The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [220]
The relationship between Joe and Rose was as proper as that between a king and queen. “She was super-concerned with her looks, her body, and her clothes were really an obsession with her,” Des Rosiers reflected. “But there was no depth to her, no womanly sexuality. But she presented a very nice picture. She believed that every minute of your life had to be a learning experience. She brought up her children and grandchildren that way. She tried to bring me up that way because she would often say, ‘Well, you should do this, you should do that.’ And I felt like saying, ‘Well, I’m doing the thing I shouldn’t do.’”
Joe was a vibrant vital man in his sixties with a mistress less than half his age. It was his son whom he had groomed for the highest of offices who had an old man’s gait, hobbling around like a cripple. Jack was not a man to broadcast his discomfort, but his back pain had become so overwhelming that he had become increasingly irritable. He could hardly make it over to the floor of the Senate.
To Jack, life on crutches was no life at all, and he set out to find a remedy so that he could live as he felt he must live. In the summer of 1954, he traveled to Boston to consult with Dr. Elmer C. Bartels and other specialists at the Lahey Clinic about an operation. Dr. Bartels had been treating Jack for seven years. The doctor had a realistic, if disheartening, appraisal of his patient’s prospects. Bartels believed that Jack had been born with an unstable back and that his Addison’s disease made an operation even less feasible. Bartels was eminently aware of the limitations of his profession and believed that Jack would simply have to exercise carefully and live a sedentary life.
“I don’t know if the words ‘back pain’ follow,” Dr. Bartels reflected, emphasizing that Jack could have lived with his condition. “I think discomfort. He never took care of his back. He’d come up to Boston and go scrimmage with the Boston College football team. It just wasn’t his temperament to take care of himself. He played touch football, and you can certainly injure your back playing that.”
Jack went shopping in New York for a doctor willing to attempt the dangerous, radical surgery. The physicians who agreed to perform the surgery were proposing to break the bone and then reset it, hoping that it would grow back properly. The doctors realized, as they wrote later, that it was “deemed dangerous to proceed with these operations.”
Jack was thirty-seven years old. He had a dazzling political career, a beautiful young wife, and a fortune. The operation would probably improve his back only marginally; it was also possible that the operation would not improve it at all, or would kill him. Weighing all these factors, another man would have turned away and limped back to Washington. That Jack did not do so suggests the magnitude of his ambition, the strength of his identity as a vibrant sexual being, and the magnitude of his pain. For all those reasons, he was willing to roll the dice marked “life” and “death.”
Jack wanted the whole business put behind him. He insisted that the two fusions be done the same day, rather than taking the more conservative approach of having two separate operations. The operation, performed on October 21, 1954, by Dr. Philip D. Wilson at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery, with Ephraim Shorr there in an advisory capacity, was deemed a success. Three days later, however, Jack was stricken with a urinary tract infection and slipped into a coma.
The priests arrived and administered the last rites. The deathwatch began. Jack’s father was devastated. Joe’s sons were the last half-drained reservoir of his faith, and that day Krock saw Joe cry as he had not cried since the death of Joe Jr. He had hardly wiped away his tears when Jack began slowly to revive, but with horrifying setbacks. Jackie was sitting beside the bed when he received a blood transfusion to which he reacted adversely, his whole face puffing up.
Jack suffered weeks of what only a resolute optimist would have called convalescence.