How JFK, Fidel and Mary Poppins crossed paths in New Orleans

Polio was feared in 1940. Historically, it had been an occasional illness, and its most dire consequences were rare. Then, in the late nineteenth century, it became a virulent epidemic killer that lurked in unusual places and descended upon innocent children, usually in the summertime, when they liked to play outside in the fresh air and sunshine. Preachers called it the wrath of God; a plague on those who dreamed about sex in secret and played ball in the street on the sabbath.

Why did polio only become a thing in the late nineteenth century? Scientists and preachers disagreed. Current thinking is that polio’s virulence was a consequence of excess hygiene. It’s counterintuitive, but it makes perfect sense. 

Children in ancient Egypt and medieval Italy played ball in the street, down the middle of which ran a constant trickle of sewer water. Their momma told them to stay out of it because it stank, but if the ball bounced in it, they ignored momma and just kept playing. Sometimes, they got diarrhea, but they didn’t die. Sometimes, the diarrhea they got was one of polio’s less virulent cousins. Polio is a digestive tract infection. Neurological consequences were secondary. By playing in dirty water, little boys inadvertently vaccinated themselves. As Rusty Henderson from Ingram used to say, from under the brim of his broad grey Stetson hat, Eat shit; ten million flies can’t all be wrong. Back when getting dirty was good, clean fun.

Then, along came hygiene. Repressive, authoritarian sanitation. Germ theory, lye soap and caustic chemicals to scrub off the grey grime of filth. A Boy Scout was clean. Cleanliness was next to godliness. John Wesley put that into a sermon in 1791. It got read and repeated. As suffragettes and abolitionists broke down the barriers of gender and race, there had to be a way to keep the unwashed horde of lepers and adulteresses at arm’s length. Excrement went underground and the self-righteous became daily bathers. The holiest even built showers into their homes. It was polio’s finest hour. All those godly little boys and girls with scrubbed skin, combed hair and starched white shirts were sitting ducks.

It was time for science. Polio was fundamentally different from smallpox. It was a virus. A whole tribe of them, in fact. There were three clans, all related, like the Burnetts in North Texas. In 1750, by playing in filthy places, most children acquired a lifetime of immunity to the lethal strains of polio (and God only knows what else) by befriending  the garden varieties. By 1950, scientists had decided that the polio was like communism. It had to be eradicated. More hygiene, they said, not less. It was a new and violent crusade. A war for the survival of life as we know it.

FDR made that call, and FDR was a legend. The national fight against the silent killer became the March of Dimes. It was a military campaign. Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe encouraged Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls to patriotically tape a dime onto a post card and mail it to the White House for research. After FDR died, those became Roosevelt dimes. The promising young scientist chosen to save the day was Jonas Salk. Clark Kent in a
knee-length white lab coat.

Polio was genus specific. It wouldn’t grow in horses, rabbits, or sheep. It would only grow in living primate tissue. Monkeys had to be brought in from far away. They were infected with the most virulent strains of polio, then, euthanized. Their monkey cadavers were processed to extract the virus. It was going to take about one monkey for every ten doses of vaccine. That was millions of monkeys. The marching dimes would finance their capture, infection, torture, death and processing. Doctor Salk was attempting to create a true inoculation, so he could eliminate the disease outright. Wipe the planet clean. But first he had to find a way to neutralize the virus he had manufactured, so that it wouldn’t just spread the disease he had intended to prevent.

There was another problem. Monkeys were mean. And, smart. They didn’t like being put in cages, getting polio and dying. They preferred swinging from vines and eating bananas in the forests of Africa. If you were one of the superhero scientists dedicated to saving a generation of children from polio, your monkeys would spit on you, piss on you and throw their shit at you. That would be, spit, pee and shit with live polio virus in it. That was a public health nightmare.

Salk used the meanest polio viruses he could find, assuming that only immunity to those would assure immunity to the less virulent forms, instead of the contrary, which was also true, and much, much safer. Jenner already knew that from the cowpox experiment. But Jonas Salk was a scientific drill sergeant and an idealist. He decided he had to march into hell for his heavenly cause.

Then, there was a breakthrough. Some science geek sent Jonas Salk an email (ok, a telegram) saying that he could grow polio virus in what came to be known as a tissue culture. To make a tissue culture, (this part is not for kids) you cut open your monkey, you chop out the organ you want to culture, put it in a blender and liquefy it. Then, you add a nutrient solution and keep it warm and gently circulating. The living cells of the eviscerated monkey would stay alive for up to a month.

