Orthopedic consultation suggested that he might be helped by a lumbosacral fusion together with a sacroiliac fusion. Because of the severe degree of trauma involved in these operations and because of the patient’s adrenocortical insufficiency due to Addison’s disease, it was deemed dangerous to proceed with these operations. However, since this man would become incapacitated without surgical intervention, it was decided, reluctantly, to perform the operations by doing two different procedures at different times if necessary and by having a team versed in endocrinology and surgical physiology help in the management of this patient before, during, and after the operation.38
This would be an experimental surgery, the team knew, with a low chance of success. (In time, they would also determine that it had been unwarranted, in view of the likely effects and risks involved.) Three times they postponed the operation. Finally, on October 21, they went ahead, led by Dr. Philip D. Wilson, who used screws to bolt a metal plate into bone in order to stabilize the lumbar spine. In Hyannis Port, Joe Kennedy was beside himself with worry, unable to sleep at all that night. As Rose recalled, “His mind kept wandering back to the last letter he received from Joe Junior, the letter written right before his death, assuring his father that there was no danger involved and that he would be sure to return. The memory was so painful that Joe actually cried out in the darkness with a sound so loud that I was awakened from sleep.”39
Joe was right to fret. Three days after the surgery, his son developed an infection that failed to respond to antibiotics. Jack’s temperature rose alarmingly and he slipped into a coma. His family was summoned at midnight to come to the hospital immediately, and a priest arrived to administer the last rites of the Church—the second time this had happened to him. Jackie Kennedy, chain-smoking throughout, clung to her father-in-law for support and, for the first time in her life, she said afterwards, “really prayed.” The next day, the Ambassador wept before journalist Arthur Krock. “He told me he thought Jack was dying and he wept sitting in the chair opposite me in the office.”40 On Capitol Hill, rumors were floated that the end was nigh, and Evelyn Lincoln received word that her boss might have mere hours to live.
Having cheated death once again, the senator leaves the hospital with Jackie by his side, on December 22, 1954, in order to begin recuperation in Palm Beach.
And then, suddenly, just as he had done so many times before, Jack rallied, staving off the seemingly inevitable rendezvous with death. He remained critically ill, with an eight-inch wound from the incision that would not heal, but he was out of immediate danger. Expressions of relief and support flowed in—Pope Pius XII sent “a pledge of Heavenly assistance” for a full recovery, and President Eisenhower, visiting Boston, told the National Council of Catholic Women that he hoped and prayed Senator Kennedy would be “shortly restored to full health.”41 For several weeks Jack lay on his back in his darkened room, more or less immobile, until the doctors decided he might recover more quickly in Florida. Shortly before Christmas he was flown to the family’s home in Palm Beach.
By then, the Senate had at long last held its vote on censuring McCarthy. The verdict went against him, 67 to 22, with only half the Republicans, and not a single Democrat, staying with him.42 Almost certainly, Kennedy would have voted for censure if present, on the same circumscribed grounds that he had planned to do so in the summer. He disliked the senator’s antics and crudeness, and had shown no hesitation in defying him over the appointments of Conant, Bohlen, and Lee. (More basically, with every voting Democrat opting in favor of censure, is it even remotely plausible to imagine Kennedy casting the lone vote against?) Yet it also must be said that Kennedy could have participated in the vote had he wanted to. Upon entering the hospital, he did not give his legislative assistant, Ted Sorensen, guidance on how to proceed in his absence. Sorensen took no action. He feared the wrath of the senator’s father and brother if he declared Kennedy in support of censure, and also, as he later said, he “suspected—correctly—that there was no point in my trying to reach him on an issue he wanted to duck.”43
