John Kennedy

by Burns, James MacGregor;

  9THE ANATOMY OF COURAGE

  During the summer of 1954, as a showdown was nearing on McCarthy, Kennedy was approaching a hard decision of his own. His back was hurting almost all the time now. He had talked with specialists of the Lahey Clinic and elsewhere but the doctors disagreed on what course to take. At least one regarded the indicated operation as too risky to undertake. But the pain and the nuisance were becoming intolerable; Kennedy decided to go ahead. The operation was postponed several times as test after test was made. Then he entered Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery, where on October 21, 1954, surgeons performed a double fusion of spinal discs in a long operation.

  For weeks, Kennedy lay flat on his back in this hospital. The room was dark; he could not sit up to read; only his wife and other immediate members of the family could see him. The pain was severe and almost incessant. He slept a good deal, but for the first two weeks he was awakened every half hour for blood tests. There were frightening episodes. On one occasion he was given a blood transfusion, and, while Jacqueline watched in horror, his face suddenly swelled and puffed out from an adverse reaction.

  Worst of all, he was not getting better. The wound in his back continued to drain. October slowly gave way to November and November to December, and he stayed in a slack, painful condition. His doctors decided, however, that he might recuperate better in Florida. Late in December, attended by his wife and a nurse, he was bundled in blankets on a stretcher, taken out of the hospital, and flown to Palm Beach. He was able to have Christmas with his family. But by January his improvement was so slow that another operation was ordered. In mid-February he flew up to his New York hospital. Again the last rites were said and again surgeons labored for hours while members of his family prayed outside. The plate was removed from his spine, and this time recovery was more rapid. On February 25, he triumphantly walked out of the hospital and, accompanied by Jacqueline and Teddy, flew back to Florida for a long convalescence.

  Grace in a Vacuum

  Lying for six months on his hospital bed in New York and Florida, Kennedy needed a very different kind of courage now from the kind he had needed in the South Pacific. Then, at least, he had not been helpless; he could keep moving from island to island. But now he was entirely dependent on others, on his wife and nurses for little personal things, on his father to issue medical bulletins, on his office to handle legislation and politics. McCarthy was being censured, Congress was convening again, committees were meeting, politicians were already talking about the 1956 elections, but Kennedy, usually so restlessly active, was out of the stream of affairs. Hemingway defined courage as “grace under pressure,” but this situation required something more demanding, grace in a vacuum, where there was little to cling to.

  So candid about most other aspects of his life, Kennedy today will say little about his emotional response to the long hospitalization. When pressed one time, he said simply, “I was just darned sick,” and let it go at that. He may have felt—certainly he would have had a right to—that he had had more than his fair share of illness and hospitalization. He was underweight during much of his childhood. He had a severe case of jaundice, and then a severe recurrence, about the time he entered college, and he had to take liver injections. He built his weight up at Harvard—he weighed 156 in 1937—so that he could play football, only to suffer a back injury in scrimmage. As a youth he stayed for many weeks in Arizona building up his strength. Rejected by the Army, he again went in for a health regimen and got into the Navy. But in the Pacific his back injury was aggravated by the PT-boat crash, he got a severe case of malaria, he went through another operation, and his weight dropped over thirty pounds.

  At the same time, he has never given the impression of physical weakness. Year after year, he has driven himself at a relentless pace. For years his typical week has consisted of legislative work in Washington for four days and politicking in Massachusetts or elsewhere for three. There is nothing so fatiguing as months of campaigning, but Kennedy has been doing it for years. Some of his friends have a theory about his illnesses—they are nature’s way of compelling Kennedy to rest in bed for a few days and hence to take a respite from the strenuous life that he otherwise usually refuses to take.

  A trying aspect of Kennedy’s medical background has been the flood of rumors accompanying any hospitalization or health treatments. Following his back operation in 1954, stories floated around that he had incurable cancer, tuberculosis, or some other serious malady. Things had got off to a bad start when successive bulletins after the operation described his condition as “excellent,” then as “reasonably good,” and finally as “fairly satisfactory.” His father issued a statement scotching “unfounded and disturbing rumors that are being circulated especially in Washington.” A photographer snapped a picture of the Senator, looking pale and gaunt, as he was carried on a stretcher out of the hospital. And the estimate, originally only two months, of the period before Kennedy would return to Washington was extended time after time.

  Nor would the rumors die. In 1959, five years after the operation, stories began to circulate that Kennedy had Addison’s disease. A degenerative disease of the adrenal glands, this malady was often fatal, but today it can be fully and permanently controlled by drugs like cortisone, just as diabetes is by insulin. As the rumors spread, Kennedy stated in an interview: “The facts are these.… During the war I contracted malaria in the South Pacific, along with water exposure and a series of fevers. Diagnosis showed that this stress was accompanied by a partial adrenal insufficiency, though there was no tubercular infection or other serious problem.

  “From 1946 through 1949 I underwent treatment for the malaria—the fevers ceased—there was complete rehabilitation and I have had no special medical care, no special checkup, no particular difficulty on this score at all, while meeting a very full schedule of committee work, Senate responsibilities and speaking engagements.”

