A First-Rate Madness (20 page)

Kennedy's
symptoms,
though well known, have not been previously seen as evidence of hyperthymia. When not ill with Addisonian episodes, young JFK possessed a huge libido. His letters abound with sexual innuendo, and he engaged in extensive sexual activity, including visiting prostitutes and probably contracting venereal diseases. Even before steroid treatment, Kennedy had high energy levels when not in an Addisonian crisis, and was extremely sociable.

This sociability and energy were not limited to his youth. Evelyn Lincoln began to work for the young new senator from Massachusetts in January 1953 (by which time he had only recently begun to use steroids), and describes a highly energetic, driven multitasking machine: “Senator Kennedy evidently woke up each morning bursting with new ideas. Many mornings, as soon as he opened the door, he would begin, ‘I have several things for you to do. First . . . second . . . third . . .' and so on, all while he was taking off his overcoat.” The young senator was a dynamo: “I had never seen anyone with so much energy,” his harried new secretary noted. He was constantly dictating letters and memos, speaking rapidly in his thick Boston accent, making accurate transcription difficult. Lincoln proved more adept at dictation than others, and soon became Kennedy's chief secretary. (Years later, President Kennedy's mania for dictation had not changed. “When you see the President,” a senator remarked, “you have to get in your car and drive like blazes back to the Capitol to beat his memo commenting on what you told him.”) One anecdote Lincoln provides captures the young senator's energy and routine recklessness—his frenzied approach to automobile and air travel:

The same hyperactivity was there in the new president, documented in a contemporaneous book by the perceptive writer William Manchester. After Kennedy's arrival in the White House, the change from Eisenhower was palpable. The ambassador to Russia, who rarely met with Eisenhower alone for more than ten minutes at a time, suddenly found himself having repeated two-hour private meetings with the new president. Kennedy kept up his senatorial pace. He “continued to vibrate with energy. He would pace corridors, read on his feet, dictate rapidly, dart out for brisk constitutionals around the monument, and return in a sprint, snapping his restless fingers.” Manchester, spending time in the president's private quarters, noticed plenty of presidential nervousness. His right hand constantly moved, thrumming the arm of his chair. His feet and legs squirmed; he was physically restless, despite the reputation for emotional cool. The physical movement took its toll on the presidential furniture: “Two White House chairs have collapsed under the stress. Once . . . in the middle of a conference with congressional leaders . . . he was fidgeting away, and the next moment there was an explosion, a hail of ancient splinters, and a loud thump as the Chief Executive sprawled at the feet of his astonished Vice-President.”

One day Manchester counted about one hundred people who entered and left the Oval Office. After one meeting, Kennedy issued seventeen directives. The action was fast, as “two months after taking the oath the new Chief Magistrate had issued thirty-two official messages and legislative recommendations—Eisenhower had issued five in his first two months—while delivering twelve speeches, promulgating twenty-two Executive Orders and proclamations, sending twenty-eight communications to foreign chiefs of state, and holding seven press conferences.” Kennedy's Senate office had been open weekends; the new president and his brother were shocked that executive offices closed on Saturdays. Employees received personal notes of thanks from the attorney general if they came to work on Saturdays.

Though not as extreme as Roosevelt's logorrhea, Kennedy liked to talk. “I need information” he said, and he sought it everywhere. The novelist Henry James once called Washington “the city of Conversation,” and Manchester dubbed JFK the “conversationalist-in-chief.” Said his family friend Gore Vidal, “He's really a great gossip”—“terrifically interested” in hearing what others have to say. Even strangers got presidential attention: Kennedy would reply two hundred times per day to the thousands of daily letters he received.

 

 

BESIDES HIGH ENERGY and sociability, a sense of humor is also a sign of hyperthymic personality, as noted earlier in relation to Roosevelt. Kennedy's wit was famous; entire books have been devoted to it. A few examples will remind us of his gift, and show how he used it to strategic advantage.

