Dr. Feelgood (15 page)

The contents of the phone message apparently panicked members of the CIA team assigned to keep watch over Monroe. Kennedy had engaged in hushed out-of-school talk with his mistress, revealing classified information he had had sworn to keep secret. Leaks had to be plugged. Three days later, Monroe was dead, but Jacobson’s treatment of Jack Kennedy continued as the president, himself becoming out of control, lurched forward to his next crisis: Vietnam.

Marilyn was dead, but the incipient Vietnam War was alive, too alive, and threatening to get worse. If Marilyn had gotten out of control, turning a simple sexual encounter—not the only one for the president—into a budding romance that not even being passed off to Bobby Kennedy could satisfy, then it was good that she was gone, at least according to Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford. The president had become more reliant on Max Jacobson’s injections despite continued warnings from his doctor, Janet Travell, who urged him to discontinue the treatments. She didn’t trust Jacobson because she believed that what Jacobson was injecting into the president was harmful and explained on many occasions that the painkillers and steroid therapy she prescribed were conflicting with the drugs Jacobson was administering. By this time, Dr. Travell would have known about the contents of Jacobson’s injections and known that methamphetamines, topical anesthetics like Provocaine, and steroids could create dangerous physical and psychological side effects. Moreover, simply the constant presence of the strange doctor with a thick German accent hanging around the president was unnerving. The press had also taken notice of Max Jacobson, who carried a thick black medical bag and followed the Kennedy family from Washington, to Massachusetts, and to Florida. Was the president really suffering from an incurable disease?

By December 1962, JFK’s worries about the press’s attention to his medical issues were bubbling up. The press had begun to sniff around all the doctors that were going in and out of the White House. If word leaked out that Kennedy was dependent on drugs that might alter his perception or his personality, what would that tell the public about the man who had his finger on the nuclear trigger? In the wake of the disaster in Vienna and the October Cuban Missile Crisis, those around JFK who knew about his medical condition and his reliance on Jacobson were also worried. The last thing the Kennedy inner circle wanted was to have to face questions about the president’s medical condition as the machinery for the 1964 reelection campaign was beginning to ramp up.

Kennedy friends and supporters in the White House told secretary Evelyn Lincoln that if Dr. Janet Travell was going to keep making innuendos concerning the president’s health, she would lose the support of his friends. Dr. Eugene Cohen, another one of Kennedy’s medical advisors, suggested to him that Travell was a possible threat to Kennedy’s condition because of the constant painkiller injections she was giving him. Kennedy agreed with Cohen and turned the management of his back injuries over to other doctors, but kept Travell on as the White House physician because he was afraid that if he fired her, she would leak stories about his physical condition to the press. But Bobby Kennedy wasn’t satisfied with any of this. In early 1962, Bobby Kennedy had asked Jacobson for a sample of the medicine he was administering to the president. He secured fifteen vials of the drugs from his brother’s own stash and another five directly from Jacobson to make sure the medicines were identical. Bobby turned all of these samples over to the FBI laboratory for analysis. When the results came back that Jacobson had formulated a substance with significant amounts of amphetamines, at least thirty milligrams, Bobby confronted his brother about it. JFK was blunt, telling Bobby that the ingredients were inconsequential to him—“I don’t care if it’s horse piss. . . . It makes me feel good,” JFK said, according to Mike Samek.
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Jacobson continued to visit the White House, often flown to Washington by his patient Mark Shaw, the Kennedy family photographer, or Mike Samek. In April 1962 Bobby confronted Jacobson and his friend Samek in the White House. According to Samek, Bobby said, “What are you fuckin’ kikes doing in the White House? You Jews aren’t welcome here. Go back to New York with the other Jews.”
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Jacobson was incensed. To him, this was a case of “been there, heard that.” He was not going to go through this again, not in this country, not after the Holocaust, not in 1962 as the Civil Rights Movement was heating up. Jacobson later sent a letter to JFK via the president’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, explaining that he wouldn’t be visiting the White House or treating the president anymore, not after that personal insult. But JFK was desperate; he needed Jacobson because he was so dependent on the doctor’s injections. Kennedy probably never realized that Jacobson, too, was needy for control, needy to bask in the glory of the White House. In fact, Kennedy probably never knew that Jacobson needed him more than he needed Jacobson. He relied on those injections and had to make up with Max no matter what his brother had said. He flew to New York, took a suite at the Carlyle Hotel, and asked Jacobson to meet him there.