  While Kennedy’s adrenal insufficiency might well be diagnosed by some doctors as a mild case of Addison’s disease, it was not diagnosed as the classic type of Addison’s disease, which is due to tuberculosis. Other conditions, often not known, can cause inadequate functioning of the adrenal glands. As in Kennedy’s case, this can be fully controlled by medication taken by mouth and requires a routine endocrinologic checkup as a part of regular physical examinations once or twice a year.

  His back has, however, continued to give Kennedy trouble. He tried a number of treatments without much improvement. In the fall of 1955, he encountered a New York City doctor who specialized in the use of novocain to treat muscular spasm. Injections of novocain, according to Kennedy, relax the spasm and permit blood to flow in; otherwise his muscles might stay in spasm for years and gradually stiffen.

  According to this doctor, there have been no “sequellae” to the back operation and today “his back is entirely well.… Senator Kennedy has tremendous physical stamina. He has above-average resistance to infections, such as influenza. The outstanding vigor with which he meets an incredibly demanding schedule, often seven days a week and with the briefest of vacations (only once as long as two consecutive weeks in the past four years), is clear evidence of his fine physique and remarkable vitality.”

  Kennedy feels, however, that no statements will put the rumors to rest. They are inherent in a campaign situation. The best way he finds to answer them is by keeping up his strenuous physical schedule. Anyone interested in his condition, he says, can try the pace of his next barnstorming tour. Meantime, he plays golf, swims with long, sure strokes, carries his two-year-old daughter on his back. Until recently, at least, he occasionally wore a light corset. In bathing trunks he looks strong and fit; the operation cut is hardly visible.

  “Profiles in Courage”

  Once Kennedy was out of immediate danger from his operation, his aides began to worry about his mental state. How would he take this prolonged inaction? They did not need to worry. As soon as he could read and write, he got to work on a problem t
hat intrigued him—political courage displayed by noted American legislators. It was not a new subject for the Senator; earlier in the year, before his hospitalization, he had done a little research and writing on the problem. Actually, his interest in political courage ran back at least fifteen years, to the time when he was writing Why England Slept and returning again and again to the failure of most English politicians to defy public opinion and rearm Britain while there was yet time. But now he had a long opportunity to write and think.

  For the Senator, writing a book in a hospital bed was no great problem. Alerted to his needs, the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress sent him cartons of books. In Washington, Sorensen acted as literary amanuensis, digging up factual material, checking with historians and other experts, going over drafts. Arthur Krock, an old family friend, and several others advised on examples of courage that should be included in the book; Krock in particular contended that Senator Taft deserved a chapter because of his unpopular stand against the Nürnberg trials, and Kennedy agreed. Jules Davids, a Georgetown University professor, and James M. Landis, prominent New Dealer and former Harvard Law School dean, long a close friend and now legal adviser to the Senator’s father, helped a good deal in the preparation of several chapters.

  But the brunt of the writing fell on Kennedy himself, lying in his bed in a ground-floor room or sitting out by the pool in front of the big stucco house in Palm Beach. In his loose, widely spaced hand he wrote on heavy white paper in a red stiff-covered “minute book” of the type used in law offices. Progress was slow. His thoughts in writing, as in conversing informally, would race ahead of his power to get the words out as he wished them to appear; he paused often to cross out sentences and paragraphs and make additions in the margins. He dictated the second draft to a secretary.

  Slowly the examples of political courage piled up. The first was John Quincy Adams, whose struggles with the Federalist party had fascinated Kennedy long before he had entered the Senate. Another New Englander, Daniel Webster, Kennedy included for his support of Clay’s compromise between the North and South, although Kennedy acknowledged that. Webster was not as illustrious as he looked, for he had demanded and accepted retainers from the Bank of the United States. One of the most notable essays dealt with Edmund Ross, of Kansas, who said—rightly—that he had looked down into his political grave when, over the bitter protests of his constituents, he saved President Johnson from impeachment. And one of the most moving told of George W. Norris, of Nebraska, whose greatest act of courage was described as not his filibuster against President Wilson’s Armed Ship Bill in 1917, but his support in 1928 of Al Smith, a Catholic, a “wet,” an urbanite, and a Democrat, in a state that was none of these things. The inclusion of the progressive Norris also made for a nice balance to that of the Republican Taft, the only other twentieth-century politician to receive star billing.

  Harper & Brothers, which had turned down Why England Slept sixteen years before, accepted this manuscript with alacrity. Their main concern was that the chapters seemed a bit stiff, and at the editors’ suggestion, Kennedy wrote short anecdotal beginnings for most of the chapters. Allan Nevins, the eminent Columbia University historian, not only did a critique of the manuscript, but contributed a foreword that described the book, with its binding together of history, practical politics, and public morals, as a “real public service.” Early in 1956, Harper brought the volume out under the title Profiles in Courage. Kennedy dedicated it to his wife.

