The Kennedy methHow a physician codenamed ‘Dr. Feelgood’ hooked John F. Kennedy — and half of Hollywood — on methamphetamines
By LARRY GETLEN,
New York PostLast Updated: 7:49 AM, April 21, 2013
Posted: 10:18 PM, April 20, 2013
In 1962, at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, a man “peeled off his clothing and began prancing around his hotel suite.” His bodyguards were cautiously amused, until the man “left the suite and began roaming through the corridor of the Carlyle.”
The man in question was delusional, paranoid and suffering a “psychotic break” from the effects of an overdose of methamphetamine.
He was also the president of the United States.
The reason for John F. Kennedy’s bizarre behavior was that, according to an explosive new book, the president was — unbeknownst to him, at first — a meth addict.
The man who supposedly made him so was Max Jacobson, a doctor who had invented a secret vitamin formula that gave people renewed energy and cured their pain, and was given the code name “Dr. Feelgood” by Kennedy’s Secret Service detail.
This formula was actually methamphetamine, and over the course of a decades-long practice, Jacobson became doctor to the stars, making unknowing drug addicts out of a long list of the famous and distinguished, including JFK and his wife, Jackie, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, Eddie Fisher, Truman Capote and many more.
In “Dr. Feelgood” (Skyhorse Publishing), authors Richard A. Lertzman and William J. Birnes allege that Jacobson had an incredible effect on world events, influencing Kennedy’s election, the Cuban Missile Crisis, even Roger Maris’ 1961 home-run record.
Jacobson, born in 1900 and raised in Berlin, began experimenting with strange concoctions in the 1930s, when he would consult with Carl Jung, whose guidance “led him to first experiment with early psychotropic, or mood and mind-altering, drugs.”
Experimenting on “animals, patients and himself,” Jacobson “looked for ways he could mix early mind-altering drugs with vitamins, enzymes, animal placentas and small amounts of hormones . . .” and believed that these drugs could not only cure disease, but could “effect remedies on a cellular level.”
The doctor’s concoction — which evolved to become a mixture of methamphetamine and goat’s and sheep’s blood — caught the attention of Germany’s National Socialists, who demanded the formula. Jacobson, who was Jewish, later said that his drug was fed to Nazi soldiers, making them more vicious. He also believed that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun eventually became addicted to his formula.
Escaping the Nazis, Jacobson had a brief tenure in Paris — where he took on celebrity client Anais Nin — then wound up in New York in 1936, establishing a practice on East 72nd Street and Third Avenue. In the years to follow, he’d hone his formula; reconnect with celebrity patients he’d served in Europe such as Nin, director Billy Wilder and author Henry Miller; and take on many new ones, including Nelson Rockefeller, Maria Callas, Bob Fosse, Ingrid Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, director Cecil B. DeMille and writer Rod Serling, who, the authors say, was high on Jacobson’s meth when he furiously wrote “The Twilight Zone” series. ...
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