What was missing
The post-nomination NYT profile from July 1960 of JFK that we mentioned below was almost entirely uncritical, but not completely so. He is an example of the criticism. The curious thing is that the Times missed the real story, along with the rest of the media:
The NYT article mentions the 1954 anti-McCarthy vote that Kennedy did not attend because of back surgery, but the article missed the real story — JFK’s severe medical problems at that time and the complete cover-up of those problems. Kennedy had Addison’s Disease, which made that 1954 back surgery so dangerous that the Lahey Clinic refused to perform it. Kennedy, who had declared himself “the healthiest candidate for President in the country”, was anything but. He was on 10-12 medications a day through his presidency, including sleeping pills and heavy duty pain killers. Indeed, according to one source, Kennedy’s “boyish good looks,” that the Times doted on in the story below, came from the treatments that he received for his disease.
The New York Times, along with the rest of the media, missed the medical story in 1960, as well as that of the cover-up, which continued on long after President Kennedy’s assassination. Things are different today, or are they? (President Clinton never released his medical records, and the NYT never pushed the matter particularly hard.) In any event we are reminded today of the warnings from the Clinton campaign last November that they had “scandalous information” on Senator Obama. It seems curious, given the results in Iowa and some of the polls in New Hampshire, that we haven’t been graced with this “scandalous information,” should it actually exist.