Free Kennedy: The Classic Biography by Ted Sorensen Page A

candidate whenever she could travel with him. But in the early years of their marriage she preferred to find quieter ways to assist the husband who was twelve years her senior: translating French works on Indochina, learning history to keep up with his reading (“He’s much more serious than I thought he was before I married him,” she said) and, above all, providing him with a relaxing home life in which he could shed the worries of the world.
    HIS HEALTH
    For much of their first two years of married life, home to John Kennedy meant a sickbed, and through most of the years of his life with Jacqueline he suffered sharp physical pain. The chief cause of his hospitalization and discomfort was his back; but the cause of his near death in the fall of 1954 was the shock of a spinal operation upon his inadequate adrenal system.
    It was this same adrenal insufficiency that gave rise to all the health rumors that plagued him for years. Before his nomination politicians whispered about it—at least one, Governor Pat Brown of California, asked him about it. In my liaison role between reporters and doctors, I realized how concerned he was that the public not consider him too sickly for the burdens of the campaign and the Presidency or too unlikely to live out his first term if elected. Aside from his 1954-1955 spinal surgery, his confinements in the hospital for any cause, however minor, were never publicized during his career as Senator, even though it often meant my offering other excuses for canceling or rearranging speaking dates (one of the tasks I disliked the most). On one occasion he checked into the New England Baptist Hospital in Boston simply as “Mr. K.”—although his special back-supporting mattress was later carried by an easily recognizable brother Teddy through the crowded hospital lobby.
    The Senator had no wish to falsify the facts concerning his adrenals, but he did insist that whatever had to be published be precise. Thus he avoided the term Addison’s disease, which, though it was no longer a barrier to a full life, had a frightening sound to most laymen and was interpreted differently by different physicians. Originally, before the newer adrenal hormones were available, Addison’s disease carried implications wholly absent in the Senator’s case—including tubercular glands, a brownish pallor, progressive anemia and, in most cases, progressive deterioration and death. (The year-round sun tan which he maintained through visits to Palm Beach and use of a sun lamp caused one suspicious reporter to question whether this wasn’t a symptom, whereupon the usually modest Senator exposed a part of his anatomy that had not been browned by the sun.)
    Instead of the term Addison’s disease, he preferred to refer to the “partial mild insufficiency” or “malfunctioning” of the adrenal glands which had accompanied the malaria, water exposure, shock and stress he had undergone during his wartime ordeal. He also preferred, rather than giving the impression that his life depended on cortisone (which he had taken in earlier years and to which his later drugs were related), to refer to the fact that the insufficiency was completely compensated for and controlled through “simple medication taken by mouth.”
    Though he was troubled for a time by high fevers, and any major operation was a risk, the insufficiency caused no other illness, and was regularly and routinely checked. In fact a December, 1958, examination (ACTH stimulation test) showed satisfactory adrenal function. In 1960, however, the rumors were rampant; and two lieutenants of his chief rival for the nomination, Lyndon Johnson—Mrs. India Edwards and John Connally, later Governor of Texas—chose to highlight a convention press conference with doubts about Kennedy’s life expectancy based on the assertion that he had Addison’s disease. Their subsequent explanation was that Kennedy’s spirited defense of his youth and vigor on television that day