The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [354]
On one occasion Caroline came bouncing into the Oval Office carrying a bird in her hand like one of her dolls. Her pet bird had just died, and she wanted to show it to her father before she gave it a proper burial. “Get it away from here!” he shouted at his daughter, as if she had arrived with a terrible omen.
Dr. Jacobson’s increasing presence in the White House was a direct and immediate threat to Dr. Travell’s authority as the official White House physician. Dr. Jacobson recalled that once when he was in the White House personal quarters, the first lady’s maid, Providencia “Provi” Paredes, came running to him saying, “Dr. Travell has daringly entered the second floor.” No one entered the private residence without permission, but Dr. Travell was so incensed at Dr. Jacobson’s access that she had dared to seek him out even there.
Dr. Jacobson slipped away and at his next meeting gave Kennedy a letter saying that from now on he thought he should see the president outside of the White House. “That’s out of the question,” Kennedy replied, and tore up the letter.
Dr. Jacobson felt that, thanks to his ministrations, the president was a healthy man. Others close to Kennedy, such as Dr. Cohen, worried endlessly about Kennedy’s condition. “He felt strongly that a man he idolized was not getting appropriate care,” reflected Cohen’s former student, colleague, and friend, Dr. David Becker. “And so he really wanted to correct the situation as best he could.”
In November, Dr. Cohen talked to Kennedy about Dr. Travell. “I am sorry that you were burdened with initiating a housecleaning in your medical staff,” he wrote Kennedy on November 12, 1961. “In spite of repeated advice against her personal publicity, this was and is rampant. But above all (and this is a serious accusation) her own interests were placed above yours.”
When Kennedy returned from the funeral of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn a week later, Dr. Cohen had another fitting opportunity to talk to him. Dr. Cohen told the president that Dr. Travell, who he believed had no business treating anything beyond muscle problems, had been treating the Texas politician for back problems and anemia when the man was dying of cancer. “I further told him that inspite [sic] of my attempts of getting Doctor Kraus in that through subterfuge and direct lies, she had prevented this,” Dr. Cohen wrote later. “He told me that there should be no further delays…. I pointedly told Doctor Travell … how she had for her own interest obstructed the proper therapy for the president. She had given him many injections that had long since been shown to be futile. She had lied about these injections.”
Dr. Travell was not going to walk quietly off to her office and sit there ostracized by the president she had come to serve. She believed in her treatments as much as Dr. Cohen and the others believed in theirs, and hers was certainly far easier than the regimen of exercise that Dr. Kraus had prescribed for the president.
When matters did not improve, Dr. Cohen sent the president another letter. Dr. Cohen considered himself as much an authority in his field as the president was in his. Though he signed his one-page letter “Humbly and respectfully,” this was a man who did not defer to Kennedy. He told the president that he could not “wait and see” any longer, but that he would have to act against a doctor who “is a potential threat to your well-being.” Dr. Travell was playing to Kennedy’s lassitude and self-indulgence, and Dr. Cohen warned him: “The program requires constant sacrifice on your part—not only in the present but in the future.”
When Cohen had finished lecturing Kennedy that he should turn over his medical treatment to a team headed by Dr. Burkley, he turned to an even larger problem:
You cannot be permitted to receive therapy from irresponsible doctors like M. J. [Dr. Max Jacobson] who by forms of stimulating injections offer some temporary help to neurotic or mentally ill individuals. I should state that these individuals