Dr. Janet Travell, the White House physician, said Kennedy took chemical relatives of cortisone to counter adrenal deficiency when he was under stress and his doctors were not inclined to stop them because he felt so well.

In fact, Kennedy had suffered from adrenal insufficiency since he was 30, Joan and Clay Blair Jr. wrote in "The Search for J.F.K." (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976). Robert Kennedy's semantic dodge rested on the point that in the disease as originally described by Thomas Addison in 1855, the adrenals were destroyed by tuberculosis; John Kennedy, whose Addison's disease was caused by unknown factors, did not have tuberculosis.

In 1954, Kennedy received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church because of the adrenal condition when he underwent back surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. The New York Times reported on the operation.

A year later, an article in The Archives of Surgery described how three unnamed patients with adrenal insufficiency had undergone major surgery after receiving extra large doses of cortisone to cope with the stress. Because an Addisonian patient needs extra hormone at times of infection or injury, the diagnosis should never be kept secret from a doctor, even if kept from the public.

After Kennedy's death, Dr. John Nichols of the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, matched the patient in the surgical report with The New York Times accounts of Kennedy's surgery, which did not discuss any adrenal condition. In a letter, "President Kennedy's Adrenals," in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1967, Dr. Nichols criticized the autopsy report sent to the Warren Commission for failing to mention Kennedy's adrenals and for concealing a diagnosis that carried no stigma.

In his book, "High Treason 2" (Carroll & Graf, 1992), Harrison Edward Livingstone wrote that no adrenal tissue could be found at Kennedy's autopsy and that his body showed the effects of long-term hormonal replacement therapy. The source was Dr. Robert F. Karnei, a pathologist who witnessed the Kennedy autopsy.

The A.M.A. journal's confirmation of the virtual absence of adrenal tissue is based on interviews with Dr. Karnei and Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, one of the principal pathologists who performed the Kennedy autopsy.