Free Kennedy: The Classic Biography by Ted Sorensen Page B

(in reply to a Truman attack) had by implication cast doubt on the health of other candidates, including heart patient Johnson. Johnson disowned the attack, and a‘subsequent explicit statement from Kennedy headquarters and a full exposition in the press put an end to all rumors and doubts—although the Republicans, not surprisingly, raised the issue again forty-eight hours before the election, with Congressman Walter Judd (a physician) attempting to cast doubt on Addisonians’, and thus Kennedy’s, “physical and mental health.”
    Addison’s disease sounds ominous, but a bad back is commonplace. Consequently Kennedy’s chronically painful back caused him less trouble politically, though it continued to cause him more trouble physically. Injured in 1939 playing football at Harvard, and reinjured when his PT boat was rammed, his back underwent a disc operation by Naval surgeons in 1944 which had no lasting benefit. He frequently needed crutches to ease the pain during the 1952 campaign. When the crutches reappeared in the summer of 1954, he complained to me about their awkwardness but not about his agonizing pain. When he then decided that an extremely dangerous double spinal fusion operation in October would be better than life as a cripple, he did not hint at the risks of which he had been warned and made plans with me for resuming work in November.
    But the effect of surgery on his adrenal shortage caused, as he had been told might happen, severe postoperative complications. Twice he was placed on the critical list and his family summoned. Twice the last rites of his church were administered. Twice he fought his way back to life, as he had once before in the Pacific.
    But he obviously could do no work, in November or for weeks thereafter. He was totally out of touch with our office from mid-September, 1954 to mid-January, 1955, having in the meantime been taken by stretcher to Palm Beach for Christmas. In February, 1955, suffering from a nearly fatal infection, he underwent still another dangerous operation to remove a metal plate that had been inserted in the preceding surgery. Back in Palm Beach, he worked on Profiles in Courage , but was bedridden most of the time. He was finally able to return to Washington in May, 1955.
    Even then he was required for some months to remain in bed as much as possible. And always thereafter he kept a rocking chair in his office, wore a cloth brace and corrective shoes, and slept with a bed board under his mattress, no matter where he traveled. In hotels where no board was available we would move his mattress onto the floor.
    Still hobbled by pain until the Novocain injections and other treatments of Dr. Janet Travell gave him new hope for a life free from crutches if not from backache, he bitterly doubted the value of the operation which had nearly ended his life. With several individual exceptions—such as Dr. Travell and the Lahey Clinic’s Sara Jordan, who had treated him since he was eleven—he had never been impressed by the medical profession, remaining skeptical of its skills and critical of its fees. After his health had been shattered during the war, while still on duty in the South Pacific, he wrote his brother Bobby:
Keep in contact with your old broken down brother…. Out here, if you can breathe, you’re one A and “good for active duty anywhere”; and by anywhere they don’t mean El Morocco or the Bath and Tennis Club.
    After his first back operation in 1944 he had written to an inquiring friend:
In regard to the fascinating subject of my operation, I should naturally like to go on for several pages…but will confine myself to saying that I think the doc should have read just one more book before picking up the saw.
    After his 1954-1955 operations he once showed me the gaping hole in his back—not to complain about the pain but to curse a job which he found wholly unsatisfactory.
    When my own back went bad in the midst of the 1956 campaign, he recommended a