The Dark Side of Camelot

2 JACK

Jack Kennedy was a dazzling figure as an adult, with stunning good looks, an inquisitive mind, and a biting sense of humor that was often self-mocking. He throve on adoration and surrounded himself with starstruck friends and colleagues. Women swooned. Men stood in awe of his easy success with women, and were grateful for his attentions to them. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Kennedy’s close friends remain enraptured. When JFK appeared at a party, Charles Spalding told me, “the temperature went up a hundred and fifty degrees.”

His close friends knew that their joyful friend was invariably in acute pain, with chronic back problems. That, too, became a source of admiration. “He never talked about it,” Jewel Reed, the former wife of James Reed, who served in the navy with Kennedy during World War II, said in an interview for this book. “He never complained, and that was one of the nice things about Jack.”

Kennedy kept his pain to himself all of his life.

The most important fact of Kennedy’s early years was his health. He suffered from a severe case of Addison’s disease, an often-fatal disorder of the adrenal glands that eventually leaves the immune system unable to fight off ordinary infection. No successful cortisone treatment for the disease was available until the end of World War II. A gravely ill Kennedy, wracked by Addison’s (it was undiagnosed until 1947), often seemed on the edge of death; he was stricken with fevers as high as 106 degrees and was given last rites four times. As a young adult he also suffered from acute back pain, the result of a college football injury that was aggravated by his World War II combat duty aboard PT-109 in the South Pacific. Unsuccessful back surgery in 1944 and 1954 was complicated by the Addison’s, which severely diminished his ability to heal and increased the overall risk of the procedures.

Kennedy and his family covered up the gravity of his illnesses throughout his life—and throughout his political career. Bobby Kennedy, two weeks after his brother’s assassination, ordered that all White House files dealing with his brother’s health “should be regarded as a privileged communication,” never to be made public. Over the years, nonetheless, biographies and memoirs have revealed the extent of young Jack Kennedy’s suffering. What has been less clear is the extent of the impact his early childhood illnesses had on his character, and how they shaped his attitudes as an adult and as the nation’s thirty-fifth president.

Kennedy’s fight for life began at birth. He had difficulty feeding as an infant and was often sick. At age two he was hospitalized with scarlet fever and, having survived that, was sent away to recuperate for three months at a sanatorium in Maine. It was there that Jack, torn from his parents and left in the care of strangers, demonstrated the first signs of what would be a lifelong ability to attract attention by charming others. He so captivated his nurse that it was reported that she begged to be allowed to stay with him. Poor health plagued Jack throughout his school years. At age four, he was able to attend nursery school for only ten weeks out of a thirty-week term. At a religious school in Connecticut when he was thirteen, he began losing weight and was diagnosed with appendicitis. The emergency operation—a family surgeon was flown in for the procedure—almost killed him; he never returned to the school. Serious illness continued to afflict Kennedy at prep school at Choate, and local physicians were unable to treat his chronic stomach distress and his “flu-like symptoms.” He was diagnosed as suffering from, among other ailments, leukemia and hepatitis—afflictions that would magically clear up just as his doctors, and his family, were despairing. Once again, he made up for his sickliness with charm, good humor, and a winning zest for life that kept him beloved by his peers, as it would throughout his life.

His loyal friend K. LeMoyne Billings, who was a classmate at Choate, waited years before revealing how much Kennedy had suffered. “Jack never wanted us to talk about this,” Billings said in an oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, “but now that Bobby has gone and Jack is gone, I think it really should be told … Jack Kennedy all during his life had few days when he wasn’t in pain or sick in some way.” Billings added that he seldom heard Kennedy complain. Another old friend, Henry James, who met Jack at Stanford University in 1940, eventually came to understand, he told a biographer, that Kennedy was not merely reluctant to complain about pain and his health but was psychologically unable to do so. “He was heartily ashamed” of his illnesses, James said. “They were a mark of effeminacy, of weakness, which he wouldn’t acknowledge. I think all that macho stuff was compensation—all that chasing after women—compensation for something that he hadn’t got.” Kennedy was fanatic about maintaining a deep suntan—he would remain heavily tanned all of his adult life—and he once explained, James said, that “it gives me confidence.… It makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive.” A deep bronzing of the skin when exposed to sunlight was, in fact, one of the symptoms of Addison’s disease.

