Dr. Feelgood (17 page)

Mysteriously, the entrance wound to Kennedy’s skull—referred to by Parkland doctors, the priest, and which was the subject of a news briefing—simply disappeared by the time Kennedy’s body got to Bethesda, because the Bethesda autopsy records don’t mention it. Accordingly, we have the Secret Service not providing data about that wound to the Warren Commission—which it was required to do as a matter of law and police procedure—and the medical examiners at Bethesda not mentioning any skull entrance wound from the front. Did it simply disappear all by itself, or was there something else at work?

If there was an entrance wound to the front of the president’s skull, there should have been an exit wound somewhere toward the rear of the skull if the wound was a “through and through.” In fact, there was just such a wound. The explosion from the exit wound was witnessed by Secret Service Special Agent Paul Landis, who said that he saw the president’s head explode in the limo when he heard the shot from the front. That exit wound was discovered and recorded at Parkland, where doctors made a sketch of the wound, and FBI agents at the autopsy procedure mentioned in their report that so much of the president’s head was blown away by the exiting bullet that the brain could have been lifted right out of the skull. But this information was never publicly reviewed by the Warren Commission.

Then there is the strange back wound that the Warren Commission noted, a back entrance wound that seemed to align with the throat wound. However, there were no metallic fragments from a bullet in the wound, even though the wound was not a “through and through,” but only penetrated part of the way. Worse, none of the doctors at Parkland had noticed that wound. Even worse, the Bethesda autopsy report moved the wound from lower in the back to higher near the nape of the neck, about four inches, so that it would coincide with the throat wound. Evidence, in this one instance, was not only omitted, but altered to fit the lone gunman scenario. Why would they do this even before the Warren Commission was empaneled?

An answer may lie in Lyndon Johnson’s own words. In a phone conversation with Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell, a conversation that was recorded on the LBJ Oval Office tapes and released by Ladybird Johnson, the president tells Senator Russell, a deep and antagonistic skeptic regarding the magic bullet theory (the theory suggesting that a single bullet could stop in mid-air after passing through the president, make a U-turn, and hit Texas Governor John Connolly), that LBJ, too, has no faith in the single bullet theory. That theory, by the way, was promulgated by a Warren Commission investigator, the late Republican-then-Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter. Senator Russell argued that the theory made no sense and that neither he nor his Warren Commission colleague representative, later president, Gerald Ford would buy into it. But President Johnson, ultimately and logically persuasive, argued that with no single bullet theory, there could be no lone gunman. With no lone gunman, there would be a conspiracy. With a conspiracy, the case would linger until, heaven forbid, the finger of suspicion would point to the Soviets. If the Soviets were thought to be responsible for the death of President Kennedy, the United States would clamor for war, a war in which scores of millions of civilians in both countries would die. And die for what? For someone who was dead and would never come back? Was the death of one person a causa belli for the deaths of scores of millions? Senator Russell had to agree, and he also agreed to bring Representative Ford—later himself the target of two assassination attempts by members of the Charles Manson Gang—along. And that was how the Warren Commission closed its case against Oswald, who had already been murdered by Jack Ruby, heavily in debt to the Chicago mob headed by Sam Giancana.

A footnote to the Kennedy assassination is the October 12, 1964, murder of Washington, D.C., socialite and JFK mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was also the former wife of CIA agent Cord Meyer. According to Peter Janney, author of
Mary’s Mosaic
,
⁴⁶
the CIA was behind Meyer’s murder, just as it had been behind the death of President Kennedy, according to a statement by Cord Meyer. When author C. David Heyman asked Cord Meyer who had killed Mary, he replied, “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”
⁴⁷

How does any of this involve Max Jacobson?

