Kennedy: The Classic Biography (9 page)

But the effect of surgery on his adrenal shortage caused, as he had been told might happen, severe postoperative complications. Twice he was placed on the critical list and his family summoned. Twice the last rites of his church were administered. Twice he fought his way back to life, as he had once before in the Pacific.

But he obviously could do no work, in November or for weeks thereafter. He was totally out of touch with our office from mid-September, 1954 to mid-January, 1955, having in the meantime been taken by stretcher to Palm Beach for Christmas. In February, 1955, suffering from a nearly fatal infection, he underwent still another dangerous operation to remove a metal plate that had been inserted in the preceding surgery. Back in Palm Beach, he worked on
Profiles in Courage
, but was bedridden most of the time. He was finally able to return to Washington in May, 1955.

Even then he was required for some months to remain in bed as much as possible. And always thereafter he kept a rocking chair in his office, wore a cloth brace and corrective shoes, and slept with a bed board under his mattress, no matter where he traveled. In hotels where no board was available we would move his mattress onto the floor.

Still hobbled by pain until the Novocain injections and other treatments of Dr. Janet Travell gave him new hope for a life free from crutches if not from backache, he bitterly doubted the value of the operation which had nearly ended his life. With several individual exceptions—such as Dr. Travell and the Lahey Clinic’s Sara Jordan, who had treated him since he was eleven—he had never been impressed by the medical profession, remaining skeptical of its skills and critical of its fees. After his health had been shattered during the war, while still on duty in the South Pacific, he wrote his brother Bobby:

Keep in contact with your old broken down brother…. Out here, if you can breathe, you’re one A and “good for active duty anywhere”; and by anywhere they don’t mean El Morocco or the Bath and Tennis Club.

After his first back operation in 1944 he had written to an inquiring friend:

In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I should naturally like to go on for several pages…but will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.

After his 1954-1955 operations he once showed me the gaping hole in his back—not to complain about the pain but to curse a job which he found wholly unsatisfactory.

When my own back went bad in the midst of the 1956 campaign, he recommended a series of steps to relieve and remedy the discomfort. And when I replied that I would do so as soon as a “medical back expert” so advised me, he said ruefully, “Let me tell you, on the basis of fourteen years’ experience, that there is no such thing!”

He knew the medical profession well. For all his vitality and endurance John Kennedy had suffered since childhood from a multitude of physical ailments. “We used to laugh,” his brother Bob has written, “about the great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy—with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die.” Never complaining about his pains or imagining new ones, he used (and carried with him about the country) more pills, potions, poultices and other paraphernalia than would be found in a small dispensary. As a boy he had required twenty-eight stitches after a bike collision with Joe. He had serious cases of scarlet fever and appendicitis and almost died of diphtheria. He had to stop school temporarily when he was fourteen on account of illness and underwent the same experience at Princeton and the London School of Economics. In the Navy he apparently suffered from malaria, and spent considerable time in the Chelsea, Massachusetts, Naval Hospital because of his back.

As a Congressman he was so pale and thin his colleagues feared for his life, and in a round-the-world trip in 1951 he was taken to a military hospital in Okinawa with a temperature of over 106 degrees and little hope for his survival. Looking back, it is impossible to say which of these bouts was due to his adrenals, which was jaundice, hepatitis or malaria, or which of these may have helped bring on the other.

His eyes required glasses for heavy reading, worn rarely for published pictures and never in public appearances. (In the fall of 1963, he told me his eyesight was weaker and that the use of large type for his prepared speech texts was all the more important.) The state of his hearing obliged him to ask me, during one debate on the Senate floor, to feed facts and figures into his right ear instead of his left. Years of injections were required to lessen his stomach’s allergic sensitivity to dogs, which he loved. A variety of other allergies remained. A youthful football injury to his right knee brought him pain from time to time and often caused a slight limp even in the White House.

His stomach was always sensitive—at one point it was suspected he had ulcers—and though he did not faithfully follow his diet (which did not, for instance, include a drink of vodka and tomato juice), he usually ate carefully and often. In the Senate his lunches were for a time prepared at home and brought by Jacqueline or “Muggsy” O’Leary to his office. On the campaign circuit he avoided the mass cooking at most banquets and ate in his hotel room or elsewhere. To keep something in his stomach, he ate frequently during the day—on the plane, at airport stops, before and after speeches, at every meal and between meals—great quantities of milk, creamed soups or chowder, sirloin steak, baked potatoes, ice cream and hot chocolate made with milk.
³

But it would be wrong to assume that he was a sickly man. “Vigah,” as he supposedly pronounced it, became a humorous byword during his administration—but it was accurate. He had astounding vitality, stamina and endurance, and this made him resent all the more the fact that he had to give up tennis and touch football and at times proceed gingerly with his children and golf. Many reporters and staff members fell weary or ill at his campaign pace, and he invited all those who had doubts about his health to accompany him on his grueling travels.

He made no pretense of ever having been a star athlete, despite his prowess in many sports. “Politics is an astonishing profession,” he told a banquet as President. “It has enabled me to go from being an obscure member of the Junior Varsity at Harvard to being an honorary member of the Football Hall of Fame.” But he had a strong, agile and nimble physique for a man over thirty-five years old, six feet tall and over 165 pounds. He rarely had a cold and never a headache. Though he drove himself too hard for too long, he looked out for his health in most other ways (“Better than 99 percent of my patients,” said Dr. Travell in 1960). He took his pills, watched his posture (after his operation, for previously he had been a sprawler), exercised regularly and bathed at least three times a day to relax and heat his aching back muscles. He managed to nap under the severest pressures and on the shortest notice, in planes, in cars and in his hotel room before a speech. He was never a confirmed hunter or fisherman, but he liked to be outdoors, and he inevitably seemed to feel better in good weather.

