JFK and Addison’s Disease

Gravely ill, Kennedy was admitted to a London hospital in 1947. His doctor's verdict: "He hasn't got a year to live."

Throughout his early life, John Fitzgerald Kennedy seemed an unlikely prospect for national and international leadership. He was a "rather frail little boy" and almost died of scarlet fever at the age of three. Moreover, his mother has told us that this was "only the beginning": "almost all his life, it seemed, he had to battle against misfortunes of health." The family used to joke that if a mosquito bit Jack, the mosquito would surely die. In addition to the usual childhood illnesses, John Kennedy suffered from diphtheria, allergies, frequent colds and flu, hives, an irritable colon, a weak stomach which required a bland diet most of his life, and asthma- which caused him considerable difficulty as a teenager.

In 1930 [at the age of 13], he wrote his mother from boarding school complaining of blurriness and color blindness in his right eye – years later he would become hard of hearing in his left ear as well - and told his father that he had gotten dizzy and fainted at Mass. He underwent an appendicitis operation in 1931, had his tonsils and adenoids removed and came down with an enervating case of jaundice two years later, and in the mid-1930s developed a severe case of pneumonia.

Approximately one year later, he had to end his studies at the London School of Economics after coming down with another case of jaundice so severe that it required hospitalization. After returning to the United States and beginning studies at Princeton, where he would be close to the New York doctors who were treating him, the jaundice recurred and forced Kennedy to spend two months in Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and then move to Arizona to recuperate. In the fall of 1936, he entered Harvard University, where he was closer to his family, but illness followed him. A bad case of the flu prevented him from making the swimming team which was to compete against Yale, and in 1940, he developed a case of urethritis which recurred with some frequency throughout the remainder of his life. His bladder and prostate difficulties were so persistent, in fact, that shortly before his marriage he questioned one of his physicians about his ability to have children. During these early years, he was described as “a slight, very slight, young man.”

In addition to back problems so grave that his brother Robert said of him that “at least one half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain,” John F. Kennedy suffered from a debilitating, potentially life-threatening disease for at least the last 16 years of his life. Had Kennedy contracted it even a few years earlier than he did, he almost certainly would have died.

While on a visit to London in the fall of 1947, Congressman Kennedy became so seriously ill with weakness, nausea, vomiting, and low blood pressure that he was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The physician who examined him diagnosed his condition as Addison’s disease and told one of Kennedy’s friends that “he hasn’t got a year to live.” Journalist Arthur Krock, however, remembered being told by Joseph Kennedy, even before his son first ran for Congress in 1946, that Jack had Addison’s disease and was probably dying. Krock related that Joseph Kennedy “wept sitting in the chair opposite me in the office.” If Krock’s memory was accurate, it would appear that John Kennedy contracted Addison’s disease somewhat earlier than previously thought. Indeed, this might well explain Kennedy’s illness during his first campaign for the House of Representatives, when he collapsed during the final campaign event, a parade in Charlestown, sweating heavily and his skin discolored.

One of the common symptoms of Addison’s disease is a discoloration or bronzing of the skin. Although several of Kennedy’s biographers indicate that he did not have skin discoloration and/or that he insisted he did not, other observers found that he had a surprisingly deep tan, or yellowish skin, or skin of a greenish tinge. One who saw him during the 1960 campaign reported that his face was “lined and tanned to the extreme – and rough-looking, like the surface of a steak.” Theodore Sorenson, special counsel to the President, related that Kennedy once responded to a suspicious reporter’s question about his year-round tan “by exposing a part of his anatomy that had not been burned by the sun.” This, however, was no proof that his tan was natural, since Addisonian bronzing is “usually more marked on the exposed portions of the skin.”

Earlier, when a journalist had asked him about the unusual tinge of his skin, Kennedy replied with uncharacteristic candor, “The doctors say I’ve got a sort of slow motion leukemia, but they tell me I’ll probably last until I’m 45. So I seldom think about it except when I have the shots.”

When Addison’s disease was first discovered in the mid-1800s, it was regarded as fatal. Before 1930, 90 percent of persons with the disease died within five years; but in the late 1930s, researchers developed a synthetic substance, desoxycorticosterone acetate (DOCA), which greatly reduced the mortality rate. However, it remained important for those with the disease to avoid great stress, since stress increases the body’s need for steroids, which the Addisonian’s adrenal glands cannot provide.

Classic Addison’s disease has been caused by tuberculosis. Since John Kennedy never suffered from tuberculosis of any kind, he and his spokespersons maintained that he did not have Addison’s disease in the classic sense. Rather, they attributed his adrenal insufficiency to the physical strain of having to spend many hours in the water after his PT boast was sunk and to the case of malaria he contracted soon afterward.

Nevertheless, Kennedy was wholly dependent on the cortisone therapy that Addisonians rely upon for survival. Initially, he took 25 milligrams of cortisone by mouth; he then took it through injection. Also, he had implanted in his thighs DOCA tablets of 150 milligrams, which were replaced several times a year. There are even reports that the Kennedy family kept a reservoir of DOCA and cortisone in safety deposit boxes around the country so that Jack would have ready access to these medications wherever he traveled. One of his closest aides recounts that John Kennedy “used (and carried with him around the country) more pills, potions, poultices and other paraphernalia than would be found in a small dispensary.”