UPDATE - Issue 16 - January 2004
Book Review: "Prostates Bridge Atlantic"
by Anthony Kilmister
Forty years ago, John Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. He and his elegant young wife had created a new 'Camelot' in the White House. Yet, as a new book - An Unfinished Life by Robert Dallek brilliantly shows, his was a most complex life-style. Drawing on never-before-opened archives Professor Dallek reveals that Kennedy was secretly in and out of hospitals throughout his life. His back was badly damaged when a Japanese warship destroyed his patrol boat PT109, he suffered with Addison's disease, Crohn's disease, a duodenal ulcer, malaria and, Update readers will be surprised to learn, prostatitis.
Kennedy, a regular and compulsive womanizer, was prescribed testosterone resulting in his libido being heightened yet more. For a man with prostatitis this can only have added to his difficulties. Yet, to the outside world the President gave the impression of being in robust good health. The author also writes of the President's charm, his political astuteness and his many successes in a life cut short prematurely. It occurred to me to look at the scene on this side of the Atlantic only a month or so before the President met his death that fateful day in Dallas.
For the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, his prostate gland eventually ended his political career. It was not prostate cancer but acute urinary retention which lead to his admission to hospital. There, Mr A.W. Badenoch - the leading expert of his time - performed a prostatectomy. It was this temporary and benign incapacity that Macmillan conveniently used as the reason for surrendering the burdens of office - something he might have later regretted. In the public mind this was all high drama but Harold Macmillan, who was distantly related to Kennedy by marriage, was able to lead a comfortable life as an Elder Statesman for the following twenty-three years. So, as co-incidence would have it, prostate problems loomed large on both sides of the Atlantic four decades ago.
John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-1963 by Robert Dallek, published by Allen Lane-Penguin, ISBN 07139-9737-0, hard-back, 838 pages, £25