The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  At the end of June, Kennedy became seriously ill with a cough, chills, a sore throat, and a high fever. By the time Dr. Travell was called in the middle of the night, the president was running a temperature of 103 degrees, rising to 105 soon after she arrived. The doctor diagnosed his condition as “beta hemolytic streptococcus” and immediately gave him penicillin, an intravenous infusion, and a sponge bath. The next day, when his temperature was coming down, Dr. Travell announced to a press briefing that the president had a “mild virus infection.”

  Kennedy had spoken bold rhetoric at his inaugural address concerning how he and his administration would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Since he had returned from the summit in Vienna, however, his words did not have the same resonant ring. As a young man, he had prophesied that one day there would be a nuclear confrontation between the two great powers, but he had not imagined that he would be one of the two leaders holding the power of destruction in his hands.

  Kennedy was deeply concerned about the nature of Soviet power. In July he sent a memo to his secretary of Defense asking about the Soviet air show. “Were any of the exhibits surprising?” he asked McNamara. “Do we believe their planes are superior to ours?”

  He knew from all the data he had received since taking office that not only was there not the missile gap that he had talked about during the campaign, but that the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Kennedy knew too that in some ways that did not matter the way it always had: in a nuclear war the Soviets would be able to turn American cities into charred, unlivable ruins even as American nuclear bombs were destroying their own cities. By this terrible new logic, it was as if all his life he had been told that the world was round and suddenly he realized that it was flat, and that he stood at a precipice beyond which lay only darkness.

  On July 25, 1961, Kennedy went before the American people on television—the medium for which his cool, elegant demeanor was perfectly crafted—to talk about the Berlin crisis. He repeated to the millions watching him much of what he had said to Khrushchev in Vienna. He would “not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.” He backed up that promise by calling for an even greater military buildup and putting half of the nuclear bomb-carrying B-52s and B-47s on ground alert. He called too for a vastly expanded civil defense program, including building and expanding bomb shelters.

  There was an eerie unreality about this speech to an America in which good times and private concerns dominated most lives, and in which the nation’s enemies were both far away, over distant oceans and ice caps, and far too near, only a thirty-minute missile journey from the Soviet Union to American cities. “I would like to close with a personal note,” Kennedy said. “When I ran for the presidency of the United States, I knew that this country faced serious challenges, but I could not realize—not could any man realize who does not bear the burdens of this office—how heavy and constant would be those burdens.”

  Kennedy may have boldly unsheathed his rhetoric, but the reality remained that Khrushchev could not go on allowing the constant drain of many of East Germany’s best-educated citizens, drawn westward by the siren call of freedom and affluence. By the summer of 1961, the exodus had become a virtual stampede: thirty thousand East Germans a month were walking into West Berlin.

  Early Sunday morning on August 13, 1961, while most of Berlin slept, East German troops and police began setting up barbed-wire barricades all along the route between East and West Berlin. Within two days they had started building the permanent concrete wall that would become one of the essential metaphors of the cold war.

  Kennedy was a leader who spoke loudly and carried a big stick that he flailed boldly but rarely used. “With this weekend’s occurrences in Berlin there will be more and more pressure for us to adopt a harder military pressure,” Kennedy wrote the secretary of Defense as the East Germans built their wall. The president had not vowed to defend East Berlin, and for a leader who thought that World War III might start here in this beleaguered city, the wall was not without its blessings. “The fact is that the wall was the de facto solution of the Berlin crisis, and as such, it was darn welcome,” Joseph Alsop reflected. “I think the president really viewed it that way too.”

  With Khrushchev’s greatest architectural achievement spread across the German city, the Soviet dictator would not push so hard over Berlin while the festering discontent was sealed up inside. Kennedy could not admit that the solution satisfied him, since doing so would contradict his rhetoric and perhaps inspire Khrushchev to take even more dramatic measures. As it was, Kennedy used the Berlin Wall again and again as a shameful example of Marxist failures, poking a finger in the eye of the Russian bear.

