John F. Kennedy: Illness, War and Mortality

As the comic character, the 2,000 year-old man, Mel Brooks was asked how he stays so young. “I fall to my knees and pray fiercely,” he replied, “….my heart should not attack me.” From early in his life, John Kennedy was overly familiar with his body attacking him. His experiences of sudden, serious illnesses from early childhood on and later of combat led him to be aware of life’s fragility, he responded to his physical prob-

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lems with fatalism and humor, his wartime experiences shook him up, and helped shape his political outlook.

At birth, one of Kennedy’s legs was shorter than the other, leading to his chronic back problems (David Pitts, Jack and Lem [NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007], p. 18). As an infant, he had trouble feeding (Nigel Hamilton, J.F.K.: Reckless Youth [NY: Random House, 1992], p. 33). When he was two, he caught scarlet fever, was hospitalized, close to death, then at the age of three years old was sent away to recover for awhile at a sanatorium in Maine. The young Jack’s response to being sick and being separated from his family was twofold. His nurse in Maine was captivated by the sense of humor of this youngster “who never com-

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plained” (Hamilton, J.F.K., (p. 42). On the other hand, his response to his mother’s frequent trips was not so sanguine. “Jack told a friend,” Doris Kearns Goodwin recounted, “he used to cry every time she packed her bags until he realized that his crying irritated her no end and only made her withdraw from him even more” (Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys [NY: Simon & Schuster, 1987], p. 353).

At the age of thirteen, young Jack was sent away to prep school. His health suffered; he lost weight, fainted, had an appendectomy, and was so slow to recover he was sent home for the rest of the school year. When he was sixteen, at another prep school, he was rushed by ambulance to the hospital. His doctors thought he might have life-threatening leukemia, once again he was losing weight. After high school, Kennedy attended Princeton, but had to drop out in early 1935, and was hospitalized for two months in Boston. Kennedy’s blood count had fallen from 6,000 to 3,500. Jack wrote: “At 1500 you die. They call me ‘2000 to go Kennedy.” He also joked about his funeral and being measured for a coffin (Hamilton, J.F.K., p. 149). Again, leukemia was suspected, but as with his other illnesses, no definitive diagnosis was made. Jack then attended Harvard, where he had periodic bouts of illness and hospitalizations with the same sudden, sharp weight loss, which as usual he handled outwardly with humor. As a young man, he also began his lifelong womanizing, which could have disrupted his political and domestic arrangements at any time. Always threatened by serious physical illness, he lived life on the edge and yet was solidly grounded.

Kennedy’s experience in combat in World War II unnerved him for a time and somewhat reshaped his outlook on life. As Commander of PT 109 in the Pacific in World War II in August 1943, his vessel was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and broken in two. John Hersey writes: “Kennedy was thrown hard to the left in the cockpit, and he thought, ‘This is how it feels to be killed’” (John Hersey, Life Sketches [NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989], p. 77). Jack survived, but two of his men were killed in the collision. The surviving men went through a grueling ordeal where Kennedy acted heroically, before they were rescued after days at sea.

Jack wrote: “It was a terrible thing…losing those two men.” One of the men had been with Kennedy as long as Jack had been there. This fellow with a wife and three kids had previously been shaken up by a bomb attack. Kennedy had planned to transfer him to base work, but he never got the chance. The other man who was killed was new to the unit (Hamilton, J.F.K., p. 607). It was clear Jack took these deaths hard. Kennedy’s own superior saw “tears streaming down his face and he said…’I might have been able to save those other two’….He was very bitter” (quoted in Hamilton, J.F.K., p. 606). He told a friend commenting on newspaper accounts portraying Kennedy’s heroic actions, “the two fellows” being “killed…rather spoils the whole thing for me” (Pitts, Jack and Lem, p. 99).

A month later, Kennedy wrote that the casualties of the war must lead toward “some definite goal” or “the whole thing will turn to ashes.” As for himself, he says: “I used to have the feeling that no matter what happened I’d get through….I’ve lost that feeling lately….If anything happens to me I have this knowledge that if I had lived to be a hundred, I could only have improved the quantity of my life, not the quality. This sounds gloomy as hell…I’ll cut it” (quoted in Hamilton, J.F.K., pp. 616-617).

