The Dark Side of Camelot

by Seymour Hersh

  The data about Kennedy's venereal disease have come into public view only because Herbst hedged his bets and sent a copy of the file he gave Robert Kennedy, including handwritten notes, to the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Washington. The file was found in a locked drawer in 1982 by archivists at the library and brought to the attention of Dr. Manfred Wasserman, head of the library's history of medicine division. Wasserman did not keep the file at his library, as Herbst had obviously intended, but in early 1983 instead sent it to the Kennedy Library with a note explaining that Herbst had hoped the file "would at some reasonable future time become available to researchers." Wasserman wrote that Herbst had an "esteemed" reputation among the medical profession in Washington, and had been the physician to Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Herbst had wanted the files kept "for posterity."

  Wasserman, in a 1995 interview for this book, said that he and his colleagues agreed at the time that such "delicate records" were "much more in the scope of the Kennedy Library than the National Library of Medicine. Without any question," he said, "something like that belongs in the presidential library." Asked what he thought of the Herbst file, Wasserman said, "You wonder if it [Kennedy's venereal disease] was transmitted." Thus Kennedy's risk taking was as dangerous, at least to his health, as some of the Secret Service agents thought. There was also an obvious risk to his wife, and to his other sexual partners.

  Another source of tension over the president's well-being was Dr. Max Jacobson, the New York physician who was the doctor of choice in the early 1960s for many in fast New York society. Jacobson made more than thirty visits to the White House, according to gate logs, and attended to the president and the first lady, who was also his patient, in Palm Beach and Hyannis Port. "Miracle Max" Jacobson supplied the president, as he did so many of his patients, with vials of specially prepared drugs and hypodermic needles for self-administration.

  Jacobson, who died in 1979, would come under investigation by federal authorities in 1968 for suspected misuse of amphetamines; his license to practice medicine was revoked in 1975 by the New York State Board of Regents. But many of the Secret Service agents had questions in early 1961 about Jacobson and his "medicines."

  "He was the bat wing and chicken blood doctor," Larry Newman told me. He and other agents knew nothing about Jacobson's medical credentials, Newman added---he was known to them as "Dr. Feelgood"---but they knew what the shots did to the president. "After lunch," Newman told me, "he was done for the day if he didn't have a boost."

  The physician, carrying his bag of drugs and needles, "came and went" in and out of the White House without challenge, Newman said, as Kennedy's women did. He was part of "the inner circle, with Dave Powers, and nobody got in there." One of the senior agents, Newman added, "knew what the guy [Jacobson] was doing, and tried to keep him away" from the president and first lady. "We didn't see them [shots] administered or know the schedule" of when Kennedy gave himself other shots, the agent said, "but I was aware that during the waking hours ... it was every six hours."

  George Smathers learned how necessary the shots were while playing golf with the president in Palm Beach. "We played about seven or eight holes," he said in a 1996 interview for this book, "and then Jack said to me, 'I'm just hurting so bad that I can't believe it. I got to get a shot of painkiller,' or whatever. But it was something in addition, some medicine he had. So we go back to his house, and Jack lies down and says to me or Frank, my brother, 'Somebody's got to give me a shot.' He told us where the medicine was, and Frank went and got it. It had a big needle, at least two and a half, three inches long. Jack was lying down and he said, 'Now, Frank, here's what you got to do. Get this tall bottle and take the syringe,'... and so on. 'And then I'm going to lie down and pull down my britches, and stick this needle in my butt and shoot it in there.' Frank did just that---got it out, put it in, and whooo, stuck it right in his butt. That's what [Kennedy] had to do. And he had to do that about once every six hours at that time."

  Kennedy was introduced to Jacobson and the magic of his shots during the 1960 campaign by Charles Spalding. In an interview, Spalding said that he had himself been referred to Jacobson by Stanislaus Radziwill, the exiled Polish prince, known as Stash to his friends, who was the brother-in-law of Jacqueline Kennedy.* "I picked up Jacobson from Radziwill," Spalding told me. "I'd see Stash jumping around town and went to see Max. I guess it was speed or whatever he gave us." After taking a shot, Spalding said, he visited with the Kennedys. "I was hopping around," he told me. "They said, 'Jesus! Where do you get all this energy?' After seeing Max, you could jump over a fence." Spalding's former wife, Betty, recalled Jacobson with less fondness. "Chuck used to shoot himself," she told me in an interview. "The doctor would give him the needles for use in the house. I don't think [Chuck] knew what he was giving him." Spalding would "take a shot," his former wife said, and "get flushed in the face. His eyes would get a glazed look---the whites would look full of mucus and be fixed---and his mouth would get dry." She did not want to know, Betty Spalding added, what it was her husband was taking.