When Jacobson arrived, carrying the special medical bag that Mike Samek had designed for him, he was ushered up to Kennedy’s suite, where he immediately prepared the president’s injection. While it took effect, he made his peace with the president, who implored him to overlook what his brother Bobby had said. JFK prevailed on Jacobson to keep treating him, at the very least for the good of his adopted country, the country that had became his haven from the Nazis. Jacobson acquiesced. Kennedy also begged the doctor to move into the White House so he could always be on hand. Jacobson demurred, telling Kennedy that he couldn’t give up his New York practice, especially his work with neuromuscular disease patients, because many of them had nowhere to turn. They agreed that Jacobson would come to the White House whenever he was needed. For the record, Jacobson’s name turns up more than thirty times in the official White House visitor logs, according to Seymour Hersh, who wrote
The Dark Side of Camelot
. Records also show that Max Jacobson was injecting patients, including JFK, who also self-injected, with concoctions containing more than thirty milligrams of methamphetamine, a huge dose of the stimulant that, on the downside rebound, was capable of causing all kinds of psychotic reactions.

Jacobson had indeed overdosed the president. After he left the Carlyle, the president, who at first felt invigorated and vibrant, suddenly began suffering from a serious psychotic reaction to the drugs and became manic. It was an absolute psychotic break. He peeled off all of his clothing and began prancing around his hotel suite. If his Secret Service detail was amused at first, they became worried when the president left the suite and began roaming through the corridor of the Carlyle. With press photographers downstairs in the lobby, the president could become easily compromised. And what made matters even worse was that JFK had another agenda for coming to New York. He had a habit of slipping away from his Secret Service detail to visit women with whom he had made arrangements in advance for sexual encounters. If Kennedy was in danger of becoming compromised by running naked through the halls of a hotel, imagine what might have happened if he became compromised by a KGB agent planted in New York to woo him away from the Secret Service. This was an untenable situation.

For the immediate moment in the Carlyle, one can only imagine how consternation turned to worry and ultimately turned to panic among JFK’s staff as he left his suite at the Carlyle, delusional as he was under the influence of a megadose of methamphetamines from Dr. Max, and began to roam the corridors. He was completely naked, on the verge of paranoia, and feeling so free of pain that he almost performed gymnastic acts in the hallway. The Secret Service detail had to control him, but can you put a president in a straightjacket? Even his military liaison, the officer who handled the nuclear ICBM codes, and, most of all, intelligence operatives serving in the White House, knew this was a completely unacceptable situation. Therefore, the issue now facing the Kennedy entourage was how to get the president under control, sedated, back into the suite, and back to normal. They needed a doctor, and fast.

An emergency telephone call went out to one of New York City’s most respected psychiatrists, Dr. Lawrence Hatterer. Dr. Hatterer explained that when he received the call of an utmost emergency at the Carlyle regarding the medical condition of the president of the United States, he immediately rushed across town to offer treatment. Dr. Hatterer said that he saw the president in a manic condition furiously waving his arms and running around without any clothes on. No one knew what to do. Hatterer instantly recognized a drug-induced mania. He opened his medical satchel, withdrew a vial of chlorpromazine, an antipsychotic and dopamine antagonistic drug, and injected the now-restrained president and monitored his condition as the drugs took effect and JFK’s mania subsided. Kennedy slowly returned to his senses. There was no need to call vice president Lyndon Johnson, who already knew about JFK’s physical and mental condition from his friend in the United States Senate, Richard Nixon.