Not long after this, Kennedy became ill, was sent back to the states, then hospitalized for months, lost weight, and eventually discharged from the Navy. Some of his friends thought he might die (Hamilton, J.F.K., p. 647). During this time, in 1944, instead his healthy older brother, Joe, was killed, and then his brother-in-law also died in war. The demise of his older brother was a blow to Jack, as he admitted that competition with Joe had defined his “own identity…. I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win” (quoted in Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kenney 1917-1963 [NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2003], p. 108). Jack put together a memorial book about his brother for the family, and this helped him in his own mourning and rivalry process.

What also brought young Jack Kennedy out of his morass was a combination of factors including a moratorium from life, when he went to Arizona to recover physically. Now that his older

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brother was dead, Kennedy went from being the number two son to the oldest son. He now became the vehicle for his father’s political ambitions. His brother’s death helped liberate him, in the complicated dynamics of the Kennedy family. As Jack Kennedy had developed an interest in international affairs while still in college, he now, with his father’s encouragement, chose public service and electoral politics as his calling. From the beginning of his adult career, Kennedy combined asking what he could do for his country with finding what he could do for himself. His identity had altered from a futile competition with his brother to one that combined his father’s wishes and his own deep interests in issues of war and peace. In February, 1945, he wrote that war “makes less sense to me than it ever made and…as my life’s goal…to do something to help prevent another” (quoted in Hamilton, J.F.K., pp. 677-678). In what Kennedy called public service he found such a mission; and one that had as a goal keeping others from enduring the traumas he had endured and the death of his comrades.

In 1946, Jack was elected to the House of Representatives, and served in elected offices until his murder in 1963. As a practicing politician, much of what Kennedy did had nothing to do with the ideals that helped bring him into politics. Yet he retained some of the capacity to feel for others that he had before the war and that was accentuated by the trauma of the PT 109 incident. Kennedy certainly was no stranger to cold war rhetoric; still he entitled his 1960 presidential campaign book, The Strategy of Peace. Biographer Robert Dallek wrote that Kennedy’s awareness of the possibility of nuclear war heightened his impulses. Dallek also maintained that Kennedy had a “sense of mortality” which was “engendered by health problems and the premature deaths of his brother and sister,” which “shaped his behavior” (Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 475). It was not only his own and his family’s experience of illness and death, but the killing of men under his command that seared his memory.

As President in 1962, a reporter asked Kennedy about some reservists being called to active duty while other men lead a normal life. “There is always inequity in life,” he replied. “Some men are killed in war and some are wounded, and some never leave the country…. It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair. Some men are sick and others are well” (Dallek, Unfinished Life, p. 504). During the intensity of the October 1962, Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy still remembered life’s inequities in war. He told his brother Robert that “politicians and officials…make the decisions, and dine with their wives and families, while the brave and the young die” (Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days [NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971], p. 80).

After the world pulled back from the brink of nuclear war over missiles in Cuba, Kennedy sought to revive a strategy of peace. His American University Address of June, 1963 exemplified Kennedy’s ability to identify with others and his sense of life’s universals and limits. Speaking of American-Soviet relations, the President said: “let us also direct attention to our common interests….For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal” (John Kennedy (edited by Theodore Sorensen), “Let The Word Go Forth” [NY: Delacorte Press, 1988], p. 286). This speech prompted negotiations with the Soviets that led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which led to a reduction of Cold War tensions, and less likelihood of the killings war engenders. After his experiences in World War II, Kennedy vowed to work for peace and for some definite goals for the sake of those who sacrificed their lives in war. He had made a step in that direction.

Kennedy’s own life experiences meant for him that death was often on his mind, even at the oddest moments. After the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis had been broken by an agreement with the Russians, President Kennedy was proud. Robert Kennedy tells the story that as Bobby was leaving the White House, the President made a “reference to Abraham Lincoln, ‘This is the night I should go to the theater.’ I said, ‘if you go, I want to go with you’” (Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days, p. 84). At the time, neither brother realized that taking a wrong exit in leaving a hotel or riding in an open limousine in the wrong place at the wrong time would have the same result as sitting in a box at Ford’s Theater.

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