Rose Kennedy by Barbara A. Perry

Author:Barbara A. Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

JACK’S HEALTH AND diet were always on Rose’s mind. In 1951 she wrote that he had “devoured caviar, sour cream, duck with all the sauces and a strawberry soufflé” at dinner with her in Paris. “[He] should have needed a few pills before he ever hit the Orient, I should think.”72 In fact, Jack had fallen ill in Japan, his fever spiking to 106 degrees. In 1953 his chronic back pain flared so badly that he could barely walk. Apparently, the corticosteroids that he took for his digestive ailments and Addison’s had caused his fifth lumbar vertebra to collapse. Following the best medical advice available, in October 1954 Jack decided to undergo a delicate procedure at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery to fuse his lumbar and sacroiliac vertebrae. The doctors’ prognosis was blunt. If the operation failed, Senator Kennedy might be confined to a wheelchair. At the very least, his Addison’s made him vulnerable to life-threatening postoperative infections. “Jack was determined to have the operation,” Rose remembered. “He told his father that even if the risks were fifty-fifty, he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.”73

Fearing the loss of another son, Joe tried to talk him out of the procedure, but Jack was adamant. The surgery went badly from the start; an infection set in, nearly killing him. Joe sobbed over his comatose son, but Jack rallied, and two months later his physicians released him to be flown to Palm Beach for Christmas. Still barely able to sit, stand, or walk, he spent much of his time confined to bed. His gaping surgical wound, around the steel plate implanted in his back, simply would not heal.74 Jackie assumed the gruesome task of changing the dressings on the open incision.

By February 1955 so little progress had been made in Jack’s condition that he decided to undergo yet another surgical procedure in New York—this time a spinal bone graft and removal of the troublesome metal plate. The third incision on his vertebrae finally healed, providing some relief. Even so, all winter and spring Jack convalesced at Palm Beach, where he began his second book, Profiles in Courage, aided by a battery of researchers and writers.75

As with Rosemary’s lobotomy, Rose played no role in managing Jack’s medical status. “[Joe] [k]ept encouraging him, too, although his father was heartbroken at different times when he was ill. There again he was with him,” Rose remembered. “He went to the doctors, he made the decisions or he gave him the advice or he decided what he would do or where he would go. A good many times I was not consulted about because I didn’t know enough of all the circumstances.…”76

Jack returned to the Senate in May 1955 and, although still underweight, he was well enough by the summer of 1956 to seek the Democratic vice-presidential nomination at the Chicago convention. He burst onto the national political scene with new charisma, not unlike that of Barack Obama forty-eight years later.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.