It only took about two weeks to grow out a crop of polio. Bingo, Jonas and the boys were back in business. Tissue cultures could, pound for pound, make a lot more polio virus than a live monkey, because the rest of the monkey wasn’t there fighting off the infection. And, tissue cultures didn’t throw their shit you. There were a lot of dead monkeys piling up around the lab, but those could be incinerated. The place began to smell like Birkenau. 

Kidneys were chosen as the preferred organ for tissue cultures. Hearts or livers would have worked, but kidneys were fairly easy to carve out. Rhesus was the preferred monkey. Rhesus came from India, but there were never enough. So, they had to use African green monkeys, as an alternative. The black market on captured monkeys was booming. There were huge holding pens in different parts of the world. The monkeys got depressed and flea-bitten. They gave each other every disease and bad habit known to primate-kind.

The problem with kidneys was that everything the monkey’s body was trying to get rid of ended up there. Dormant toxins, bacteria and viruses abounded in the trillion tiny filter tubes that made up a kidney. Often, whatever was already there would also grow out in a tissue culture. You couldn’t exactly boil it for ten minutes. It would no longer be a tissue culture. It would just be monkey soup. (Mm, mm, good!) The monkey cells had to be alive to do their job.

Lab workers would sometimes notice that some of the two-gallon jugs of living death looked funny, so they would throw them out. Science, comrade. If they looked funny, but not funny enough, they would use them anyway, assuming that a couple of weeks in formaldehyde would probably kill whatever exotic tropical infection they had just unintentionally mass produced for thousands of innocent school children. In baseball, you got three strikes. Why not in science? A pattern began to develop among the funny-looking tissue cultures. Many developed what technicians called vacuoles, colonies of oversized cells that looked like slimy cauliflower. The tissue cultures, essentially, got cancer. No one worried. They trusted their formaldehyde.

There were many assumptions in Jonas Salk’s calculation. He was a smart guy and all, but he was under a lot of pressure to become a superhero quickly. There were about 50,000 cases of polio every summer, with three thousand deaths and 20,000 lasting disabilities. And the Russians were coming. You heard of the Space Race. Well, this was the Vaccine Race. America had to grow one before they did. And Doctor Salk had to hurry and get his picture on the cover of Time Magazine. Because Rolling Stone hadn’t come out yet.

Science, comrade, was not done in a hurry. And, there was an arrogance that went with becoming a superhero. The kryptonite thing; it created blind spots. Superheroes couldn’t see things that, in retrospect, seemed obvious. Salk missed his milkmaid moment. He should have been working with polio’s less deadly cousins, as Jenner had done, a century and a half ago.

Next question, why use a kidney, if it was one of the dirtiest organs in the body? The tissue culture issue was decided using industrial criteria. Salk needed to create a vaccine that could be mass-produced. Kidneys were easy and efficient. And, why assume that two weeks in formaldehyde would kill exotic viruses that no one knew anything about? It was just a guess.

And, why use monkeys at all? Imagine those nasty little primate viruses waiting to jump the species barrier and redirect the course of evolution. No one did. And then, there were all those monkey catchers to worry about. Wildlife poachers. There were a lot of bad people who had to be paid off. For a patriotic cause. Or so it seemed.

At one point, in the holding pens, the African greens caught something from the rhesus monkeys. The African greens got sick, while the rhesus didn’t. Tissue cultures from the sick African greens formed vacuoles in their warm two-gallon jars. Our old friend, the slimy cauliflower. That’s when it got a name: Simian Virus Number 40, or SV-40, which means 39 other simian viruses were identified before it, but none so exotic, perverse or diabolical. Besides making African green monkeys sick, it was discovered that SV-40 also gave prisoners flu symptoms. Yes, they were doing experiments on prisoners. It was pretty disgusting. Technicians with white coats and federal funding put the
slimy cauliflower in a blender, then in a centrifuge, and then into a syringe and into a convict’s butt cheek. It showed up in their urine and feces for six weeks after infection.

SV-40 also consistently caused cancer in hamsters and laboratory rats. That was medical research heresy. Cancer was supposed to be the body’s own system going haywire for no real reason besides pesticides, cyclamates and burgers that got a little too black on the grill. And the wrath of God. Dogma had been declared: no germs were ever involved. Amen.

