KENNEDY, 35th, 1961-63

John Fitzgerald Kennedy had a tan year-round, a symptom of Addison's disease. He liked it, "It gives me confidence ... it makes me feel strong, healthy, attractive." Steroids altered the shape of JFK's face. Several photographs of JFK show a roundness classically known as "moon facies."

JFK was hospitalized more than three dozen times and given last rites three times. His mother remembered him as "a very, very sick little boy ... bed-ridden and elfin-like." In his adolescence, doctors described gastrointestinal symptoms, weight and growth problems as well as fatigue. Later in life, he suffered from abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, osteoporosis, migraine and Addison's disease raising the possibility that JFK had celiac disease.

Some of the drugs JFK received in large doses during his first six months in office are described in a Medicine Administration Record: Cortisone — at one extreme steroid psychosis can result, at the other, a profound sensation of well-being; Lomotil for diarrhea — in toxic doses, can make someone mad as a hatter; Paregoric containing Opium; Phenobarbital for diarrhea — a classic downer; Testosterone; Trasentine for diarrhea — causes giddiness and euphoria; and Amphetamines.

JFK dismissed concerns about the medicine, saying, "I don't care if it's horse piss. It works." It is thought that he was under the influence of amphetamines when he made his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.

At age 21 his sister Rosemary, considered promiscuous by her father, tripped at a visit to the Queen of England thereby embarrassing him, though the Queen said she saved herself gracefully. Joseph Kennedy reacted by forcing a pre-frontal lobotomy that "proved to be a disaster." She spent the rest of her life in an institution.

In 1963 JFK confided that he got a headache if he went too long without a woman. A fellow congressman observed that traveling with him was like traveling with a bull.

He was absolutely fearless about airplanes, flying anywhere, at any time, in any weather in which he could get aloft, sleeping through anything, scarcely seeming aware that he was off the ground. Yet four persons in his family had died in aircraft accidents.

One aid recalls, "He never thought he was going to live to be an old man anyway."

In Dallas, TX, Lady Bird Johnson said, "Suddenly, I found myself face to face with Jackie, in a small hall. I think it was right outside the operating room. You always think of her or somebody like her as being insulated, protected. She was quite alone I don¹t think I ever saw anybody so alone in my life."

Among JFK's endowments — rarely to be found in politicians — was the capacity for cold and critical self-examination. Even so, he injected the Presidency with a cosmopolitan glamour and the Kennedy idealism, which made it seem that a more equitable and peaceful world was possible.

d. November 22, 1963 (Dallas, Texas) at 46 by assassin's bullets.