Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
DESPITE THE FAMILY’S WEALTH and palatial houses, Jack had never seemed to feel as if he had a home, or at least a special place in one of the houses that was exclusively his. A young woman who went with Jack to Hyannis Port when the rest of the family was in Palm Beach “was surprised to see him go through the empty house like an intruder, peeking into his father’s room and looking in his dresser draw[er]s, and picking up objects on all the surfaces as if he hadn’t seen them before.”
Part of the reason had to do with his mother. Rose’s absences had always made Jack unhappy. In 1923, when he was almost six and Rose was about to depart on a six-week trip to California, Jack exclaimed, “Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.” Jack, who had been apart from his parents earlier for an extended hospital stay, saw any separation as a return of that unhappy experience. And while he seemed able to tolerate his father’s business trips, with his mother it was different. He told LeMoyne Billings that whenever Rose announced another trip, he openly cried, which greatly irritated her and made her more distant than ever from her anxious son. Jack learned, as he told Billings, to act stoically in the face of her departures. “Better to take it in stride,” he said.
That said, her presence wasn’t necessarily an improvement. Rose’s insistence on rigid rules of behavior upset and angered Jack. One commentator has said: “[She] organized and supervised the large family with the institutional efficiency she had learned from the Ursuline nuns of Sacred Heart Academy. She insisted on strict adherence to domestic routines and an idealistic dedication to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.” Lem Billings remembered her as “a tough, constant, minute disciplinarian with a fetish for neatness and order and decorum.” She discouraged any excessive emotional display. Touching, personal warmth, sensuality of any kind, was frowned on. “She was terribly religious. She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing… I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life…. It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was… this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him…. She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife…. She didn’t love him…. History made him what he was.”
In response, Jack staged minor rebellions. He refused to toe the line on her religious concerns or follow her household rules. Once when she instructed the children on a Good Friday to wish for a happy death, Jack said he wanted to wish for two dogs. He occasionally interrupted Rose’s recitations of Bible stories with impious questions. What happened to the donkey Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem on the way to his crucifixion? Jack asked. Who attended to the donkey after Jesus was gone? Jack also expressed his antagonism to Rose by keeping a messy room, dressing sloppily, and arriving to meals tardy.
His annoyance with her compulsive demands poked through a letter he wrote in response to a round-robin note she sent to all the children in 1941, when he was twenty-four. “I enjoy your round robin letters,” he answered. “I’m saving them to publish—that style of yours will net us millions. With all this talk of inflation and where is our money going—when I think of your potential earning power… it’s enough to make a man get down on his knees and thank God for the Dorchester High Latin School [sic] which gave you that very sound grammatical basis which shines through every slightly mixed metaphor and each somewhat split infinitive.”
If Jack and the other children had their tensions with Rose, they were not the product of the child-rearing habits of a thoughtless, selfish mother. On the contrary, Rose saw her maternal duties as a high calling requiring considered and devoted action. “I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty,” she said, “but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world, and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.” There was in fact a professionalism to Rose’s organization of her large family that rested on the conventional wisdom of the day: Dr. L. Emmett Holt’s widely read book, The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses (1934). Holt was the Dr. Benjamin Spock of the first half of the twentieth century, and Rose closely followed his rules, which included the need for a daily bath, regular outdoor activity, strict discipline—“spare the rod and spoil the child”—and limited displays of affection. As Holt recommended, Rose kept file cards on her children’s illnesses and made neatness and order a high priority, though to little avail in Jack’s case.
It is also essential to remember that she was burdened with a retarded daughter who consumed a large part of her energy and reduced her freedom to attend to and practice a more joyful give-and-take with her other children. Rosemary, the third child, had been born in the midst of the flu epidemic of 1918. Whether the contagion or some genetic quirk or brain damage from inexpertly used forceps during her delivery was the cause of her disability is impossible to know. By the time she was five, however, it was clear that her physical and mental development was dramatically abnormal. She could not feed or dress herself, had limited verbal skills, and could not keep up with the physical activities of her siblings or her classmates at school. Determined not to send her to an institution, as was accepted practice at the time for “feebleminded” children, Joe and Rose committed themselves to keeping her at home under Rose’s supervision, helped by a special governess and several tutors.
Rose gave the child unqualified love and attention. Eunice remembered the many hours Rose spent playing tennis with Rosemary, even though she never played with the other children. Moreover, Rose and Joe required everyone in the family to treat Rosemary as an equal as much as possible. The other children responded with an attentiveness and kindness that speaks well of all their characters and the strength of shared family purpose. To Rose, Rosemary’s disability was a kind of gift from God, reminding the most fortunate that they must give as well as receive. She also believed that Rosemary’s difficulties sensitized her other children to the meaning of daily hardship and suffering, which was the lot not just of the poor and underprivileged.
Certainly for Jack, Rosemary’s retardation gave him an uncommon compassion for human failings. One friend recalled that he had “a marvelous capacity for projecting himself into other people’s shoes. That was one of the great keys to his whole personality. He could become a little old lady who was being embarrassed by her husband’s conduct. I saw it happen so many times.” The friend recounted an episode in a New York restaurant when a drunk at a nearby table began verbally assaulting Jack, who was by then a well-known public figure. The friend suggested that they leave, but Jack, who sat stoically through the abuse, said, “Would you look at that guy’s wife and what she’s going through?” The woman looked as if she were “about to die. She was purple with embarrassment…. Eventually the wife did take over and get him out of there. And,” Jack’s friend said, “I thought that was so humane. There were loads of things like that.”
Jack himself was as generous toward his sister as any of the children and undoubtedly felt as much remorse as others at her deterioration in 1939–41 when she reached physical maturity. After years of effort that had produced small gains in her ability to deal with adult matters, Rosemary turned violent at the age of twenty-one, throwing tantrums and raging at caretakers who tried to control her. In response, Joe, without Rose’s knowledge, arranged for Rosemary to have a prefrontal lobotomy, which contemporary medical understanding recommended as the best means for alleviating her agitation and promising a more placid life. The surgery, however, proved to be a disaster, and Joe felt compelled to institutionalize Rosemary in a Wisconsin nunnery, where she would spend the rest of her life.
Part of the family’s impulse in dealing with Rosemary as they did was to hide the truth about her condition. In the twenties and thirties, mental disabilities were seen as a mark of inferiority and an embarrassment best left undisclosed. Rosemary’s difficulties were especially hard to bear for a family as preoccupied with its glowing image as the Kennedys. It was one thing for them to acknowledge limitations among themselves, but to give outsiders access to such information or put personal weaknesses on display was to open the family to possible ridicule or attack from people all too eager to knock down Kennedy claims to superiority. Hiding family problems, particularly medical concerns, later became a defense against jeopardizing election to public office.
Yet there was a benefit to keeping quiet about family suffering that served Jack in particular. The corollary to not speaking openly about family problems was bearing individual suffering stoically. The Kennedys believed that people as fortunate as they were should be uncomplaining about adversity. A visitor to the Hyannis Port home remembered how one Kennedy child, seeking sympathy for an injury suffered while playing, fell to the floor in front of Rose and began to whine. “ ‘On your feet,’ Rose ordered. The child promptly rose and practically stood at attention. ‘Now you know how to behave,’ she added. ‘Go out there and behave as you know you should.’ ” The premium placed on strength and courage as answers to personal burdens would serve Jack well through a lifetime of medical problems and physical suffering.
BACK IN JUNE 1934, as Jack’s junior year at Choate ended and he began feeling ill again, Joe had sent him to the famous Mayo brothers’ clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He spent a miserable month there. “The Goddamnest hole I’ve ever seen. I wish I was back at school,” he wrote Lem Billings. By himself at the Mayo and then nearby St. Mary’s Hospital, where he was transferred after two weeks, he kept his sanity and his hopes for a return to friends and family through a series of letters to Lem. We can only imagine how endless, painful, intrusive, and embarrassing the tests he was subjected to by strangers must have seemed to a seventeen-year-old wrestling with normal adolescent concerns about sex and his body. But having learned from his parents, Jack was stoic and uncomplaining about his difficulties. Lem Billings later told an interviewer, “We used to joke about the fact that if I ever wrote a biography, I would call it ‘John F. Kennedy: A Medical History.’ [Yet] I seldom ever heard him complain.” Trying to be optimistic that the doctors would figure out his problem and restore him to health, Jack told Billings that during a telephone conversation with his father, “he was trying to find out what was wrong with me and for 20 minutes we were trying to hedge around the fact that we didn’t know.”
Judging from his letters describing the medical tests administered to him and later medical records, Jack had “spastic colitis,” which the doctors initially thought might be peptic ulcer disease. They began by prescribing a diet of rice and potatoes preparatory to tests Jack hoped would be over in a few days. But the exams lasted much longer than he had anticipated. “I am suffering terribly out here,” he wrote Billings on June 19. “I now have a gut ache all the time. I’m still eating peas and corn for my food and I had an enema.” He expected to be there for at least another twelve days. By then, “I’ll be dipped in shit…. My bowels have utterly ceased to be of service and so the only way that I am able to unload is for them to blow me out from the top down or from the bottom up.”
Two days later he told Billings: “God what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 lbs. And still going down…. I’m showing them a thing or two. Nobody able to figure what’s wrong with me. All they do is talk about what an interesting case. It would be funny,” he declared wishfully, “if there was nothing wrong with me. I’m commencing to stay awake nights on that. Still don’t know when I’ll get home. My last eight meals have been peas, corn, prunes. Pul l l lently [sic] appetizing.”
Six days later he gave another graphic description of his ordeal. He had heard that he might have to stay in the hospital until July 4. “Shit!! I’ve got something wrong with my intestines. In other words I shit blood.” He feared he might be dying: “My virility is being sapped. I’m just a shell of the former man and my penis looks as if it has been through a wringer.” The doctors were still trying to determine the cause of his illness: “I’ve had 18 enemas in 3 days!!!! I’m clean as a whistle. They give me enemas till it comes out like drinking water which,” he said in an expression of rage toward his caretakers, “they all take a sip of. Yesterday I went through the most harassing experience of my life. First, they gave me 5 enemas until I was white as snow inside. Then they put me in a thing like a barber’s chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled… with my head where the seat is. They (a blonde) took my pants down!! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled them in the aisles by saying ‘you have a good motion.’ He then withdrew his finger and then, the shmuck, stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass. They had a flashlight inside it and they looked around. Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great as I know you would having a lot of strangers looking up my asshole. Of course, when the pretty nurses did it I was given a cheap thrill. I was a bit glad when they had their fill of that. My poor bedraggled rectum is looking at me very reproachfully these days…. The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach—the latest news.”