At the Democratic convention in 1960, Kennedy sat quietly as his opponent, Lyndon Johnson, tried to convince delegates that he should be nominated for president. The Texan went on and on about all he had achieved in his years in Congress. Cheers rang out when he finished. Kennedy stepped to the rostrum. Looking at Johnson sheepishly, he said he agreed: Lyndon was doing such a great job as Senate majority leader, he should stay there. When they became running mates, Kennedy kept up the humor, even on the long and tense election night when a thin margin was in the balance; from Cape Cod, Kennedy wired Johnson in Texas: “I hear
you're
losing Ohio, but
we're
doing fine in Pennsylvania.”

Kennedy, like FDR, gave many press conferences, and he used his charm to great advantage with reporters. Once, during his trying first year, he was asked whether he would have sought to be president, knowing what he then knew, and whether he would recommend the presidency to others. He immediately replied with a smile, “Well, the answer to the first is yes, and the answer to the second is no. I don't recommend it to others, at least not for a while.”

His classic style was self-deprecatory; asked during a 1960 campaign press conference about the impact of being Catholic on a reticent voting public, Kennedy replied, “I feel as a Catholic I'll get my reward in my life hereafter, although I may not get it here.”

 

 

THE
COURSE
OF Kennedy's hyperthymic symptoms was constant, not episodic, consistent with personality traits (rather than a full-blown disease like mania). His own self-medication, seeking to enhance his hyperthymic traits, as described in the next chapter, provides
treatment
evidence in support of hyperthymic personality. This leaves
family history,
still a touchy aspect of John Kennedy's increasingly exposed life. Bipolar disorder in the family would support Kennedy's hyperthymic personality; the two conditions are inherited together in families.

Psychiatrically speaking, living people are more difficult to examine than the dead: those who are alive naturally want to protect their privacy; the dead cannot do so. Now we come to the controversial tale of John's sister Rosemary. Did she too have a mental illness? The standard story is that she was born with mental retardation that worsened over time, leading to being institutionalized from her mid-twenties until her death in 2005 at age eighty-six. Her sister Eunice, in a widely read 1962 article, revealed Rose's mental retardation.

Decades later, historians discovered that when she was twenty-three years old Rosemary received a frontal lobotomy from the founders of psychosurgery, neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts. This revelation raised the question of whether Rosemary had, like most lobotomy cases, preexisting mental illness. In retrospect, Rosemary probably had mild mental retardation from birth, with delayed developmental stages (walking, talking) uncommon in mental illnesses. The mildness of the retardation is shown by her ability to do arithmetic and to write adequate English composition as a teenager. Before their passing, unfortunately, Eunice and Ted Kennedy did not respond to interview requests regarding Rosemary; one journalist managed to track down the ninety-year-old neurosurgeon, Dr. Watts, who recalled that she was treated for “agitated depression.” Another researcher scoured all the records and correspondence of Walter Freeman and found no reference at all to Rosemary Kennedy. It seemed that Freeman carefully avoided documentation about her.

Rose Kennedy, in her 1974 memoir, describes her daughter's anger, rather than mental retardation per se, as the cause of lobotomy. Rosemary “was upset easily and unpredictably. . . . Some of these upsets became tantrums or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people. Since she was quite strong, her blows were hard.” Sent to a convent in Washington, D.C., she would sneak out at night and return disheveled; the nuns worried that she was having nocturnal sexual encounters. Some friends of the family saw Rosemary, at the time, as mentally ill, not just mentally retarded.

In one medical evaluation, during Congressman John Kennedy's first hospitalization at George Washington University in 1950, a doctor noted, as part of the routine family history, “Sister is insane.” How this history was obtained, who gave it to the doctor, and what it meant are unclear. Could it be that this touchy history was briefly raised early in Kennedy's career, when he was still a little-known congressman, but purposefully ignored or downplayed in future records of the rising senator and president? Or was this isolated bit of information actually a misinterpretation? This note, which I believe has never before been discussed in biographies or articles about Kennedy's health, at least raises the question that perhaps mood disorder was present in the Kennedy family, touching Rosemary severely and John lightly.