Kennedy’s failure to vote on the final censure resolution would cause him no end of grief in the years to come, especially at the hands of liberal Democrats, who deemed his moral position wobbly at best. His principal legalistic defense—that the Senate was acting like a jury, and no juror absent from the trial should have his predetermined opinion recorded—cut no ice with these critics. McCarthy was not in fact on trial, they rightly pointed out, and moreover his conduct over the past four years was a matter of common public knowledge. To them, it was obvious that Kennedy had acted on the basis of his family’s ties to McCarthy and his fear of alienating the Wisconsin demagogue’s sizable mass of unreconstructed backers. Had Kennedy instructed Sorensen to register support for censure (through a Senate procedure known as pairing, in which two absent lawmakers declared positions on opposite sides of an issue), he would have spared himself much future agony. Initially, however, his decision not to do so had logic behind it. When the right-wing Boston Post ran a page 1 editorial blasting those New England lawmakers who voted against McCarthy as having acted “in accordance with the desires of the Kremlin,” John Kennedy was not one of its targets.44
The comment he made to Chuck Spalding shortly before being wheeled into surgery was revealing: “You know,” he said in a contemplative way, “when I go downstairs [after the operation], I know exactly what’s going to happen. Those reporters are going to lean over my stretcher. There’s going to be about ninety-five faces bent over me with great concern. And then every one of those guys is going to say, ‘Now, Senator, what about McCarthy?’ Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reach for my back and I’m just going to yell, ‘Oow,’ and then I’m going to pull the sheet over my head and hope we can get out of there.”45
The censure vote marked the effective end of Joe McCarthy’s reign (though not the end of McCarthyism). He continued thereafter to make belligerent speeches on the Senate floor, but fewer and fewer colleagues heard them. With the Democrats having scored gains in the midterm elections and gained control of both houses of Congress, his clout was reduced. Even worse, to his mind, the press stopped paying attention. His alcoholism, already advanced at the time of the vote, became more severe, and he suffered bouts of deep depression. In May 1957, he died, succumbing to acute hepatitis brought on by the years of alcohol abuse. Robert Kennedy, loyal to the end, cried upon hearing the news and flew to Wisconsin for the funeral, while Joe Kennedy told McCarthy’s widow how “shocked and deeply grieved” he was to learn of the senator’s passing. “His indomitable courage in adhering to the cause in which he believed evoked my admiration. His friendship was deeply appreciated and reciprocated.”46
V
Throughout the long postoperative ordeal, first in New York and then in Palm Beach, Jackie Kennedy was the picture of steadfast support, remaining at her husband’s bedside more or less continually, serving as de facto chief nurse. “Jackie was magnificent with him,” recalled journalist and friend Charlie Bartlett, who visited the hospital in November. “She had this almost uncanny ability to rise to the occasion. She sat with him for hours, held his hand, mopped his brow, fed him, helped him in and out of bed, put on his socks and slippers for him, entertained him by reading aloud and reciting poems she knew by heart, bought him silly little gadgets and toys to make him laugh, played checkers, Categories, and Twenty Questions with him.” Chuck Spalding agreed. “She stepped right in and did everything humanly possible to see that he’d pull through. People who thought she was some flighty society girl realized they’d made a big mistake. Jackie was far from helpless.” She plumped his pillows, brought him snippets of gossip about family and friends, and told him about the new movies generating the most buzz. She smuggled in his favorite candy. And she urged friends to come by the hospital as often as possible, knowing that such visits distracted him from the pain. “Jack is feeling lousy
,” she’d say. “Come on down.”47
Even strangers were recruited to the cause. At an evening function in Manhattan that she attended with her sister, Lee, Jackie met the glamorous screen star Grace Kelly, who would soon win an Oscar for her role in George Seaton’s The Country Girl. The two sisters asked Kelly to come with them to the hospital to cheer Jack up. She agreed, slipping quietly into the room and—at the sisters’ suggestion—whispering in his ear, “I’m the new night nurse.” Depending on the account, Kelly either did or did not don a nurse’s outfit, and Kennedy either recognized her or stared blankly ahead, too drugged to comprehend anything. Kelly’s own recollection was that he “recognized me at once and couldn’t have been sweeter or more quick to put me at ease.”48