Kennedy had few options other than being strong and attractive; his father saw to that. Joseph Kennedy viewed his son’s illness as a rite of passage. “I see him on TV, in rain and cold, bareheaded,” Kennedy told the writer William Manchester in 1961, “and I don’t worry. I know nothing can happen to him. I tell you, something’s watching out for him. I’ve stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.… You can’t put your finger on it, but there’s that difference. When you’ve been through something like that back, and the Pacific, what can hurt you? Who’s going to scare you?”

Jack was always striving to be strong for his father; to finish first, to shape his life in ways that would please Joe. Jack’s elder brother, Joseph Jr., always in flourishing health, had been his father’s favorite, the son destined for a successful political career in Washington. With Joe Jr.’s death in 1944 as a naval aviator, Jack became the focus of Joe Kennedy’s aspirations. In Jack’s eyes, his father could do little wrong. Many of Jack’s friends thought otherwise, but learned to say nothing. “Jack was sick all the time,” Charles Spalding told me in 1997, “and the old man could be an asshole around his kids.” During a visit to the Kennedy home in Palm Beach, Florida, in the late 1940s, Spalding said, he and his wife, Betty, were preparing to go to a movie with Jack and his date, Charlotte MacDonald. Spalding went upstairs with Jack and Charlotte to say good night to Joe, who was shaving. The father turned to Charlotte and said scathingly, “Why don’t you get a live one?” Spalding was appalled by the gratuitous comment about his best friend’s chronic poor health and couldn’t resist making a disparaging remark about Joe Kennedy to Jack. The son’s defense of his father was instinctive: “Everybody wants to knock his jock off, but he made the whole thing possible.”

Charles Bartlett, another old friend, saw both Joe Kennedy’s toughness and his importance to his son. Bartlett, who became friends with Jack in Palm Beach after the war, declared that Joe Kennedy “was in it all the way. I don’t think there was ever a moment that he didn’t spend worrying how to push Jack’s cause,” especially as his son sought the presidency in 1960.

“He pushed them all,” Bartlett, who later became the Washington bureau chief of the Chattanooga Times, told me in an interview for this book. “He pushed Bobby into the Justice Department, and he made Jack do things that Jack would probably rather not have done. He was very strong; he’d done things for the kids and wanted them to do some things for him. He didn’t bend. Joe was tough.” And yet, Bartlett added, “I just found that, in so many things, his judgment down the road was really enormous. You had to admire him.”

Jewel Reed vividly recalled her first visit to a family gathering at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the intense energy Joe Kennedy focused on his children. “The table was dynamic, and Mr. Kennedy was checking up on everybody about whether they had come in first or second or third in tennis or yachting or whatever,” she said in an interview for this book. “And he wanted them to be number one. That stuck with me a long time. I remembered how intensely he had focused on their winning.”

There was a high cost, Reed added. “His values that he imposed upon his children were difficult. His buying things. I hate to use the word bribery, but there was bribery in his agenda often.” During Jack Kennedy’s first Senate campaign, in 1952, Reed said, when he stunned the experts by defeating Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., “the billboards in Massachusetts came to about a quarter of a million dollars. That was a long, long time ago, and a quarter of a million was an awful lot of money.” Reed also said that Joe Kennedy purchased thousands of copies of Profiles in Courage, Jack’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, published in 1956, “to keep it on top of the bestseller list. I don’t know what he did with all those books. That was bribery in a way. He was pushing, and if it cost money, he paid it. I’m sure that the children couldn’t have felt comfortable about that.”

The point, Reed added, was that Joe Kennedy “loved his family. It was very evident, and I remember Teddy [Edward M. Kennedy, Joe’s youngest child] paying tribute to his father in saying that he was always there when they needed him. And that’s saying a lot.”