  The book was an instant and brilliant success. Accorded lead reviews in newspapers and magazines across the country, it drew high praise from most critics. It shot to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for many months. It was translated into Spanish, Turkish, Japanese, Arabic, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Telugu. Readers seemed delighted and surprised that a politician—even a politician in the United States Senate—could be so literate. “That a United States Senator, a young man of independent means with a gallant and thoughtful background, should have produced this study is as remarkable as it is helpful,” wrote editor E. D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor. “It is a splendid flag that Senator Kennedy has nailed to his mast. May he keep it there!”

  Since both author and subject were good copy, the short biographies of men of courage served double and even triple duty. Some were published in magazines as separate articles and one or two of these appeared in magazine digests. The book also served as an almost inexhaustible reservoir of anecdotes, historical facts, and ideas for Kennedy’s future speeches.

  The grand climax came more than a year after publication, when Profiles in Courage was awarded the Pulitzer prize for biography. No other honor has meant so much to Kennedy as this recognition of intellectual and literary distinction. (The $500 prize the Senator turned over to the United Negro College Fund.) It may well be, too, that the award had a small but discernible effect on his political popularity and presidential appeal. In January 1957, the Gallup Poll had asked people their preference if the choice for the Democratic presidential nomination narrowed down to Kefauver and Kennedy. The outcome was 38 per cent for Kefauver and 41 per cent for Kennedy. Four months later, in answer to substantially the same question, the returns split 33 per cent to 45 per cent in the same order. Since the only relevant and significant event in the four-month interim was the Pulitzer award, it seems possible that literary honors carry more weight with the public than has been commonly thought.

  There was one jarring note. Some doubted that any United States senator could produce a book of literary merit. Soon after publication, a rumor began to circulate that Kennedy’s book had been entirely ghost-written by Sorensen or some other assistant. It was strange that this rumor went as far as it did, since Kennedy had, of course, already written a best seller at the age of twenty-three, and no one charged that Why England Slept was ghosted; but the latter had been pretty much forgotten by 1956. To be sure, he had had more help in the preparation of Profiles in Courage than authors customarily have, because of his illness; nonetheless, he wrote his own book. Kennedy was annoyed but could do nothing about the anonymous whispers. After the Pulitzer award, however, Drew Pearson repeated the charge on the Mike Wallace television program. Kennedy threatened to take action, and after going over the original manuscript and drafts, Pearson stated that Kennedy was author of the book. Still the rumors lingered on. As late as March 1958, Kennedy invited Senator Richard Neuberger, himself a professional writer, to drop into his office some time and look over the manuscript. He knew this was unnecessary as far as Neuberger was concerned, but he wanted the Oregon Senator to be able to speak on the matter with complete authority.

  The Meaning of Courage

  Kennedy’s profiles of courageous politicians were sandwiched between opening and closing essays on the meaning of political courage in general. These were the most important part of the book. Drawn from the Senator’s own experience as well as from his researches, the essays dwelt on the practical problems and complex aspects of political courage. Because this quality is to Kennedy the “most admirable of human virtues,” because his own career has seemed to some full, and to others empty, of political courage, and because he has thought about this quality in relation to political success, his views may throw some light on his own career and prospects.

  Kennedy began by quoting Walter Lippmann’s statement that successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men who advance politically only as they “placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding threatening elements in their constituencies.” Kennedy denied this. Innumerable obscure acts of political courage, he said, took place almost daily in the Senate chamber. Any decline had been less in the Senate than in the public’s appreciation of the nature of the Senate as a legislative chamber and the need for compromise and balance. People simply did not understand the “terrible pressures” that discouraged acts of political courage.

  What were these terrible pressur
es? One was the legislator’s human desire to get along with his fellow members of the club, not to follow lone-wolf tendencies that might embarrass his colleagues. “The way to get along,” Kennedy said he had been advised when he entered Congress, “is to go along.” But to the Senator, going along was more than just good fellowship; it was also the essence of compromise, the compromise that “prevents each set of reformers—the wets and the drys, the one-worlders and the isolationists, the vivisectionists and the anti-vivisectionists—from crushing the group on the extreme opposite end of the political spectrum.” He wrote:

  “The fanatics and extremists and even those conscientiously devoted to hard and fast principles are always disappointed at the failure of their Government to rush to implement all of these principles and to denounce those of their opponents. But the legislator has some responsibility to conciliate those opposing forces within his state and party and to represent them in the larger clash of interests on the national level; and he alone knows that there are few if any issues where all the truth and all the right and all the angels are on one side.”

  The second pressure against courage was the desire to be re-elected. This was not necessarily a selfish motive, for politicians going down to defeat in defending a single principle would not be on hand to fight for other principles. Defeat, moreover, was not hard simply for a senator, but for his friends and supporters who had sacrificed for the cause and even for his wife and children. After all, only in totalitarian countries were persons expected to sacrifice all—even their careers—for the national good. Dwelling on this point, Kennedy defended the lot of the harassed politician. “In no other occupation but politics is it expected that a man will sacrifice honors, prestige, and his chosen career on a single issue.