Sometimes Jackie showed a different side. Priscilla Johnson, who had been a research assistant for the senator the previous spring and whom he sporadically pursued, came to the hospital on a weekend afternoon in November. Jackie was there. “She looked absolutely stunning in a black suit,” Johnson remembered, “frolicking around the bed, smiling and laughing, eating Jack’s meal, before she was to venture out to meet her old beau, John Marquand, for dinner.” To the former assistant it seemed obvious that Jackie, so perfectly made up, so fetching and attractive, was baiting her husband, trying to make him a little jealous, and that it was working. “I realized then and there she was an actress, a really excellent actress. She loved him, and she wanted him to know what he had in her, to really feel it.”49
In Palm Beach she carried on in her role as lead caretaker. Years later she joked of that Christmas of 1954 that it was a “horrible” affair. “We spent the whole time hovering around the heir apparent.” Yet she was ever attentive, day after exhausting day, never complaining even as the hours grew long and her own sleep was cut short. Her husband remained frail, his weight below 130 pounds, and he suffered regular infections and spikes in his temperature. His wound, deep and suppurating, required constant attention, and it was Jackie who gave it, and without fuss. “Jackie cleaned the wound skillfully, gently, and calmly,” Rose Kennedy subsequently said, “and made no comment about it to anyone.” As she had done in New York, she bathed him and fed him, read to him and told him stories, and she now added a new activity: she got him to try oil painting, in the manner of his hero Churchill. Her efforts notwithstanding, he suffered bouts of enveloping gloom and bitterness. Friends such as Red Fay and Dave Powers and Lem Billings saw it when they visited him in Florida, and family members saw it up close. (It says something about the devotion Jack inspired in his friends that Fay stayed for ten days, and Billings for a month.) At times they feared he was losing the will to go on as he contemplated possibly having to give up his Senate seat.50
What rescued him, according to his wife, was the writing project he had first conceived the previous winter, on political courage and the true meaning of representative democracy. It was a natural fit for him: he was a student of history, for one thing, and moreover the phenomenon of courage in public affairs had fascinated him since his youth. At various points in 1954, acquaintances suggested nominees for a list of U.S. senators who had acted on principle even at the price of damage to their political careers. Arthur Krock suggested Robert Taft, while Ted Sorensen lobbied for the inclusion of fellow Nebraskan George Norris. In a book of orations, Kennedy read Daniel Webster’s Seventh of March speech and the abolitionists’ condemnation of it. Jackie’s Georgetown course with Jules Davids in the spring of 1954 likely also played a role—Davids lectured dramatically to the students on the nation’s political history, and in the evenings Jackie and Jack would discuss the themes and readings of the class. The senator’s reading of another Herbert Agar book—A Time for Greatness, with its clarion call to Americans to lead the drive to a better and more just world—may have provided further inspiration.51
Now, in early 1955, the project gained momentum. It should be more than a magazine article, Kennedy determined; it should be a book, featuring profiles of senators representing different regions and political persuasions. Fifteen years had passed since the publication of Why England Slept, which had been a turning point in its author’s young life; the new work would prove to be another milestone for him, not least for the deeper insight it would give him into his own political philosophy. As in the earlier book, Kennedy concerned himself here with the problem of the responsibilities of leadership in democratic society—in particular, what is a statesman to do if his constituents and his party advocate a course of action that he believes is dangerously mistaken?