  Kennedy had not been indulging in a hyperbolic exercise when he told the American people how much heavier his burdens were than he had ever imagined. One evening that summer he was talking in the Oval Office with Hugh Sidey of Time. Kennedy was in a morbid mood that had always been foreign to his being; now he was a dark Cassandra musing on the human tragedy. “Ever since the crossbow when man had developed new weapons and stockpiled them, somebody has come along and used them,” he said. “I don’t know how we escape it with nuclear weapons.” That was his theme that summer. Another evening Bobby told Sidey that he had been seated next to his brother in his bedroom that August when the president began to cry. Decades later, when Sidey reflected on what Bobby had told him, it seemed to him that the attorney general had meant that the president’s eyes were wet with tears, not that he had been sobbing. What was so extraordinary was that Bobby had never seen his brother like that before. “It doesn’t matter about you and me and adults so much, Bobby,” he said. “We’ve lived some good years. What is so horrible is to think of the children who have never had a chance who would be killed in such a war.”

  Kennedy might have had teary eyes, but this haunting, newfound concern with nuclear death had been set off in large part by the president himself and his newfound obsession with civil defense. In September, Life had a special issue whose cover featured a model dressed in a fallout suit. The administration knew this “fallout suit” protected only against dust, not against true nuclear fallout. A record called “The Complacent Americans,” purporting to give the official civil defense survival instructions, begins after the bombs have just fallen: “The H-Bomb! The H-Bomb! The H-Bomb! Flash of brightness. A tremendous roar…. And I, the complacent American, thinking that no one would ever dare attack an American city. And I told my friends that nuclear war would never happen … but it did. I always thought I was a good American—patriotic and civic minded. But I was wrong. I failed myself and my country.” In churches, ministers debated whether it was Christian to shoot down a slothful citizen trying to push himself and his family into his neighbor’s fallout shelter. Other ministers were appalled at the whole idea of a nation hunkering down in private shelters. The Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., the Right Reverend Angus Dun, said, “The every-family-for-itself approach to fallout shelter construction is immoral, unjust, and contrary to the national interest.”

  The administration worked on developing a pamphlet about fallout shelters. Fifty to sixty million copies would be printed, enough so that most American families would receive one. The initial draft was full of indomitable American optimism. Those Americans with the gumption, foresight, and patriotism to build their own bomb shelters would emerge from their safe havens after a nuclear attack. Although the pamphlet was nowhere so explicit, the reality it implied was that the working class and the poor who did not have bomb shelters would be largely gone, but the upper middle class and the wealthy would survive. In this moral triage, no one would have a better chance of survival than the creators of this policy in the White House. “Some of us had been issued helicopter passes,” recalled Adam Yarmolinsky, special assistant to the secretary of Defense, �
��so that we could be spirited away to an impregnable underground fortress in the event of nuclear attack. It was not at all clear whether the passes would be used, leaving families to cope as best they could. But the passes did help to create an atmosphere of unreality.”

  During a glorious Thanksgiving weekend at Hyannis Port, Kennedy had to decide if he wanted to go ahead with the pamphlet. In September, Father L. C. McHugh, a retired professor of ethics at Georgetown University, had faced the moral dilemma of the nuclear age straight on, advising that those farsighted enough to have their own bomb shelters had the perfect right to shoot their foolish neighbors who sought admission. “There’s no problem here,” Bobby quipped. “We can just station Father McHugh with a machine gun at every shelter.” Kennedy decided to have the pamphlet rewritten to emphasize public shelters. Before long the obsession with bomb shelters receded, but it rested in the American consciousness, part of the natural paranoia of the nuclear age.

  During that long difficult summer, Dr. Kraus began coming to the White House to give Kennedy an exercise program, and Joe and the president started taking a swim before lunch. But there still remained dangerous tension among the various doctors involved with the president’s care, the most unsettling aspect of which was the presence of Dr. Jacobson. He had the professional patina of a celebrity doctor, and he was socially accepted in the president’s circles the way none of Kennedy’s other physicians ever had been. Unknown to the public, he had been there during the two days of Kennedy’s serious viral illness, doubtless called in by the president. In the six months from mid-May to mid-October 1961, Dr. Jacobson spent thirty-six days with the president, based on his billing for incidental expenses and travel. Dr. Jacobson attended the president in Palm Beach, Washington, New York City, and Hyannis Port, seeing him on average more than once a week. The bill did not even include the days Dr. Jacboson had been with the president on his European trip.

