Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [119]
20. EPHRAIM SHORR (1896–1956) was a New York Hospital endocrinologist. Philip Wilson (1886–1969) was chief surgeon at the city's Hospital for Special Surgery, where the operation was performed, and a Harvard classmate of JFK's father.
21. JANET TRAVELL (1901–1997) later became JFK's White House physician, the first woman to serve in that role.
22. JFK's double spinal fusion operation at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York was actually on October 21, 1954, and included insertion of a metal plate to support the lumbar spine. That August, he had been warned by Lahey Clinic physicians that without such an operation, he might lose the use of his legs—and that for an Addison's disease patient like JFK, the surgery might produce an infection that could kill him. When the doctors operated, the latter occurred, leaving the senator in a coma. Last rites were administered. The following February, when doctors feared that the plate was infected and recommended another operation to remove it and perform a bone graft on his spinal column, Jackie wanted a second opinion, but doctors persuaded her not to seek it. The second surgery threw her husband into three months of agony and depression while recuperating in Palm Beach; she wished she had fought the doctors. After JFK's first operation, when he was on the brink of death, she had heard him calling for her but was barred from the room. She resolved never to let it happen again. Therefore on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, when a Parkland Hospital nurse tried to prevent her from entering the chamber where her husband was receiving desperate measures, Jackie told her, "I'm going to get in that room," and she did, which enabled her to be with him when he died.
23. The Carroll Arms Hotel was across the street from the Old (now Russell) Senate Office Building, in which JFK had his office.
24. RFK wrote the foreword to a memorial edition of his brother's book, which was published in 1964.
25. JFK played softball at a Georgetown park with Senate colleagues.
26. FRANCIS X. MORRISSEY (1911–2008) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, a dockworker's son who put himself through night law school, worked in JFK's campaigns for the House and Senate, and won appointment as a Boston municipal judge.
27. The Last Hurrah (1956) by the Boston novelist and newspaperman Edwin O'Connor re-created the old, dying Irish-American politics of his city and was made into a 1958 feature film starring Spencer Tracy.
28. JOHN FRANCIS FITZGERALD (1863–1950) was JFK's maternal grandfather and namesake, briefly a congressman from Massachusetts, then the first Irish-American mayor of Boston, known for his renditions of "Sweet Adeline." On the night in 1946 when JFK was elected to the House, "Honey Fitz" performed an Irish jig and forecast that his grandson would someday be President. Kennedy admired the upward mobility of his grandfather's political generation and enjoyed its folktales, but his own identity was so conspicuously different that some in his state called him "the first Irish Brahmin."
29. DAVID POWERS (1912–1998) was another Irish-American from Charlestown, jovial and unflappable, who started with JFK during that first House campaign and stayed with him for the rest of Kennedy's life, as friend, raconteur, traveling companion, and man-of-all-work.
30. The three-story Boston apartment houses known for housing newly arrived immigrants and factory workers and their descendants, especially Irish-American ones, such as Morrissey and Powers.
31. JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH (1908–2006), born in Ontario, was a Harvard economist and liberal activist, best known in the late 1950s for his book The Affluent Society. He supported JFK in 1960 and became his ambassador to India.
32. CHARLES BARTLETT (1921– ) was a Washington columnist for the Chattanooga Times, later nationally syndicated, who, with his wife Martha, introduced JFK to Jacqueline in 1951 and remained a close friend of the President's. A fellow Catholic, Bartlett had served in naval intelligence