Other eyes were on the president as well, ever-vigilant eyes that were not as benevolent as those of Kennedy’s own staff or members of the Secret Service. These eyes had read the FBI file on Max Jacobson, his dealings with Communist sympathizers and possible Soviet agents, and his treatments of pro-socialist artists and celebrities as well as his treatment of CIA nonofficial cover officer Mark Shaw. These eyes had borne witness to the debacles in Cuba and Vienna when the president had told James Reston of the
New York Times
that he had experienced the worst day of his life in his meeting with Nikita Khrushchev. And now the president was demonstrating his inability to control himself while on serious stimulant drugs. Was this a president who could complete a second term? Was this a president who should be allowed to complete his first?

For all of his popularity with the American public, this was a president, who, under the influence of stimulants, was lining up assignations with disreputable women at locations that could not be guarded. What if one of these women was a KGB agent? Hadn’t Kennedy already revealed state secrets to Marilyn Monroe?

Kennedy had already crossed the CIA, particularly the director Allen Dulles, when he refused to reinforce the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. Dulles was not a person to take that kind of double-crossing lightly. Soon there would come another slight to the CIA that would threaten to reduce its influence in the intelligence community significantly, and it came in the form of secret Senate subcommittee testimony. In April 1962, a then relatively obscure Army lieutenant colonel named Philip J. Corso, who was working as the director of the Army Office of Research and Development’s Foreign Technology Division and who had served on President Eisenhower’s national security staff as well as on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff during the Korean War, testified before the Senate’s Internal Government Security Subcommittee that the CIA was laundering money for drug growers in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. This was a source of untraceable money, he said, for the CIA to support its black operations. In addition, Corso testified, the CIA was doctoring its National Intelligence Estimates to be more favorable to the Soviet Union. And Corso, who had tactical nuclear weapons under his control in Germany when he commanded an anti-aircraft missile battalion, had lots of credibility. Corso’s testimony was classified, but its transcript soon found its way to attorney general Robert Kennedy.

The attorney general asked Corso and the committee if he could read Corso’s testimony. Corso said that Robert Kennedy could read the testimony if, and only if, he promised to hand that testimony over to the president. This was how JFK learned that the CIA was engaging in narcotics trafficking in Southeast Asia. President Kennedy, who felt that a war in Southeast Asia would undermine his domestic agenda, ultimately ordered the dissolution of the CIA paramilitary, while at the same time facilitating the creation of the United States Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs. It would be a direct blow to the reach and power of the CIA. But the CIA had a card to play in the person of vice president Lyndon B. Johnson, the former leader of the Senate, who was becoming implicated in the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals, and who could just as easily find himself under the threat of indictment and off the 1964 Democratic national ticket. Would this be like a game of Monopoly: Go directly to jail, or go to the White House and collect your $200? LBJ had been a player. He would understand. And his hatred of the Kennedys would drive the day for the CIA if it needed him.

Then in October 1962, Nikita Khrushchev decided to play his hand. He had wanted the United States to remove its guided missiles from Turkey, missiles that were already obsolete but nevertheless posed a threat. Khrushchev dropped the nuke card by installing guided missiles in Cuba less than one hundred miles off the coast of the US mainland. He believed that Kennedy, frightened at Soviet blustering and compromised by drugs, would simply turn the other way and do nothing.

According to Army Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso, Kennedy at first ignored the images he received from the National Reconnaissance Office that indicated the construction of a missile launch site in Cuba as well as the missiles themselves. But soon newspaper reporters picked up the story, leaked by intelligence community insiders, and the president’s hand was forced. This would become a major crisis when Kennedy made his demand that the Soviets withdraw the missiles. General Curtis LeMay, a former commander of the Strategic Air Command who had been instrumental in developing the United States satellite surveillance capability, advocated the strategic bombing of Cuban missile sites and a subsequent invasion of Cuba. Kennedy, however, ordered a naval blockade of the island, relying on his instincts that Khrushchev would think twice about starting a war in US home waters.