  Jacobson, in an unpublished memoir, wrote that he first treated Kennedy with a shot shortly before one of the televised debates with Richard Nixon in the fall of 1960. He traveled with Kennedy and gave him repeated shots during the president's June 1961 visit to Paris and Vienna. One shot was given moments before Khrushchev was scheduled to arrive for a summit meeting, Jacobson wrote. The doctor was listed on the official White House staff manifest for the trip. Jacobson also treated the president, he said, during the tense moments of the October 1962 missile crisis. FBI records made available under the Freedom of Information Act show that in June 1962 one of Bobby Kennedy's aides in the Justice Department sought to have a vial of Jacobson's drugs analyzed by the FBI's laboratory. The laboratory could not do so, the FBI reported, because the sample supplied was insufficient. In his memoir, Jacobson claimed that the president "hesitantly" told him that his brother Bobby "had demanded a sample of all my medications for testing by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]." The doctor said he sent fifteen vials of medicine to the attorney general's office, but heard nothing further. Jack Kennedy, Jacobson wrote, had no intention of stopping treatment. "I don't care if it's horse piss," Jacobson quoted Kennedy as saying. "It's the only thing that works."

  The president's womanizing, like his questionable reliance on Jacobson's "feel-good" shots, was widely known to members of the White House staff, Larry Newman said. Kennedy's daily swims in the White House pool were not merely to soothe his back, as the Schlesinger and Sorensen memoirs depicted them, but a focal point for sexual activity. "It was common knowledge in the White House," Newman said, "that when the president took lunch in the pool with Fiddle and Faddle, nobody goes in there." These were two young female staff aides who would be "scooped up by Dave Powers and taken into the pool at noon with JFK. They would go skinny-dipping with Jack." The president's brothers, Bobby and Teddy, often joined in.

  During those moments, Newman added, the pool was completely off-limits, even for staff members of the National Security Council who were dealing with international crises. "We had one occasion when one of the military aides came up from the Situation Room," Newman told me, carrying a cable that needed immediate attention from the president. "He came around the corner and he was moving fast---and stopped and cursed when he saw me standing up, away from the [pool] door, and just said, 'How long has he been in there?' I didn't answer him at first. Then I said, 'Oh, about half an hour.' And he said, 'What's your best guess?' And I said, 'Another half hour. Take your best shot if you want to go in. It's up to you.' So he swore again and said, 'I'll wait.' He stood there awhile and shuffled his feet. And he said, 'I got to get an answer on this.' And then turned around and went in by the Oval Office and then paced back out. Eventually Kennedy came out, in about half an hour. This guy was a ranking officer in the military and he wasn't going in that room at all."

  An added complication was the affec
tion and respect the agents had for Jacqueline Kennedy. "We thought a lot of her, and it sort of pulled you and pushed you both ways," Newman told me. "You thought, 'Well, I'm really proud because I'm with a popular guy and the public loves him and he's good to the Secret Service.'"

  The president did not carry on when his wife was in the White House, Newman said, but the first lady spent much of her time, especially on weekends, with their children at the rented family retreat at Glen Ora, near Middleburg, in Virginia's horse country. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent in charge of her protection, usually went with her. "When Jackie left with Clint for Glen Ora," Newman told me, Kennedy "was out of there [the Oval Office], had his bowl of soup, and hit the pool with Fiddle and Faddle. When she was there, it was no fun. He just had headaches. You really saw him droop because he wasn't getting laid. He was like a rooster getting hit with a water hose." Despite the president's womanizing, Newman said, he and the other Secret Service agents on the detail were convinced that Mrs. Kennedy "really loved him."

