destruction and which also represented an unimaginably dangerous indulgence for the most powerful man in the world. The president’s chronic “back pain” was probably in some sense a generic term for all the suffering he was going through. By now his adrenal glands had completely atrophied. He needed to take naps in the afternoons, though most men of his generation considered naps a mark of self-indulgent weakness.

Kennedy was not using Dr. Jacobson’s injections as a recreational high, but to help him get through his days with demonstrable energy. To Kennedy, true manhood was everything, and a man was a vibrant, active, physical, sexual being or he was nothing. Even with his treatment, when John Jr. rushed forward to the helicopter to greet his returning father, Kennedy could not bend down to pick the boy up but had to foist him off on an aide.

Those who worked with Kennedy would consider it slander to suggest that the president they served may have been a drug addict. He may have needed a nap every day, but he did not slur his words, wander in and out of conversations, rant on in manic jags, or do anything that would have alerted
them to his drug use. He may have used the injections the way some long-term alcoholics drink, never disgracing themselves, managing their lives and business seemingly as well as if they were sober. In that case, he did a brilliant job of disguising his problem, for his awesome sense of detail, insatiable appetite for facts, and intense curiosity, which took him to the nooks and crannies of government where some presidents rarely ventured, never seemed impaired.

Kennedy’s back once again became so painful the week before Christmas that in Palm Beach he had to go to bed. Outside his door his doctors began their minuet in earnest again, Dr. Burkley, Dr. Travell, Dr. Kraus, and Dr. Wade all standing there offering medical advice. Dr. Travell, as always, was ready with her injections of novocaine to deaden the pain, a treatment that appalled the other physicians. When the doctors were shown into the bedroom, Dr. Kraus dramatically raised the subject with the ailing president. “I will not treat this patient if she touches him again,” he asserted, staring at Dr. Travell. “Even once.” Kennedy appeared to nod his acceptance.

On Christmas day, Dr. Travell went into Kennedy’s bedroom to talk to him about a front-page story in that morning’s paper with the headline: “Dr. Travell Quitting as Kennedy’s Doctor.” After listening to the doctor, the president apparently decided against formally accepting her resignation but decided to let her keep the title while taking away most of her authority. “I hate to use the word blackmail,” Dr. Cohen said, “but essentially this is how she kept her tentacles stuck to the White House.”

After this meeting Dr. Burkley became in effect Kennedy’s White House physician, though the change was not made public until 1963. Dr. Travell kept her office in the White House, though many members of the staff no longer visited her. She had the title that she wanted above all things, but she no longer had authority over the president’s medical treatment.

As for Dr. Cohen, he kept secret all that he knew about the president’s health. When the physician died in 1999, he had no idea that his letters had been saved by Evelyn Lincoln. “I asked him many times to dictate his memories, particularly about Kennedy’s care, and then at least there would be a straight record of it,” said Dr. Becker. “He was not interested. He was afraid it would get in the wrong hands.”

T
he medications that Kennedy was taking, along with his various medical problems, might have diminished his sexual drive or even rendered him impotent. That is why Dr. Jacobson may have included one of the newly discovered anabolic steroids such as nandrolone or testosterone in his medical cocktail. For the president, sex had always been a life force, an assertion that
he would never be tied down to all the routines of the sick and the dying. Beyond that, rapacious sex was part of his father’s definition of a true man. If anything, Kennedy was even more interested in the sweet touch of female flesh, in laughter that had no reason but to please, in meetings that had no purpose but pleasure. He was greedy for it, frolicking in the White House pool with two young aides known as Fiddle and Faddle, insisting that there be women available when he traveled, scheduling his women in the White House when Jackie was away.

The haunting question is, to what extent did the president’s sexual practices affect his administration? A successful leader minimizes the natural vulnerabilities of the political life, in votes cast and in actions taken. Kennedy cavalierly exposed himself to a number of people who made their livings in part by trading on the vulnerabilities of the weak and susceptible, be they a Mafia figure like Sam Giancana or a corporate lobbyist like William Thompson, who was one of Kennedy’s procurers. To these men, overt blackmail was only the final and usually unnecessary step along a dark road that Kennedy had only begun to travel.

One of the FBI’s informers was an upscale prostitute who told of receiving a phone call from a friend of the president and being asked to go to the Waldorf Towers. She was shown to a suite where a second woman sat waiting. Kennedy entered the room, and together the two women performed their specialties on the president. That was just another sordid little tale, fit for nothing more than to be dropped into the FBI’s bottomless files of undigested, unverified facts and mindless allegations. The woman, however, had another client, a Russian diplomat. She was willing, her FBI handler said, “to give him up with pictures, the whole bit, if that’s what we wanted.” The Soviets had developed sexual blackmail into a dark art, and a woman who was willing to give up the Russian to the FBI might have been willing to give up the president to the Russian. That did not happen, but Kennedy had made himself endlessly vulnerable.