Then, there was mesothelioma. Supposedly caused by asbestos exposure. Mesothelioma didn’t exist before the 1950’s. It attacked a lining of the lung cavity that consisted of a very primitive sort of cell, remnant of an early fetal stage. Mesothelioma is incurable. Problem was that over half of mesothelioma patients had no discernible history of asbestos exposure. But they all got polio vaccines with substantial traces of SV-40.

There is an unanswered question there. Science has reluctantly recognized a link between SV-40 and soft tissue cancers in hamsters. They get lymphoma, brain cancer, breast cancer, testicular cancer and mesothelioma. But tenured and funded authorities emphatically affirm there is no scientific evidence that SV-40 causes cancer of any kind in humans. Which is just silly. All that really means is that there has never been any funding for research. Not now, not ever. Important people don’t want to know. Their reason for not wanting to know? That, we don’t know.

One would think researchers would try to find a way to neutralize and eliminate the contaminant. In fact, the CIA came running to develop it. So that the enemies of truth, justice and the American way could seem to die of
natural causes.

Dr. Alton Ochsner, a very respected researcher at Tulane, and passionate anti-communist crusader, was supervising the initiative. This was the doc who had his two grandchildren vaccinated with the Salk vaccine during a press conference, while it was still experimental, to show people how safe he considered it to be. Both children contracted polio. One died, and the other was paralyzed. Jenner was lucky, I guess. I don’t know why Alton Ochsner was not jailed and forever banned from medical practice for killing and maiming his grandchildren. But then, he was medical nobility.

He had in his service at Tulane one Dr. Mary Sherman. She was a brilliant researcher and a fine surgeon. She was using a particle accelerator to try to get the SV-40 DNA to mutate, to make it more virulent. To make it weapons grade. The hamsters were getting cancer, most of them, but some of them were surviving. The weapon was intended for Fidel, so it had to be a sure thing.

She had a lab assistant whose name was Judith Vary Baker. I believe we’ve met. They also had a driver and logistics man whose name was Lee Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald, you remember, comrade, the one with the Russian wife?

Dr. Mary Sherman blew her arm off one warm New Orleans evening with the particle accelerator. Or, the CIA blew her arm off. They had decided to shut down the operation and Dr. Mary knew too much. There were some mean characters at CIA. Guys who drank too much. Guys who thought the rosaries said by innocent Catholic school children were all a waste of time; that only their unbridled ruthlessness would save the planet from World War III.

Even Judyth, the innocent biology whiz kid from Florida, was ardently searching for the viral holy grail, convinced that, if it could be used as a weapon against evil empires, she would be helping to save the lives of thousands of Marines who would otherwise have to invade Cuba to get rid of Evil Fidel who was pointing nuclear weapons at her mom. A human thing, this business of wars and germs and weapons. Monkeys don’t do that. They just throw
their shit at you.

Dr. Mary was set up. They made it look like she was raped and murdered for sex and money. Not likely. They set her apartment on fire. There was smoke. The curtains were lightly singed, but her arm was burned off. Vaporized. That only happens at about three thousand degrees. That temperature only occurs in particle accelerators. And in massive nano-thermite detonations in the steel cores of hundred-story office buildings when they get blown up from the inside.

Judyth tried to quit the program. She was blacklisted when her handlers discovered that she had a conscience. She kept her head down and survived.

Everyone knows what happened to Lee. It was on TV. Lee and Judyth were lovers. So were Kennedy and Marilyn. So were FDR and Lucy Mercer. So were Eleanor and Amelia Earhart. FDR even had a thing going with Princess Martha of Sweden. She was a refugee in the White House for the duration of the war, and FDR’s paralysis was only in his legs. The hot whirlpool therapy left him feeling pretty good sometimes.

Even after the Salk vaccine was approved by the FDA, there were some bad batches that caused polio. I suspect that my college buddy, Brian Lemon, got polio from one of those. Other children died. Those deaths spelled opportunity for Albert Sabin. He was the other researcher.

Born Albert Saperstein in a corner of Poland that had been overrun by Russia in 1906, he came to America in 1922, and became Albert Sabin. That had a ring to it. A good stage name was important in science. It was not a fake name, just a new name. It made him sound Mediterranean instead of Jewish. Sabin one-upped Salk by creating a vaccine out of the less virulent forms of polio. But it was alive, and you had to swallow it. Monkey pus on a sugar cube.

