The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [139]
The brothers communicated in only one idiom, a jocular bonhomie more appropriate for boys at Choate than for brothers in a war-torn, tragic world. This was the only emotional language among men that Joe Jr. knew. He told Jack that he thought the New Yorker article was “excellent” and that “the whole squadron got to read it, and were much impressed by your intestinal fortitude.” But he gave that niggardly spoonful of praise only to set Jack up for another merciless put-down. “What I really want to know, is where the hell were you when the destroyer hove into sight, and exactly what were your moves, and where the hell was your radar.”
Often Joe Jr. found that the only way to deal with fears and emotional truths was to say the opposite of what he meant. “Tell the family not to get excited about my staying over here,” he wrote. “I am not repeat not contemplating marriage nor intending to risk my fine neck (covered in the back with a few fine silk black hairs) in any crazy venture.”
Joe Jr. was at the start of his adult life and career, but he had an overwhelming sense of his own mortality and age. All the letters from America were full of stories of Jack and his health problems. Joe Jr. might have contrasted his own vibrant health with the ill health of his brother. But he saw Jack as youth and vitality and sexual vigor. He figured he’d be back in the States around the first of September, and then maybe, if Jack had the time, he “will be able to fix your old brother up with something good.” Jack would have to get on his stick, for his big brother had “graying hair,” and he would have to come up with “something that really wants a tired old aviator.”
Jack was the winner in all the competitions that mattered, from the honors of war to the spoils of women. “My congrats on the Medal,” Joe Jr. concluded his letter. “It looks like I shall return home with the European campaign medal if I’m lucky.” Joe Jr. knew that was not true. If he succeeded, he would fly home to America not only with the medal given to all who had served in the campaign but with the navy’s highest honor, the Navy Cross, and he would once again be ahead of Jack on that road on which he believed they both traveled.
If Joe Jr. could only have seen Jack, he would have realized that his younger brother was no longer trudging manfully up the road their father had paved for his sons. Jack sat at the side, dazed, looking out on a world that hurried on without him. The previous winter he had suffered relapses of malaria, his body shaking uncontrollably, his face peaked and yellow, his condition so perilous that his father’s friend Joe Timilty thought that he would die. The malaria, however, was nothing more than a sweet souvenir of the South Pacific compared to Jack’s back problems.
Chronic back pain is not only a physical condition but a philosophical assault that turns even Pollyannas into doomsayers. In June 1944, Jack’s back had been operated upon at the New England Baptist Hospital, where the surgeon from the Lahey Clinic achieved a “thorough removal of the degenerative portion of the cartilage.” But that seemed only to worsen matters. “He … is obviously incapacitated by pain in low back and down L. (left) leg,” Jack’s August 1944 medical report stated. “He cannot bend forward supporting weight of trunk. Lat and post, bending limited…. This is a high-strung individual … who has been through much combat strain. He may have recurrent disc or incomplete removal but better bet is that there is some other cause for his neuritis.” This is the only place in Jack’s long medical history where there is a suggestion that there may have been a relationship between his psychological condition and his health. Another possible contributing factor was impending Addison’s disease, a potentially deadly malady that would not be diagnosed for several years.
As Jack lay in his bed, a group of his old PT-boat mates burst into his room at Boston’s Baptist Hospital with a basketload of good cheer and endless stories