The Passage of Power (12 page)

Only an operation—a complicated fusing of two areas of the spine, with a metal plate inserted to stabilize it—could enable him to walk, doctors agreed, but an operation would be extremely dangerous because of the havoc that Addison’s played with the body’s ability to resist infection;
“even
getting a tooth extracted was serious,” said a doctor at Boston’s Lahey Clinic, and surgeons at the clinic flatly refused to operate; that same year, as Doris Goodwin reports,
“a
47-year-old man with Addison’s underwent an appendectomy and died three weeks later from a massive infection that antibiotics were unable to treat.”

His father tried to dissuade him from having the operation by telling him that he could live a full life even if he was confined to a wheelchair; look at Roosevelt, he said. Nonetheless Kennedy told his father he had decided to have it; his mother was to write that
“He
told his father that … he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.” The operation took place at a New York City hospital on October 21, 1954.
“Thirty-seven
years old, a United States senator with a limitless future before him, he succumbed to the anesthesia knowing he had only a 50-50 chance of ever waking up again,” Goodwin wrote.

Three days after the operation, the infection materialized; his longtime secretary,
Evelyn Lincoln, was told that doctors did not expect him to live through the night; his family gathered at his bedside while a priest administered last rites; his father, coming from the hospital and needing someone to talk to, wandered, almost in a daze, into the office of his friend the columnist
Arthur Krock;
“he
told me he thought Jack was dying and he wept sitting opposite me.” Recalls Rose: “It seemed
inconceivable
that he could once again be losing his eldest son.” Gradually recovering from the infection, Jack remained in the hospital for eight weeks, but his back wouldn’t heal—the huge incision, more than eight inches long, around the plate refused to close. In Palm Beach, where he was taken to recuperate, the scar still refused to heal, and he couldn’t walk; he could only lie on his back, in pain,
“and
the doctors,” as Goodwin writes, “would not say whether he would ever walk again, let alone walk without crutches.”

On February 15, 1955, a second operation was performed, and the metal plate was removed, and he began to heal—somewhat. Three months later, on
May 23, he returned to the Senate, coming down the steps from his plane, and, on Capitol Hill, walking to his office, without crutches, a smile on his face. He was
“tanned
and fit,” the
Herald Tribune
said.
“Aside
from experiencing some difficulty in walking, the Senator looked to be in excellent shape,” the
Boston Post
said. But the reality was very different—as a new physician, Dr.
Janet Travell, saw three days later when, in desperation, he came to consult her for the first time in her office on the ground floor of a New York brownstone.

She had read the news stories about his return to Washington, Dr. Travell was to recall.
“It
must have taken tremendous grit for him to create that effect.” The young senator could barely get down the few steps to her office; the taxi driver had to help him. As he sat in her office, she saw that he was too thin, and that under his tan he looked pale and anemic; “he moved guardedly” and “couldn’t turn to face her … without turning his entire body.” He answered all her questions, but did so reluctantly, “as if he were retelling a boring story.… He seemed tired and discouraged.… When I examined him, the reality of his ordeal was brought home to me by the callus under each armpit … where the skin had borne his weight on crutches for so long.”

Dr. Travell’s treatment—injection of the muscles in spasm in Kennedy’s back and legs with a solution of procaine and Novocain—worked to a considerable extent, and in remarkably short order. The pain was still there, although far less than before, and so was the brace; but the hated crutches were gone. After he began using a rocking chair she prescribed, sitting became much easier. And the cortisone kept the Addison’s, except for isolated incidents, under control: his face was no longer gaunt; he was no longer tired so often; he was, in fact, filled with energy. And after so many years of thinking he would die young, he had a different view.
“Jack
had grown up thinking he was doomed,” Lem Billings was to say. “Now … instead of thinking he was doomed, he thought he was lucky.” And by the 1956 convention, when he grabbed at the vice presidency, it was apparent that that was not the
“higher
office” he had in mind.
“I’m
against vice in all forms,” he joked not long thereafter, and by 1957, a large map of the United States was always spread out on a table in Palm Beach. Jack Kennedy, and his father, and visiting politicians—and they were visiting from all over the United States—would pore over it, noting “potentially valuable contacts.”

