Despite his image of virility as President of the United States, despite his World War II heroism, I think most of us realize that John F. Kennedy was a pretty sickly guy. I never knew how sickly until I picked up Laurence Leamer’s “The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963.”
I’ve only read up to JFK’s Harvard years-I know there are many more illnesses to come- but from birth he was in and out of the hospital for one mysterious malady or another-a couple of times doctors thought he was suffering from leukemia, which was a death sentence in those days. At one point he was in the Mayo Clinic for a series of tests; at another point he was in St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., from where he penned this darkly humorous letter to a close friend describing in detail an examination to in an attempt to diagnose his intestinal issues:
Yesterday I went through the most harassing experience of my life. First they gave me five enemas until I was white a snow inside. Then they put me on a thing like a barber chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled on something that resembles the foot rest with my head where the seat is. They took my pants down! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I blushed because you know how it is. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled ‘em down the aisles by saying “You have a good motion.” He withdrew his finger. And then, the shit stuck an iron tube 12 inches long and 1 inch in diameter up my ass. They had a flashlight inside it and they looked around. Then they blew a lot of air in me to pump up my bowels. I was certainly feeling great as I know you would having a lot of strangers looking up my ass-hole. Of course when the pretty nurses did it I was given a cheap thrill.
Admittedly I laughed out loud at JFK’s graphic description of his pre-colonoscopy intestinal exam. But sharing some scatological humor from out future president isn’t the point. Leamer notes it’s easy to forget that at that moment JFK was a 17 year-old in a hospital bed with doctors “poking and prodding” trying to determine whether or not his mysterious ailment would kill him. (I know myself at that age and I would be scared to death.) Yet there young Jack was, portraying “boastful boyish bravado” that went as far as lustfully ogling the pretty nurses that came in and out of his room.
Leamer continues:
There was a heroic quality in the magnitude of Jack’s denial and the daring invention of this picaresque life. He could have given in to his illness and accepted an invalid’s pale life. Instead, Jack had learned a denial technique when dealing with the implacable realities of life……Young Jack was in a situation that would have filled most adults with fear, but there was none of that in him. Here in this hospital room his sense of irony grew hard and became the preeminent means by which he looked at the world.
We can only imagine how the history of our great country would be altered if JFK had accepted the pale invalid’s life.