There were three families of polio, and one virulent strain in each family. Sabin cultivated one of the less virulent strains from each family and came up with a live viral cocktail that provided immunity from the entire clan. One dose would do it, because it was alive. If viruses are, in fact, alive; a question yet to be resolved. One might think of them as just code, strings of ones and zeros that can make defense department computers launch atomic bombs by mistake.

Sabine’s creation was a better vaccine and it never gave anybody polio. The problem was that he grew his polio crop on the same primate tissue cultures that Jonas Salk had used. He was still giving a healthy dose of live monkey virus to a generation of school children, among whom I must be counted. There was, moreover, no formaldehyde in Sabine’s recipe, no attempt to maintain the species barrier.

So, we all swallowed some version of SV-40, the CIA’s Death Star, on a sugar cube, to make the world safe for democracy. Woodrow Wilson said that. He was FDR’s godfather. He was also an enthusiastic advocate of racial segregation. He was from Virginia. Gone with the Wind and all that. But, for him, Jim Crow was not about the old cotton fields back home. It was about eugenics. Science had led leaders to believe it was their responsibility to keep the races pure. Clean and godly. Safe for democracy.

By 1976, there was some public concern about a few possible contaminants in primate-based vaccines. There had been a lethal outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever among lab workers in Germany. They got peed on by their monkeys. They all died quickly and horribly. By then, there was a tissue culture of human cells that was available. But Merck and Pfizer were not willing to retool. They liked their good old monkey soup.

Wild monkey kidneys were part of the system until the 1990’s. All those monkey poachers would be out of a job if they changed it. And, to change it, they would have to recognize that SV-40 existed, that it had been disseminated and that it was dangerous. But, public health was deemed less important than national security. The CIA didn’t want there to be any talk about viruses that caused cancer. Nothing that would spill their beans.

Doctor Bernice Eddy first identified SV-40 in rhesus tissue cultures in 1960, based on the kind of cell deformations that it created. She also observed that she could give quick and nasty cancers to hamsters by injecting them with it. That was the end of her career as a researcher. She wasn’t fired. Nothing to draw attention. She was just unexplainably given no lab space, no funding and no possibility for publication. Freedom, science, objectivity and the American way.

In the early ‘90’s, Italian researcher Michele Carbone at Loyola in Chicago did some brilliant work on just how SV-40 actually caused cancer among humans. He found that it was a very small virus, with precise mechanisms for attacking all four of the body’s natural defenses against cancer simultaneously. Now, he can get no funding. The experts who insisted that Carbone’s lab samples were probably contaminated were lavishly compensated, comrade.

Modern polio vaccines don’t have SV-40 in them. But, no matter. SV-40 is passed along from mother to child, from lover to lover, from generation to generation. That means it is here to stay. Soft tissue cancers have increased dramatically since the ‘60’s. Breast cancer and prostate cancer and lung cancer. So have bone cancers, like the one Daddy had. And lymphatic cancers, like the one Steven Brown died of. And rare brain cancers, and mesothelioma. But instead of working to cure it, the scientific community has scoured the earth for ways to deny it.

Enriched SV-40, the weaponized version, didn’t work out for assassinations of foreign heads of state. That was a bat-shit crazy idea from the start. It required more bodily confidence than men like Fidel would allow. But it was ideal for rubbing out Jack Ruby.

Ruby was Marcello’s man in Dallas. He was the guy who could have things arranged. Rough somebody up for $25. A hit would cost you $200. His last murder was a spectacular command performance. Oswald was supposed to have been gunned down at the Texas School Book Depository. But he was smarter than his handlers. Plan B was to shoot him in the back at the Texas Theater, but Lee refused to run away. Ruby’s shooting him on live television was an act of conspiratorial desperation, their Plan C. A trial was unthinkable. Oswald knew too much. And he knew too many people. Very powerful people.

After the shooting, Oswald was taken to Trauma 1 at Parkland Hospital. Exactly where Kennedy had been taken. It was one shot, but it mangled his liver, kidney, lung and diaphragm. As Oswald lay dying, Dr. Charles Crenshaw took an urgent call from the White House. This is the President of the United States. I want a deathbed confession from that boy. He didn’t get one. I guess when you already have a bullet in your aorta, you can tell LBJ to go fuck himself.

After that, it was Ruby who knew too much. But he was too visible. He wasn’t someone that you could shoot five times in the face and have local law enforcement rule it a suicide. A quick cancer in jail was ideal. Ruby never got a chance to spend his $200.