It was different with Rose Kennedy. As Jack’s friends knew, he was full of misgivings about his mother. Kennedy once said to his aide Kenny O’Donnell that he could not recall his mother ever telling him, “I love you.” Charles Spalding got a firsthand glimpse of a rare flash of Jack’s hostility toward his mother. “I remember being down in Palm Beach and she [Rose Kennedy] came by in the middle of lunch and said to Jack, ‘Oh, baby, I just hate the idea of your having to go back [to Washington].’ Jack just blurted out, ‘If you hadn’t pushed me to be a success, I could stay here.’”

In an interview in 1990 with British biographer Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth, a definitive account of Kennedy’s early years, Spalding speculated that Jack’s craving for women and his compulsive need to shower, as often as five times a day, were linked to a lack of mothering. Kennedy, Spalding said, “hated physical touching—people taking physical liberties with him—which I assume must go back to his mother and the fact that she was 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.”

“What is touch?” Spalding added. “It must come from some deeper maternal security—arms, warmth, kisses, hugs.… Maybe sex is the closest prize there is, that holds the whole thing together. I mean if you have sex with anybody you care about at all, you feel you’ve been touched.…”

In an extraordinary series of interviews, one of Jack Kennedy’s lovers has candidly described his strengths and weaknesses as she saw them during a bittersweet relationship that spanned four years during which he campaigned for and won the presidency. The woman, who subsequently married and had a successful career, agreed to share her insights only upon a promise of anonymity. She had met Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, at a fund-raising dinner in Boston in the late 1950s; she was nineteen years old, a student at Radcliffe, and he began flirting with her.

“It was glamorous,” she recalled. “It was supposed to be terrific. It was supposed to be just what anybody would want, what any woman would want. During that early time there would be looking at me. There would be nodding at me. There would be leaning across the table to say something just to me. There would be those signs of special attention. Yes, in public. And of course that was very flattering. I thought, ‘Oh, gosh. I really must be quite something.’”

The affair deepened. She fell totally in love with the handsome Kennedy and spent hours, after making love with him, at dinner or in long conversations in bed. “I was absolutely thrilled to the gills,” she told me. “Here I was, twenty years old, having dinner in the White House, the Abraham Lincoln bedroom. It seemed very amazing. There was a time when he needed to make a statement about a certain thing that happened in the world. And [he] went off and came back half an hour later and was really thrilled with the fact that he had come up with six declarative sentences that just laid it out.” Their relationship, the woman said, “was supposed to be secret, and so I just went along and didn’t talk about it.” As for Kennedy’s seemingly ideal marriage to Jackie, she said, “I did not have the foggiest idea of any consciousness of solidarity with other women. It just did not flicker. I cannot tell you how unevolved as a woman I was, and how it was assumed that women compete with each other for the best men. I just went right along with that. Somehow it didn’t register with me at any deep level that what I was doing was absolutely immoral, absolutely atrocious behavior.”

Kennedy, while attentive and engaging, rarely talked about his childhood in their time together, the woman told me. But she now understands that his ability to compartmentalize his life, to take the enormous risk—while seeking and occupying the presidency—of being so publicly married and so privately a womanizer, stemmed from his experiences as a child. He was “a boy who was sick frequently, who was frail, in a family where there was a tremendous premium on aggressive, competitive, succeeding, energizing activity. In the class that John Kennedy came from, there’s a tremendous emphasis on appearance and how does it look? Well, it’s not supposed to look like it’s painful. It’s not supposed to look like you feel like you don’t know something or that you don’t understand what’s going on in your family or in the world. There’s a tremendous premium on being smooth and in charge and in control—you aren’t sweaty and nervous. You just sail effortlessly through the trials and tribulations that bring down other people, but not you.”

The inevitable result, she explained, was that there were many times when Jack felt the pain of being excluded. “If you are a sickly child who spends a good deal of time in your bed at a young age in a house full of a lot of children, all of whom are in school or playing games or doing whatever they’re doing, you could feel left out. It didn’t sound like everybody then [in his family] took turns to come and sit with him and chat with him and draw pictures with him.” Kennedy could have responded to the experience, the woman told me, by learning to “identify with others in the same situation. Or you can say ‘I’m never going to have that feeling again.’” Kennedy chose to shut out the pain. “It was something he did not reflect [on] and didn’t want to think about much and hoped would never happen and went out of his way to make sure it”—thinking about his childhood emotions—“didn’t happen.”