On June 30, he was “still in this God-damned furnace and it looks like a week more.” He had become “the pet of the hospital.” It was testimony to his extraordinary stoicism and good humor that he had managed to charm the staff despite his ongoing ordeal. “I only had two enemas today so I feel kind of full,” he told Billings. “They have found something wrong with me at last. I don’t know what but it’s probably something revolting like piles or a disease of my vital organ. What will I say when someone asks me what I got?” His question was not posed hypothetically. As with Rosemary, Jack and the family were determined to hide the seriousness of his medical problems. Nothing good could come from revealing that Jack might have some debilitating long-term illness that could play havoc with his future.
All the gastrointestinal tests indicated that Jack had colitis and digestive problems, which made it difficult for him to gain weight and threatened worse consequences if the colon became ulcerated or bled. In July 1944, Dr. Sara Jordan, a gastroenterologist at Boston’s Lahey Clinic, would note that Jack’s diagnosis at the Mayo Clinic and then at Lahey was “diffuse duodenitis and severe spastic colitis,” intestinal and colonic inflammations that could become life-threatening diseases. The premium was not only on finding a better diet for him but also on relieving emotional stress, which in those days was assumed to be a major contributor to ulcers and colitis.
Judging from accounts of colitis therapy published in the January 1934 and December 1936 Mayo Clinic journal, Proceedings, the treatment given to Jack was a combination of restricted diet and injection or subcutaneous implant of a serum obtained from horses. Although the clinic claimed a measure of success with this treatment, it was clearly no cure-all. Indeed, in November 1935, the American Journal of Medical Sciences recommended a “calcium and parathyroid” therapy. The use of parathyroid extract (parathormone) paralleled the development of adrenal-hormone extracts, which the Mayo Clinic, along with other research centers, was then testing. These extracts held promise in the treatment of a variety of illnesses, including chronic spastic and ulcerated colitis. Obtaining these extracts was then very costly. “We always had adrenal extract for those who could afford it,” Dr. George Thorn, an expert at Harvard and Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, said in 1991. There seems no doubt that Joe was able to pay for the medication.
There are intriguing questions about Jack’s medical history that remain difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. In 1937, the first clinical use of adrenal extracts—corticosteroids, or anti-inflammatory agents—became possible with the preparation of DOCA (desoxycorticosterone acetate). This drug was administered in the form of pellets implanted under the skin. It is now well known that Jack was treated with DOCA in 1947 after his “official” diagnosis of Addison’s disease (a disease of the adrenal glands characterized by a deficiency of the hormones needed to regulate blood sugar, sodium and potassium, and the response to stress; it is named after the nineteenth-century English physician Thomas Addison). But there are earlier references to Jack implanting pellets. Early in 1937, in a handwritten note to Joe, Jack worried about getting his prescription—probably the parathyroid extract, or DOCA—filled in Cambridge. “Ordering stuff here very [illegible word],” he wrote his father. “I would be sure you get the prescription. Some of that stuff as it is very potent and he [Jack’s doctor] seems to be keeping it pretty quiet.” Nine years later, in 1946, Paul Fay, one of Jack’s friends, watched him implant a pellet in his leg. He remembers Jack using “a little knife… [to] just barely cut the surface of the skin, try not to get blood, and then get underneath and put this tablet underneath the skin, and then put a bandage over it. And then hopefully this tablet would dissolve by the heat of the body and be absorbed by the bloodstream.” Thus, before the diagnosis of Addison’s, Jack may have been on steroids—still in an experimental stage, with great uncertainty as to dosage—which may have been successfully treating his colitis, but at the possible price of stomach, back, and adrenal problems.
Physicians in the 1930s and 1940s did not realize what today is common medical knowledge: namely, that adrenal extracts are effective in treating acute ulcerative colitis but can have deleterious long-term chronic effects, including osteoporosis with vertebral column deterioration and peptic ulcers. In addition, chronic use of corticosteroids can lead to the suppression of normal adrenal function and may have caused or contributed to Jack’s Addison’s disease.
It is also possible that the DOCA had little impact on Jack’s back or adrenal ailments. Unlike synthetic corticosteroids, which did not become available until 1949, the initial DOCA compounds did not have the sort of noxious side effects associated with the later compounds. Nevertheless, by 1942, twenty-eight varieties of DOCA or adrenal extracts had become available, and since no one can say which of these Jack may have been using or exactly what was in them, it remains conceivable that the medicine was doing him more harm than good.
Jack could also have been suffering from celiac sprue, an immune disease common to people of Irish ancestry and characterized by “intolerance to gluten, a complex mixture of nutritionally important proteins found in common… food grains such as wheat, rye, and barley.” Although Jack would manifest several symptoms associated with the disease—chronic diarrhea, osteoporosis, and Addison’s—other indications of celiac sprue—stunted growth in children, iron deficiency anemia, and family history—were absent. The presence of persistent, severe spastic colitis (now described as irritable bowel syndrome) and the possibility that he had Crohn’s disease (an illness marked by intestinal inflammation and bleeding as well as back and adrenal problems) also diminish, though do not eliminate, the likelihood that Jack had celiac sprue, a disease of the small intestine, not the colon. Moreover, despite many hospitalizations at some of the country’s leading medical centers after 1950, when celiac sprue was first identified, none of his doctors suggested such a diagnosis. However, the fact that physicians in the fifties and sixties did not readily recognize the disease in adults leaves such a diagnosis as a possibility.
From September 1934 to June 1935, Jack’s senior year, the Choate infirmary had kept close watch on Jack’s blood count. In turn, Joe passed the results on to the Mayo doctors. At that time, there was also concern that Jack might be suffering from leukemia, a fatal disease resulting from uncontrolled proliferation of the white blood cells. With the benefit of current knowledge, it seems likely that the changes in Jack’s blood counts were a reaction to the drugs he was taking. When he fell ill the following year, Dr. William Murphy of Harvard advised that Jack had agranulocytosis, a drug-induced decrease of granular white blood corpuscles, which made him more susceptible to infections.
Some of Jack’s hospitalizations were brief. Except for his short stay in the infirmary in April 1935, he enjoyed good health during his final year at Choate. While in London in October for his post-Choate courses at the London School of Economics, he had to be hospitalized, but a quick recovery allowed his enrollment at Princeton for the fall term. Jack’s relapse probably resulted from an inconsistent use of the medicines or a reduction of dosage when his health showed improvement.
But sometimes Jack’s visits were lengthy. When he had to withdraw from Princeton to enter Peter Bent Brigham in Boston, he spent most of the next two months there. Uncertain as to whether they were dealing strictly with colitis or a combination of colitis and ulcers and worried that his medicines were playing havoc with his white blood cell count, his doctors performed additional tests. Jack told Billings it was “the most harrowing experience of all my storm-tossed career. They came in this morning with a gigantic rubber tube. Old stuff I said, and rolled over thinking naturally that it would [be] stuffed up my arse. Instead they grabbed me and shoved it up my nose and down into my stomach. They then poured alchohol [sic] down the tube…. They were doing this to test my acidosis…. They had the thing up my nose for 2 hours.” The test measured Jack’s acid levels to see if he was prone to stomach ulcers. The doctors were concerned anew about his blood count. According to what Jack wrote Billings, it was 6,000 when he entered the hospital and three weeks later it was down to 3,500. “At 1500 you die,” Jack joked. “They call me ‘2000 to go Kennedy.’ ”
By the end of January, he was more worried than ever about his health, though he continued with more biting humor to defend himself against thoughts of dying. “Took a peak [sic] at my chart yesterday and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat drink & make Olive [his current girlfriend], as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral. I think the Rockefeller Institute may take my case…. Flash—they are going to stick that tube up my ass again as they did at Mayo.” His frustration with and anger at medical experts who seemed better able to inflict painful and humiliating tests on him than explain and cure what he had was evident when he wrote Billings: “All I can say is it’s bully of them or more power to my smelly farts.”
And yet behind the jokes was Jack’s fear that he was slated for an early demise, making him almost manic about packing as much pleasure into his life as he could in the possibly short time remaining to him. His letters to Billings are full of frenetic talk about partying and having sex. He was frustrated at having to stay in Boston, even though he left the hospital on weekends to socialize. He heard that there were “ ‘millions of beautiful young misses arriving in Palm Beach daily,’ so am getting rather fed up with the meat up here, if you know what I mean,” he wrote Billings. He gave him a scorecard of his actions: “Got the hottest neck out of Hansen Saturday night. She is pretty good so am looking forward to bigger and better ones. Also got a good one last night from J. so am doing you proud.” “Flash—,” he added in another letter, “B.D. came to see me today in the hospital and I laid her in the bath-tub.” As for another date, he declared: “The next time I take her out she is going to be presented with a great hunk of raw beef, if you know what I mean.”
Jack’s seeming indifference to the young women he was using for his sexual pleasures was not entirely due to his sense of urgency. It was also a measure of the times in which Jack came to manhood. In the thirties and forties, Jack’s “catting about” was accepted practice among well-off college boys “sowing wild oats.” What became anathema in the last third of the twentieth century with the rise of women’s liberation and the change in social mores was little frowned upon by men in that bygone era. Jack certainly had genuine regard for his sisters Rosemary and Kathleen. He treated Rosemary with great sensitivity and had only respect for Kathleen, who, like Jack and unlike elder brother Joe, had a rebellious streak. She was the sibling he felt closest to. But under the influence of his father’s example, contemporary male behavior, and the appeal of hedonism to a teenager facing a possibly abbreviated life, glaring contradictions toward women became a mainstay of his early and later years.