Mary Meyer had been one of Jacobson’s patients. She also was sexually intimate with JFK. When the CIA realized that Kennedy had revealed state secrets to Marilyn Monroe, they assumed he was also talking to the very socially connected Mary Meyer. They also knew through family friend James Jesus Angelton that Meyer kept a diary. Had she recorded classified information in it? According to Tony Bradlee, Mary’s sister and the former wife of the
Washington Post
’s Ben Bradlee, Meyer’s diary contained information that JFK had divulged to her while under the influence of LSD. Meyer was friendly with Timothy Leary, as was Max Jacobson, and provided LSD to Jack Kennedy. There was no way for the CIA to find out what Meyer knew without interrogating her, which they were reluctant to do because of her Washington connections. There was only one alternative: to have her killed. Almost a year after Kennedy’s assassination, Meyer was murdered along a secluded path by a canal in Georgetown. Her brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, noticed that her house had been broken into and discovered none other than CIA counterespionage chief James Jesus Angelton looking through Mary’s desk. Because Angelton was a friend, Bradlee gave him Meyer’s diary, which Angelton returned without comment, presumably either having found what he was looking for or assuring himself that no secrets had turned up in it. With Mary out of the way, any secrets that a drug-addled Jack Kennedy had told her had gone to their respective graves.

As tangential as Max Jacobson’s relationship was to these historic events, it can be argued that Kennedy’s presidency might have taken a very different course had he not been suffering from psychotic breaks that resulted from his drug dependency. In the eyes of the CIA, Jacobson’s injections had put the office of the presidency, the nation, and perhaps the entire civilized world, at risk. Had it not been for Max Jacobson and his influence on the president of the United States, history might have taken an entirely different course.

One of the most revealing sources about the medical practices of Dr. Max Jacobson was his employee and part-time actor Harvey Mann. Mann primarily worked for Jacobson as an office assistant, answering calls, making appointments, and sweeping floors. According to Jacobson’s friend Alvin Aronson, Mann approached playwright Alan Jay Lerner with a threat to expose Max. Lerner knew Mann was extorting him. “Lerner, whom I was working for at that time, promised to get him work in Los Angeles. . . . When the jobs didn’t pan out, Mann followed through on his threats and reported [Max],” claimed Aronson.
⁴⁸
Mann reported Jacobson to the
New York Times
at about the same time that reporters for the
Times
were investigating a story about vice president Spiro Agnew’s receiving methamphetamine injections from Jacobson.

When the
New York Times
published its exposé of Jacobson on December 4, 1972, it made no mention of Harvey Mann, even though he claimed to author A. E. Hotchner that he had been the one to tip off the
Times.
In his book,
Choice People: The Greats, Near

Greats, and Ingrates I Have Known
, Hotchner reveals what Mann told him about Max Jacobson. Hotchner’s literary agent, Audrey Wood, had told him about “a young man, sent by a doctor friend of mine, who has a compelling story that I’d like you to hear. I think it’s something you may want to write about.”
⁴⁹
She then told him that it concerned Max Jacobson, who was being exposed by the
New York Times
. Wood said that “Mann is ready to tell everything, his own story, which, believe me, is frightening and terrible, as well as what he knows about all the people whom Jacobson treated while Mann worked for him—from President Kennedy to Truman Capote.”
⁵⁰
After watching the death of a friend from amphetamines, Hotchner thought that telling Mann’s story might be “an effective way to expose speed and the Mephistophelian speed doctors, who quietly and legally speed up the lives of their patients, faster and faster ’til many of them spin out of control. . . . Harvey Mann might be a way to tell the story as it should be told—from the inside out.”
⁵¹
Mann agreed to meet with Hotchner to tell his story.

When director Yul Brynner sent fourteen-year-old Mann to see Jacobson for a bad cold, Mann was immediately struck by Jacobson’s appearance. According to Mann, Jacobson was “a powerful man, enormous trunk, huge steely arms. . . . The way he looked at me, his voice, the whole thing, I just felt I was in the presence of God.”
⁵²
He said Jacobson never examined him, nor did he ever see Jacobson examine a patient in all the years he worked for him. He gave him three injections while informing him that he would make him “look like an actor,” and Mann felt reenergized. After that, he became a frequent patient and started hanging around Jacobson’s office. By the time he was in his early twenties, he was working for the doctor full time. Jacobson soon had Mann injecting patients—“me, with absolutely no training, of any kind”
⁵³
—and preparing the mixtures. “I helped prepare some of his new, experimental stuff, like the extract from the glands of an electric eel, and an extract made from the bone marrow of beef. He tried them on me—the marrow shot caused me to break out in sores like cigarette burns all over my body; the eel injection hurt painfully for more than a year, caused me to run a high temperature, and left me feeling numb in my hip.”
⁵⁴
He told Hotchner, “Max thought he could cure anything with shots. Once, after giving me shots, he tore off my glasses and broke them and told me I could see now; my eyesight was cured. Of course that was ridiculous—without glasses I was Helen Keller.”
⁵⁵

