The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [355]
This esteemed doctor accused Kennedy of risking the future of the world by indulging himself in drug use. The president was being put on the firmest notice of the risks he was taking. And he did nothing. Dr. Jacobson continued to come to the White House, and the president continued to get his treatments.
Dr. Jacobson was not a junkie’s doctor, writing out his prescriptions and giving injections with no thought of his patient’s well-being. Dr. Jacobson believed that what he was doing for Kennedy was good and noble. Over those many months he undoubtedly mixed a special brew of amphetamine, steroids, and other elements especially for his exalted patient, from whom he was taking no payment other than expenses. Dr. Cohen’s letter apparently had no impact on the president. He had the addict’s mindset that without his injections he could not go on.
Not only did Kennedy continue to see Dr. Jacobson, but his drug use apparently became enough of a problem that Bobby eventually felt obligated to become involved. In June 1962, the attorney general’s assistant, Andrew Oehmann, left a vial of orange-colored liquid at the FBI for analysis. The bottle had Dr. Jacobson’s name and address on it and appeared to be the sort that he gave to patients so that they could inject themselves at home. Bobby had shown such “obvious intense personal interest” that Oehmann speculated that the medicine may have been for the attorney general’s father.
The FBI laboratory received not that one small vial but four vials containing probably between thirty-five and forty milligrams of liquids, far more than would have been in the original container. Moreover, the FBI technicians described the liquid as yellow, not the orange-colored liquid that Bobby’s assistant had delivered. Amphetamines were usually dispensed in brown-colored vials, and either an orange- or yellow-colored liquid would have been quite peculiar if these samples were indeed Dr. Jacobson’s injection. These may be meaningless anomalies, or they may suggest that the FBI did not analyze the sample originally given to its laboratory. In any case, the FBI analysis showed that the specimen contained a solution of vegetable oil and water and did not contain “any barbiturates or narcotics, such as Methadon, Demerol, or opium alkaloids.”
It is unclear whether the FBI tested the liquid for amphetamines, or if it did, whether the test was positive. The vial was undated, and in his memoir Dr. Jacobson wrote that when tested after two weeks, “there was no trace of amphetamine in the solution.”
Surely it was reckless of Kennedy to continue with Dr. Jacobson’s injections, which Dr. Cohen feared could have led to his destruction and which also represented an unimaginably dangerous indulgence for the most powerful man in the world. The president’s chronic “back pain” was probably in some sense a generic term for all the suffering he was going through. By now his adrenal glands had completely atrophied. He needed to take naps in the afternoons, though most men of his generation considered naps a mark of self-indulgent weakness.
Kennedy was not using Dr. Jacobson’s injections as a recreational high, but to help him get through his days with demonstrable energy. To Kennedy, true manhood was everything, and a man was a vibrant, active, physical, sexual being or he was nothing. Even with his treatment, when John Jr. rushed forward to the helicopter to greet his returning father, Kennedy could not bend down to pick the boy up but had to foist him off on an aide.
Those who worked with Kennedy would consider it slander to suggest that the president they served may have been a drug addict. He may have needed a nap every day, but he did not slur his