There was an obsessiveness in Kennedy’s sexuality, unlike that of other presidents whose adulterous trysts could also have been chronicled. The handsome, debonair Kennedy had an erotic quality unlike any of his predecessors, and it made of his assignations pleasurable vicarious reading, amply supplied in books, articles, and documentaries. “You must always remember that sex is something which gives every journalist, every writer, an equal start,” said Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, as wryly witty at ninety as at forty-five. “If you’re talking about economics, foreign policy, or war and peace, you have to have information. On sex, everybody is equal. Therefore, sex is the avenue by which the most incoherent gain attention.”

In the White House, the Secret Service agents were trained not to look at
the president but only outward toward those who might harm him. Kennedy’s aides learned to do much the same thing. They looked away, and yet they knew that things were not right. A serial adulterer is rarely one of humankind’s noblest specimens, yet the men around Kennedy, the men who knew him best, loved and revered him deeply. Paolella sensed what was going on, but that did not diminish what he and his colleagues felt. “I would say I think everybody loved him,” the agent reflected, his voice etched with feeling. “I mean, there’s no doubt, he had charisma, he had a kind of self-deprecating sense of humor. And he never let you think that he was above you.”

J
ackie abhorred what she considered the prisonlike atmosphere of the White House and was spending as much time away as in Washington. She had the feeling that those around her husband had “hit the White House with their Dictaphone[s] running.” It was as if his aides and advisers were seeking to live twice by memorializing their every moment when they ended up not living at all, or only half a life. She thought, “I want to live my life, not record it.” Her perceptions of the events and people in the White House were sometimes savagely penetrating, but she kept all her impressions largely to herself, pointedly never even keeping a journal.

The president found it difficult to understand Jackie’s fey reticence. At the first state dinner, the president held Jackie’s arm behind her back and pushed her toward a group of women reporters in the Blue Room. “Say hello to the girls,” Kennedy said, to which his wife muttered a perfunctory “hello.” As she turned back out of the Blue Room, the imprint of Kennedy’s fingernails was still visible in Jackie’s arm. Kennedy may have been the most powerful leader in the world, but he was discovering that he had become at least partially hostage to the will and whim of his wife, soliciting her time and bargaining with her over the functions that she would grace with her appearance.

The president’s other women were much easier to handle. Most of them were so overawed by Kennedy’s sheer presence, so caught up in the moment, or so narrow of mind-set, that they had no rich insights into the man and his psyche. His young Boston mistress was one of the few who observed with depth and sagacity. She did not see the president very often, but when the call came, as it did every few weeks, she was available.

There was a tremendous optimism about him that was very attractive, and a sense that good fortune would smile on him. But in the end I think that all that vitality became a trap, masking or even obliterating a more nuanced way of being. His image of high-performing achievement robbed him of his connection to his interior life. His light and energy could be stimulating, but it could also be intimidating and competitive. There was a magic circle, but there was always the threat of being cast out of that special place. So what do you do to maintain your position? Well, in this situation, you especially did not want to be boring or insipid or wishy-washy. I was always afraid of losing color, dwindling into invisibility. So I would try to be smooth and perfect, and then I’d be resentful that I was trying so hard and would be sullen and annoying. One day I was wearing a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and he said, “Don’t you have anything better than this to wear in the White House?” I was glad he noticed that I wasn’t trying to look good the way everybody else did. And I was furious because he didn’t understand that I was “making a point.” All those feelings and nowhere for them to go. Because he, magical he, prized smoothness. There were so few colors, and yet human beings have so many colors.

Kennedy set up his Boston mistress in the White House, parading her past such bluenose academics as Bundy and Rostow. He had a heedless disregard for the chances he was taking, though just as Dr. Cohen had warned him about his drug use, so too did he continue to have ample warnings that his sexual indulgences might become public knowledge. Florence Kater had continued trying to expose what she was convinced was a sexual relationship between Kennedy and Pamela Turnure, sending out letters to prominent journalists, even picketing one of his campaign speeches. The president could have tried to quiet Kater’s campaign by shuttling Turnure off into some obscure sinecure in Washington. Instead, he made the startling decision to bring Turnure into the White House as Jackie’s press secretary.