And Jack Kennedy made the contacts—and turned contacts into allies—in person, crisscrossing the country again and again. In September, an infection around the spinal fusion required hospitalization and a
“wide
incision,” and thereafter, as he recuperated in Hyannis Port, was so painful that his father made what must have been a difficult telephone call for him.
“Maybe
Jack should stop torturing himself and he should call the whole thing off,” Joseph Kennedy said to Dr. Travell. “Do you think he can make it? There are plenty of other things for him to do.” Calling it off, however, was not something Jack Kennedy was considering. Visiting Hyannis Port, Dr. Travell sat with the senator studying his schedule for the next five weeks, and trying to find time in it for rest periods.
“There was,” she wrote,
“scarcely
a free hour.” The senator told her the schedule couldn’t be changed.

Lyndon Johnson might well have read John F. Kennedy differently than he did—more accurately. He was, in fact, particularly well qualified—almost uniquely well qualified—to do so. For all the differences between the two men, there was at least one notable similarity, and it had to do with their campaigns for office, starting with each man’s first campaign. Jack Kennedy was not the only one of the two men, after all, who had, during his first campaign for Congress, driven himself to the limit of his physical endurance, and then beyond, until at the end of the campaign—but not until the end—he had collapsed in public. Kennedy’s collapse had been in that Bunker Hill Day parade on the last day before the election; Johnson’s, during
his
first campaign for Congress, in 1937, was two days before the election, in the Travis County Courthouse. All during that campaign—a campaign it seemed all but impossible for him to win—he had been losing weight; during it he lost about forty pounds from an already thin frame, until his cheeks were so hollow and his eyes sunk so deep in their sockets that, as I have written, “he might have been
a
candidate by El Greco.” Then he began vomiting frequently, constantly complaining of stomach cramps, sometimes doubling over during a speech. The complaints were not taken seriously because he never slackened the pace that led to Ed Clark’s comment that “I never thought it was
possible
for anyone to work that hard,” but on a Thursday night in the courthouse—the election was on Saturday—he was delivering a speech, holding on to the railing in front of him for support, when, doubling over, white-faced, he sat down on the floor. He got up, finished the speech and then was rushed to an Austin hospital, where doctors, finding his appendix was about to rupture, operated almost immediately. Jack Kennedy was, moreover, not the only one of the two men who had fought through pain—great pain—in a later campaign. During his 1948 race for the Senate, Johnson was suffering from a kidney stone and kidney colic, an illness whose
“agonizing
” pain medical textbooks describe as
“unbearable
.” His doctor said he didn’t know
“how
in the world a man could keep functioning in the pain that he was in.” But he kept functioning, smiling through speeches and receiving lines even though, in the car being driven to them, his driver, looking in the rearview mirror, often saw him doubled over in pain, clutching his groin, shivering and gasping for breath. A temperature of over 104 degrees left him racked alternately by fever and violent chills. Refusing for long days to be hospitalized despite warnings that he was risking irreparable loss of kidney function, he suspended his campaign only (and even then against his will) when he could no longer control his shivering, and could barely sit upright. When, in the hospital, doctors told him that an operation to remove the stone was imperative—that with his fever, caused by infection, not abating, and the possibility of abscess and gangrene in the prognosis, his situation was becoming life-threatening—Johnson nevertheless refused to agree to one because the lengthy recovery time
would end his hopes of winning the campaign, finally persuading surgeons to try to remove the stone by an alternative procedure that they were doubtful would work, but which in fact succeeded. Throughout his life, Lyndon Johnson had aimed at only one goal, and in his efforts to advance along the path to that goal had displayed a determination—a desperation, really—that raised the question of what limits he would drive himself to in that quest, and indeed whether there
were
any limits. Had Johnson read Jack Kennedy more accurately, he might have seen that the same question might have been asked about
him.
The man Lyndon Johnson was running against—this man he didn’t take seriously—not only wanted the same thing he did, but was a man just as determined to get it as he was.

