Dr. Feelgood (4 page)

Dr. Jacobson’s first injection took immediate effect as the methamphetamines hit his blood stream. Suddenly JFK, who had entered the office tired and weak, had a bounce in his step and could move more easily, despite the pain that he lived with every day of his adult life. He felt stronger, cool, focused, and very alert, he said. It was almost as if the patient had become another person, emerging like the mythical phoenix from the tired shell.

Others have described what Kennedy must have felt. Eddie Fisher said that after receiving the injection from Jacobson’s inch-and-a-half needle, he felt as if he was being lit from within.
⁹
Truman Capote described it as “instant euphoria. You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go seventy-two hours straight without so much as a coffee break. You don’t need sleep, you don’t need nourishment. If it’s sex you’re after, you go all night. Then you crash—it’s like falling down a well, like parachuting without a parachute. You want to hold onto something and there’s nothing out there but air. You’re going running back to East 72nd Street. You’re looking for the German mosquito, the insect with the magic pinprick. He stings you, and all at once you’re soaring again.”
¹⁰

So it was with John Kennedy. Jacobson gave him a bottle of “vitamin” drops—essentially another dose of methamphetamine— that he instructed him to take orally right before the debate with Nixon. That would fix him up, Jacobson said.

After his patient left, Jacobson felt more than satisfied that he had managed to affect symptomatic relief for the young senator. Jacobson already knew the long-term addictive effects of his injections. It only took one extraordinary high, followed by an equally extraordinary crash, and the patient would be back for more special elixir and would thereafter be under Jacobson’s control. Control was the key, and Jacobson knew how to exert it.

While it could be said that Jacobson influenced the works of composer Leonard Bernstein, author Truman Capote, composer Alan Jay Lerner, and playwright Tennessee Williams with his magic potion, the doctor’s crowning achievement occurred on the night of the first Nixon debate, where many have conjectured that the history of American politics changed. Nixon, who barely lost the popular vote in 1960 by just over 100,000 votes, was as powerful and aggressive a debater when it came to slugging it out as ever there was. Nixon extolled the virtues of a “rock ’em, sock ’em” campaign, bringing the fight directly to his opponent, whom he regarded as the enemy. As for Kennedy, although he had studied hard and tried to rest in preparation for the debate, he was hoarse and weak, his laryngitis had returned, and he was no match for the emboldened Richard Nixon, who was ahead in the polls.

On the evening of September 26, 1960, Kennedy visited Jacobson again, complaining in a voice barely above a whisper of extreme fatigue and lethargy. This time, Jacobson inserted his needle directly into Kennedy’s throat and pumped methamphetamine into his voice box. The result was apparent in minutes. By the time Kennedy appeared on camera in his dark suit and professional make-up before an audience of seventy million television viewers, he seemed younger and far more vigorous than his opponent, the heavily perspiring vice president with the five o’clock shadow. Kennedy, who had been moribund, exhausted, and hoarse prior to the injection, was suddenly charismatic and radiated an energy that was contagious.

The difference between the candidates’ appearances, their demeanors, and the way they responded to the questions made such an impression on the national viewing audience that in the polls, more than half of the voting public said they favored Kennedy’s performance over Nixon’s. Although Kennedy entered the debate behind Nixon, he emerged slightly ahead and gained the edge on that first night. That favorable initial impression was clearly important, because fewer people watched the ensuing debates. That first debate changed the outcome of the presidential campaign and, quite possibly, altered the course of modern American history.

That debate performance also put Max Jacobson at the top of JFK’s medical priority list. JFK did not forget who and what had made him feel good. As Jacobson would record in his own notes, Kennedy had the ability to make someone feel as if that person were the most important person in the world. And for a refugee from Germany, the son of a kosher butcher who fled the Holocaust and struggled to gain a medical practice in New York in the late 1940s, Kennedy’s bestowal of trust and friendship meant that he was accepted by the most powerful man on earth. It was a source of great pride.