In preparation for attending Harvard in the fall of 1936, Jack had spent that spring recuperating in Arizona, where he enjoyed improved health. But he remained worried that it would not last. “Plunked myself down for an injection after reading of Irving Carters’ [sic] death from the same thing I have, to the Dr.’s office,” he wrote Billings in May. “This morning I awoke with a hacking cough which Smokey [James “Smokey Joe” Wilde, a Choate friend with him in Arizona] assures me is T.B. in the more advanced stage. It will be the fucking last straw if I come down with T.B.” He did not, and the rest of his stay in the desert and then at Cape Cod in the summer gave him a renewed sense of well-being. During his first year at Harvard there were no serious medical crises, which allowed him to compete on the freshman football and swimming teams. In the summer of 1937, however, during his trip to Europe, he was stricken by swelling, hives, and a reduced blood count. Billings, who was with him, said later, “Jack broke out in the most terrible rash, and his face blew up, and we didn’t know anybody and had an awful time getting a doctor.” Exactly what accounted for his symptoms is unknown, but at least one doctor suspected an allergic reaction to something Jack ate, although the reduced blood count suggests continuing agranulocytosis.
Whatever he had cleared up quickly, but it did not signal an end to his medical problems. On the contrary, from the beginning of 1938 to the end of 1940, stomach and colon problems continued to plague him. In February 1938, he had gone back to the Mayo Clinic for more study. The Mayo treatment for ulcerated colitis now consisted of blood transfusions, liver extract, nicotinic acid, thiamine chloride, and Neoprontosil, a sulphur drug, but the clinic itself acknowledged that its therapy was of limited value. At the end of the month, Jack found himself in the Harvard infirmary suffering from grippe, and at the beginning of March he had “an intestinal type infection” that lasted two weeks and forced him to enter New England Baptist Hospital. Though he was able to return to school to finish out the term, he spent another two weeks in New England Baptist in June for the same complaints.
By October he was still “in rotten shape,” but he refused to reenter the hospital for what now seemed like additional pointless tests. At the end of his fall term in February 1939, however, he gave in and went back to the Mayo Clinic. It was the same old routine: a diet of rice and potatoes three times a day and another inspection of his colon and digestive system. By November, under the care of Dr. William Murphy of Harvard, the Nobel laureate who co-discovered the treatment of pernicious anemia and had an uncommon faith in the healing power of liver extracts, Jack recorded that he was going to “take my first liver injection today and I hope they work.” It did not. A year later, he was still wrestling with abdominal pain, a spastic colon, and low weight. If the adrenal extracts were limiting the effects of his colitis—and it is not clear that they were—it certainly was worsening his stomach problems. Nevertheless, it did not stop him from attending to the crisis that had engulfed the world. “For a man with a weak stomach,” his father wrote him in September 1940, “these last three days [the Battle of Britain] have proven very conclusively that you can worry about much more important things than whether you are going to have an ulcer or not.” In fact, whatever the effects of the parathyroid hormone and then adrenal extracts on his colitis, they were almost certainly contributing to the onset of a duodenal ulcer. Though such a condition remained undiagnosed until November 1943, when “an x-ray examination reported an early duodenal ulcer,” current medical knowledge suggests that the extracts were a prime cause of this condition. In 1944, a gastroenterologist concluded that Jack was still suffering from a spastic colon. Moreover, there was evidence of “spasm and irritability of the duodenum [or small intestine]… which was suggestive of a duodenal ulcer scar.” But there would be no public acknowledgment of any of this, nor any privately evident self-pity. Stoically refusing to let health concerns stop him became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career.
The onset of serious back problems in 1940 added to Jack’s miseries. In 1938 he had begun to have “an occasional pain in his right sacro-iliac joint. It apparently grew worse but at times he was completely free from symptoms,” a medical history made in December 1944 recorded. “In the later part of 1940 while playing tennis he experienced a sudden pain in his lower right back—it seemed to him that ‘something had slipped.’ He was hospitalized at the Lahey Clinic… for ten days. A low back support was applied and he was comfortable. Since that time he has had periodic attacks of a similar nature.” Although he had suffered football injuries and other mishaps that could help account for his emerging back pain, the onset of his back problem could have been related to his reliance on adrenal extracts and/or parathyroid hormone to control his colitis; they may have caused osteoporosis and deterioration in his lumbar spine. Back surgery in 1944 showed clear evidence of this condition. During the surgery “some abnormally soft disc interspace material was removed and… very little protrusion of the ruptured cartilage present” was noted, which would make him vulnerable to progressive back injury. It was, as it had long been with Jack, one thing after another.
IN THE FALL OF 1940, Jack, at age twenty-three, was among the first slated for induction into the U.S. Army. Because he was enrolled at Stanford for 1940–41, he was not to be called until the end of the academic year. His colon, stomach, and back problems, however, promised to give him an easy out. “The only humorous thing in my life to date,” a Harvard friend at law school wrote Jack in the fall of 1940, “has been you getting drafted. I swear to God Jack I thought I’d die of exhaustion from laughing…. Christ of all the guys in the world…. It’s a lucky thing you’ve got your stomach.”
But Jack wanted to serve. “This draft has caused me a bit of concern,” he wrote Billings. “They will never take me into the army—and yet if I don’t [serve], it will look quite bad.” He wanted to keep his medical problems as quiet as possible, and failing to qualify for service would subject his difficulties to public discussion. In addition, it would add to the criticism already leveled against his father for being adamantly opposed to American involvement in the war. There was also the fact that he remained uncertain about a career. Thoughts of attending law school did not excite him. A stint in the military seemed like a challenging alternative, especially alongside a desire not to let Joe Jr., who was becoming a navy pilot, outshine him.
Yet none of these reasons seem sufficient to explain his readiness to enter the military in spite of his medical difficulties. It was an impressive act of courage. His intestinal and back problems would make a military regimen a constant struggle and seemed likely to further undermine his health. When, in 1941, Jack failed the physical exams for admission to first the army’s and then the navy’s officer candidate schools, he turned to his father to pull strings on his behalf. Although he followed an exercise routine all summer to prepare himself for another physical, no program of calisthenics was going to bring him up to the standards required for induction into either service. Only a denial of his medical history would allow him to pass muster, and he was able to ensure this through Captain Alan Kirk, his father’s former naval attaché at the American embassy in London and current head of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, D.C. Kirk had arranged for Joe Jr. to enter the navy as an officer in the spring of 1941, and now at Joe Sr.’s request he did the same for Jack that summer. “I am having Jack see a medical friend of yours in Boston tomorrow for physical examination and then I hope he’ll become associated with you in Naval Intelligence,” Joe wrote Kirk in August.
One month later, the board of medical examiners miraculously gave Jack a clean bill of health. Reading the report of his exam, one would think he never had a serious physical problem in his life. The doctors listed the “usual childhood diseases” and noted that he had been on a “restricted… diet of no fried food or roughage,” but they claimed that he had “no ulcers,” and declared him “physically qualified for appointment” as an officer in the naval reserve. It was a complete whitewash that would never have been possible without his father’s help. The Office of Naval Intelligence was delighted to accept this “exceptionally brilliant student, [who] has unusual qualities and a definite future in whatever he undertakes.” True, being in intelligence made it unlikely that he would be exposed to physical danger, but once in the service almost anything could happen.
Jack entered the navy in October 1941 as an ensign and immediately went to the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the ONI in Washington. He became a paper-pusher, collating and summarizing reports from overseas stations for distribution in ONI bulletins. It was uninteresting work. One of six officers assigned to a plain room with metal desks and typewriters, Jack spent his days “writing, condensing, editing” news of international developments. But his humdrum nine-to-five, six-day-a-week job changed with Japan’s December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor. Jack’s office then went to a round-the-clock schedule. He drew the night shift, working seven nights a week from 10:00 P.M. to 7 A.M., an exhausting cycle. “Isn’t this a dull letter,” he wrote Billings on December 12, “but I’m not sleeping much nights.”
In contrast with his navy job, Jack enjoyed a rich social life in Washington. His sister Kathleen, who was a reporter for the conservative Times-Herald, gave him instant access to a social whirl in which groups of young men and women spent evenings together eating, attending movies, playing party games, exchanging gossip, and romancing one another. Through her, Jack met Inga Arvad, a blond, blue-eyed Dane who “exuded sexuality” and was described as “a perfect example of Nordic beauty.” New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, who had helped Inga get a job at the Times-Herald, was “stupefied” by her beauty. Four years older than Jack, twice married, and worldly-wise, Inga Binga (as Jack fondly called her) was a daily columnist. “She couldn’t write anything extended at all,” her editor said later, “but she had a good intuitive style of writing about people.” Her interviews under the title “Did You Happen to See?” engaged a faithful audience as much by her personality as by her subjects. A column she did on Jack provided an amusing portrait of “a boy with a future” who did not like to be called “Young Kennedy” lest he be seen as in his father’s shadow and short on accomplishments.
The column was a small window on Jack and Inga’s relationship. She liked Jack, Inga told a fellow reporter. She thought him “refreshing” because “he knows what he wants. He’s not confused about motives.” As Inga was still married to her second husband, from whom she was separated, they began with an understanding that theirs was no more than a passing affair. “I wouldn’t trust him as a long term companion, obviously,” she added. “And he’s very honest about that. He doesn’t pretend that this is forever. So, he’s got a lot to learn and I’ll be happy to teach him.”
Jack and Inga kept up a pretense of not being lovers by double-dating with Kathleen and her current beau, John White, a feature writer at the Times-Herald, but despite the modest attempts to hide his involvement with Inga, Jack’s affair was an open secret. Joe, who kept tabs on everything the children were doing, was certainly well informed, and he did not object to Jack’s involvement with a twice-married woman as long as it was nothing more than a fling.