Skeptics then and later wondered if the new book wasn’t mostly an effort to make amends for his non-vote on McCarthy’s censure. No doubt it was, in part, though it bears reiterating that he had conceived the study many months before the McCarthy crisis came to a head. At that time he had been too busy to give the project close attention; now, flat on his back on the Florida oceanfront, he had all the hours in the world. “Jack couldn’t sleep for more than an hour or two at a time because the pain was so bad,” his father remembered, “so he’d study to get his mind off the pain.” Patricia’s husband, Peter Lawford, not generally awed by the Kennedy men, was amazed by his brother-in-law’s self-discipline and drive. “He was really ill with that back, but he fought his way through that, and…wrote the book while he was lying on his back.”52
“This project saved his life,” Jackie said. “It helped him channel all his energies while distracting him from pain.”53
Her own role was critical, as the author would note in his preface: “This book would not have been possible without the encouragement, assistance and criticism offered from the very beginning by my wife Jacqueline, whose help during all the days of my convalescence, I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.” Jackie read aloud to him when he was too weary to hold a book, taking detailed notes along the way, and she successfully lobbied to have him seek input from Professor Davids on some of the chapters.54 She also coordinated on logistical matters with Ted Sorensen, who would be Kennedy’s principal collaborator in the writing. From the senator’s office in Washington, Sorensen worked with a coterie of clerical assistants who transcribed from Dictabelts, took dictation, and typed research materials and, later, sections of draft chapters. He also consulted with historians and other experts. Staff at the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress sent cartons of books, some to Palm Beach, some to Sorensen in the Senate office.
Kennedy made the final choices about which figures to feature in the book. And although Sorensen took the lead role in drafting the bulk of the chapters, with significant input on some of them from Davids and Jim Landis, the senator was responsible for the book’s architecture, themes, and arguments. Sorensen, gifted though he was in so many ways, didn’t have that capacity—at twenty-seven and with no personal political experience, he was too green, and moreover he knew far less about the details of U.S. history than did his boss. Kennedy was especially critical to the first and last chapters, as well as a big chunk of chapter 2, on John Quincy Adams—it was the Adams case that had first drawn him to the project, and he produced a lot of prose on Adams that never made it into the finished book. Often he worked while prone in bed, on heavy white paper in his loose, widely spaced hand; on better days, he was propped up on the patio or the porch. Some sections he dictated into a machine or to stenographers hired locally. On an almost daily basis, Sorensen recalled, Kennedy sent him instructions about “books to ship down, memoranda to prepare, sources to check, materials to assemble. More than two hundred books, journals, magazines, Congressional Records and old newspaper files were scanned, as well as my father’s correspondence with Norris and other sources.”55
“Politics is a jungle,” Kennedy wrote in his notes, “torn between doing the right thing and staying in office—between the local interest & the national interest—between the private good of the politician & the general good.” Moreover, “we have always insisted academically
on an unusually high—even unattainable—standard in our political life. We consider it graft to make sure a park or a road, etc., be placed near property of friends—but what do we think of admitting friends to the favored list for securities about to be offered to the less favored at a higher price?…Private enterprise system…makes OK private action which would be considered dishonest if public action.”56
“Enclosed pleased find the drafts for two chapters,” Sorensen wrote to Kennedy on February 4. “These two chapters are of the approximate length intended; although undoubtedly you will want to introduce a more flowery style and greater historical detail (beyond that which was taught in Lincoln Central High School, the only American history I’ve ever had). I will say that this is the most gigantic undertaking we have ever gigantically undertaken; and I doubt whether Gibbon could have produced ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ in a proportionately brief time.” The same day, Sorensen also shipped to Palm Beach biographies of Mississippi’s Lucius Lamar and Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton. On February 14, he followed with draft chapters on John Tyler, who was a senator from Virginia before he became vice president and president, and Sam Houston of Texas (only the latter made the final cut) and, under separate cover, “reference texts for your use in expanding and rewriting these drafts.”57
The pace caused Kennedy to worry that they were moving too fast and risked producing a “second-rate” work; he wondered if they needed to take a step back and include more original research drawn from archival sources. But Sorensen pressed on, assuring his boss that the book would succeed or fail based on its broad interpretive claims and biographical richness, not on “whatever new, previously uncovered facts or facets we might include.” This was no academician’s work, after all, but a book by a statesman: “Even more important than the telling of these stories is the fact that a United States senator is telling them, telling them for their meaning and inspiration today, discerning the patterns in them and discussing in opening and concluding chapters the whole concept of political courage. No other Senator or author has done this.”58
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