Jacobson became a regular, if not constant, member of the Kennedy entourage. He responded to every summons from “Mrs. Dunn” and reinvigorated the president with his injections. After JFK won the election, he invited the Jacobsons to attend the inauguration and the balls that followed.

The Jacobsons were excited about attending the Kennedy inauguration, not just because of the honor it bestowed but because it also foretold a long and friendly relationship with JFK, a relationship that would put Jacobson in some of the most affluent and powerful circles in the world. He relished the opportunity and the power it conferred. Here he was treating the president of the United States by means of a potion that controlled the president’s every emotion, his psychological state, and his physical capabilities.

For a control freak like Max Jacobson, this was the ultimate. Doris Shapiro, who was Allen Jay Lerner’s assistant and one of Jacobson’s patients, wrote, “Big Max, with his false savagery, thrived on dispensing his mythical powers.”
¹¹
Shapiro claimed that “Max was not a simple charlatan. He was a far more complicated one, brilliant, mysterious in his power to manipulate and orchestrate all the body systems and the mental ones, as well. He had about him a symptom of greatness. But he was corrupt to the core.”
¹²
The most frightening part was that Max Jacobson now had control of the most powerful person in the world.

Inauguration Day, 1961. The morning was crisp and the air so cold that attendees could see the condensation from their breath freezing in the falling snow. The Jacobsons and their hosts, Senator Claude Pepper and his wife, were among the early arrivals and took their reserved seats about fifty yards from the presidential platform. Looking around at the shivering guests, Jacobson was concerned about the health and resilience of the president-elect. JFK had now become his personal president, and Jacobson extended his mantle of professional proprietorship over him. Jacobson peered at the crowd of dignitaries seated near the platform, picking out President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and his soon-to-be patient, JFK’s wife Jackie.

Despite the cold, and despite the crowd’s amazement that the new president-elect who was about to be sworn in had removed his overcoat before the ceremony, everyone in attendance was wildly enthusiastic during Kennedy’s inaugural address, a speech in which he laid out his agenda for a new generation of American leaders. Jacobson, who saw himself as key to Kennedy’s victory because of his medical help, was especially proud of what his treatments had accomplished.

Due to the weather and Washington traffic, the Jacobsons and Peppers didn’t reach the celebratory ball until close to midnight, where they met the legendary Joseph P. Kennedy and billionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., shook the new president’s hand, and watched Frank Sinatra perform in an astronaut costume. It was Jacobson’s dream come true. And to think that it all started with a single injection to help Senator Kennedy overcome campaign stress and fatigue. Yes, Dr. Max Jacobson, who’d fled for his life from Nazi Berlin, had finally made it.

Despite the fact that he had been invited to the inaugural events, Jacobson was still surprised when he received a phone call from the White House prior to the president’s trip to Canada in 1961. Dr. Janet Travell was on the other end, and she asked him detailed questions about his treatment of the president’s stress. Travell explained that she needed to ensure Jacobson’s treatment plan did not conflict with hers. Max explained how his treatments involved his special vitamin injections and how these injections relieved the president’s fatigue.

Jacobson never shared the ingredients for his magic elixir with either colleagues or patients, even some of whom, such as Truman Capote, lived in fear that no other physician could duplicate the formula in case Jacobson was unavailable. Renowned New York psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Hatterer once asked Jacobson for the ingredients of his formula to be able to treat his former patients now seeing Hatterer. Jacobson flatly replied, “I’ll be glad to inject you with the drug so you can understand its effect.” Hatterer promptly refused the offer.

Jacobson now tried the same tack with Travell and offered to send her the information in writing just in case she didn’t get everything over the phone, as well as a sample of the fluid he was injecting. As psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Hatterer would do the following year, Travell also refused to sample the drug and abruptly hung up. Jacobson later surmised that the real reason for Travell’s call was that she realized he now had the president under his control. This control would come into play again at the upcoming Vienna Summit, where President Kennedy would soon face off with Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Who was the man who was now controlling with his addictive drugs an aspect of President Kennedy’s behavior? Where did Dr. Max Jacobson come from, and how did he discover the concoction that would destroy so many lives?