Kennedy spoke to the woman only once, she recalled, about being a trustworthy parent. If his daughter, Caroline, who was born in 1957, ever got into any kind of trouble, “he hoped that she would come to him and not feel that she had to hide it from him. His father had always wanted him to have that feeling about him, and that was a really important thing.” The woman came to understand that Kennedy’s relationship with his father was “the most vibrant relationship he’d ever had—love, fear, palpitations, trying to please him.” Asked whether Kennedy felt he could turn to his mother for help, she answered, “I do not know. I never heard him speak about his mother. Never.”

Jack Kennedy’s delight in his children, and in all children, was profound, and recognized as such by staff aides who knew nothing of his early life. Marcus Raskin, who worked on nuclear disarmament issues for the National Security Council, recalled in an interview for this book that he and his colleagues would ask, in moments of international crisis, “Where are the children?” If Caroline and her younger brother, John, “were in Washington, then there wouldn’t be a war. If the children were away, then you weren’t sure.” The question was not facetious, Raskin insisted. Jerome B. Wiesner, the president’s science adviser, told McGeorge Bundy’s national security staff, Raskin said, “to watch where the kids are. If they’re here [in Washington], then there’s going to be no war this week. If the kids aren’t here, then we’ve got to be careful.” Wiesner’s remark was obviously tongue-in-cheek, Raskin said, but “many things are said ha-ha that have a grain of truth to them.” He and his colleagues, Raskin said, looked in moments of crisis “for some sort of human affect to understand the momentous questions that they were dealing with.”

If the president’s national security advisers understood his love for children, so did the Secret Service. Larry Newman was one of the White House agents assigned to Kennedy on the evening in August 1963 when the president made a visit to his youngest child, Patrick, born prematurely and hospitalized with a lung ailment, who was fighting for his life in Children’s Hospital in Boston. Newman, who was in the elevator with the president and Patrick’s doctor, listened as Kennedy was told that his newborn son was unlikely to survive. The elevator stopped at the fifth floor, where the pediatric intensive care unit was. The floor had been cleared of all visitors for the presidential visit. The hallway was dark; the patient rooms were illuminated by night-lights. Newman recalled in an interview for this book that while walking with the president to intensive care, “we passed a room where there were two delightful-looking little girls who were sitting up in bed. They were probably about three or four years old, and they were talking and laughing together. The only problem—one girl was bandaged up to her chin. She had severe burns. And the other had burns down her arms and huge pods [of bandages] on the end of her hands. President Kennedy stopped and just looked at these two little girls. He asked the doctor, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ And the doctor explained that one girl may lose the use of her hands. The president stood there. His son was down at the end of the hall in grave to critical condition. We just stood there with him; it was just a small party in the dark. He started feeling in his pockets—it was always a sign he wanted a pen. Someone gave him a pen. He said, ‘I’d like to write a note to the children.’ And nobody had any paper for the thirty-fifth president of the United States to write a note on. So the nurse scurries to the station and gets the name of the children and their family and Kennedy writes a note to each child. There was no fanfare, no photo-op. There was nothing. The nurse took the notes and said she would see that the family got it. And then we proceeded down the hall to see his son, who of course died the next day. It was something he didn’t need to do, but he always seemed to come out of his reserved and Bostonish [ways] with children.

“Nothing was ever said about it. There was no press release or anything. He just went on to do what he had to do—to see his son. This was part of the dichotomy of the man—the rough-cut diamond. You could see so many qualities he had that just glowed; you couldn’t see why he wanted to follow other roads that were so destructive. It was truly painful.”

The women who knew Jack Kennedy, whether they were his lovers or not, invariably spoke, in interviews for this book, about his overwhelming attractiveness. The writer Gloria Emerson was an aspiring journalist when she was first introduced to Kennedy in the 1950s at a cocktail party. “I was almost hypnotized by the sight of this man,” she told me in a 1997 interview. “He was such a stunning figure. He didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in the battalions, by the brigades. And the interesting thing was he didn’t care if you made an effort to make him interested in you. He was perfectly cordial—but come and go, it didn’t really matter to him.”