The Health of the First Ladies: Medical Histories from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama (33 page)

Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of John Kennedy. Her obstetrical history was an arduous one (Library of Congress).

Mrs. Kennedy and her son were discharged from Georgetown Hospital two weeks after her C-section. The plan was to fly immediately to Palm Beach to recuperate. However, a political responsibility intervened—a social visit at the White House with outgoing first lady Mamie Eisenhower. Jackie’s nurse warned the physically and emotionally exhausted new mother that “if she got up on her feet she might die.” After walking up the White House steps and greeting Mrs. Eisenhower, Mrs. Kennedy looked desperately for a wheelchair that was not there. “If she was not ill before, she was ill now, and she took John John and the nurse and flew down to Palm Beach.” There she remained for six weeks until just prior to the inauguration.
¹⁹

Secret Service agent Clint Hill observed that as soon as she arrived from Washington, “Mrs. Kennedy immediately went to her bedroom to rest, and rarely emerged for the next week.”
²⁰
This comment may be the first notice of a severe postpartum depression. Frenzied political and family activities at Palm Beach provided the opposite of a necessary recuperation. Jackie returned to Washington shortly before her husband was inaugurated president.

The inauguration and the inaugural balls were a nightmare. Anxious, exhausted and depressed, the new first lady awoke “alone and terrified…. [H]er legs were gripped by painful muscle spasms [and] to her horror, she realized she was unable to stand.” She summoned Dr. Janet Travell, the White House physician, who gave her a Dexedrine (amphetamine) pill to get through the inaugural balls. By midnight the pill’s effects had dissipated, and an exhausted Mrs. Kennedy insisted that she be returned to the White House.
²¹

During a post-assassination conversation with Arthur Schlesinger, the widow talked about her near-catatonic state during the January 1961 inauguration ceremonies: “I left after a couple of hours because again, I was really so tired that day…. And about 9 o’clock or something. when it was time to start getting dressed, again I couldn’t get out of bed. I just couldn’t move. And so I called Dr. Travell just frantic and she came running over. And she had two pills, a green one and an orange one, and she told me to take the orange one. So I did and said, ‘What is it?’ And then she told me it was Dexedrine, which I‘d never taken in my life—But thank God, it really did the trick because then you could get dressed…. I guess the pill wore off because I just couldn’t get out of the car.”
²²

The first lady stayed in bed for a week after the inauguration. Dr. Travell became concerned about her depression and overall physical condition and prescribed an immediate return to Palm Beach, where Mrs. Kennedy remained secluded in a bedroom.
²³
In retrospect it is clear that a postpartum depression commenced almost immediately after John’s birth and was still present six months later. Jackie’s symptoms were extreme fatigue, sadness, withdrawal, and lack of motivation.

Ceremonial and social events that required Mrs. Kennedy’s grace and style began to appear on the 1961 “New Frontier” calendar. The president increasingly worried that his wife’s depression would mar state visits to Canada, Paris, and Vienna. Since neither time nor Travell had lifted his wife’s mood, he took the desperate and dangerous step of inviting Dr. Max Jacobson, also known as Dr. Feelgood, due to his happy and invigorating potions, to Palm Beach. Kennedy and a close friend had been injected previously by Jacobson with positive results. The general reaction to Feelgood’s injections in the arm, hand, hip, buttocks, or solar plexus, was “a sense of being lit up from within.”
²⁴
Eventually Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother and closest advisor, apprehensive over Jacobson’s treatments, had five of Feelgood’s therapeutic vials analyzed by the FBI’s laboratories. Analysis revealed high concentrations of amphetamines and steroids in all five vials.
²⁵
Counseling, antidepressants, and hormonal therapy are the usual treatments for postpartum depression. Instead, the first lady, whose position could command the best medical care in America, was subjected to the amphetamine shots of Dr. Max Jacobson.
²⁶

