New York. -- The Journal of the American Medical Association has a presidential-class scoop in this week's issue -- only 32 years too late.
''Closing the Case in JAMA on the John F. Kennedy Autopsy'' is the title, and it reveals that despite all the family and medical denials during his lifetime and later, Kennedy did indeed have Addison's disease -- a once-terminal failure of the adrenal glands.
And that wasn't the half of it. The 35th president had a range of maladies, known and unknown, that kept him in a sickbed, boy and man, for months and years at a time. His back problems and mysterious fevers were congenital, not football injuries or war injuries or malaria, as the cover stories went in those days.
He also had a very uncertain stomach that restricted him to a bland diet all his life, some deafness in his right ear, and a baffling range of allergies that sometimes laid him out. To make things worse -- or better -- he was a promiscuous user of medications, including corticosteroids to replace the normal output of adrenal glands, amphetamines and Demerol for pain.
His friend Paul Fay watched Kennedy getting ready to inject himself in the thigh, as he did most days, and said: ''Jack, the way you take that jab, it looks like it doesn't even hurt.''
Kennedy lunged over and jabbed the needle into Fay's thigh. His friend screamed in pain.
''It feels the same way to me,'' Kennedy said.
I've spent the better part of the last five years researching and writing a biography of President Kennedy, and it certainly seems to me that it was his health, and not his sexual adventurism, that was the great covered-up story of the Kennedy years. He was a rather gallant liar about his health, learning as a boy bedridden with scarlet fever that when people say, ''How do you feel?'' they are not interested in either the truth or the whole story. ''Fine,'' is all they want to hear.
So, all his life, Jack Kennedy said ''Fine,'' particularly after he got into politics in 1946, a skinny, sickly kid with the perpetual tan that makes some Addisonians look terrific most of the time. That was one of the times he said it was malaria -- from the Pacific during the war.
''That young American friend of yours, he hasn't got a year to live,'' Sir Daniel Davis, a prominent British physician, told Pamela Churchill, Winston's daughter-in-law, after she brought a very sick Congressman Kennedy to the London Clinic on September 21, 1947. Addison's disease, he said.