In spite of his intentions to keep the romance from becoming serious, Jack found himself smitten by Inga, and she reciprocated the affection. “He had the charm that makes birds come out of their trees,” she said later. “When he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering but exuding animal magnetism.” But their growing attachment became a source of unhappiness for both of them. A non-Catholic divorcée was hardly what Joe and Rose would find acceptable as a mate for any of their sons. And if that were not enough to sabotage the romance, revelations that Inga had been given privileged access to Nazi higher-ups, including Hitler, during a journalistic stint in Germany raised suspicions that she was a spy. The FBI had begun tracking her movements in the middle of 1941 after she had come to the United States to earn a journalism degree at Columbia University. Her affair with Jack fanned Bureau suspicions. It also worried the ONI, which now saw Jack as a potential weak link in naval security. Consequently, in January 1942, when nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell revealed that Jack was having an affair with Inga, it raised the possibility that he might be forced out of the service. Instead, the navy transferred him to a desk job at the Charleston Navy Yard in South Carolina. Jack later told a reporter, “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde, and they thought she was a spy!”
For almost two months after going to Charleston, Jack clung to the relationship. He was unhappy about being sent into exile, disliked his work, and greatly missed Inga. “Jack finds his present post rather irksome,” Rose said in a round-robin letter to her children in February, “as he does not seem to have enough to do and I think will be glad of a transfer.” His desk job in Charleston “just seemed to him a waste of time,” Billings recalled. “He was very frustrated and unhappy.”
Without work to absorb him, Jack was easily preoccupied with Inga. They exchanged love letters, spoke on the phone, and spent long weekends together in Charleston, where she went to visit him a few times. But their relationship grew stormy. FBI wiretaps on their telephone calls and conversations in a hotel room during her visits to South Carolina make clear the growing divide between them. She was worried about being pregnant and “accused Jack of ‘taking every pleasure of youth but not the responsibility.’ ” When she “spoke of the possibility of getting her marriage annulled,” Jack “had very little comment to make on the subject.” It was clear to Inga that he would never be able to wed her. “We are so well matched,” Inga told him. “Only because I have done some foolish things must I say to myself ‘NO.’ At last I realize that it is true. We pay for everything in life.”
In fact, it is doubtful that Jack would have agreed to marry Inga, but any thoughts he might have had along those lines were largely squelched by his father, who warned Jack that he would be ruining his career and hurting the whole family. In early March 1942, Jack, with Inga’s assent, ended the romance. “There is one thing I don’t want to do,” Inga told him, “and that is harm you. You belong so wholeheartedly to the Kennedy-clan, and I don’t want you ever to get into an argument with your father on account of me…. If I were but 18 summers, I would fight like a tigress for her young, in order to get you and keep you. Today I am wiser.” And possibly richer: Inga’s ready acquiescence in the breakup raises the possibility that Joe paid her off to end the romance quietly. Joe had made such arrangements for himself. Although their intimacy ended, Jack and Inga kept up a correspondence and a friendly relationship that lasted for three more years.
The recurrence of Jack’s back problems in March and April added to his miseries. Since the treatment at the Lahey Clinic in 1940 for back pain, Jack had suffered “periodic attacks of a similar nature.” After he entered the navy, his spasms had become “more severe.” Moreover, in March 1942 he told Billings that he had thrown out his back while doing calisthenics. His stomach was also acting up again. He went to Palm Beach to talk to Joe, who advised him to consult Dr. Lahey in Boston again.
By April his backache had become so severe that he sought medical attention from the local navy doctor, who declared him unfit for duty and noted that the Mayo Clinic had “advised that a fusion operation was indicated.” The navy physician diagnosed the problem as a chronic, recurrent dislocation of the right sacroiliac joint and set it down to a “weak back.” By May, with no change in Jack’s condition, he was authorized to go to the naval hospital in Chelsea, Massachusetts, for further evaluation and treatment. He was then also able to consult his doctors at the Lahey Clinic about possible back surgery. Since such an operation might end his naval career, Jack and the doctors were reluctant to do it. Besides, the navy physicians at Chelsea concluded that it was unnecessary. They saw no ruptured disk, and now advised that “tight muscles in his legs and abnormal posture consequent thereto” were causing Jack’s back pain. By late June his doctors (perhaps with prodding of navy brass by Joe) changed Jack’s diagnosis from a dislocation to a “strain, muscular, lower back,” which was described as “probably secondary to arthritic changes due to unusual strain from the tenseness of his leg muscles.” The recommended course of action was no more than massage and exercise.
There is no hint in these navy medical records of any treatment for his colitis. It may be assumed that Jack and Joe agreed that he should continue to hide the severity of his intestinal problems and say nothing to the navy about any treatment he was receiving. According to the notation in the Chelsea Naval Hospital record, Jack’s “general health has always been good. Appendectomy in 1932. No serious illnesses.” It is unlikely that any of Jack’s navy doctors would have picked up on the possibility that steroids might be causing the “arthritic changes” or deterioration of bone in his lower back. When Rose saw him in September, Jack’s stomach, colon, and back problems went unremarked. “You can’t believe how well he looks,” she told Joe Jr. “You can really see that his face has filled out. Instead of it being lean, it has now become fat.” (This was a likely consequence of steroid therapy.) By late June, Jack’s doctors declared him fit for duty.
At this time, Jack considered renouncing Catholicism as a kind of retaliation against his parents for their pressure on him to drop Inga. But Jack’s ties to Joe and Rose and the Church were stronger than his rebellious inclinations. His iconoclasm went no further than threats to teach a Bible class, which he thought would be seen as “un-Catholic.” “I have a feeling that dogma might say it was,” he wrote his mother, “but don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church. We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchical structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top—a structure that allows for no individual interpretation—or are we?”
His impulse to challenge authority also extended to the medical experts, who seemed unable to solve his health problems. In the midst of the war, however, Jack deferred his inclination to defy conventional wisdom and instead applied for sea duty, which would allow him to get out of the United States and away from his parents and Inga. But, as he would quickly find, life on the front lines provided no escape from his tensions with authority. Instead of unpalatable parental and religious constraints, he found himself frustrated by military directives and actions that seemed to serve little purpose.
IN JULY 1942, the navy granted Jack’s request for sea duty and instructed him to attend midshipman’s school at a branch of Northwestern University in Chicago. There, he underwent the training that was producing the “sixty-day wonders,” the junior naval officers slated for combat. Jack found the demands of the program tiresome and less than convincing as a training ground for sea duty. “This goddamn place is worse than Choate,” he wrote Billings. “But as F.D.R. always says, this thing is bigger than you or I—it’s global—so I’ll string along.”
Jack’s ambition was to command a motor torpedo boat, one of the PTs (for “patrol-torpedo”), as they were popularly known. The papers were full of stories about the heroic work of these small craft and their foremost spokesman, Lieutenant Commander John Bulkeley, who had won a Congressional Medal of Honor for transporting General Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines through five hundred miles of enemy-controlled waters to Australia. Bulkeley was a great promoter of these craft and had convinced President Roosevelt of their worth. In fact, in his drive to attract aggressive young officers to join his service, Bulkeley had vastly exaggerated the importance and success of the PTs. While Jack’s natural skepticism made him suspicious of Bulkeley’s claims about all the damage his boats were inflicting on the Japanese, the glamour of the PTs and, most of all, the chance to have his own command and escape the tedium of office work and navy bureaucracy made Bulkeley’s appeal compelling.
The competition to become a PT commander was so keen and Jack’s back problems so pronounced that he saw little likelihood of being accepted by Bulkeley. But against his better judgment, Joe intervened on Jack’s behalf. The positive publicity likely to be generated by having the former ambassador’s son in his command and the very positive impression Jack made in an interview persuaded Bulkeley to give Jack one of 50 places applied for by 1,024 volunteers. Once accepted, though, Jack worried about surviving the physical training required for assignment to a boat. Riding in a PT, one expert said, was like staying upright on a bucking bronco. At full speed it cut through the water at more than forty knots and gave its crew a tremendous pounding. In September, while on leave, Jack went to see Joe at the Cape. “Jack came home,” Joe wrote his eldest son, “and between you and me is having terrific trouble with his back…. I don’t see how he can last a week in that tough grind of Torpedo Boats and what he wants to do of course, is to be operated on and then have me fix it so he can get back in that service when he gets better.”
Since he wasn’t about to have an operation and since the navy was not objecting to his service in the PTs, he decided to test the limits of his endurance. The almost daily exercises at sea put additional strain on his back. “He was in pain,” a bunkmate of Jack’s during training in Melville, Rhode Island, recalled, “he was in a lot of pain, he slept on that damn plywood board all the time and I don’t remember when he wasn’t in pain.” But he loved the training in gunnery and torpedoes, and particularly handling the boats, which his years of sailing off Cape Cod made familiar and even enjoyable work. “This job on these boats is really the great spot of the Navy,” he wrote Billings, “you are your own boss, and it’s like sailing around as in the old days.” Rose told her other children that Jack’s presence at Melville had changed “his whole attitude about the war…. He is quite ready to die for the U.S.A. in order to keep the Japanese and the Germans from becoming the dominant people on their respective continents…. He also thinks it would be good for Joe [Jr.]’s political career if he [Jack] died for the grand old flag, although I don’t believe he feels that is absolutely necessary.”
Rose and Joe were relieved that he didn’t think it “absolutely necessary” to give his life, but they found nothing funny in Jack’s flippant remark about sacrificing himself for his brother’s ambitions. Jack’s decision to enter combat in the PTs was “causing his mother and me plenty of anxiety,” Joe told a priest. He was proud of his sons for entering the most hazardous branches of the service, but it was also causing their parents “quite a measure of grief.”
Joe’s anxiety about seeing Jack enter combat as a PT commander may have been the determining influence behind a decision to keep Jack in Rhode Island for six months to a year as a torpedo boat instructor. A few of the best students in the program were routinely made instructors, Jack’s commander said later. But a fitness report on him, which described Jack as “conscientious, willing and dependable” and of “excellent personal and military character,” also considered him “relatively inexperienced in PT boat operations” and in need of “more experience” to become “a highly capable officer.” Why someone as inexperienced as Jack was made a training officer is difficult to understand unless some special pressure had been brought to bear.
Jack certainly saw behind-the-scenes manipulation at work, and he moved to alter his orders. He went directly to Lieutenant Commander John Harllee, the senior instructor at Melville. “Kennedy was extremely unhappy at being selected as a member of the training squadron,” Harllee recalled, “because he yearned with great zeal to get out to the war zone…. As a matter of fact, he and I had some very hard words about this assignment.” But Harllee insisted that Jack stay.
