Nation: A Minor Ailment

Since Dwight Eisenhower’s illnesses. the U.S. has come to expect frank, explicit and even intimate information about the health of its President. But John Kennedy’s press aides have been reluctant to discuss the President’s back injury, and his doctors have refused to say anything at all. If, as they insist, it is only “a minor ailment,” then by their reticence they have needlessly caused confusion and concern.

Angry Press. All week long, Dr. Janet Travell, the White House physician, smilingly dodged the press. While the President was in Palm Beach, Associate Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher was asked if a consulting doctor had been called in, answered, “No.” But word soon leaked out that Dr. Preston Wade, a New York surgeon, had indeed flown to Palm Beach to examine the President’s back.

Facing angry correspondents, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger said that Hatcher had not known of Wade’s visit when first asked. Hatcher, said Salinger, had learned about it later, but had not bothered to inform the press because nobody had asked him about it. Salinger later implied that the reporters were somehow at fault for not repeating their questions.

Dr. Wade concurred with Dr. Travell’s diagnosis of an ordinary lumbosacral strain, unconnected with the President’s old, nearly fatal spinal fusion. But back in New York, Wade parried a reporter’s query with the words: “I don’t want you to finish your question. I don’t want to say a thing about it.” All of which left it pretty much up to the U.S. to make its own judgments about the President’s health—and the nation could hardly be happy about what it saw. A “cherry picker” elevator was used to lift the President, grim-faced and ignoring the photographers below, aboard his plane in Palm Beach, and a similar device lowered him to the ground in Washington. He canceled one scheduled speech, delivered a second —to the National Conference on International Economic and Social Development —seated in a chair. When callers came to the White House, the President talked to them lying down, or seated in his rocking chair. A second specialist, Captain J. H. Cheffey, chief of orthopedics at the Naval Medical Center, was summoned for brief consultation.

Silent Treatment. As he hobbled into his second week on crutches, the President continued to wear the small laced corset on his back. Most evenings he went for a brief, gingerly swim in the White House pool (heated to 87°) and relaxed on electric heating pads covered with moist towels. New treatment was introduced with the use of ultrasonic therapy. The silent sound waves were played across the President’s back from a portable machine for 15 minutes every other day to ease tense muscles.

In Athens, Jacqueline Kennedy learned for the first time of her husband’s disability by reading about it in a newspaper. Alarmed, she cabled the White House, was assured that there was no need for her to cut her trip short and come home. So Jackie stayed on vacation. Clad in a modish dark blue bathing suit and a bright blue cap, she swam and water-skied in the Aegean Sea, while units of the Royal Hellenic Navy kept unwelcome small craft at bay. As her vacation idyl ended, Jackie tooled through the countryside in a Mercedes with young Crown Prince Constantine at the wheel. On her return to Washington, she found her husband waiting for her, sitting in the back seat of his Cadillac. The tanned and radiant First Lady raced through the official welcome-home ceremonies to the waiting car, jumped nimbly over her husband’s outstretched legs, and planted an affectionate kiss on his cheek.