These Few Precious Days by Christopher Andersen Read Free Book Online Page B

away at Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school in bucolic New Milford, Connecticut, thirteen-year-old Jack was rushed to the hospital in nearby Danbury with stabbing pains in his stomach. Hours later—and apparently just in the nick of time—Jack underwent an emergency appendectomy.
    Transferring to a markedly more Waspy Connecticut institution, Choate, Jack was in and out of the school infirmary with severe dehydration, abdominal pains, fainting spells, rashes, and fevers. Doctors suspected hepatitis, then leukemia, even ulcers. None of these diagnoses proved correct. (Doctors would later discover that Jack was also lactose intolerant, suffered from an underactive thyroid, and had a high cholesterol count that would peak at a startling 350 when he reached adulthood.)
    To further complicate matters, Jack was only twenty and a junior at Harvard when he suffered the crippling back injury that would plague him for the rest of his life. In October 1937, Jack and his brother Joe were getting ready to compete in Harvard-Princeton football matchups—Joe as a varsity player, Jack as a junior varsity substitute—when Joe Sr. pulled up in his chauffeur-driven Buick (“Joe Kennedy was nuts about Buicks—that’s all the Kennedys drove,” said JFK campaign aide Patrick “Patsy” Mulkern). On Joe Sr.’s orders, the family driver announced their arrival by sneaking up on Jack and tackling him from behind.
    Jack, who as a freshman somehow also managed to qualify for the Harvard swimming and boxing teams, never played college sports again. “Jack was always sick with one thing or another,” said his roommate, Charlie Houghton. “But this was different. This time he couldn’t just bounce back. He tried, but the poor guy couldn’t hide that he was in real misery.”
    From that point on, Jack almost always wore a corset or brace beneath his shirt. Fearing the truth—that he was a rich boy who had been bested by the chauffeur—JFK also concocted a less embarrassing story to explain how he sustained the injury, claiming in interviews that no fewer than three burly linemen had piled onto him during practice. “I’ve never been free from pain,” Jack said, “since that day in practice.”
    In his twenties, Jack stood over six feet tall and never weighed more than 145 pounds. If anything, his scrawny physique and sickly pallor made him more attractive to women. “Are you kidding?” said Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, arguably the closest friend JFK ever had. “He had looks, sympathy, and money!”
    Taking his father’s advice to “get laid as often as possible,” Jack began by losing his virginity at seventeen to a prostitute in Harlem. According to Jack’s Choate buddy Rip Horton, Jack and Billings, who had also visited the prostitute, knocked on the door of his Manhattan apartment “in a total panic” over the possibility they may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease. Just to be safe, they rousted Joe Sr.’s personal physician out of a sound sleep so he could give them shots of penicillin.
    Despite lingering fears that he would acquire a venereal disease, Jack went on to rack up an awe-inspiring string of sexual conquests during his four years at Harvard. “All he had to do,” said his classmate James Rousmaniere, “was snap his fingers.”

    EVENTUALLY, JACK’S FEARS WERE REALIZED when doctors treated him for gonorrhea in 1940. JFK, who routinely referred to his penis as “JJ” or “the Implement” in wisecracking letters to his buddies, was stunned. Just two years earlier, he had been circumcised—a painful procedure for a twenty-one-year-old to undergo—on the advice of doctors who told him his level of sexual activity warranted it. “Gee,” he told Billings, “I thought old JJ and I were in the clear.”
    According to JFK’s urologist, Dr. William P. Herbst, sulfonamide drugs were used to successfully treat the disease. There were still to be long-term consequences, however. For the