It was not for long, however. Jack, distrusting his father’s willingness to help, went to his grandfather, Honey Fitz, who arranged a meeting with Massachusetts senator David Walsh, the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee. Walsh, who was very favorably impressed with Jack, wrote a letter to the Navy Department urging his transfer to a war zone. In January 1943, Jack was detached from his training duties and instructed to take four boats to Jacksonville, Florida, where he would be given reassignment.
Though he thought he was on his “way to war,” as he wrote his brother Bobby, who was finishing prep school, he was not there yet. During the thousand-mile voyage, he became ill with something doctors at the naval station in Morehead City, North Carolina, diagnosed as “gastro-enteritis.” Since he recovered in two days and rejoined the squadron on its way to Jacksonville, he probably had an intestinal virus or food poisoning rather than a flare-up of his colitis. It was a signal nonetheless that his health remained precarious and that he was a wounded warrior heading into combat. “Re my gut and back,” he soon wrote Billings, “it is still not hooray—but I think it will hold out.” Upon his arrival in Jacksonville, his new orders assigned him to patrol duty at the Panama Canal. Unwilling to “be stuck in Panama for the rest of the war,” he immediately requested transfer to the South Pacific and prevailed upon Senator Walsh to arrange it. By the beginning of March, he was on his way to the Solomon Islands, where Japanese and U.S. naval forces were locked in fierce combat. After U.S. victories in the Coral Sea and at Midway in the spring of 1942, both sides had suffered thousands of casualties and lost dozens of ships in battles for control of New Guinea and the Solomons.
Jack’s eagerness to put himself at risk cries out for explanation. Was it because he felt invincible, as the young often do, especially the privileged? This seems doubtful. The reality of war casualties had already registered on him. “Your friend Jock Pitney,” he wrote Lem on January 30, 1943, “I saw the other day is reported missing and a class-mate of mine, Dunc Curtis… was killed on Christmas day.” Was Jack then hoping for a war record he could use later in politics? Almost certainly not. In 1943, Joe Jr. was the heir apparent to a political career, not his younger brother. Instead, his compelling impulse was similar to that of millions of other Americans who believed in the war as an essential crusade against evil, an apocalyptic struggle to preserve American values against totalitarianism. One wartime slogan said it best: “We can win; we must win; we will win.” Small wonder, then, that Jack applauded Lem’s success in getting himself close to combat in North Africa by becoming an ambulance driver in the American Field Service. “You have seen more war than any of us as yet,” he told Billings, who had failed his army physical, “and I certainly think it was an excellent idea to go.” Jack also admired their friend Rip Horton for thinking about transferring from the Quartermaster Corps to the “Paratroopers—as he figured if my stomach could stand that [the PTs] he could stand the other. He’ll be alright if his glasses don’t fall off.”
The seventeen months Jack would spend in the Pacific dramatically changed his outlook on war and the military. “I’m extremely glad I came,” Jack wrote Inga, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but I will be extremely glad to get back…. A number of my illusions have been shattered.”
Among them were assumptions about surviving the war. The combat he witnessed in March 1943, on his first day in the Solomons, quickly sobered him. As his transport ship approached Guadalcanal, a Japanese air raid killed the captain of his ship and brought the crew face to face with a downed Japanese pilot, who rather than be rescued by his enemy began firing a revolver at the bridge of the U.S. ship. “That slowed me a bit,” Jack wrote Billings, “the thought of him sitting in the water—battling an entire ship.” An “old soldier” standing next to Jack blew the top of the pilot’s head off after the rest of the ship’s crew, which was “too surprised to shoot straight,” filled the water with machine-gun fire. “It brought home very strongly how long it’s going to take to finish the war.”
It also made the perils of combat clearer to Jack. His Harvard friend Torbert Macdonald described a letter Jack wrote the next day, telling Macdonald “to watch out and really get trained, because I didn’t know as much about boats as he [Jack] did, and he said I should know what the hell I was doing because it’s different out in the war zone.” A visit to the grave of George Mead, a Cape Cod friend who had been killed in the Guadalcanal fighting, underscored the grim realities of the war for Jack. It was “among the gloomier events,” he told Inga. “He is buried near the beach where they first landed.” It was “a very simple grave” marked by “an aluminum plate, cut out of mess gear… and on it crudely carved ‘Lt. George Mead USMC. Died Aug. 20. A great leader of men—God Bless Him.’ The whole thing was about the saddest experience I’ve ever had and enough to make you cry.” When Rose told Jack that “all the nuns and priests along the Atlantic Coast” were “putting in a lot of praying time” on his behalf, he declared it comforting. But he hoped “it won’t be taken as a sign of lack of confidence in you all or the Church if I continue to duck.”
What impressed Jack now was not the eagerness of the men in the war zone for heroic combat—that was romantic stuff dispelled by battlefield losses—but their focus on getting home alive. He told Inga that the “picture that I had in the back of my greatly illusioned mind about spending the war sitting on some cool Pacific Beach with a warm Pacific maiden stroking me gently” had disappeared. What “the boys at the front” talked about was “first and foremost… exactly when they were going to get home.” He wrote his parents: “When I was speaking about the people who would just as soon be home, I didn’t mean to use ‘They’—I meant ‘We.’ ” He urged them to tell brother Joe not to rush to join him in the Pacific, as “he will want to be back the day after [he] arrives, if he runs true to the form of everyone else.” When Billings told Jack that he was considering a transfer to Southeast Asia to fight with the British, Jack expressed delight that he was “still in one piece,” noting that “you have certainly had your share of thrills,” and advised him to “return safely to the U.S. and join the Quartermaster Corps + sit on your fat ass for awhile…. I myself hope perhaps to get home by Christmas, as they have been good about relieving us—as the work is fairly tough out here.”
Jack’s letters make clear that he was particularly cynical about commentators back home pontificating on the war from the safety and comfort of their offices and pleasure palaces. “It’s not bad here at all,” Jack wrote Billings, “but everyone wants to get the hell back home—the only people who want to be out here are the people back in the states—and particularly those in the Stork Club.” He made a similar point to Inga: “It’s one of the interesting things about this war that everyone in the States, with the exception of that gallant armed guard on the good ship U.S.S. Stork Club—Lt. Commander Walter Winchell—wants to be out here killing Japs, while everyone out here wants to be back at the Stork Club. It seems to me that someone with enterprise could work out some sort of exchange, but as I hear you saying, I asked for it honey and I’m getting it.” “I always like to check from where he [the columnist] is talking,” he wrote his parents, “it’s seldom out here.” All the talk about “billions of dollars and millions of soldiers” made “thousands of dead” sound “like drops in the bucket. But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw [on my boat]—they should measure their words with great, great care.”
Jack admired the courage and commitment to duty he saw among the officers and men serving on the PTs, but he also sympathized with their fear of dying and saw no virtue in false heroics. When one of the sailors under his command, a father of three children, became unnerved by an attack on their PT, Jack found his reaction understandable and tried to arrange shore duty for him. After the man was killed in another attack on Jack’s boat, he wrote his parents: “He never said anything about being put ashore—he didn’t want to—but the next time we came down the line—I was going to let him work on the base force. When a fellow gets the feeling that he’s in for it—the only thing to do is to let him get off the boat—because strangely enough they always seem to be the ones that do get it.”
Jack reserved his harshest criticism for the high military officers he saw “leading” the men in his war zone. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, was no hero to him. Jack thought MacArthur’s island-to-island strategy was a poor idea. “If they do that,” he wrote his parents, “the motto out here ‘The Golden Gate by 48’ won’t even come true.” Jack reported that MacArthur enjoyed little or no support among the men he spoke to. The general “is in fact, very, very unpopular. His nick-name is ‘Dug-out-Doug,’ ” reflecting his refusal to send in army troops to relieve the marines fighting for Guadalcanal and to emerge from his “dug-out in Australia.”
The commanders whom Jack saw up close impressed him as no better. “Have been ferrying quite a lot of generals around,” he wrote Inga, “as the word has gotten around evidently since MacArthur’s escape that the place to be seen for swift and sure advancement if you’re a general is in a PT boat.” His description to Inga of a visit to their base by an admiral is priceless. “Just had an inspection by an Admiral. He must have weighed over three hundred, and came bursting through our hut like a bull coming out of chute three…. ‘And what do we have here?’ ” he asked about a machine shop. When told what it was, he wanted to know what “you keep in it, harrumph ah… MACHINERY?” Told yes, he wrote it “down on the special pad he kept for such special bits of information which can only be found ‘if you get right up to the front and see for yourself.’ ” After additional inane remarks about building a dock in a distant bay, he “toddled off to stoke his furnace at the luncheon table…. That, Binga, is total war at its totalest.”
Worse than the posturing of these officers was the damage Jack saw some of them inflicting on the war effort. As far as he was concerned, many of them were little more than inept bureaucrats. “A great hold-up seems to be the lackadaisical way they handle the unloading of ships,” he wrote his parents a month after arriving in the Solomons. “They sit in ports out here weeks at a time while they try to get enough Higgins boats to unload them…. They’re losing ships, in effect, by what seems from the outside to be just inertia up high…. They have brought back a lot of old Captains and Commanders from retirement and stuck them in as heads of these ports and they give the impression of their brains being in their tails, as Honey Fitz would say. The ship I arrived on—no one in the port had the slightest idea it was coming. It had hundreds of men and it sat in the harbor for two weeks while signals were being exchanged.” Jack was pleased to note, however, that everyone had confidence in the top man, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. But he was especially doubtful about the academy officers he met. Now Rear Admiral John Harllee recalled Kennedy’s feeling in 1947 that “many Annapolis and West Point graduates were not as good material as the country could have selected…. He felt, for example, that some of the senior officers with whom he had had contact in the Navy left something to be desired in their leadership qualities.” Somewhat ironically, given his own convoluted path into military service, Jack saw political influence on admitting candidates to the academies as the root of the problem. The resulting unqualified officers were a significant part of what he called “this heaving puffing war machine of ours.” He lamented the “super-human ability of the Navy to screw up everything they touch.”
