Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [77]
The decision would come down to the coldest calculation. Sorensen, in his memoir, summed up the situation: “JFK knew that if he voted with his fellow Democrats and anti-McCarthy Republicans on a motion to censure McCarthy, he would be defying many in his home state and family, but if he voted against such a motion, he would be denounced by the leading members of his party, by the leading liberals and intellectuals in the country and his alma mater, by the leaders of the Senate, and by the major national newspapers.”
That spring of 1954, as he looked to both past and future—his entangling ties to McCarthy and what they would cost him later—Jack Kennedy found himself staring into the face of mortal danger. In April, the back pain from which he’d long suffered turned unbearable. X-rays taken showed that the fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, a result believed by some to be a result of steroids prescribed over the years for his Addison’s disease. According to the historian Robert Dallek, he couldn’t even bend down to pull a sock onto his left foot; only by walking sideways could he get up and down stairs.
Yet Kennedy managed to keep any awareness of these ever-encroaching medical setbacks from the public. Snapshots taken that May show Jack, Jackie, and Bobby Kennedy enjoying the Washington spring, playing touch football in the park behind Dumbarton Oaks. Wearing a T-shirt, Jack looks sunny and healthy. Jacqueline, still in her preregal stage, appears joyously youthful and untroubled.
The photographs reveal nothing of either’s pain. You can see in these pictures neither the dire reality of Jack’s health nor the sadness his infidelities were already causing the twenty-four-year-old he’d married just the autumn before. “I’ve often wondered if I’d do it again,” Charlie Bartlett would say of the two he’d brought together after seeing the one hurt the other so. “I don’t understand Jack’s promiscuity at all.” Yet all that’s apparent in the images of those halcyon days are the skills the pair shared in their concealment.
As bad as his condition was, however, it was about to get worse. By August his weight had dropped from 180 pounds to 140. So bad was the back pain that Jack needed to remain on the Senate floor between votes rather than attempt the commute from his office across Constitution Avenue. As the days passed, with little to stimulate him except agony, he arrived at a point of existential decision: the choice was between living a life of increasingly limited mobility—ending up in a wheelchair was inevitable—or else taking an enormous risk by submitting to spinal surgery.
In describing to Larry O’Brien the operation he chose now to endure, he minced no words. “This is the one that kills you or cures you.”
To John Galvin, he explained that he was going to New York, to the Hospital for Special Surgery there, because his Boston doctors had advised against the procedure. “They said the best thing to do would be to stay with the crutches and live, rather than take the chance on the operation and die. He told me then, ‘I’d rather die than be on crutches the rest of my life.’ “
What intensified the danger was his Addison’s disease. It meant his body could not produce the adrenaline needed to deal with the shock of surgery. The steroids he was taking complicated matters still further by reducing his ability to stave off infection. Jack knew that he faced the possibility of dying on the operating table. None of this was foreign territory to him.
With this high-risk surgery now on his calendar, Kennedy had to take on two political crises. One was the McCarthy censure, the other even nastier.
The midterm elections were coming in November, and Jack’s Massachusetts colleague Foster Furcolo was running for the Senate. Jack didn’t like the man’s ambitions, which happened to be the same