Jacobson also created a package of skin cream in his lab, Mann said, that he sold to cure all kinds of skin conditions from acne to cancer. “It was made up of Nivea cream, vitamins, and all the leftovers of what was injected into patients the last week, including hormones and what not. . . . He sold an enormous number of those jars at forty dollars each. . . . We called it Max’s chicken fat.”
⁵⁶
Mann showed Hotchner proof of his employment with Jacobson, including tax forms. He told Hotchner, in great detail, about his treatment of famous patients, including legendary pianist Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn. He recounted to Hotchner, “Van made it big with his Russian performance, and he was hooked on Max’s injections. . . . When Van returned back to New York for his Carnegie recital, he developed an infection in a cuticle on one of his fingers that Max treated. . . . Max injected the infection with collagen . . . however, his finger swelled up as thick as his wrist. . . . Van’s manager rushed him to the Hospital for Joint Diseases, where an emergency team of surgeons went to work on his finger. Later on, Van told me that the head surgeon had said that another hour or so they might have been forced to amputate the finger . . . but a week later Van was back in Max’s office getting his regular shot.”
⁵⁷

Mann told Hotchner that Jacobson treated many of his patients free of charge. “Max had a lot of creative people he carried during lean times. Max didn’t really care all that [much] about money. What really mattered to Max was that all these people were dependent on him. . . . In his office, Max was King.”
⁵⁸
Harvey recalled to Hotchner that “almost any hour of the day or night, if you wanted a shot, Max was there to give it to you. I sometimes came to Max’s waiting room at two, three in the morning, and there’d be twenty people sitting around, waiting their turn. You see, speed people can’t sleep. They’re high all the time. . . . Some people like Marlene Dietrich just maintained a level and to hell with sleep. . . .”
⁵⁹

Mann confirmed that Jacobson had given Kennedy injections while at the Vienna Summit. “I can prove it,” he said.
⁶⁰

Mann also had an interesting perspective on the way Jacobson’s drug cocktails interacted with his patients: “The injection itself gives you the initial flash; the needle actually feels red-hot going in, and you get a reaction in your testicles just like an orgasm, your testicles feel hot as hell, your feet rise above the ground, you feel like you’re in heat, like you could have multiple orgasms. It’s the calcium-niacin combination [that] gives you that, and it’s no wonder those injections hooked all of us.”
⁶¹

Mann presented Hotchner with three shopping bags full of material that included an A to Z file of Jacobson’s celebrity patients. This index contained cards for, among others, Otto Preminger, Lee Radziwill, Andy Williams, Eartha Kitt, Hermione Gingold, Pablo Casals, Gertrude Lawrence, Sheilah Graham, Margaret Leighton, Katherine Dunham, Montgomery Clift, Hedy Lamarr, Maurice Chevalier, and Zero Mostel. He told Hotchner about loading Jacobson’s medical bag himself when he was summoned to the Carlyle Hotel by the president. One of the most shocking stories Mann revealed to Hotchner was how Jacobson poisoned his wife, Nina, with his magic elixir:

I spent a lot of time in Max’s apartment. I was virtually one of the family. I got to know Nina very well. . . . She became addicted to the amphetamine mix that Max was feeding her. Nina was a woman of Garboesque beauty. . . . She was an artist, a truly lovely woman, well bred, intelligent, and the slow tragic death which I observed her suffer had a profound effect on me. At the time she died she was thin as my finger, wasted away, a terrible tragedy.
⁶²

Mann told Hotchner of Jacobson’s use of amphetamines on himself: “Max is hard pressed to find a vein in his body he can get a needle into. They’re all collapsed. Shot out. . . . Max literally injects himself every couple of hours. . . . It’s been going on for thirty years. . . . He never sleeps.”
⁶³
Mann said that Max’s injections had nearly driven him to suicide: