injections of painkillers and amphetamines that allowed Kennedy to stay off crutches, which he believed essential to project a picture of robust good health.
As President, he sometimes took five hot showers a day to ease his pain. And while the 1954 surgery that his Addison’s disease had made so risky had given him some limited relief, he continued to live with almost constant discomfort. The bone loss and destruction in his lower back from steroids had been the source of back pain since at least 1940. Between May 1955 and October 1957, while he was launching his Vice-Presidential and Presidential bids, he was secretly hospitalised nine times.’ Here is Dallek’s depiction of Kennedy’s health at an early point in his Presidency: ‘Stoically refusing to let health concerns stop him,’ Dallek writes, ‘became a pattern that would allow Jack to pursue a political career. There is still a certain amount of speculation about his diseases and disabilities, but it sometimes seems a wonder that he could function at all. Apart from anything else, the effect of mixing the many medications he was taking – some of them apparently taken inappropriately – was unknown then (it is hardly better known now). That he was often in agony, unable to lift his left leg to put on a sock, that he went up stairs sideways and was often on crutches when hidden from public view, that he was almost always sick, often from several things at once: none of this was included in the picture of Kennedy the public was given at the time, and it isn’t part of the picture his followers have held in their minds.Īccording to Dallek, Kennedy’s health didn’t interfere with his functioning as President, but sometimes it seems a very close call. For better or for worse, someone known to have his several ailments, including Addison’s disease, an adrenal insufficiency which is fatal if untreated, would not be elected today. He does not treat the matter salaciously: how Kennedy dealt with his poor health becomes evidence of his ‘strength of character’ – though even more striking is the deception practised by him and his entourage. Earlier books had revealed that Kennedy took a number of different medications, and we were vaguely aware at the time that he had a bad back, but Dallek’s new information about the extent of Kennedy’s health problems is astonishing. More specifically, Dallek persuaded the caretakers of the flame to open sealed papers concerning Kennedy’s health problems, which were held at the John F.
The historian Robert Dallek is neither he decided to enter the field, as he explains in his introduction, in part because documents had become available that threw new light on several aspects of Kennedy’s life, and in part because he thought the old ones should be given a fresh reading.
Kennedy have been written either by toadying family retainers or by people bent on destroying the Camelot myth.
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