Yet pain was almost always with him—“at least one-half of the days that he spent on this earth,” according to his brother. “Those who knew him well,” said Bob Kennedy, “would know he was suffering only because his face was a little whiter, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his words a little sharper. Those who did not know him well detected nothing.” But Kennedy accepted it all with grace. His philosophy was summed up midway in his Presidential term in a news conference answer on the Reservists:

…there is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country…. It’s very hard in military
or in personal
life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. Some people are sick and others are well.

Life was unfair in many ways to John Kennedy. But he never complained. He loved life too much.

1
A slogan subsequently adapted by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for many states, and more recently used, without change but this time with considerable criticism, by Edward Kennedy in his 1962 race for the same Senate seat.

2
“And in those days,” the Senator told me, “an Ambassador was really on his own. Today, if there is any flap, Dulles can fly to London in a few hours, but when I decided to fly back to Harvard from the Embassy in 1938, there was no nonstop plane, and it took both a train ride and a boat ride to reach what plane there was.”

3
In early 1955 he joshed Jacqueline that her expensive course in French cooking had taught her some imaginative recipes but not how to make him hot chocolate.

CHAPTER II
THE SENATOR

J
OHN KENNEDY WAS NOT
one of the Senate’s great leaders. Few laws of national importance bear his name. And after he graduated in November, 1958, from the traditionally inactive freshman class, his opportunities for major contributions to the Senate—except for his battle for fair labor reform and against rackets—were increasingly eroded by the demands of his Presidential campaign.

During his first four years Kennedy’s two committees—Labor and Government Operations—handled comparatively little legislation of importance. He was frustrated in his efforts both to obtain major assignments (e.g., an investigation of lobbying) for the Government Operations Committee and to exchange his seat on that committee for another on a more important one. In 1957 Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson named him to the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee, but in 1955 I had had occasion to write to Senator Kennedy while he was in Europe:

Lyndon Johnson has finally come through, making up for his failure to appoint you to the Foreign Relations or Finance Committees. He had recommended that you be appointed to the Boston National Historic Sites Commission!

Nevertheless, considering his eight years as a whole, the Senator could take some pride in his less spectacular work in committee, in his participation in major debates, in the dubious measures he had helped defeat and in the smaller bills, amendments and modifications for which he could take some credit. Not all were widely known or controversial. He originated, for example, the resolution leading to the “Three Wise Men” study of Western aid levels to India and Pakistan. It was highly important, but rarely mentioned. A review of his voting record, and the bills and amendments he sponsored that were enacted, reflects his widening horizons, his deepening convictions and his growing interest in ideas as well as voters. Except for absences due to illness, his attendance record on roll-call votes improved—although his 1959-1960 campaign efforts coincided and at times conflicted with a sharp increase in his committee responsibilities. (When Kennedy reminded Nikita Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961 that they had met during the Chairman’s *959 American tour at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, the latter replied, “I remember…you were late.”)

RELATIONS WITH OTHER SENATORS

Senator Kennedy was never a full-fledged member of the Senate’s inner circle, the “club” whose influence has been exaggerated by both its defenders and its detractors. He was too young, too liberal and too outspoken. Early in his first term, his participation in a floor debate caused him to move closer to the front from his seat in the back row, and he found himself temporarily sitting next to Senate “Dean” Carl Hayden, who had entered Congress more than forty years earlier. Ever interested in history, he asked Senator Hayden what changes, if any, had occurred in that time, and the reply was: “New members did not speak in those days.”

Nevertheless, even in the early years the older members of the Senate would have agreed with Kennedy’s first Naval promotion report: “Very willing and conscientious.” He was liked and respected by nearly all Senators. Fellow Democrats appreciated his never-ending willingness to speak at their fund-raising dinners and to appear on their televised reports. His close friends included liberal Republicans such as John Sherman Cooper and conservative Democrats such as George Smathers. His contributions to floor debate were well regarded for their careful facts and cool logic. His independent votes in committee and on the floor were appreciated as the product of intelligence, courage and restraint. “My crowd listens when your man gets up to speak,” Senator Lister Hill of Alabama told me. “They know he’s done his homework and they know no one else can deliver his vote.”

His independent ways, however, also disgruntled a few colleagues. Because he voted with the Democratic leadership on committee assignments, Wayne Morse—whose fiery logic Senator Kennedy admired (“The only man,” he told me, “who speaks in precise paragraphs without a text”)—denounced him in Massachusetts and opposed his participation in the 1954 Neuberger campaign in Oregon. Because he was the only Democrat voting against the Democratic leadership on the 1955 Interstate Highway Bill on the day he returned from his convalescence, one Democratic Senator grumbled that Kennedy might have stayed away one more day. When he voted to give flexible farm price supports a chance to prove their merit (they didn’t, he later concluded), Minnesota’s Democrats under Hubert Humphrey canceled their invitation to Kennedy to speak.
¹

He also found that economy in government was a principle in the Senate but not always a practice. In the House Kennedy had taken pride in being one of a handful of Democrats who had upheld President Truman’s vetoes of unjustified veterans’ pensions. In the Senate he had led the fight for the reform measures recommended by the Second Hoover Commission (on which his father served), though it was under fire from the Democratic National Committee. When a New England business group which had badgered him mercilessly about reducing Federal spending insisted that he vote more funds for airport construction, he voted against the increase partly for that reason. But when, after careful study, he openly attacked “pork barrel” river and reclamation projects, their sponsors resented his role and overrode his protests. When he exposed a Congressional pension plan as actuarially unsound, a few veteran staff members hoping for windfalls spoke sarcastically about his wealth.