Kennedy’s Medical Records Tapped: President Suffered Incredible Pain, More Than Previously Thought, says Author
By Randy Trick
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19, 2002–The cover of the December edition of The Atlantic Monthly pictures a vibrant President Kennedy frolicking in the Atlantic Ocean, and teases the cover story inside, by Robert Dallek, a professor of history and co-director of the Boston University Washington Center.
The photo is tinted blue, as is the tone of Dallek’s piece, based on the first opportunity for a writer to view Kennedy’s medical records from 1953 until his death in 1963.
Despite the healthy-looking photo on the magazine’s cover and a headline reading “A Picture of Health,” the article shows that Kennedy was a medical mess. Early in his life, he suffered chronic intestinal ills, the treatment of which may have led to the degenerative back troubles always searing though the adult Kennedy’s body, leaving him unable to put on his left sock.
It’s likely that the steroids Kennedy took in his teenage years led to his osteoporosis. X-rays Dallek viewed showed that Kennedy’s lower vertebrae had “turned to mush,” as Dallek said recently, and were littered with fractures.
Kennedy’s playboy lifestyle already having been discussed at length in a myriad of books and articles over the last decade, Dallek offers something new – the first ever analysis of Kennedy’s sealed medical records, based on research he did for his forthcoming book on the former president..
“It was pretty startling to see,” Dallek said. “It feels very good, of course,” to have been the first to look at Kennedy’s medical records.
Dallek said the sheer amount of medications Kennedy’s doctors gave him is sensational.
During his presidency, Kennedy was receiving steroids for Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder; painkillers for his back; anti-spasmodics for his colitis; antibiotics for his urinary tract infections; and antihistamines for his allergies.
Researching Kennedy’s near -rippling health problems only bolstered Dallek’s appreciation for the man’s courage.
“He was so buoyant, courageous and stoic about it,” Dallek said. “I’ve said if I were in his health I’d cower in a corner with a blanket.”
Absent in the pages and pages of medical history Dallek waded through over two days is any mention of sexually transmitted diseases, about which several authors have hypothesized.
“There is nothing – nothing,” Dallek said. Intentionally, he avoided speculation about Kennedy’s womanizing.
In his article, Dallek mentions only a chronic urinary tract infection, attributable to just about anything.
The Atlantic article–the first of two that will appear in the magazine before Dallek’s biography of Kennedy, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, is published next spring, –reads like a medical analysis. It includes details never before unveiled, but perhaps even more spectacular has been the attention Dallek’s findings have generated.
“What impresses me is the phenomenal hold Kennedy still has on the imagination of the world,” Dallek said. “It’s fascinating why people like Kennedy, deceased, still capture the public imagination.”
Since Dallek’s discoveries were publicized over the weekend in The New York Times and early this week on major television and radio talk shows, he has received a slew of e-mails, including one from Greece – “It’s all the talk in Greece,” he recalled it saying.
To Dallek, his article is only a case study of a greater issue, one that, given Vice President Dick Cheney’s history of heart trouble, is ever-present. He wants readers to ponder some questions: To what extent should the health of public figures be public, and is society sophisticated enough to see through medical stereotypes to recognize the archetype of leadership?
Dallek called Cheney a “walking time bomb.” He said that the public does not know Cheney’s cholesterol level or the extent of his heart problems, although doctors attest publicly to his health.
During Kennedy’s years of public service, doctors also lauded his health, at one time calling it “exceptional,” Dallek said in his article. Records, however, reveal that the president’s cholesterol level once exceeded 400, and typically stayed in the 300 range.
The records “read like the ordeal of an old man, not one in his late thirties, in the prime of his life,” Dallek wrote in the article.
“These guys have their finger on the nuclear trigger,” said Dallek. “Yet Kennedy carried it out brilliantly.” Even with a backbone of mush.
Published in The Lawrence Eagle Tribune, in Massachusetts.