Max Jacobson may be the most fascinating of all the physicians who medically ministered to America’s first ladies. A Jew from Berlin, Jacobson fled the Nazis to establish a medical practice on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His treatments consisted almost exclusively of injections of his potions, which contained amphetamines as their principal ingredient. His patients were a “Who’s Who” of the entertainment industry and included Eddie Fisher, Alan Jay Lerner, Tony Curtis and Milton Berle. Later he treated Jack and Jackie Kennedy. The Secret Service agents that guarded JFK code-named the physician “Dr. Feelgood.”
²⁷

When beckoned by the new president, Jacobson flew to Florida, interviewed the first lady, noted her depression, and injected her. As a result her mood changed completely. Her presence during the subsequent state visits charmed both the Canadians and French president Charles DeGaulle. The only annoying side effect was a dry mouth.
²⁸
Max Jacobson continued to treat both Jackie and Jack. Mrs. Kennedy was injected on at least six occasions, and undoubtedly more, in Palm Beach, in the White House, and in Paris.
²⁹
After her husband’s assassination, Jacobson flew from New York City to the White House at Jackie’s request. On the night of November 23, 1963, he injected the first lady with his medicinal cocktail. Afterwards, Mrs. Kennedy told her brother-in-law, “I have no idea what the shot contained. All I know is that my nerves have finally begun to settle.”
³⁰

In 1963, Jackie Kennedy was pregnant for the fifth time. She summered at Cape Cod near the Kennedy Hyannis Port estate, but planned to return to Washington to deliver by the inevitable C-section at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
³¹
Previously Dr. John Walsh, her obstetrician, Dr. Janet Travell, the official chief White House physician, and Mrs. Kennedy’s Secret Service agent Clint Hill, auditioned several Cape Cod area hospitals to determine the one most suitable if once again premature labor would occur. The trio selected the hospital at Otis Air Force Base. Dr. Walsh offered to remain at Hyannis Port for the remainder of the summer to monitor the first lady, an unusual obstetrical perquisite specific to the wife of a United States president. Moreover, the air force spent nearly five thousand dollars in refurbishing the hospital’s eight-room suite should the first lady become a maternity patient there.
³²

Columnist Jack Anderson wrote of a different situation: “It will take a major crisis to keep President Kennedy from his wife’s side when their baby is born. For his presence, say confidants, has become an issue in their marriage.”
³³
Kennedy was certainly apprehensive over the upcoming birth. In mid–July, Jackie awoke with an uncomfortable feeling. A frantic search for Dr. Walsh ensued and Mr. Kennedy became “very upset over the doctor’s absence.” The physician had been on a walk, but Kennedy insisted that he “always tell someone where you are, how you can be reached immediately.” The discomfort was a false alarm.
³⁴
Despite JFK’s admonition to the obstetrician, it was Kennedy who was once again absent for the delivery.

On August 7, Mrs. Kennedy experienced sudden labor pains, and Walsh and his patient boarded a helicopter for Otis. A four-pound, 10.5 ounce baby boy, named Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was born there shortly after midnight, once again by C-section. The infant was five and one-half weeks premature and almost immediately had difficulty in breathing. The diagnosis of idiopathic respiratory disease syndrome was established and the chief resident of Boston Children’s Hospital, Dr. James E. Drobaugh, was summoned to transport the baby to Boston by helicopter. Despite intensive therapy and the expertise of prestigious physicians (Drs. Stephen Clifford, William Bernhard of Harvard and Dr. Samuel Levine of Cornell), Patrick died after a life of 39 hours and 12 minutes.
³⁵
Unfortunately, Patrick was born too soon. Fifty years later medical advances have allowed neonatal intensive care units to save babies born at thirty-two weeks of gestation. A senior neonatologist at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center was quoted in a recent article: “We hardly worry at all about a baby like the Kennedy infant.”
³⁶

Mrs. Kennedy was discharged from the hospital after a week (at the time a seven-to-ten day postpartum hospital stay was routine). Once again she required two units of blood.
³⁷
Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger announced the first lady’s recuperation plans: “Mrs. Kennedy has made a very satisfactory recovery. However, in order to assure her complete rehabilitation and continuing good health, it will be necessary for her to curtail her activities and not undertake an official schedule until after the first of the year.” The plan was to recuperate at Cape Cod until mid–September, then to go to her parents’ home near Newport for several weeks, and then to Virginia. Lady Bird Johnson and the Kennedy sisters-in-law were expected to fill in for Jackie at social and ceremonial activities.
³⁸

