The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [182]
Lodge and Jack had many parallels in their lives. As a senator in his early forties, Lodge had every reason not to serve in combat in World War II. He had done so, however, with valor and distinction, then returned to reclaim his Senate seat in the same election that sent Jack to Washington.
Lodge was a man of moderation and thoughtfulness when those virtues were not always common. He was an internationalist who on many of the issues of the day sat on the same side of the aisle as Jack. In what boded to be a Republican year, Lodge appeared impregnable.
Smathers was appalled at the way his friend was throwing away his political career. As a former House member, Smathers had floor privileges and he wandered around until he found Jack lying on a couch in the cloakroom. Jack was in such a state that he could not even stand up. Smathers reached down and pulled his legs down onto the floor. The two men walked onto the House floor and stood leaning on the bar at the back of the room. “My God, man, I don’t see how you can possibly think about running,” Smathers implored in a loud whisper, “when you can’t even get up and down.”
Smathers was not making a trivial point. A tough campaign is about as vigorous and sustained a period of physical activity as can be imagined, and running against a popular incumbent is the very definition of a tough campaign. There was a new nastiness to American politics as well. Smathers had won in 1950 by turning Senator Claude Pepper, a somewhat naive but decent reformist liberal, into a virtual traitor. (“Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiraling spider web of the Red network. The people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.”) Jack’s friend and colleague Richard Nixon had done virtually the same thing to Helen Gahagan Douglas to win a Senate seat from California.
“I’m running,” Jack replied firmly.
“Why do you say that? You can’t even move. How can you run from a hospital bed? I don’t understand. I don’t think you ought to try. I think Lodge is too strong at this point.”
“I’ve made up my mind,” Jack replied definitively. “I’m going to run.”
From everything he had experienced, Jack knew that he couldn’t expect to live to a sweetly blanketed old age. He saw his plague of maladies not as an omen telling him that he must prepare for death rather than life, but as a goad pushing him out into a world that he probably would not long inhabit. Even Smathers did not know how sick Jack truly was. The columnist Joseph Alsop recalled that in the late 1940s, Jack “turned a strong shade of green: this odd skin color combined with his hair—still decidedly reddish—to make the congressman look rather like a bad portrait by Van Gogh.”
When Alsop asked Jack why he exuded this strange color, he replied that he had “some kind of slow-motion leukemia. The disease, he explained, was a kind of blood cancer for which the doctors kept prescribing chemicals to cure. The latest chemical, he felt, had turned him green. He added in a flat tone, ‘They tell me the damn disease will get me in the end. But they also tell me I’ll last until forty-five, and that’s a long way away.’”
Years later, in reflecting on what Jack had told him, Alsop concluded that Jack was talking about Addison’s disease, not leukemia. The chemicals Jack was taking that had turned him “green,” however, would probably not have been for Addison’s disease but for some other illness. There was, moreover, another strong witness to his purported cancer. “He had leukemia at one point,” Rose told Robert Coughlin in an unpublished, tape-recorded interview for her autobiography. “I remember because there was one doctor who
could cure it, or who had specialized in it They don’t get over that
[leukemia] very often.”
Jack’s mother would not have invented an illness for a son so beleaguered by illnesses. His leukemia, or suspected leukemia, was yet another secret that had to be carefully contained. No record of this adult illness exists