When It Counted, He Never Faltered

By Hugh Sidey Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002
    • Robert Dallek's revelations suggest that J.F.K. and his handlers recklessly deceived the public. But there is a huge disconnect between what we now know about Kennedy's pills and injections and his ability to perform his duties as Senator and President.

    From 1957, when I met John F. Kennedy and began to write about him, to 1963, when I saw his casket wheeled out of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, I observed him in public as closely as any other journalist. I never saw Kennedy emotionally or physically impaired for any great length of time or at any important moment. The medical treatment I witnessed seemed reasonable for a man who had suffered so many years of discomfort. But Dallek's idea that Kennedy overcame pain and his faltering system through nonstop, heroic willpower and feverish pill popping is surely exaggerated. In his public appearances, Kennedy was nearly always working hard and displaying genuine good humor, a far cry from Dallek's image of a constantly pain-ridden biochemical man.


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    When Kennedy was shepherding the labor-reform act of 1959 through the Senate, he would brief me outside the chamber, lounging on that sore tailbone of his, making marvelously irreverent cracks about recalcitrant Senate colleagues and the pretty secretaries who walked by. During the 1960 campaign, I watched him up close: at Wisconsin factory gates at 5 a.m., in the New Hampshire snow, tramping through the hamlets of West Virginia. His days ran 20 hours. I felt more debilitated than he looked. True, J.F.K. didn't indulge in displays of physical prowess (no push-ups or arm wrestling). He just kept going, his mind always in overdrive. That was his true, as he would say it, "vigah."

    Yes, we knew Kennedy had a fragile physical side and was often in pain. On board the Caroline and other chartered planes, I saw him take plenty of pills. But I was never alarmed. I knew of his many youthful illnesses and how he had twice received last rites in his young life, even though the public was not fully aware of that history. But he kept his spirits up. Once, flying late at night in a small plane from Milwaukee, Wis., to Seattle, I watched Kennedy's pill routine and then stretched out on the cramped cabin floor for some sleep. I was awakened by a tinkling sound. I turned my head, and Kennedy was urinating in a plastic cup by my ear. He grinned and explained nonchalantly that it was the effect of his pills.

    In 1960 I watched Kennedy during his grueling, endless Inauguration Day, both on and off the public stage. He never faltered. At midnight, he stood in that snow-laden landscape in front of the White House, tugged a couple of times on an expiring cigar, then literally skipped up the portico stairs and into the White House. In June 1961 Kennedy returned from a U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna on crutches and was lifted onto Air Force One by a cherrypicker, the most graphic public display of his physical problems. But two nights later, he was in Palm Beach sipping daiquiris while Frank Sinatra records played in the background, telling amusing and frightening stories of his encounter with Nikita Khrushchev. The back spasm of two days earlier never came up. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, which roused the most thunderous audience response I have ever witnessed or felt, came after hours of touring the Berlin Wall while standing in the back of an open-air limo with Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

    So what to make of the newly released medical records? They are indisputable, but they don't give the whole picture and do leave the impression that Kennedy was little more than a chemical shell ready to self-destruct. I have my doubts. John Kennedy was a strong, determined President partly handicapped by a weakened body. But he was never an invalid.