  There were obvious tensions in the marriage, however. One Secret Service agent said he came away from a two-year assignment on the presidential detail feeling "sorry for Jackie. She was real lonesome." He recalled driving her home by herself from parties. "She seemed sad---just a sad lady," he said in an interview. At times, according to Mary Gallagher, the first lady's personal secretary, "the president was so busy that Jackie occasionally had to make a date to get to see him in the evening." In her 1969 memoir, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, Gallagher described the procedure: "I would call Evelyn [Lincoln] and ask, 'Has the President anything to do Thursday night?' And another time, 'Has the President anything on his schedule for Saturday night? Would he like to go to a dinner dance?'"

  The White House pool was an especially important area for sexual partying in the Kennedy years and, not surprisingly, it was Joe Kennedy who paid for the pool to be redecorated and repainted in the spring of 1961. A new sound system was installed, enabling swimmers---and partygoers---to listen to music while in the water. Most important, the one wall in the pool area with windows was redesigned; workmen covered the glass with a large mural depicting the sunset over St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. A private passageway also was constructed that enabled the president and his guests to have direct access from the pool area to an elevator leading to the second-floor living quarters. In her 1966 oral history for the Kennedy Library, Dr. Janet Travell praised the setup: "He would have his swim just before lunch and put on a beach robe and beach slippers and walk from the pool directly to the elevator and upstairs, not meet anybody, and rest and have his lunch."

  A few days after arriving at the White House, Newman caused near panic among a group of Secret Service supervisors by casually wandering after duty hours into the sacrosanct pool area, which contained exercise machines, and treating himself to a workout and a swim. "I told my supervisor that was a pretty nice thing they had, and I thought the man was going to have a baby. He was very nice and patient with me, but he said, 'Never, never do that again.' And I didn't." Newman, the new guy on the job, was mystified. He came to understand that the supervisors knew what Kennedy was doing in the pool, "but they didn't want to tell the agents. Nobody wanted to talk about it because ... they didn't want to end their careers. You [the newly assigned agents] just learned by doing. It gave new definition to on-the-job training."

  Newman said he agreed to talk to me on the record about what he saw in an attempt to balance history. "It irks me that some of the people who worked with him are historically incorrect about how he ran his presidency, how he ran his life, and what a picnic the whole thing was. There were things that went bump in the night," Newman added. "It was also our time with him," referring to the Secret Service, "and we loved the man. By the same token, we grieve that he would conduct himself in such a way as to make us so vulnerable and make the country so vulnerable."

  Newman left the presidential detail in 1963, not long before the president's assassination, and was reassigned to the Secret Service office in San Francisco. He worked in Secret Service field offices on the West Coast for the next twenty years, pursuing counterfeiters among others, and became chief of security for Western Union after retiring.

  William T. McIntyre, of Phoenix, Arizona, arrived at the presidential detail in the fall of 1963, just as Newman was leaving, from a two-man Secret Service office in Spokane, Washington. He came with high expectations. "How often does a twenty-eight-year-old guy get a chance to participate in anything in and around the center of government?" McIntyre asked in a 1995 interview for this book. "You expect to see a lot of professionalism, a lot of integrity." He, too, was given no warning of what was to come. The new arrival was briefed by Jerry Behn, head of the White House detail, and immediately assigned to the midnight shift. McIntyre got his first hint on the first or second night on duty. His shift supervisor, the highly respected Emory Roberts, took him aside and warned, McIntyre told me, that "you're going to see a lot of shit around here. Stuff with the president. Just forget about it. Keep it to yourself. Don't even talk to your wife." Over the next few days, McIntyre said, he saw "girls coming in---hookers." Roberts was nervous about it. "Emory would say," McIntyre recalled with a laugh, "'How in the hell do you know what's going on? He could be hurt in there. What if one bites him'" in a sensitive area? Roberts "talked about it a lot," McIntyre said. "Bites." Despite such fears, McIntyre said, "we would never stop them from going in if Powers or O'Donnell was with them. We wouldn't check them over."

