Seymour Hersh - The Dark Side of Camelot

Mickelson told me that the procedure for handling the extraordinary material was always the same. A Secret Service agent would arrive at his shop—ten blocks from the White House—early in the morning with a photograph. “I’d look at it, take the measurement, and then he’d take it back.” The agent would return that evening, after the gallery closed, and wait once again in the same room with Mickelson until he completed the framing. He never had a chance, Mickelson told me, to make a copy of a photograph—something he thought about doing—because “the Secret Service agent was always with it.”

Mickelson, who was seventy years old when we spoke, told me that he had remained especially troubled by the photographs, and his role in framing them, because at the time his shop was deeply involved in the restoration of the White House, managed by the first lady. “I had a very good relationship with Jackie and I respected her,” Mickelson said. “But,” he added with a shrug, “my feeling is whatever the White House sends me …

“No other White House did this.”

John F. Kennedy’s recklessness may finally have caught up with him in the last weeks of his life. One of his casual paramours in Washington, the wife of a military attaché at the West German Embassy, was believed by a group of Republican senators to be a possible agent of East German intelligence. In the ensuing panic, the woman and her husband were quickly flown out of Washington, and Robert Kennedy used all of his powers as attorney general, with the help of J. Edgar Hoover, to quash investigations by the Congress and the FBI. The potential damage of the presidential liaison was heightened, as the worried Kennedy brothers understood, by the ongoing sex scandal involving John Profumo, the British secretary of state for war, that was riveting London—and the British tabloids—throughout the summer of 1963. The government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan barely survived the scandal.

Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual excesses and compulsiveness. He severely tore a groin muscle while frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.

Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald’s first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president remained erect—and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the head. Kennedy’s groin brace, which is now in the possession of the National Archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor was the injury that had led to his need for it.

November 22, 1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for decades to come.

* Morgenthau would not learn until he was interviewed for this book that Robert Kennedy had planned to tell him that afternoon that he was resigning his cabinet post and wanted Morgenthau to replace him as attorney general. Joseph F. Dolan, who was one of Kennedy’s confidants in the Justice Department, said in a 1995 interview for this book that Kennedy “was going to run” his brother’s 1964 reelection campaign.

* The tape recordings remained in direct control of the Kennedy family until May 1976, when they were deeded to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. In a report issued in 1985, the library acknowledged that it was “impossible to establish with any certainty how much might have been removed” from the collection prior to 1975. “That at least some items were removed cannot be doubted.” Some Dictabelt tapes of telephone conversations were also discovered to be in the possession of Evelyn Lincoln after her death in 1995.

Jack Kennedy was a dazzling figure as an adult, with stunning good looks, an inquisitive mind, and a biting sense of humor that was often self-mocking. He throve on adoration and surrounded himself with starstruck friends and colleagues. Women swooned. Men stood in awe of his easy success with women, and were grateful for his attentions to them. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Kennedy’s close friends remain enraptured. When JFK appeared at a party, Charles Spalding told me, “the temperature went up a hundred and fifty degrees.”

His close friends knew that their joyful friend was invariably in acute pain, with chronic back problems. That, too, became a source of admiration. “He never talked about it,” Jewel Reed, the former wife of James Reed, who served in the navy with Kennedy during World War II, said in an interview for this book. “He never complained, and that was one of the nice things about Jack.”

Kennedy kept his pain to himself all of his life.

The most important fact of Kennedy’s early years was his health. He suffered from a severe case of Addison’s disease, an often-fatal disorder of the adrenal glands that eventually leaves the immune system unable to fight off ordinary infection. No successful cortisone treatment for the disease was available until the end of World War II. A gravely ill Kennedy, wracked by Addison’s (it was undiagnosed until 1947), often seemed on the edge of death; he was stricken with fevers as high as 106 degrees and was given last rites four times. As a young adult he also suffered from acute back pain, the result of a college football injury that was aggravated by his World War II combat duty aboard PT-109 in the South Pacific. Unsuccessful back surgery in 1944 and 1954 was complicated by the Addison’s, which severely diminished his ability to heal and increased the overall risk of the procedures.

Kennedy and his family covered up the gravity of his illnesses throughout his life—and throughout his political career. Bobby Kennedy, two weeks after his brother’s assassination, ordered that all White House files dealing with his brother’s health “should be regarded as a privileged communication,” never to be made public. Over the years, nonetheless, biographies and memoirs have revealed the extent of young Jack Kennedy’s suffering. What has been less clear is the extent of the impact his early childhood illnesses had on his character, and how they shaped his attitudes as an adult and as the nation’s thirty-fifth president.

Kennedy’s fight for life began at birth. He had difficulty feeding as an infant and was often sick. At age two he was hospitalized with scarlet fever and, having survived that, was sent away to recuperate for three months at a sanatorium in Maine. It was there that Jack, torn from his parents and left in the care of strangers, demonstrated the first signs of what would be a lifelong ability to attract attention by charming others. He so captivated his nurse that it was reported that she begged to be allowed to stay with him. Poor health plagued Jack throughout his school years. At age four, he was able to attend nursery school for only ten weeks out of a thirty-week term. At a religious school in Connecticut when he was thirteen, he began losing weight and was diagnosed with appendicitis. The emergency operation—a family surgeon was flown in for the procedure—almost killed him; he never returned to the school. Serious illness continued to afflict Kennedy at prep school at Choate, and local physicians were unable to treat his chronic stomach distress and his “flu-like symptoms.” He was diagnosed as suffering from, among other ailments, leukemia and hepatitis—afflictions that would magically clear up just as his doctors, and his family, were despairing. Once again, he made up for his sickliness with charm, good humor, and a winning zest for life that kept him beloved by his peers, as it would throughout his life.