Up & Down

For a while last week, the most important instrument of Government was the thermometer that measured the ups and downs of presidential temperature. Even as the nation's most celebrated backache seemed on the mend, John Fitzgerald Kennedy came down with what the White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell, described as a "mixed bacterial and viral infection."

Until the virus came along, the President's month-old lumbosacral strain was, by official accounts, coming along fine. After a couple of days of rest at Middleburg, the President hopped about on his crutches with decreasing evidence of pain. Although Kennedy had twice recently reinjured his back--once by tilting too far back in his black leather swivel chair, another time by leaning too hastily over his desk to sign some letters--Dr. Travell said that her patient would soon be off his crutches. Just the same, Kennedy canceled a trip to the Governors' Conference in Hawaii, bowed out as the guest of honor at the Women's National Press Club annual dinner.

Crutches Aside. Gradually, cautiously, painfully, the President began working himself away from his crutches. For a White House luncheon with former President Dwight Eisenhower and Japan's Premier Hayato Ikeda (see Foreign Relations), Kennedy put the crutches aside, walked around with his guests in his old hands-in-the-pocket manner. When the President took Ikeda for a short Potomac cruise on the presidential yacht, Honey Fitz,* Kennedy hobbled up the gangplank without crutches.

That boat ride may have been the worst presidential decision since the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was a cold, rainy day; the President boarded his yacht without hat or coat, spent much of the two-hour trip on an open deck. He returned to the White House later that afternoon, underwent about a 15-minute physical examination from Dr. Travell. All seemed to be going well. But at 1:30 o'clock the next morning. John Kennedy awoke with a sore throat, an aching head, a queasy stomach. The President took his own temperature, then put in a hurried call to Dr. Travell at her Foggy Bottom home.

Physician Travell easily diagnosed the ailment as a respiratory infection caused by what she called "the two-days' virus." Fearful that the President's back injury would weaken his resistance, she gave her patient an oral dose of tetracycline (aureomycin under another name), a whopping intramuscular shot of penicillin (1.2 million units, or at least three times what most doctors would have prescribed for an otherwise healthy adult). She also gave him an extra dose of the corticosteroids he regularly takes to compensate for his longstanding adrenal insufficiency. The fever rose to a high of 101.6DEG at 7 in the morning. New York Surgeon Preston Wade, who had been called in several times by Dr. Travell for consultation on the back injury, flew in to help decide whether the virus had affected Kennedy's ailing back. Press Secretary Salinger announced that the President's appointments for the day were canceled.

Side Effects. Salinger, badly stung by charges that he had been evasive about the true nature of the back injury, set up a press conference for Dr. Travell. To some 100 White House reporters, Janet Travell said that there was no connection between the virus and the back troubles. She took a dim view of the Potomac cruise --admitted she would have liked to have advised against it. But the infection, she added, had one good side effect: by forcing the President to bed, it gave the back an additional chance to heal. There was not much time for healing: after 31 supine hours, impatient John Kennedy got up out of his sick bed to say farewell to Ikeda, hold a three-hour crisis conference with his foreign-policy advisers on Berlin. Then, still weak but "feeling fine," he flew off to recover over a weekend at Glen Ora.

*To some Washington observers, it seemed singularly inappropriate to entertain a friendly Japanese dignitary aboard a ship, even if the ship's name happened to be the Honey Fitz and not the U.S.S. Missouri. To other Washingtonians, any sort of Potomac cruise just seemed like a big bore. Asked one wag: "What's duller than a boat ride down the Potomac?" The answer: "The boat ride back up."

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