Another difficulty Jack and others saw was the overestimation of the PTs’ ability to make a substantial contribution to the fighting. Despite wartime claims that just one PT squadron alone had sunk a Japanese cruiser, six destroyers, and a number of other ships in the fighting around Guadalcanal, a later official history disclosed that in four months of combat in the Solomons, all the PT squadrons combined had sunk only one Japanese destroyer and one submarine. One PT commander later said, “Let me be honest. Motor torpedo boats were no good. You couldn’t get close to anything without being spotted…. Whether we sunk anything is questionable…. The PT brass were the greatest con artists of all times. They got everything they wanted—the cream of everything, especially personnel. But the only thing PTs were really effective at was raising War Bonds.” Jack himself wrote to his sister Kathleen: “The glamor of PTs just isn’t except to the outsider. It’s just a matter of night after night patrols at low speed in rough water—two hours on—then sacking out and going on again for another two hours.” The boats were poorly armed with inadequate guns and unreliable World War I torpedoes, had defective engines and highly imperfect VHF (very high frequency) radios that kept conking out, lacked armor plating, and turned into floating infernos when hit.
Jack’s doubts about local commanders and the PTs as an effective fighting force extended to the crews manning the boats. In May he told his parents, “When the showdown comes, I’d like to be confident they [his crew] knew the difference between firing a gun and winding their watch.” By September, he declared that he “had become somewhat cynical about the American as a fighting man. I had seen too much bellyaching and laying off.”
During his initial service in the Solomons in April and May 1943, Jack had seen limited action. The United States had won control of Guadalcanal by then, and Kennedy arrived during a lull in the fighting. Nevertheless, the island-hopping campaign against the Japanese was not close to being over. In anticipation of another U.S. offensive and to reinforce garrisons southeast of their principal base at Rabaul on New Britain Island, the capital of the Australian-mandated territory of New Guinea, the Japanese launched continual air and naval raids. In June, when U.S. forces began a campaign to capture the New Georgia Islands and ultimately oust the Japanese from New Guinea, the PTs took on what U.S. military chiefs in the region called the “Tokyo Express”: Japanese destroyers escorting reinforcements for New Georgia through “the Slot,” the waters in New Georgia Sound southeast of Bougainville Strait and between Choiseul Island and the islands of Vella Lavella, Kolombangara, and New Georgia itself.
Jack’s boat was sent to the Russell Islands southeast of New Georgia in June and then in July to Lumbari Island in the heart of the combat zone west of New Georgia. On August 1, his boat—PT 109—was one of fifteen PTs sent to Blackett Strait southwest of Kolombangara to intercept a Japanese convoy that had escaped detection by six U.S. destroyers posted north of the island. The fifteen were the largest concentration of PTs to that point in the Solomons campaign. It also proved to be, in the words of the navy’s official history, “the most confused and least effective action the PT’s had been in.” In a 1976 authoritative account, Joan and Clay Blair Jr. describe the results of the battle as “a personal and professional disaster” for PT commander Thomas G. Warfield. He blamed the defeat on the boats’ captains: “There wasn’t much discipline in those boats,” he said after the war. “There really wasn’t any way to control them very well…. Some of them stayed in position. Some of them got bugged and didn’t fire when they should have. One turned around and ran all the way out of the strait.”
The attack by the boats against the superior Japanese force failed. Broken communications between the PTs produced uncoordinated, futile action; only half the boats fired torpedoes—thirty-two out of the sixty available—and did so without causing any damage. Worse yet, Jack’s boat was sliced in half by one of the Japanese destroyers, killing two of the crew members and casting the other eleven, including Jack, adrift.
Since the speedy PTs were fast enough to avoid being run over by a large destroyer and since Jack’s boat was the only PT ever rammed in the entire war, questions were raised about his performance in battle. “He [Kennedy] wasn’t a particularly good boat commander,” Warfield said later. Other PT captains were critical of him for sitting in the middle of Blackett Strait with only one engine running, which reduced the amount of churning water that could be seen (and likelihood of being spotted and bombed by Japanese planes) but decreased the boat’s chances of making a quick escape from an onrushing destroyer.
In fact, the failure lay not with Jack but with the tactics followed by all PT boat captains and circumstances beyond Kennedy’s control. Since only four of the fifteen boats had radar and since it was a pitch-black night, it was impossible for the other eleven PTs to either follow the leaders with radar or spot the Japanese destroyers. After the radar-equipped boats fired their torpedoes, they returned to base and left the other PTs largely blind. “Abandoned by their leaders and enjoined to radio silence, the remaining PT boats had no real chance, in pitch dark, of ambushing the Japanese destroyers,” one of the boat commanders said later.
The ramming of Jack’s PT was more a freak accident than a “ ‘stupid mistake’ ” on Jack’s part, as Warfield’s successor described it. With no radar and only one of his three engines in gear, Jack could not turn the PT 109 away from the onrushing destroyer in the ten to fifteen seconds between the time it was spotted and the collision.
With six crew members, including Jack, clinging to the hull of the boat, which had remained afloat, Kennedy and two other crewmen swam out to lead the other five survivors back to the floating wreck. One of the men in the water, the boat’s engineer, Pat “Pappy” McMahon, was seriously burned and Jack had to tow him against a powerful current. He then dove into the water again to bring two other men to the comparative safety of the listing hull. Two of the crew were missing, apparently killed instantly in the collision. They were never found, and Jack remembered their loss as a “terrible thing.” One, who had feared that his number was up, had been part of Jack’s original crew; the other had just come aboard and was only nineteen years old.
At 2:00 P.M., after nine hours of clinging to the hull, which was now close to sinking, Kennedy organized the ten other survivors into two support groups for a swim to a seventy-yard-wide deserted speck of land, variously known as Bird or Plum Pudding Island. Jack, swimming on his stomach, towed his wounded crewman by clenching the ties of his life jacket in his mouth while “Pappy” McMahon floated on his back. The swim took five grueling hours. Because the island was south of Ferguson Passage, a southern route into Blackett Strait normally traveled by the PTs, Kennedy decided to swim out into the passage to flag a boat. Although he had not slept in thirty-six hours, was exhausted, and would face treacherous currents, he insisted on going at once. An hour’s swim brought him into position to signal a passing PT with a lantern, but no boats showed up that night; believing that no one on the PT 109 had survived the collision, the commanders had shifted their patrol to the northeast in the Vella Gulf. Bouts of unconsciousness marked Jack’s return swim to his crew, who had given him up for lost until he returned at noon. Too exhausted to try another swim to the passage on the night of August 3, he sent another crew member, who returned on the fourth with no better result.
That day, the party swam to the larger nearby Olasana Island, where they found no drinking water to relieve their increasing thirst except for some rain they caught in their mouths during a storm. On the fifth, Kennedy and Barney Ross, another officer who had come on the boat just for the August 1 patrol, swam to Cross Island, which was closer to Ferguson Passage. There they found a one-man canoe, a fifty-five-gallon drum of fresh water, and some crackers and candy. Jack carried the water and food in the canoe back to Olasana, where the men, who had been surviving on coconuts, had been discovered and were being attended to by two native islanders. The next day, after Jack returned to Cross Island, where Ross had remained, he scratched a message on a coconut with a jackknife, which the natives agreed to take to Rendova, the PT’s main base. NATIVE KNOWS POSIT HE CAN PILOT 11 ALIVE NEED SMALL BOAT KENNEDY. The next day, four islanders appeared at Cross with a letter from a New Zealand infantry lieutenant operating in conjunction with U.S. Army troops on New Georgia: “I strongly advise that you come with these natives to me. Meanwhile, I shall be in radio communication with your authorities at Rendova and we can finalize plans to collect balance of your party.” On the following day, Saturday, the seventh day of the survivors’ ordeal, the natives brought Jack to the New Zealander’s camp. Within twenty-four hours, all were aboard a PT, being transported back to Rendova for medical attention.
“In human affairs,” President Franklin Roosevelt had told the uncooperative Free French leader Charles de Gaulle at the Casablanca Conference the previous January, “the public must be offered a drama.” Particularly in time of war, he might have added.
Jack Kennedy was now to serve this purpose. Correspondents for the Associated Press and the United Press covering the Solomons campaign immediately saw front-page news in PT 109’s ordeal and rescue. Journalists were already on one of the two PTs that went behind enemy lines to pick up the survivors. In their interviews with the crew and base commanders, they heard only praise for Jack’s courage and determination to ensure the survival and deliverance of his men. Consequently, when Navy Department censors cleared the story for publication, Jack became headline news: KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN PACIFIC AS DESTROYER SPLITS HIS PT BOAT, the New York Times disclosed. KENNEDY’S SON SAVES 10 IN PACIFIC; KENNEDY’S SON IS HERO IN THE PACIFIC, the Boston Globe announced with local pride.
Jack became the center of the journalists’ accounts, though not simply because he was a hero—there were many other stories of individual heroism that did not resonate as strongly as Jack’s. Nor was his family’s prominence entirely responsible for the newspaper headlines. Instead, Jack’s heroism spoke to larger national mores: he was a unifying example of American egalitarianism. His presence in the war zone and behavior told the country that it was not only ordinary G.I.s from local byways risking their lives for national survival and values but also the privileged son of a wealthy, influential father who had voluntarily placed himself in harm’s way and did the country proud. Joe Kennedy, ever attentive to advancing the reputation of his family, began making the same point. “It certainly should occur to a great many people,” he declared, “that although a boy is brought up in our present economic system with all the advantages that opportunity and wealth can give, the initiative that America instills in its people is always there. And to take that away from us means there is really nothing left to live for.”
