Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [44]
“I was never so startled in my life. He sat back in his chair, and it just flowed right out. He had such a grasp of what he was saying, and was able to put it in such beautiful language. I thought, ‘Wow. This guy has a brain.’ I mean, you didn’t get that impression when you first met him because he looked so young and casual and informal. But he knew what it was all about. He knew about everything.”
Richard Nixon had a similar epiphany. Ted Reardon recalled the time that Jack became deeply focused on an issue before the Education and Labor Committee, so much so that he went himself to the National Archives to look something up. “At the hearing, the thing I remember is when Jack started to talk, Dicky Boy sort of looked at him . . . with a look between awe and respect and fear.”
Jack’s greatest secret remained his bad health, the extent of which, until then, was unknown even to him. When Kennedy arrived in Washington that January, his problems had followed. “He was not feeling well,” Mary Davis noticed. “I mean, he still had his jaundice, he still had his back problems.”
“Emaciated!” is how his fellow congressman George Smathers of Florida remembers his frail classmate. The Florida Democrat, who had been assigned to the same hallway as Kennedy, vividly recalls that “every time there was a roll call, he’d have to come over on his crutches.” Wanting to help, Smathers often would stop by Jack’s office to give him a hand as his new friend made the painful journey across Independence Avenue to the Capitol to vote.
The various maladies from which he visibly suffered were being blamed on his war traumas, but that explanation, while infinitely useful spinwise, was only part of the story. For Jack the truth lay deeper, and he was about to discover it.
During the summer recess of 1947, a group of congressmen, Dick Nixon included, headed to Europe to study the impact of the Marshall Plan, which was now being implemented. For a bon voyage gesture—one that was, apparently, ignored—Kennedy had sent his married California colleague the names of a few women he might look up while in Paris. For himself, Kennedy also set off across the Atlantic, first to Ireland with his sister Kick, then to the Continent along with a Republican colleague to look into the Communist influence on European labor unions.
Arriving in London after falling ill on the first leg of his journey, he was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a serious disorder of the adrenal glands. Prior to Jack’s release, the attending physician offered this grim prognosis to Jack’s English traveling companion. “That American friend of yours, he hasn’t got a year to live.” Just as the Queen Mary docked in New York, a priest came aboard to administer to him the last rites.
He had lost his older brother in 1944. The husband of his beloved Kick had died the following year. Yet, on the return voyage home from England and near death, he showed himself as politically curious as ever. Much of his time was spent quizzing a fellow passenger on the new British health service created by the Labour Party.
Jack continued to keep tight the compartments of his life. Like the ship’s captain he still was, he knew he couldn’t sink if he kept each of them strongly secure from the other. In Georgetown, he basked in a princely life, attended by a housekeeper, Margaret Ambrose, and a valet, George Thomas, who delivered a home-cooked hot lunch to his Capitol office each day.
Meanwhile, Billy Sutton was with him 24/7, since Jack still couldn’t stand to be alone. On those nights he didn’t have a date for the movies, his “firecracker” provided entertainment and company. Mary Davis explained the dynamic between the two men this way: “He