“My father was a Kosher butcher,” Dr. Max Jacobson often remarked whenever fortune bestowed its grace upon him. Leaving inaugural balls, meeting President Truman, waiting outside the meeting room in Vienna in case President Kennedy needed medical attention during his summit with Nikita Khrushchev, Jacobson would remind himself that although he might have been walking among the giants of his time, his origins were as humble as any could be. Controlled, as he was, by the drug that he was using to control others, Jacobson could remember a humbler time when only the world of scientific research was his Holy Grail. After all, Max didn’t come from a powerful family. He came from a village where his family worked hard to survive.

Max Jacobson’s family wasn’t rich by any means. In fact, his hometown wasn’t even a town. He was born in Fordon, a small village just inside the border of Poland on the banks of the Vistula River. Across the river was the warlike German state of Prussia. Fordon was almost like a shtetl, one of the tiny villages out of stofries of Sholem Aleicham in which the tiny Jewish community lived according to traditions and rules laid down 5,000 years earlier. In the town, young Max’s father, Louis Jacobson, was the butcher. He had wanted to be a teacher, but he became a butcher so that he could pay his sisters’ dowries; by the time he had raised the money to pay for them, he was forty years old—too old, he believed, to start an entirely new career. And so he remained a butcher and looked for a bride for himself.

Louis placed an announcement in the
Berliner Tageblatt
describing the type of woman he sought. As luck would have it, he found himself a match—Ernestine, a woman born in Heckelberg, a small village in Brandenburg consisting of about two hundred peasant families. Hers was the only Jewish family in the village, but her ancestors had lived in that village for two hundred years. She was descended from Moses Mendelsohn, a great philosopher at the court of King Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Ernestine had attended a girls’ high school, where she learned secretarial skills and bookkeeping. After graduation, she moved in with a family living in Berlin and got a job in a small print shop. It was in that print shop that she came across Max’s father’s announcement. She responded to the ad, and they arranged to meet at a sweet shop. Jacobson later described his father’s embarrassment when, unnerved by the woman’s beauty, he plunked his top hat right into the whipped cream of her dessert. It was an auspicious introduction, which ultimately blossomed into a marriage for the man from a shtetl in Poland.

The Jacobsons had three sons, of which Max, born on July 3, 1900, and named after his mother’s brother, was the youngest. His Uncle Max had fought for Prussia, serving in the Guarde Kuirassier regiment, but had been wounded in the Franco-Prussian War and eventually died from his injuries. Max’s Hebrew name was Moishe, after Moses Ben Maimonides, the great twelfth-century philosopher and physician. With three boys and a family business in a small village, things were tough for the Jacobsons. Ernestine finally came to the conclusion that they would be squeezed financially by the small returns from the butcher business and the overwhelmingly arduous work that Louis had to do.

Most kosher butchers bought their meat from the slaughterhouse. Max’s father, however, because it was less expensive, had to buy live cattle, load the animals onto wagons himself, take them to the kosher slaughterer, and assist while the cattle were hoisted upside down on chains and killed by a single stroke. Then all the blood was drained out of the animals, in keeping with the commandment in the Torah that forbade the drinking of blood of any kind and in any form because “blood is the life thereof.”

Ultimately, Louis conceded to his wife’s wishes and moved the family to Berlin when Max was one year old. It was a fortuitous move because, in time, the little Polish village of Fordon would be occupied by the Nazis and the villagers forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves. They were then ordered to stand by the graves while Nazi gunners opened up, exterminating every villager and then closing the graves. This was the fate that the Jacobsons escaped.

The Jacobsons opened their new butcher shop on Magazinstrasse, one of the commercial thoroughfares in Berlin. They lived with Max’s aunt and uncle along with three salesgirls and three butchers, all of whom worked in the business and had private apartments, more like small suites, in the building. In that house, Max decided at an early age that he would become a medical doctor. This, he said, was because of an accident that he had in his neighborhood along the Magazinstrasse.