Jack himself viewed his emergence as an American hero with wry humor and becoming modesty. He never saw his behavior as extraordinary. “None of that hero stuff about me,” he wrote Inga. “The real heroes are not the men who return, but those who stay out there, like plenty of them do, two of my men included.” Asked later by a young skeptic how he became a hero, he said, “It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half.” He understood that his heroism was, in a way, less about him than about the needs of others—individuals and the country as a whole. Later, during a political campaign, he told one of the officers who had rescued him, “Lieb, if I get all the votes from the people who claim to have been on your boat the night of the pickup, I’ll win easily!” When The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest ran articles about him and PT 109, he enjoyed the renown but had no illusions about military heroes and worried about their influence on national affairs. “God save this country of ours from those patriots whose war cry is ‘what this country needs is to be run with military efficiency,’ ”he wrote a friend. When Hollywood later made a film about PT 109, which served his political image and ambitions, he was happy to go along. But at a special White House showing, he made light of the occasion. “I’d like you to meet the lookout on PT 109,” he jokingly introduced Barney Ross. In his chuckle was an acknowledgment of an absurdity that had lasted.
In fact, for all the accuracy of the popular accounts praising Jack’s undaunted valor, the full story of his courage was not being told. Everything he did in the normal course of commanding his boat and then his extraordinary physical exertion during the week after the sinking was never discussed in the context of his medical problems, particularly his back. Lennie Thom, Jack’s executive officer on PT 109, was writing letters home at the time discussing Kennedy’s back problem and his refusal to “report to sick bay…. Jack feigned being well, but… he knew he was always working under duress.” Jack acknowledged to his parents that life on the boats was not “exactly what the Dr. (Jordan) ordered. If she could have put in the last week with me, she would have had that bed turned down for me at the [New England] Baptist [Hospital].” Yet Jack did not let on to his crew or commanding officer that he was ill or in pain. And except for his chronic back ailment, which he simply could not hide and which he seemed to take care of by wearing a “corset-type thing” and sleeping with a plywood board under his mattress, his men on PT 109 saw no health problems. Joe Kennedy knew better, writing son Joe after news of Jack’s rescue that he was trying to arrange Jack’s return to the States, because “I imagine he’s pretty well shot to pieces by now.” Joe Sr. told a friend, “I’m sure if he were John Doake’s son or Harry Hopkins’ son he’d be home long before this.”
But even if the navy were willing to send him home, Jack was not ready to go. He wanted some measure of revenge for the losses he and his crew had suffered. He felt humiliated by the sinking of his boat. According to Inga: “It was a question of whether they were going to give him a medal or throw him out.” Jack’s commanding officer remembered that “he wanted to pay the Japanese back. I think he wanted to recover his own self-esteem—he wanted to get over this feeling of guilt which you would have if you were sitting there and had a destroyer cut you in two.” He took ten days to recuperate from the “symptoms of fatigue and many deep abrasions and lacerations of the entire body, especially the feet,” noted by the medical officer attending him. On August 16, he returned to duty “very much improved.”
The PTs were now in bad standing, but there were so many of them that the navy needed to put them to some good purpose. Consequently, the brass was receptive to converting some PTs into more heavily armed gunships. Jack’s boat—which he helped design—was the first of these to enter combat, in early October. And for the next six weeks he got in a lot of fighting and, to his satisfaction, inflicted some damage on the enemy.
By the late fall, however, he was weary of the war and ready to go home. He wrote Inga that the areas over which they were battling were “just God damned hot stinking corners of small islands in a group of islands in a part of the ocean we all hope never to see again.” And the war itself now seemed “so stupid, that while it has a sickening fascination for some of us, myself included, I want to leave it far behind me when I go.”
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than the war-weariness stimulating Jack’s desire to go home were his continuing health problems. He now had almost constant back pain and stomachaches, which added to his normal fatigue from riding the boat at nights and struggling to sleep in the heat of the day. But unless he brought his medical difficulties to the attention of the navy doctors, he doubted that they would send him back to the States. “I just took the physical examination for promotion to full Looie,” he wrote his brother Bobby. “I coughed hollowly, rolled my eyes, croaked a couple of times, but all to no avail. Out here, if you can breathe, you’re one A and ‘good for active duty anywhere’ and by anywhere, they don’t mean the El Morocco or the Bath and Tennis Club, they mean right where you are.” He wrote Billings: “I looked as bad as I could look, which is ne plus ultra, wheezed badly, peed on his [the doctor’s] hand when he checked me for a rupture to show I had no control, all to no avail. I passed with flying colors, ready ‘for active duty ashore or at sea’ anywhere, and by anywhere they mean no place else but here…. Everyone is in such lousy shape here that the only way they can tell if he is fit to fight is to see if he can breathe. That’s about the only grounds on which I can pass these days.”
By November 23, however, his stomach pain had become so severe that he had to go to the navy hospital at Tulagi in the Solomons for an examination. X rays showed “a definite ulcer crater,” which indicated “an early duodenal ulcer.” It was enough to compel Jack’s return to the States. On December 14, his commander detached him from the PT squadron and ordered his return to the Melville, Rhode Island, PT training center by the first available air transport. Once back in the States, where he didn’t arrive until January, he was entitled to thirty days’ leave before reporting for duty.
He went first to Los Angeles to visit Inga, who saw him as “definitely not in good shape,” and then to the Mayo Clinic for an examination. Joe Sr. joined Jack in Rochester and thought he was “in reasonably good shape, but the doctors at Mayo’s don’t entirely agree with me on this diagnosis.” The doctors suggested that he consider having surgery to relieve the constant pain in his lower back, but, Joe wrote Rose, “Jack is insistent that he wants to get going again, so he left here Saturday to go and see his brothers and sisters and then report for duty.” Before heading to Rhode Island, however, he visited Palm Beach and New York for some R and R. “He is just the same,” Rose wrote his siblings, “wears his oldest clothes, still late for meals, still no money. He has even overflowed the bathtub, as was his boyhood custom.” The rest did not ease his ills, which now compelled him to take additional leave from duty for further medical evaluation in Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital. There, in February, the doctors also recommended back surgery.
But Jack was in no hurry to have an operation. He delayed, perhaps in the hope that the problem would let up or that it could wait until the war ended and he got out of the navy. His reluctance rested partly on the concern that it might raise questions about his failure to disclose his pre-service back, stomach, and colon problems and lead to a medical discharge under a cloud. In the meantime, the navy had reassigned him to a PT base in Miami, Florida, where he did nothing of consequence. “Once you get your feet upon the desk in the morning,” he told John Hersey, who was writing The New Yorker article on PT 109, “the heavy work of the day is done.” With no work of importance and his pain too great to delay further treatment, however, he agreed in May to have surgery. Occasional high fevers, coupled with a yellow-brown complexion—which was later diagnosed as malaria—underscored his need for medical attention. He joked that he would get through the war “with nothing more than a shattered constitution.” The navy now gave him permission for back surgery at New England Baptist by a Lahey Clinic doctor.
He entered the Chelsea Naval Hospital on June 11 and was diagnosed as having a ruptured disk. On June 22, he was transferred to New England Baptist, where the following day a Lahey surgeon operated on him. The surgery disclosed not a herniated or ruptured disk but “abnormally soft” cartilage, which was removed. A subsequent “microscopic report showed fibrocartilage with degeneration.”
Jack did well for the first two weeks after the operation, but when he began walking, he suffered severe muscle spasms in his lower back that “necessitated fairly large doses of narcotics to keep him comfortable.” The surgeon noted that only nine other patients out of more than five hundred had exhibited similar symptoms. Jack continued to have considerable pain when standing, and the physician predicted that it would be at least six months before he could return to active duty.
It was an overly optimistic prognosis. When Jack transferred back to the Chelsea Naval Hospital in August, a neurosurgeon described the case as “an interesting complication of disc surgery where the surgeon at the Lahey Clinic may well have failed to get to the bottom of the situation…. The pathology seen at operation was not evidently a clear cut disc.” Jack was “obviously incapacitated,” and the navy physician had no answer to his problem, as he believed “there is some other cause for his neuritis.”
Jack’s back difficulties were only one of several medical problems afflicting him. He was also described as having “a definite doudenal ulcer which recently was healed by x-ray, but he now has symptoms of an irritable colon.” Sara Jordan, the leading gastroenterologist at Lahey, told the navy doctors that Jack had “diffuse duodenitis and severe spastic colitis.” Though prior to entering the navy he had suffered “abdominal pain, sometimes of a dull nature and sometimes acute,” he had been in “good condition for some time, having had no abdominal symptoms, but using considerable discretion in his diet and some times resorting to antispasmodic medication.” He told Dr. Jordan that his current distress had begun after his ordeal in the Solomons. Jordan’s report said nothing about the extensive Mayo Clinic workup and treatment ten years earlier. By the middle of July, Jack had almost constant abdominal pain that only codeine could relieve.
During September and October, his back symptoms eased up, but the intestinal troubles continued. “The main difficulty,” the navy doctors noted on November 6, “is now failure to gain weight and strength with continuation of spasmodic pain” in the left side of his abdomen. Since Jack’s recovery was going to take “an indefinite amount of time,” his surgeon declared him “unfit for service.” The doctors now changed his diagnosis from “hernia, intervertebral disc” to “colitis, chronic.” By the end of November, the medical team at Chelsea Naval Hospital declared him permanently unfit for service and recommended that he appear before a retirement board.
Jack was now at the end of his patience with doctors and their treatments. In August, after eight weeks of hospitalization, he wrote a friend: “In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I… will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.” In November, he wrote Lem: “Am still in that god damned hospital—have had two ops. and Handsome Hensen, who is now in charge of my case, wants to get cutting again. He is the stupidest son of a bitch that ever drew breath…. He’s a mad man with a knife.”
The chief of the navy’s medical bureau, a Dr. B. H. Adams, now also temporarily frustrated Jack by raising questions about the origins of his disability. Jack’s restricted diet before he entered the navy seemed to “clearly indicate that the subject officer suffered some type of gastro-intestinal disease prior to his appointment in the U.S. Naval Reserve.” Adams disputed the conclusion that “ ‘the background of his present physical status is an exhausting combat experience….’ This opinion would appear to be not supported by the past history as set forth above.” Prior to Jack’s appearance before a retiring board, Adams wanted “the history relating to the gastro-intestinal disease… clarified.” But other medical officers overruled Adams, declaring that Kennedy’s “present abdominal symptoms started” after “he spent over 50 hours in the water and went without food or drinking water for one week.” They took at face value Jack’s statement that “his present abdominal discomfort is different than that noted previous to enlistment.” After interviewing Jack on December 27, the retiring board concluded that his incapacity for naval service was permanent and was “the result of an incident of the service… suffered in [the] line of duty.” He was placed on the navy’s retirement list as of March 1, 1945.