The plans were soon changed by Mrs. Kennedy. She remained on Cape Cod only until September 6 and at her parents’ estate at Newport until September 23. On October 1, she commenced a vacation on the luxury yacht owned by Aristotle Onassis that cruised the Aegean Sea. She returned to Washington by way of a stop in Morocco.
³⁹
Life aboard the yacht was apparently very restorative, as she had the following conversation with her Secret Service agent: “Mr. Hill … the president is going on a trip to Texas next month, and he wants me to join him. I had told him I didn’t want to go—I didn’t think I was ready. But now I feel so much better and I really want to help him as much as I can. Maybe I will go after all.”
⁴⁰
Thus on to Dallas and the legend of Camelot.

Mrs. Kennedy’s obstetrician boarded Air Force One when it returned from Dallas with Mrs. Kennedy, the body of her dead husband, and the new president, Lyndon Johnson. The doctor was available to console the grieving first lady. He injected her with sodium amytal, a barbiturate, and Vistaril for anxiety that night and the following evening.
⁴¹
Walsh was an army physician in Europe during World War II. After the war he established a private practice in Washington and Bethesda, Maryland. Additionally, he was a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Georgetown University Medical School. It is unknown why Mrs. Kennedy chose Walsh to be her obstetrician, but she became his patient in 1957.
⁴²

“On Friday, September 1, after long weeks at Gray Gables, the President, Mrs. Cleveland, and Baby Ruth returned to the White House in the midst of a rain. Eight days later Dr. Bryant ushered into the world the second Cleveland child, another daughter—the first child of a President ever born in the White House.”
⁴³

Grover Cleveland was both the twenty-second (1885–1889) and the twenty-fourth president (1893–1897) of the United States. His tenure was interrupted by the election of Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893). When first elected, Cleveland was—and remains—only the second bachelor to be president. On June 2, 1886, in the first and only presidential wedding in the White House, the forty-nine-year-old Cleveland married twenty-one-year-old Frances (Frankie) Folsom. The groom had known his new bride from her infancy; she was the daughter of his deceased law partner. Cleveland was the administrator of the Folsom estate and the unofficial guardian of Frances, Folsom’s daughter.
⁴⁴

Frankie Cleveland was very healthy during her two tours as first lady of United States. She soon discovered that she was a popular icon in the eyes of the press and the public. Moreover, she was a quick study in adapting to her social responsibilities: “Frank demonstrated every ounce of her poise and skill,” clearly no longer the inexperienced schoolgirl of the previous year.
⁴⁵
During the second Cleveland administration, “Frances now devoted her energies to her family.”
⁴⁶

However, Mrs. Cleveland’s most significant contribution to her husband’s presidency may have been her conspiratorial role in assuring the secrecy of his cancer operation on July 1, 1893. Almost a third of the president’s upper jaw was excised during surreptitious surgery upon a yacht sailing along New York’s East River. The entire episode was clandestine in order not to spook the political and financial communities during the economic panic of 1893.
⁴⁷

The president recuperated at Grey Gables, the Clevelands’ summer home in Bourne, Massachusetts. There he joined his wife, who was in the third trimester of her second pregnancy. The upcoming birth helped to divert attention from the future father’s medical status: “Her obvious condition gave the press something to focus on in reporting about the Clevelands.
⁴⁸
On September 1, 1893, three months after his surgery, the president, Mrs. Cleveland, and their young daughter returned to the White House.
⁴⁹
On September 9, 1893, Dr. Joseph Bryant managed the successful and uncomplicated birth of the second Cleveland child, another daughter. Esther Cleveland is so far the only presidential child ever born in the White House. Esther was named after the biblical Esther and lived for eighty-seven years.
⁵⁰