The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [340]
The president strained his back anew falling out of his old spring-back Senate chair. On another occasion early in his term his chair mysteriously splintered, hurting him again. On yet another occasion he had been playing with Caroline and John Jr. when he cracked his head against the corner of a table. The three-quarter-inch wound required the services of a plastic surgeon, who covered the stitches with a thick bandage.
The president’s friends occasionally caught a glimpse of the inner world of Kennedy’s health. He never took off his stoic mask, but they knew that he was in pain. “You could see it sometimes,” recalled his friend Ben Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and later the executive editor of the Washington Post. “He would have to lie down, watching the movies lying on the bed.”
In one of the most famous photos of his presidency, Kennedy stands leaning over a table lost in thought. The reality was that Kennedy was resting his painful back. His back had become so troublesome that he had not only a special mattress of nonallergenic hair set over a heavy bed board in the White House but another bed board on Air Force One. Because he often woke up with a puffy face, the legs of the head of the White House bed were set on three-inch-high blocks so that he could sleep with his head elevated. He was so allergic to horsehair that the one time he attended the Washington horse show he had to leave in the middle of the event and return to the White House. To help immunize him from his allergies, he took weekly or biweekly injections of a vaccine made of dust gathered around the White House family quarters.
That did not help with his allergy to milk. That allergy was particularly irritating to Kennedy, for like many of his generation he considered milk a natural wonder drug that he would have loved to drink by the quart, not to mention the pints of ice cream he would love to have eaten. The calcium supplement that he took to make up for the lack of milk was only one of the many pills he was supposed to take each day.
George Thomas, his valet, set a box of pills before him at breakfast and lunch. There were six pills in all—Cytomel, Meticorten, hydrocortisone, Florinef, calcium, and vitamin C—that he took all at once, swallowed down with a quick swig of orange juice or water. He also took 500 milligrams of ascorbic acid once or twice a day.
Cytomel is the trade name for a T3 thyroid replacement drug that Kennedy took in 25-microgram pills twice a day for thyroid insufficiency. He also took 25-milligram cortisone pills for Addison’s disease each day, and for a number of years injections of 150-milligram desoxycorticosterone acetate pellets every three months.
The Kennedy administration was one of the most crisis-filled periods of American history, and the president was weighed down by an overwhelming burden of decision. He dealt with issue after issue that resolved itself as history usually does, not in monumental triumph or brutal defeat but in ambiguity and uncertainty. He was under such stress that healthy adrenal glands would have been pumping adrenaline into his system to give him the force and stamina to prevail. Instead, in difficult times he upped his hydrocortisone to improve his general functioning. Without the daily medicine, he would have died. The cortisone was that essential to his life.
Other doctors who had not even examined Kennedy sensed that he was not the healthy man he pretended to be. When the president stood so boldly against the elements giving his inaugural address, he was watched on television by Major General Howard M. Snyder, Eisenhower’s White House physician. “He’s all hopped up,” Dr. Snyder commented, seeing beads of sweat on Kennedy’s forehead. He hypothesized that the new president had taken a double shot of cortisone that morning. “I hate to think,” the doctor reflected, “of what might happen to