The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [341]
Dr. Snyder was suggesting that the new president was a cortisone junkie, shooting himself up with the drug. Kennedy had taken the drug orally for several years, and he needed more of his daily dosage of cortisone in times of stress. Just as a person who begins to exercise needs more calories, so in times of increased tension Kennedy needed more cortisone. He was seeking not a euphoric high but merely the feeling of being a healthy human being. If he did not take enough, he risked feeling an overwhelming sense of lassitude and exhaustion. If he took too much, he risked feeling a rush of manic invincibility that in some instances spilled over into despair and depression.
One of Kennedy’s physicians, Dr. Eugene Cohen, was worried that even if the president survived a plane crash, he would go into shock without his cortisone. Thus, the endocrinologist devised an ingenious mechanism through which Kennedy could keep a safe supply of cortisone. Dr. Cohen put a syringe full of the drug in a cigar holder. He surrounded the holder with cigars and placed it in a sealed humidor to be carried on Air Force One.
Dr. Cohen had been largely responsible for the president choosing Dr. Janet Travell as the primary White House physician, but Kennedy also received medical advice from several others, including Dr. Cohen himself. In her first few months in Washington, Dr. Travell made herself into one of the most celebrated figures in the administration and was featured in a New York Times profile and celebrated in U.S. News & World Report and the Washington Post. Kennedy did not like his aides to get publicity. He found it an indulgence that served neither him nor them. Moreover, there was a high irony in the fact that the May issue of Reader’s Digest celebrated the matronly, silver-haired, fifty-nine-year-old doctor’s successful treatment of “thousands of persons with disabling back conditions, including the president,” while Kennedy hobbled around the White House, unable to get relief from his pain.
Dr. Travell was a doctor who knew only one chamber in the temple of medicine. She attempted to wall the president off from other medical advice as she continued to inject him with painkillers and stick needles in his lower back, a treatment that had always given him respite from his pain. It was not working now, however, precisely when Kennedy desperately needed relief before his European trip.
Dr. George G. Burkley was the other day-to-day source of medical advice in the White House. Dr. Travell was so possessive of her access to the president that the assistant White House physician had been on staff for two months before Dr. Travell even introduced him to Kennedy. Dr. Travell had little choice but to let the rival doctor see the president eventually since the navy captain, soon to be named a rear admiral, always traveled with the presidential party.
In Ottawa, Dr. Burkley told the president that he had aggravated his back by the way he held the shovel. The navy doctor suggested to Dr. Travell that the president see Dr. Hans Kraus, who believed in the efficacy of exercise and physical therapy in treating Kennedy’s pain. Dr. Burkley’s proposition was a subtle criticism of the now-celebrated White House physician. Dr. Burkley and his colleagues at Bethesda Naval Hospital were becoming increasingly worried by Dr. Travell’s promiscuous use of novocaine. It was not a drug to be injected two or three times daily, day after day. Eventually its effect would be deadened and the president might move on to employing narcotics to assuage his pain.
Dr. Burkley and his Naval Hospital colleagues were not the only serious critics of Dr. Travell. Dr. Dorothea E. Hellman, a highly regarded doctor at Georgetown University and the National Institutes of Health, was growing dismayed. “I had the opportunity to see a great deal of Mr. Kennedy and was aware of the fact that he was not only pigmented but often ‘Cushingoid,’ “she recalled. “This meant that he was