The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [221]
It wasn’t just his back that was troubling Jack, but a recurrence of the nonspecific prostatitis that probably was a venereal infection he had picked up at Harvard and that had periodically plagued him ever since. He had been blessedly free of the problem during his honeymoon with Jackie, but upon returning to Washington he had begun to suffer again. On occasion he had a large number of “pus cells” in his secretion. When he entered the hospital, he had what his physician specialist, Dr. Thomas A. Morrissey, called an apparent “acute attack of mild prostatitis … the prostate was tender, somewhat swollen and there was a moderate urinary urgency.” The sitz baths and Pyridium, a urinary tract analgesic prescribed by the physician’s brother and partner, Dr. John H. Morrissey, seemed to have worked, but in the aftermath of the operation, the problem and all its pain were back again.
When Jack had spent weeks in bed as a teenager at the Mayo Clinic, he had been able to weave a sexual fantasy for his friend Billings that projected him away from his wounded body. As he lay in a hospital bed this time, he attempted to distance himself as best he could from his broken body and constant pain. He had an upside-down picture of Marilyn Monroe pinned to the door as if to remind himself of what lay out there in the world beyond his hospital bed. He had stacks of books on the floor to remind him of other aspects of the world outside. He was often on the phone, even talking when the nurses changed his dressing or yet another doctor poked at his dormant form. He had many guests too, especially young women. One of them, Priscilla Johnson, was a student of Russian affairs at Columbia University who had worked for a few weeks in Jack’s Senate office. He had not managed to bed the twenty-three-year-old student, but he called her periodically and had met her several times in New York. “Tell them you’re my sister,” Jack told her on the phone. “You got to be a relative to get in here.” Johnson did as she was told. “I’ve never seen a man with so many sisters,” the receptionist said as she pointed the attractive young woman down the hall.
Jack thought at times of Gunilla, especially when a dark-haired Swedish nurse entered his room. He was terribly sick, but he fantasized about driving up to that house high above the Riviera and meeting Gunilla there. “We stay in session in Washington until the end of July and then I return to the mountains of Cagnes,” he wrote her in December.
Most of the time there was no respite from his pain. “You could see that he [was in pain] by the look in his eyes,” said Janet Auchincloss, his mother-in-law. “He still would always talk about the world you were in and not tell you about his operation, which is unusual.”
While he lay in bed, the conflict over McCarthy rose to a dramatic call for a censure vote in the Senate. Several years afterward Jack scoffed at those who had attempted to turn the conflict over Joe McCarthy into an important moral issue. “I think your attitude toward this [McCarthy] thing right through was you seemed to want to divest it of any great moral, ethical [dimension] to a literal specific thing,” Jack’s authorized biographer, James MacGregor Burns, told him.
“That’s right,” Jack replied. “Well, I think that’s right…. Hell, if you get into the question of just disapproving of senators, you’re going to be in some difficulty…. I don’t think, Jim, you could probably tell me very well what McCarthy ultimately was censured for.”
Jack only had to look among his New England colleagues to find senators who would have told the junior senator from Massachusetts why McCarthy was being censured. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, was spending most of her term in a lone crusade against