Good column on JFK from a Historian who is close to the scene.
November 21, 2002
Kennedy's Private Ills
By RICHARD REEVES
[P] aul Fay, who served with John F. Kennedy in World War II, remained close enough to the lieutenant who would become president that he occasionally watched J.F.K. inject himself in the thigh with the corticosteroids that kept him alive. The president used that needle twice every day to replace the adrenaline his glands no longer produced because he had Addison's disease.
Jack, said Paul Fay, the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn't even hurt.
The president lunged at his friend and stabbed the needle into his leg. As Paul Fay screamed in pain, Kennedy said, it feels the same way to me.
Paul Fay told of that incident in the manuscript of "The Pleasure of His Company," a memoir he wrote in 1966. No one knew that, though, because the president's widow, Jacqueline, and his brother, Robert, crossed out those paragraphs before publication. That was the way it was done. Kennedy lied and lied about his health while he was alive, even using his father's influence to get into the Navy without ever taking a medical examination. After he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, his family and the men who had served him continued the lying and began the destruction, censoring and hiding of Kennedy's medical records.
Still, the story of Kennedy's courage and deception has gradually surfaced over the last 39 years. The latest details, based primarily on the files of Janet Travell, one of his many doctors, were published this week. Robert Dallek, a historian, and Jeffrey Kelman, a physician, were granted access to some Kennedy records, including X-rays by Dr. Travell that showed J.F.K.'s spinal troubles were actually caused by extraordinarily painful osteoporosis. The myth of war or football injuries had long been exposed as false, but until now neither scholars nor the public knew the exact cause of his crippling back pain.
Perhaps his medical history is close to complete (and true) now. It has been a long struggle against obsessive secrecy involving dozens of researchers. My own research and book on Kennedy made public entries from the diary of Dr. Max Jacobson, the New York doctor who regularly (and very secretly) injected Kennedy with speedballs of vitamins, animal placentas and amphetamines. In 1976, Joan and Clay Blair Jr. gained access to records of Kennedy's childhood medical problems, which included teenage venereal disease.
One great irony of the generally successful efforts to conceal Kennedy's many illnesses is that the basic story was available as long ago as 1955, when the American Medical Association's Archives of Surgery, in an article titled "Management of Adreno-cortical Insufficiency During Surgery," recounted the medical history of a 37-year-old man who was the first Addisonian to survive traumatic surgery.
The operation took place on Oct. 21, 1954. The 37-year-old man was easily identifiable as Senator John F. Kennedy. He opted for the surgery at New York Hospital after physicians told him he would probably die on the table. I would rather be dead, he answered, than live with this kind of pain. Paul Martin, of the then-small Gannett newspaper chain, published the story in early 1961, but no one paid any attention.
That would not happen now. The press is a great deal more aggressive than it was in the good old days. Political life is more transparent now. Witness the skeptical surveillance of the medical charts of Bill Bradley in 2000 or Vice President Dick Cheney today. By our rules now, John F. Kennedy almost certainly could never have become president.
Richard Reeves is author of "President Kennedy: Profile of Power" and, most recently, "President Nixon: Alone in the White House."
nytimes.com |