And then we have Joseph Kennedy Sr. himself.

 

 

WHEN THINKING OF the features of hyperthymia—high energy, elevated libido, workaholism, sense of humor, risk-taking, extraversion, sociability, marked ambition—few match the concept more closely than Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. As with many people with hyperthymic personality, Kennedy's temperament allowed him to achieve great success in the business world, a success that he parlayed into political influence for himself and eventually his entire family.

Born the son of a saloon keeper, Kennedy was among the first Irish Americans to excel in Anglophilic Boston. Elected president of his class at Boston Latin School, he entered Harvard College, where he parlayed his social skills into membership in elite social clubs like the Hasty Pudding. He married above himself, taking to bride the daughter of Boston's mayor, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, whereupon he began breeding the clan of nine children who would become famous. He started by taking over a failing local bank, becoming at age twenty-five the nation's youngest bank president.

Joseph Kennedy became a hyperthymic success. He worked long hours and traveled constantly. He was always planning and scheming, making some money grow into more, wanting some power to become much more. He took risks others would not consider. From the very beginning when he took over a failed bank as his first business move, to plunging into the 1920s stock market and being among the earliest “short” sellers, to getting out (just before the Great Crash of 1929) when everyone else was getting in, to taking over failed Hollywood studios and rebuilding them, to stockpiling liquor when the government prohibited it, Kennedy was a lifelong contrarian, gambling against the conventional wisdom, and he made it work over and over again.

His new wealth went far in the Depression-era 1930s, as he bought real estate everywhere and even dabbled in Hollywood. By the mid-1930s he was rich enough to buy political attention, and he became a prized business supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. Soon FDR appointed Kennedy to office, first to head the new Securities and Exchange Commission, then as ambassador to England before the Second World War. Kennedy's pacifist sympathies ended his career when the war began, but by then he had prepared a straight path to the presidency for his sons.

Hyperthymia can lead to much success, but at the cost of much failure. Openness to experience enhances creativity and often leads to incredible new ideas, but it can also become impulsive risk-taking and result in disaster. For all his successes, Joseph Kennedy also had his failures, and has been accused of more than his share of sins. His libido was famous; he not only had numerous affairs, but he was quite open about them, flaunting his relationship with the Hollywood actress Gloria Swanson, and in later years even trying his luck with the girls who came around his sons. Some have suggested his liquor business included illegal rum-running during Prohibition; some claim he bribed journalists; others append anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sympathies to his pacifism. Even his business genius, acknowledged even by his critics, is sullied by claims that his millions ensued from Wall Street insider trading that would today be illegal.

The sons were much like the father: highly social, extraverted, libidinous, ambitious. Joseph Kennedy usually is credited with passing along these traits through his paternal devotion and care (or control) of them. It could also be that he passed along those traits through his hyperthymic genes. This probability is supported by an objective assessment of two generations of Kennedys, whose lives, though still often shrouded in privacy, are sufficiently public for some assessment of potential hyperthymic personality or mental illness. There were nine siblings in the first generation (sons and daughters of Joseph Sr. and Rose Kennedy); there are twenty-seven cousins in the next generation (grandchildren of Joseph Sr. and Rose Kennedy). Of these thirty-six people, excluding two assassinations, one person died of a drug overdose (David Kennedy, son of Robert), four died by accident (three in plane crashes—Kathleen, Joe Jr., and JFK Jr.—and one in a skiing accident—Michael, son of Robert), four had substance abuse problems (alcohol in Edward Kennedy, heroin for RFK Jr., cocaine and prescription opiates for David, alcohol and prescription opiates for Patrick, son of Edward), and two had definite or probable mental illness (Rosemary as above, and Patrick, diagnosed with bipolar disorder).