A
S DETERMINED AS HE WAS
, and much better at running for the presidency than Johnson had thought possible.

One of Jack Kennedy’s most impressive characteristics was an ability to observe—and to generalize from his observations, to understand the implications of what he was seeing—no matter how hectic his pace might be: to
“learn
on the run,” as one of his aides would put it. And as he raced back and forth across the United States in 1957, and continued to do so at the beginning
of 1958, he had drawn one definite conclusion: that, as he told a friendly reporter at the end of 1957,
“The
Senate is not the place to run from”—that not only was being a United States senator not much of an advantage when it came to running for the presidency, it might even on balance be a disadvantage, and quite a considerable one at that.

While newspaper and magazine coverage of the Senate, of necessity consisting of hard-to-follow explanations of arcane legislative technicalities, didn’t translate into public interest in that body, and the benefit to a presidential candidate in being an active senator was therefore very limited, the liability inherent in such a role wasn’t limited at all. A senator was constantly being forced to take stands on controversial issues, and such stands antagonized one side or the other—which meant antagonizing individuals or groups whose support a senator needed if he wanted to be President. One reason that Kennedy had lost the vice presidential nomination to Kefauver was the refusal of Midwest states to support him because of a vote he had cast against an
Eisenhower Administration bill to prop up farm prices. And then there had been the Joe McCarthy issue: McCarthy was a friend of Joseph Kennedy Sr., a friend of the whole Kennedy family; in fact, Kennedy had been the only Democratic senator not to vote for McCarthy’s censure. Kennedy had hoped that the fact that he had been in the hospital for much of the censure debate might insulate him from criticism for not voting; it hadn’t. In the history of the United States, only one senator—Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1921—had ascended to the White House directly from the Senate, and Kennedy understood why:
“No
matter how you vote, somebody is made
happy and somebody unhappy,” he explained. “If you vote against enough people, you are dead politically.”

Jack Kennedy had the ability not only to “learn on the run” but also to act on what he learned, to act rationally, dispassionately, coldly. Spending time in the Senate was a drawback, so he would spend as little time as possible there: that meant not doing the job to which he had been elected. He would be criticized—for absenteeism, for shirking his duties. But he had calculated that, in terms of his presidential run, such criticism would be far outweighed by the benefits from campaigning across the country; it was a criticism that would have to be accepted—and he accepted it.

Not only was Kennedy learning who had what
Theodore H. White calls the
“pieces
of power,” he was learning who didn’t have them—which meant that he was learning, firsthand, the hollowness behind Lyndon Johnson’s belief that the Old Bulls of the Senate ruled their home-state pastures. Politics was changing, the old-style organizations were no longer so dominant, and as part of the change, in every state younger men—in 1957, about Kennedy’s age: forty—were rising up on the political ladder, some still on the lower rungs, some just entering politics, many of them war veterans like himself; they identified with him, were willing to work for him. Kennedy organizations were being set up in many states; thousands of names were being indexed at Kennedy headquarters.
“Johnson
thinks the campaign is in Washington,” Kennedy said one day to Ted Sorensen. “It’s not. It’s out here.”

And, of course, there was the new factor in politics, the factor that was to transform politics, the medium—
television—that could transmute a little-known senator into a national figure in a moment.

Jack Kennedy had had that moment, at the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago—had had, at that convention, two moments, in fact. The first had been on its opening night. The lights in the hall dimmed, a huge movie screen unrolled above the podium, and a dramatic and moving documentary,
The Pursuit of Happiness,
on the history of the Democratic Party, made by the Hollywood director
Dore Schary, was shown to the eleven thousand delegates—and to forty million viewers watching the convention on television. The shots of Roosevelt and Truman brought the delegates to their feet with a roar—and so did the film’s on-screen narrator, Jack Kennedy. Schary, sitting on the convention floor, saw that the personality of the young, handsome senator
“just
 … jumped at you on the screen.” Jack Kennedy, the
New York Times
reported,
“came
before the convention tonight as a movie star.”