Perhaps Jack experienced a different type of abdominal pain from what had plagued him before entering the navy, but his difficulties were all of one piece. The colitis had been afflicting him since at least 1934, when he was only seventeen, and his back problems had begun in 1938 and had been a constant source of difficulty since 1941. The steroid treatment for the colitis, which apparently began in 1937, may have been the principal contributor to his back trouble and ulcer without curing his “spastic colitis.” Because they could not identify the origins of his back miseries, the doctors now called it an “unstable back.”
The available evidence suggests that adrenal extracts in the form of implanted pellets used to control his colitis may have been the basis of his stomach ulceration and back difficulties. Jack apparently used these drugs episodically, relying on them when his colon disease flared up and stopping when he felt better. No doubt circumstances—the difficulty of consistently having so new a drug available during his nine months in the Pacific, for example—also made his use of them erratic. One expert on steroids says that regulating dosages was initially a serious problem, especially as DOCA was given intramuscularly or inserted under the skin with the expectation that it would be effective for a period of eight to ten months. Considerable uncertainty as to how much or how little was appropriate for a patient suggests that even under the best of circumstances Jack’s use of them was uneven.
What makes assertions that Jack’s stop-and-start use of steroids was a source of his stomach and lumbar diseases more convincing is the events in his medical history between 1945 and 1947. At the beginning of 1945, Jack went to Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, to recover his health. It was an elusive quest. Although Jack refused to complain to his father about his continuing maladies, Dr. Lahey saw him in Phoenix and reported to Joe that he was not “getting along well at all.” His back remained a source of almost constant pain and he had trouble digesting his food. A companion in Arizona remembered that “he looked jaundiced—yellow as saffron and as thin as a rake.” After a month in the desert, he told Billings that his back was “so bad that I am going to Mayo’s about the first of April unless it gets a little better.”
It did not, and so in mid-April he went back to Rochester, Minnesota. Since his doctors had nothing new to recommend, he decided against additional medical workups. Instead, in May, as the war ended in Europe, he went to work as a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers covering the United Nations conference in San Francisco and then the British elections and the Potsdam Conference in Germany. When friends saw him in San Francisco, he looked sickly and spent a lot of time in bed resting his back. In July he was down with a fever in London, and then in August, after returning to London from Germany, he became terribly ill with a high fever, nausea, vomiting, “vague abdominal discomfort,” and “loose stool.” Doctors at the U.S. Navy Dispensary in London noted “a similar episode in 1942” and a previous history of malaria in 1944, but recorded his current illness as “gastro-enteritis, acute.” In June 1946, after marching in a parade in Boston on a blistering hot day, he collapsed. One witness to the onset remembered that he “turned very yellow and blue” and looked like someone having a heart attack.
Dr. Elmer C. Bartels, an endocrinologist at the Lahey Clinic who subsequently treated him for his Addison’s, recalled that Jack was negligent about taking his medicine with him on trips. During his 1947 visit with Kathleen in Ireland, Jack became ill and cabled home asking that prescriptions be filled and sent with either his younger sister Patricia or a friend sailing to England. Before his sister or friend arrived with the medication, however, he became very ill in London. Seen at Claridge’s Hotel by Dr. Sir Daniel Davis, a prominent physician, Jack was immediately hospitalized at the London Clinic, where he was diagnosed with Addison’s. His nausea, vomiting, fever, fatigue, inability to gain weight, and brownish yellow color were all classic symptoms of the disease. (Because malaria had similar symptoms and because Jack’s long history of stomach and colon problems suggested that his difficulties were related to an ulcer or colitis, his previous doctors had not diagnosed the Addison’s.) Jack’s failure to take his medicine probably triggered this Addisonian crisis.
Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, like the ulcer and osteoporosis and degeneration of his lumbar spine, was likely the result of the supplemental hormones he had apparently been taking on and off since the 1930s. It is now also understood that sustained treatment with steroids can cause the adrenal glands to shrivel and die. Doctors who had treated Jack’s Addison’s or read closely about his condition have concluded that he had a secondary form of the disease, or a “slow atrophy of the adrenal glands,” rather than a rapid primary destruction. Because his sister Eunice also suffered from Addison’s, it is nevertheless possible that the disease had an inherited component.
Yet whatever the etiology of the problem, it was yet another potentially life-threatening disorder for Jack. An insufficient supply of cortisone reduces the body’s capacity to resist infection and makes people ill with Addison’s disease susceptible to medical crises from any sort of surgery, even the extraction of a tooth. By the time Jack was diagnosed with Addison’s, however, medical science had developed hormone replacements that, if given in proper doses, could ensure a normal life span. But it was hard, even given the Kennedy family confidence, not to fear that Jack’s days were numbered.
JACK’S MEDICAL ORDEAL paralleled family suffering that, added to his experience in the war, made him intensely conscious of the precariousness of life. In 1944, his brother Joe had been flying antisubmarine patrols in the English Channel. Although he had been entitled to return home after thirty missions, he insisted on remaining through at least the D-Day invasion to help guard the amphibious Allied forces against possible German U-boat attacks. But even after contributing to the success of the June 6 landing by providing air cover against submarines, Joe Jr. was not content to go home. Part of his eagerness to stay in the war zone was a competitive urge to outdo Jack. On August 10, Joe wrote him that he had read Hersey’s New Yorker article and was “much impressed with your intestinal fortitude.” But he could not resist asking: “Where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar.” The underlying message was: Some hero to have let your boat been sunk. Joe was also intensely conscious of who got what awards. “My congrats on the [navy and marine] medal,” he wrote Jack. “To get anything out of the Navy is deserving of a campaign medal in itself. It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.”
But it was not enough. In August, Joe volunteered for a terribly dangerous mission flying a navy PB4Y Liberator bomber loaded with 22,000 pounds of explosives, the highest concentration of dynamite packed into a plane up to that point in the war. The objective was for Joe and his copilot to fly the plane toward the principal German launch site on the Belgian coast of the V-1s, which were then terrifying London with their distinctive buzzing sound before impact and destruction of lives and property. The two pilots were to parachute out after activating remote-control guidance and arming systems, turning the plane into a drone controlled by a second trailing bomber. Although Joe assured Jack in his letter of August 10 that he was not “intending to risk my fine neck… in any crazy venture,” he knew that he had taken on what might well be a suicide mission. Several earlier attempts to strike the V-1s in this way had failed with casualties to the pilots, who had to bail out at dangerously high speeds and low altitudes. “If I don’t come back,” Joe told a friend shortly before taking off, “tell my dad… that I love him very much.”
The mission on August 12 ended in disaster when Joe’s plane exploded in the air before reaching the English Channel coast. An American electronics officer had warned Joe before he took off that the remote-controlled arming system on the plane was faulty and that a number of things—“radio static, a jamming signal, excessive vibration, excessive turbulence, an enemy radio signal”—could prematurely trigger the explosives. Joe waved off the warning, assured by Headquarters Squadron that tests with 63,000 pounds of sand, substituting for the cargo of explosives, had produced “excellent” flight results and a “perfect” performance by the equipment.
An air force report on August 14 assessing the causes of the explosion speculated that it could have resulted from any one of seven possibilities, including “static—electrical explosion” or “electric heating of Mark 143 electric fuse from unknown source.” The analyst believed “a static electric explosion… highly improbable.” Because “the explosion was of a high order,” he suspected “a possible electrical detonation… by a friendly or enemy stray or freak radio frequency signal.”
U.S. military authorities never established a clear cause of the premature explosion. In 2001, however, a veteran of the British Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers serving as a telecommunications mechanic in Suffolk, England, where the Kennedy plane exploded, came forward with an explanation. “The Americans, based all over the South [of England], had turned off their radars,” he explained, “so as not to interfere with their flying armada. Unfortunately, they did not warn their British Allies of the exploit, so that it came under the scrutiny of a large number of powerful and less-powerful ground-based radars. Their pulses upset the delicate radio controls of the two Liberator bombers, leading to gigantic aerial explosions and the total destruction of the air armada.” It was a crucial, and fatal, error of omission by the U.S. air command.
Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he explained that he needed to interest himself in something new, or he would go mad, “because all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Joe’s death also confirmed his father’s worst fear that U.S. involvement in the war would cost his family dearly, deepening his antagonism to American involvements abroad for the rest of his life.
His brother’s death also evoked a terrible sense of loss in Jack. He eased his grief partly by conceiving the idea for a book of personal reminiscences about Joe by family and friends. As We Remember Joe was not only a tribute to him but a kind of lament for all the fine young men who had perished in the war and would never realize their promise.
His heroic death left Jack with unresolved feelings toward his brother and father. His competition with Joe had “defined his own identity,” he told Lem Billings. Now there was no elder brother to compete against, and Joe Jr.’s death sealed his superiority “forever in his father’s heart.” “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack said.
Less than a month later, the family suffered another blow when Kathleen’s English husband, William Hartington, was also killed in combat by a German sniper in Belgium. “The pattern of life for me has been destroyed,” Kathleen wrote Jack in October. “At the moment I don’t fit into any design.” Four months later, in February 1945, when Kick, as the family affectionately called her, heard news of two other friends killed in the fighting, she wrote from England: “The news of Bill Coleman really upset me because I know how much he meant to Jack and how Jack always said that he would do better than anyone else he knew, and then Bob MacDonald lost in a submarine. Where will it all end?”
“Luckily I am a Kennedy,” Kathleen told Lem Billings. “I have a very strong feeling that makes a big difference about how to take things. I saw Daddy and Mother about Joe and I know that we’ve all got the ability to not be got down. There are lots of years ahead and lots of happiness left in the world though sometimes nowadays that’s hard to believe.”
Jack shared Kathleen’s resiliency. He also saw valuable lessons in human suffering and tragedy. As he later said of the poet Robert Frost, “His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation.” Having been spared in the war, enjoying so much God-given talent, Jack was determined to make a mark on the world. But how? It was a question he had been struggling to answer for a number of years. Now, at long last, he would begin to answer it.