The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [292]
Part of the time, Jack’s back was bothering him so badly that he lay on the bed in obvious pain while the two aides continued their questioning. Feldman was amazed that he could even go on. Jack may well have had a secret weapon that afternoon that lifted him high above the deadening fatigue of the campaign. In recent months, Jack had noticed that his old friend Spalding, who was stuck in the dread routine of a bad marriage and a nine-to-five job, had a new bounce to his step, a lilt to his voice, and a lowering of his querulous complaints. His friend said that it was all due to Max Jacobson, a wondrous doctor who gave his patients magical vitamin injections that contained, among other things, the blood of young lambs.
The first time Spalding had gone to Jacobson’s New York office, he had been taken aback by the unkempt quality of the place. Jacobson had yellow spots on his smock and to some might have appeared slightly mad. Yet his office was full of patients, some of them famous, all happily waiting for their shots. The moment the doctor injected Spalding, he felt his body fill with life, a pure energy of such magnitude that he stayed up for three days without sleeping. Spalding got his own supply of this liquid life and at home started injecting himself. It was a time when few Americans knew what amphetamines were or the dangers they represented. Spalding had no idea that the magical ingredient was Methedrine, an amphetamine that would in a few years become notorious as “speed.”
Dr. Jacobson worked his chemical miracles as much as one hundred times a day, injecting celebrities, socialites, and politicians with a happy mixture of vitamins and amphetamine. They came sometimes once a month, others once a week, and some every day. Truman Capote might be sitting there in the small outer office, or Eddie Fisher, former Senator Claude Pepper, Alan Jay Lerner, or Cecil B. DeMille. Jacobson filled his syringe with unique mixtures drawn from half a dozen bottles filled with various liquids and injected them almost anywhere in the body.
For Jack’s first visit to Jacobson in September just before the debate, he entered an office suite cleared of other patients. “The demands of his political campaign program were so great that he felt fatigued,” Jacobson wrote in his unpublished autobiography.
His muscles felt weak. It interfered with his concentration and affected his speech…. If not attended to these complaints could not only become more severe but would probably lead to more serious discomforts in the future. I took a short case history, and previous diseases he had, accidents, and treatments he had been given. I asked him about his present condition and what medication he was presently taking. The treatment of stress has been one of my specialties. After his treatment he told me his muscle weakness had disappeared. He felt cool, calm, and very alert. I gave him a bottle of vitamin drops to be taken orally, after which he left.
Jack had a long, laugh-filled luncheon with Bobby and several others. Then he planned to take a nap, but he was so restless that he got up in his bathrobe and walked out on the terrace of his suite. There was a confidence in Jack, not a dumb, blustering arrogance, not a dangerous, willful pride, but a subtle understanding of his own abilities and those of his opponent.
Jack paced back and forth in his bathrobe that long autumn afternoon before the first debate, hitting his fist again and again, like the challenger in his dressing room before the championship fight. As Jack dressed, he told Powers that he felt the tense excitement and nervousness of a prizefighter getting ready to enter the ring in Madison Square Garden. “No, Senator,” Powers replied, with his exquisite sense of what to say to the man he served with such perfect fidelity. “It’s more like the opening-day pitcher in the World Series—because you have to win four of these.”
At the studio, Jack waited with a small group that included Bobby and Bill Wilson, his television adviser. Wilson had observed the contrast between Jack’s elegant