  Dr. Jacobson had become in some respects Kennedy’s most important doctor and was injecting the president with his treatment on a regular basis. For the most part, even those around the president had no idea of his apparent dependency on Dr. Jacobson’s injections. Some were struck at times by the president’s unusual energy. “He wasn’t a real healthy guy,” said Joseph Paolella, a Secret Service agent. “On the other hand, I used to be amazed because we’d go on trips, and he seemed to be almost inexhaustible. I’d wonder, ‘How can this guy do this?’ The Secret Service guys would be dragging. He just had unlimited energy.”

  Kennedy did not mind that an old friend like Senator George Smathers knew about his drug use. “I wasn’t sure what it was he was taking,” Smathers reflected. “I don’t think Jack knew. He just knew it made him feel better. So, he’d say, ‘Give me the injection.’ So I’d say, ‘Now, did you really …’ He said, ‘Be damn sure that you take alcohol first and clean it off. I don’t want to get infected.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Then just like a pro I’d stick him and shoot it in there. On these physical things, he could stand pain better than anybody I ever saw. I mean, he endured, when you stopped to look at what really bothered him, he endured pain like you wouldn’t believe.”

  The unspoken conspiracy was to pretend that Kennedy was a vibrantly healthy man. It began not with his friends or his doctors but with the man himself. Woe betide anyone who brought to him sad tidings, reminding him that a dark ship was out there somewhere.

  On one occasion Caroline came bouncing into the Oval Office carrying a bird in her hand like one of her dolls. Her pet bird had just died, and she wanted to show it to her father before she gave it a proper burial. “Get it away from here!” he shouted at his daughter, as if she had arrived with a terrible omen.

  Dr. Jacobson’s increasing presence in the White House was a direct and immediate threat to Dr. Travell’s authority as the official White House physician. Dr. Jacobson recalled that once when he was in the White House personal quarters, the first lady’s maid, Providencia “Provi” Paredes, came running to him saying, “Dr. Travell has daringly entered the second floor.” No one entered the private residence without permission, but Dr. Travell was so incensed at Dr. Jacobson’s access that she had dared to seek him out even there.

  Dr. Jacobson slipped away and at his next meeting gave Kennedy a letter saying that from now on he thought he should see the president outside of the White House. “That’s out of the question,” Kennedy replied, and tore up the letter.

  Dr. Jacobson felt that, thanks to his ministrations, the president was a healthy man. Others close to Kennedy, such as Dr. Cohen, worried endlessly about Kennedy’s condition. “He felt strongly that a man he idolized was not getting appropriate care,” reflected Cohen’s former student, colleague, and friend, Dr. David Becker. “And so he really wanted to correct the situation as best he could.”

  In November, Dr. Cohen talked to Kennedy about Dr. Travell. “I am sorry that you were burdened with initiating a housecleaning in your medical staff,” he wrote Kennedy on November 12, 1961. “In spite of repeated advice against her personal publicity, this was and is rampant. But above all (and this is a serious accusation) her own interests were placed above yours.”

  When Kennedy returned from the funeral of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn a week later, Dr. Cohen had another fitting opportunity to talk to him. Dr. Cohen told the president that Dr. Travell, who he believed had no business treating anything beyond muscle problems, had been treating the Texas politician for back problems and anemia when the man was dying of cancer. “I further told him that inspite [sic] of my attempts of getting Doctor Kraus in that through subterfuge and direct lies, she had prevented this,” Dr. Cohen wrote later. “He told me that there should be no further delays…. I pointedly told Doctor Travell … how she had for her own interest obstructed the proper therapy for the president. She had given him many injections that had long since been shown to be futile. She had lied about these injections.”

  Dr. Travell was not going to walk quietly off to her office and sit there ostracized by the president she had come to serve. She believed in her treatments as much as Dr. Cohen and the others believed in theirs, and hers was certainly far easier than the regimen of exercise that Dr. Kraus had prescribed for the president.

  When matters did not improve, Dr. Cohen sent the president another letter. Dr. Cohen considered himself as much an authority in his field as the president was in his. Though he signed his one-page letter “Humbly and respectfully,” this was a man who did not defer to Kennedy. He told the president that he could not “wait and see” any longer, but that he would have to act against a doctor who “is a potential threat to your well-being.” Dr. Travell was playing to Kennedy’s lassitude and self-indulgence, and Dr. Cohen warned him: “The program requires constant sacrifice on your part—not only in the present but in the future.”

  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.”