The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [162]
“So that was a long walk for a guy who had a bad hip and a bad back and a bad everything else then. So he would lean on me, and we would get over there. And we’d vote. So that’s really how we became very close friends, just through the labor of getting from our office over to vote. He was a pretty brave guy. He didn’t complain about hurting. But you could see the hurt.”
Smathers recalls Jack being sickly from the first day he met him but there came a point when his condition dramatically worsened. In August 1948, Jack traveled to Ireland to spend some time with his sister Kathleen before heading off to the Continent on a congressional junket. Jack was an Anglophile who had no Irish mud on his English boots. He stayed with his sister at Lismore, the Irish castle owned by her deceased British husband’s family. The group spent most days playing golf, as close to the common sod of Ireland as most of Kathleen’s aristocratic friends ever traveled.
Jack had a bad back and wasn’t about to test it by swinging a golf club. He decided to go off to see whether he could find the old Kennedy homestead. It was a peculiar journey for a man who had once found it expedient to say that his father was born in the more fashionable Winthrop, not the largely immigrant community of East Boston, and who had managed to get into Harvard’s Spee Club only by latching onto friends whose forebears had not been born in humble Irish cottages.
One of the other houseguests, Pamela Churchill, the shrewd, socially astute wife of Churchill’s son, Randolph, did not play golf either, and she agreed to accompany him. Pamela was a connoisseur of upper-class men, and she found Jack rather disappointing in his immature boyish ways, a woefully less sophisticated man than his brother Joe. Pamela had a courtesan’s adeptness at casual conversation, and she carried on in full form on the hundred-mile drive through the Irish countryside. Whether or not Pamela expected to see a Kennedy castle rising out of the heather, she surely had not anticipated a thatched cottage outside of which stood a menagerie of pigs, goats, and chickens, and a sturdy outhouse, while inside resided an unaccountable brood of children and a modest couple who called themselves Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy.
“I spent about an hour there surrounded by chickens, pigs, etc., and left in a flow of nostalgia and sentiment,” Jack recalled a decade later. “That was not punctured by the English lady turning to me as we drove off and saying ‘That was just like Tobacco Road.’ “
Pamela might have wanted to hold a perfumed handkerchief over her nose, but for the first time in his life Jack had looked straight on at his heritage and admired it. It was disappointing to him that his sister did not feel the same way.
“When we got home, we were very late for supper, but Jack was very excited,” Pamela recalled. “He said, ‘We found the original Kennedys.’ I remember Kick saying, ‘Well, did they have a bathroom?’ And he said, ‘No, they did not have a bathroom.’ And I think that she was interested but not in the same way that Jack was.”
Jack traveled to London before heading off on his congressional junket. He had hardly arrived when he collapsed in his hotel. A British doctor gave Jack the potentially devastating news that he had Addison’s disease, a condition marked by an insufficiency of the adrenal glands. These glands, the size and dimensions of a small strawberry, sit on top of the two kidneys. They play a crucial role in physical and psychological health, pumping steroids into the system. These hormones regulate metabolism, sexual characteristics, and the ability to handle stress and injury.
The disease has no distinctive signs itself and masquerades in many guises. Its victims often just seem vaguely tired. They sometimes have stomach troubles, diarrhea, or vomiting, symptoms they blame on bad food or nervousness. Jack had been ill so often, and had overcome so many maladies, that he tended to ignore complaints that would have