The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [342]
Travell’s ministrations to the president had also begun to worry Dr. Cohen, who was treating Kennedy’s adrenal problems. “Dr. Cohen got her the White House job,” reflects a former close colleague. “He liked to be a kingmaker but he didn’t always recognize the frailties of those he chose and he sometimes came to regret what he had done.”
Dr. Cohen reluctantly concluded, as he wrote his colleague Dr. Burkley later, that Dr. Travell was “a deceiving, incompetent, publicity-mad physician who only had one consideration in mind and that was herself.” Dr. Cohen was not an argumentative man, but he was a passionate doctor whose main divertissements were his wife, Regina, his German shepherd, a white Cadillac convertible, and his dahlias. “He was totally devoted to his patients,” reflected Dr. David V. Becker, his former student at the Cornell University College of Medicine and later his colleague there. “As a teacher, he made major points about always listening to the patient and responding to the patient’s need.”
Dr. Cohen looked on with growing concern as Dr. Travell refused to invite Dr. Kraus down to consult with the president. Instead, she agreed to call in another prominent physician, Dr. Preston Wade, who in 1957 had drained the soft-tissue abscesses in Kennedy’s back. Dr. Wade prescribed treatments that did not include Travell’s novocaine injections, but she continued nonetheless with her dangerous treatments. “Then, as you know,” Dr. Cohen wrote Dr. Burkley in 1964, “there were just repeated series of injections without any response—injections that were not to have been given as outlined by Doctor Wade.”
Dr. Travell’s jealous hold over the president’s care was threatened even more ominously by the arrival in the White House of Dr. Max Jacobson. The New York doctor, who had first treated Kennedy during the campaign, was a kindred spirit to Dr. Travell. He too promised absolution from physical pain, traveling always with a magical syringe that contained not novocaine but a mixture of amphetamine, vitamins, and other drugs. Kennedy had called Dr. Jacobson when Jackie was suffering from depression and headaches before his Canadian trip. His beautiful, young, outwardly healthy wife continued to be so disheartened with her life as first lady that she might not be able to accompany her husband on his European trip. Dr. Jacobson flew down to Palm Beach, where he spent four days, and gave Jackie injections that miraculously perked her up.
Kennedy fooled his constituents, and he fooled many of the women he slept with, rarely playing the invalid. Now he would have to play the healthy man on the largest stage in the world, and he had only a few days to effect this transformation. The president invited Dr. Jacobson to Washington. Dr. Jacobson’s visits to the Kennedys were not going unnoticed. “Does JFK have a new personal physician?” a gossip columnist asked in the New York Daily News on May 12. “Dr. Max Jacobson, with offices at 155 E. 72nd St., has been making frequent phone calls to the White House.”
The Manhattan physician flew down to Washington on May 23, only a week before the beginning of Kennedy’s European trip. The doctor once again gave Jackie an injection that immediately cured her migraine and ended her pouting uncertainty about whether she would accompany Kennedy. Then Dr. Jacobson saw the president, whose condition, to his eyes, appeared to have worsened: Dr. Travell had sprayed freezing ethyl chloride on his back, numbing it for a few minutes, but causing longer-term problems.
Dr. Jacobson was a German Jew who had fled Berlin before the war and had a thick accent, a comforting manner, and a mystical, knowing aura. He applied to the president the same psychologically astute approach he took to all his patients. He first talked to