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By Root 1691 0

emerge from their safe havens after a nuclear attack. Although the pamphlet was nowhere so explicit, the reality it implied was that the working class and the poor who did not have bomb shelters would be largely gone, but the upper middle class and the wealthy would survive. In this moral triage, no one would have a better chance of survival than the creators of this policy in the White House. “Some of us had been issued helicopter passes,” recalled Adam Yarmolinsky, special assistant to the secretary of Defense, “so that we could be spirited away to an impregnable underground fortress in the event of nuclear attack. It was not at all clear whether the passes would be used, leaving families to cope as best they could. But the passes did help to create an atmosphere of unreality.”

During a glorious Thanksgiving weekend at Hyannis Port, Kennedy had to decide if he wanted to go ahead with the pamphlet. In September, Father L. C. McHugh, a retired professor of ethics at Georgetown University, had faced the moral dilemma of the nuclear age straight on, advising that those farsighted enough to have their own bomb shelters had the perfect right to shoot their foolish neighbors who sought admission. “There’s no problem here,” Bobby quipped. “We can just station Father McHugh with a machine gun at every shelter.” Kennedy decided to have the pamphlet rewritten to emphasize public shelters. Before long the obsession with bomb shelters receded, but it rested in the American consciousness, part of the natural paranoia of the nuclear age.

During that long difficult summer, Dr. Kraus began coming to the White House to give Kennedy an exercise program, and Joe and the president started taking a swim before lunch. But there still remained dangerous tension among the various doctors involved with the president’s care, the most unsettling aspect of which was the presence of Dr. Jacobson. He had the professional patina of a celebrity doctor, and he was socially accepted in the president’s circles the way none of Kennedy’s other physicians ever had been. Unknown to the public, he had been there during the two days of Kennedy’s serious viral illness, doubtless called in by the president. In the six months from mid-May to mid-October 1961, Dr. Jacobson spent thirty-six days with the president, based on his billing for incidental expenses and travel. Dr. Jacobson attended the president in Palm Beach, Washington, New York City, and Hyannis Port, seeing him on average more than once a week. The bill did not even include the days Dr. Jacboson had been with the president on his European trip.

Dr. Jacobson had become in some respects Kennedy’s most important doctor and was injecting the president with his treatment on a regular basis. For the most part, even those around the president had no idea of his apparent dependency on Dr. Jacobson’s injections. Some were struck at times by the president’s unusual energy. “He wasn’t a real healthy guy,” said Joseph Paolella, a Secret Service agent. “On the other hand, I used to be amazed because we’d go on trips, and he seemed to be almost inexhaustible. I’d wonder, ‘How can this guy do this?’ The Secret Service guys would be dragging. He just had unlimited energy.”

Kennedy did not mind that an old friend like Senator George Smathers knew about his drug use. “I wasn’t sure what it was he was taking,” Smathers reflected. “I don’t think Jack knew. He just knew it made him feel better. So, he’d say, ‘Give me the injection.’ So I’d say, ‘Now, did you really …’ He said, ‘Be damn sure that you take alcohol first and clean it off. I don’t want to get infected.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Then just like a pro I’d stick him and shoot it in there. On these physical things, he could stand pain better than anybody I ever saw. I mean, he endured, when you stopped to look at what really bothered him, he endured pain like you wouldn’t believe.”

The unspoken conspiracy was to pretend that Kennedy was a vibrantly healthy man. It began not with his friends or his doctors but with the man himself. Woe betide anyone who brought to him