a difficult hero a difficult hero
Lionized by Democrats and Republicans since his death, JFK still remains an enigma in many ways. Matthews uncovers the Kennedy who defied the odds to become president. Excerpt from “Chris Matthews in Silicon Valley,” November 8, 2011. Chris Matthews Host, “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” MSNBC;
Author, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero
David Kennedy Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History,
Emeritus, Stanford University - Moderator KENNEDY: You [have] touched on the matter of Kennedy’s chronic and several illnesses. Do you want to say a little more about that? MATTHEWS: You could cry if you understood the guy. He was a far greater hero
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
than he ever let us know. He’s young: he has scarlet fever, he has asthma, he has what for a long time in high school they thought was leukemia. He’s always having his blood count tested, and his mother never visits him; his mother has no time for him, apparently.
f e br ua ry/mar ch 2012
JFK photos by U.S. Gov / Wikimedia Commons, Matthews photo courtest of MSNBC
JFK: JFK:
[Jacqueline Kennedy] said, a week after he was dead – in the notes I was able to get from her interview with Theodore White that never got published – [that his mother] never loved him. She liked being the mayor’s daughter, the ambassador’s wife, but never loved him. That was Jackie’s view of Rose Kennedy. Jack was much more merciless; he said his mother was a nothing. [He had] a pretty frightening youth, I’d say; very much an old English kind of youth: sent away to school with no love, and even though he was dying, he thought he’d never have his mother visit him. He [also] had something wrong with his stomach. Nobody knew what it was. He said it was a “knot” in his stomach, and it never went away. They thought it was leukemia, then they thought it was colitis – I guess it was colitis – and he would always get steroids. The great historian Bob Dallek got the medical records: The steroids that he was taking for years for the colitis really got to his bone structure, and it began to degenerate. That was his real problem; it wasn’t being hit by a Japanese destroyer, so much. He should never have been approved for service in the PTs [patrol torpedo boat service], but he was able to sneak in basically with the help of his father and the senator from Massachusetts, David I. Walsh. He was able to get PT service. But here’s a guy that had to sleep on either a table or a plywood plank because he couldn’t stand sleeping on a regular bed. He had to wear a sciatic corset. All the time in the Navy, he was dressed like this. He would be running around saying, “Do you have a needle and thread? I’ve got to work on my corset, fix my back.” It got much worse after they were rammed and cut in half by the Japanese destroyer, and he was in the hospital for the whole next year – 1944 – and you can’t find anything about him except that he was in the hospital. He got down to about 125 pounds. Then he got the Addison’s Disease. It came in in 1947, the first time he had the Last Rights. He was in London; Pamela Harriman got him to the hospital. The doctor said, “This kid doesn’t have a year to live.” He had it strike again in ’51, when he was on a Far Eastern trip with Bobby. Bobby actually first became interesting to Jack at that time because Bobby saved him. He became his protector that trip and got him to a military base in Okinawa. [Jack] had