Backache

Outwardly, the President of the U.S. seemed his usual active self. Returning from Europe, he made his television report to the nation, kept a campaign pledge to greet the senior class of the Tomah, Wis., high school at the White House, addressed graduating midshipmen at Annapolis, spoke to editors of United Press International, and entertained the French Congo Republic's President Fulbert Youlou, who came with a huge pair of elephant tusks as gifts. But all the while, John Kennedy was in considerable pain with a back injury--and at week's end he was on crutches.

During his state visit to Canada last month, Kennedy had attended a tree-planting ceremony in front of Ottawa's Government House. Shoveling about ten spadefuls of dirt, he felt a twinge in his back but said nothing about it. During the next few days the pain grew worse and when, just before his trip to Europe, he went to rest at Hyannisport, he sent for the White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell. She diagnosed the ailment as "a lumbosacral strain," treated the President with Novocain injections and hot packs. Out of public view, he used crutches to get about the big estate.

The President's back continued to plague him throughout his trip to Europe, but he concealed his discomfort. Back in the U.S., he took further treatment, underwent X-ray examinations, went on crutches again.

According to Dr. Travell, the President's backache was of a common type that periodically afflicts about one person out of every four over 40. Indeed, it could be dismissed as a passing pain were it not for John Kennedy's long history of back trouble. He first suffered what apparently was a ruptured disc between two lumbar vertebrae while playing football as a Harvard sophomore. Again, the disc was jammed against spinal nerves in 1943, when his PT boat was run down by a Japanese destroyer. Doctors operated on the disc in 1944, but the pain continued, and ten years later, while a member of the Senate, Kennedy took to crutches. In the fall of 1954, in a double fusion of spinal discs, a metal plate was inserted in his back. But the area became infected, and his condition, aggravated by his adrenal insufficiency (for which he still takes a cortisone derivative), brought him near death. In another operation, the plate was removed. Aided by Dr. Travell's Novocain treatments, Kennedy finally mended --and, during last year's campaign, his health was pronounced "excellent."

Last weekend President Kennedy took off for a brief rest at the Palm Beach villa of a friend, Charles B. Wrightsman. There, as he slept for up to twelve hours at a stretch and swam in a heated, salt water pool, his pain could be expected to ease--if, as his aides insisted, his new condition really had no connection with his old ailment.

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