  McIntyre, too, had a pool story. He was on duty when Jacqueline Kennedy decided, on short notice, that she wanted to take a swim. Her husband, as Mrs. Kennedy undoubtedly suspected, "was in the pool with a couple of bimbos." The agent on duty refused to let her in, and an angry first lady summoned Clint Hill, the senior agent on her detail. "By the time Clint got there," McIntyre recalled, "the president had gotten the word somehow" and fled the pool. "You could see one big pair and two smaller pair of wet footprints leading to the Oval Office." In McIntyre's view, a public scandal about Kennedy's incessant womanizing was inevitable. "It would have had to come out in the next year or so. In the [1964 presidential] campaign, maybe."

  McIntyre said he and some of his colleagues on the White House detail felt abused by their service on behalf of President Kennedy. "Each agent is, after all, a sworn law enforcement officer," he told me. "When you see some type of criminal offense, whether it's a misdemeanor or a felony, occurring in your presence, blatantly, that makes you feel a little bit used"---especially if it's done by the president. "A procurement is illegal," McIntyre added. "And if you have a procurer with prostitutes paraded in front of you, then as a sworn law enforcement officer you're asking yourself, 'Well, what do they think of us?' When that occurs, the agent would feel that his authority and his reason for being there is nullified." McIntyre said he eventually realized that he had compromised his law enforcement beliefs to the point where he wondered whether it was "time to get out of there. I was disappointed by what I saw."

  Tony Sherman, of Salt Lake City, served two years on the Kennedy presidential detail before returning to Secret Service field work on the West Coast and in Salt Lake City. "It was just not once every six months, not every New Year's Eve, but was a regular thing," Sherman said of the presidential womanizing in interviews in 1995 and 1997 for this book. "I'm serious in my job. I didn't want a part of it. It's difficult to talk morally about other people, but we aren't talking about other people. We're talking about the president of the United States. We're talking about my country. And we're talking about people my age with wives and children who were willing to give their lives."

  "It took me a week to learn what was going on," Sherman said. He learned the hard way. Within a week or so of being assigned to the president's personal detail, Sherman flew with Kennedy for a weekend at his father's home in Palm Beach. Sherman was assigned to the midnight to eight A.M. watch. At around two in the morning he heard noises at the pool, and he investigat
ed, gun at the ready. To his dismay, he found the president and a prominent European socialite, both naked, at play in the water.

  "We had bosses who'd been around a long time," Sherman told me. "Their attitude was different: 'This is a family. We not only protect the family, we protect the ability of him to do whatever he wants inside the family.' We got to the point where we'd say, 'What else is new?' When you see nude bodies going down the hall.... Were we bothered by it? It didn't matter. There were women everywhere. Very often, depending on what shift you were on, you'd either see them going up, or you'd see them coming out in the morning [from the president's family quarters]. People were vacuuming and the ushers were around. And we were there. There were several of them that were regular visitors. Not when Jackie was there, however. We'd say good morning."

  There were many days, Sherman told me, when Kennedy "didn't work at all. He'd come down late, go to his office. There were meetings---the usual things---and then he had pool time before his nap and lunch. He is president, but it's so regular and so often that we didn't know what to think. If the president is happy and doing his job, we're doing our job. But I wanted out." He left the White House detail shortly before Kennedy's assassination.

  Sherman also told me that one of the Secret Service's jobs was to prevent Kennedy from being caught in the act by his wife. Jackie would "visit New York and things would go on in the White House pool," Sherman said. "We would receive word that the first lady was landing, and we would notify the president, and his friends would leave. I never figured for the two years I was there that she really didn't know what was going on. It would have been impossible" to keep her eyes shut. There was one very tense moment when the warning didn't come until Mrs. Kennedy was en route from the airport, Sherman told me. The agent in charge screwed up his courage and ran into the pool to tell the president that his wife would arrive within fifteen minutes. Bobby and Ted Kennedy were also in the pool. "The door opened," Sherman recalled, "and people scattered. And as [the president] ran out, he was holding a bloody mary in his hand. I happened to be on the post and he said, 'Here. Take this.' He didn't know what to do with it. He went and everybody left, none the wiser. Another day on the beat. It got to the point where we didn't worry about [the president's pool time], particularly when both brothers were around. How safe can you be in the White House, in the swimming pool ... both your brothers with you?" Bobby and Ted would do anything, the agents knew, to protect their brother. "We felt secure," Sherman said.