The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [476]
It finally came time for the president to leave. Autumn had already been hard upon the land, and it was far too cold for Joe to sit out on the porch to see the president off. His son came up to his bedroom and said good-bye. The president did not like to hug or kiss other men, but he kissed his crippled father, and then he hurried out of the room.
As soon as the president left, Joe motioned toward the balcony, insisting that his bed be moved there to watch the presidential helicopter depart. The world waited on his son now, the way it once had waited on him, but the helicopter did not lift off. Joe’s face twisted up in disbelief. As he sat looking down on the grass where his sons had so often played, he felt a touch on his shoulder. “Look who’s here, Dad,” the president said.
Kennedy had come to say good-bye again. He felt he had to touch his father one more time. He wrapped his father in his arms and kissed him. Then he was gone, and within a moment the helicopter lifted off into the leaden skies.
On Tuesday, November 12, Cartha DeLoach, the new FBI liaison to the White House, walked into the Oval Office. That first visit to the presidential office inspired a moment of awe in the most sanguine of men. Kennedy had just started wearing glasses except when he was in public, and he did not quite have the youthful, forceful look by which most Americans knew him. DeLoach introduced himself and listened to Kennedy, but he kept staring at the president’s hands. They were shaking. As the president continued talking, he put his hands under the desk as if he did not want DeLoach to see the uncontrollable tremor.
The following Saturday, DeLoach was in the auditorium when Kennedy gave a speech to the National Academy of the FBI. DeLoach tried to pay attention, but he kept looking at the president’s hands. “His hand was shaking terribly, and I couldn’t think that was from stress or the strain of the speech,” DeLoach said. “I thought it must be a disease of some kind.”
DeLoach was not the only one to notice that Kennedy’s hands often shook. The Boston Globes Bob Healy observed the trembling hands as well, though it was not something that he would consider writing about in his paper. Since Kennedy had entered the White House, the only major publication to write about his health problems in an important way was the scandal sheet Confidential, in an almost scholarly “special report” on the potential effects of Addison’s disease. Other than that July 1962 article titled “Medical Facts on President Kennedy’s Mysterious Malady,” the press had largely left the story alone.
Kennedy was heading into an election year in which he would have the punishing task of running for president while he continued to bear all the onerous burdens of office. The campaign would have tested the mettle and stamina of the healthiest of men, and it was a question whether Kennedy was up to such a challenge. It was not simply that his hands trembled, that he was corseted with a metal and cloth brace to protect his back, and that in privacy at Hyannis Port he often used crutches. The question was whether his regimen of drugs and all the endless tensions of his office had begun to break the man down. How much longer could he maintain the greatest of all his many illusions—that he was a vibrantly healthy young president?
Politics is always defined by endings, and as the political year concluded, Kennedy’s legislative program was in trouble. His tax cut bill was spat back at him by a vote of 12–2, and the Senate Finance Committee decided to table the matter until 1964. His civil rights bill was pushed back again, its delay fostered primarily by southern Democrats who could win in procedure what they would lose in votes. At least his foreign aid bill was passed, but the recalcitrant Senate stripped it of $800 million of the $4.5 billion he had requested, and that was still $200 million beyond what the House was willing to give him.
On the very weekend that this disastrous news led the nation’s newspapers, the White House could at least announce that Jackie