SV-40 was bad, but there was something else to be considered. Another demon had escaped from Pandora’s proverbial box in the quest to vanquish polio. The first case of HIV/AIDS was registered in the Congo in blood samples recovered from a patient deceased in 1959. At that time, virologist Hilary Kaprowski, in a race with Albert Sabin, was testing his version of the live oral vaccine there. Official sources swear that he wasn’t using chimpanzee kidneys. Congolese lab workers swear that he was, and they have the photos to prove it. The horror, the horror.

Kaprowski and Sabin were both Polish. Sabin had contacts in Eastern Europe. He found a way to test his viral juice on the Stalinized multitude who lived on vodka and potatoes behind the Iron Curtain. Science was working undercover behind enemy lines. It was all for the cause, comrade. And the mission was a success.

Kaprowski had Belgian contacts. The Belgians thought they owned the Congo. That’s why Kaprowski’s lab work and his field trials happened there. The theory was that HIV jumped the species barrier because of a hypothetical someone who hypothetically cut his hand while hypothetically chopping up a dead chimp for a hypothetical primate barbecue. And then, had hypothetical sex with a whole lot of real people, before he died.

More feasible, however, is the hypothesis that thousands of Congolese children were inoculated with an experimental live vaccine produced on chimp kidneys. AIDS seems to have arisen in several villages simultaneously, the same villages where Kaprowski’s field trials had taken place. It’s a question for science to answer. If science dares. If science can find funding.

All very promiscuous, in the end. The blood-dimmed tide was loosed. We traded polio for viral cancer and AIDS. Both are big business, now. They are so expensive. If you read that from the other side of the desk, that says lucrative.

We were better off playing ball barefoot in our underwear beside the open sewer. The way little boys did two hundred years ago. Before cleanliness became so god-awful godly.

When Barb Steichen’s brother, Johnny, was 23, he died of glioblastoma. That was a very rare brain cancer. When Barb was 46, she died of glioblastoma. Her doctors told her it was just a coincidence. There might be more to it than that. Barb and Johnny were most likely given their first dose of polio vaccine from the same batch. Senator Ted Kennedy died of glioblastoma, too, and now Senator McCain has it. I guess it’s not so rare, anymore. Another question for science to resolve. If it can find the funding. 

I remember taking the Sabin vaccine. It was 1963 and I was five. We went to the cafeteria at St. Monica’s in Dallas. Daddy drove us. He seemed pleased that his children would never get polio. That we could play outside in the summertime. He trusted science and rocket ships and the government. That was a few weeks before the Kennedy assassination.

By 1964, we had relocated to Austin. It was the same year that Disney came out with Mary Poppins. She was had floated in on the coattails of John, Paul, Ringo and George. Americans were spellbound by all things British. Given a chance, screaming fans might have rolled back Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to go live in a yellow submarine, right about then.

Julie Andrews had been a British child phenomenon with a four-octave voice and the pitch-perfect agility of a schooled coloratura at the age of nine. In another place and time, she might have been burned for witchcraft. As it turned out, she was asked to perform for King George VI in 1948. God save our gracious King. A command performance. God didn’t, incidentally. Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor died unexpectedly of throat cancer in 1952.

Eliza Doolittle brought her to Broadway. Then there was Camelot. She charmed the Kennedy administration and conjured the mythical backdrop for public policy, foreign and domestic. Then, Walt made her into Mary Poppins on the big screen. Jane and Michael Banks needed a nanny with a cheerful disposition; rosy cheeks and no warts. When their new nanny arrived, she sang to the children about how a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. We all saw it at the Paramount Theatre. There were only two theatres in Austin, back then. The Varsity and the Paramount. The Paramount was the classy one. We had elegance, if only for a moment.

Miss Andrews sang it in a most delightful way, as she always did everything. Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that we were not reminded of the stacks of sugar cubes placed in tiny paper cups each one anointed with a few drops of magical monkey goo. We were kids, after all, and big fans of sugar. Delicious, crunchy white cubes delicately basted in the soppy drippings from Albert Sabine’s controversial science project. Well. We didn’t get polio. 

I doubt if Julie Andrews made the connection. I also doubt seriously if the Disney people didn’t make the connection. Maybe even got paid for it. Walt was, after all, a die-hard Mason, a man who would not flinch at conscious manipulation of the masses to hasten the birth of the new order of fraternal humanity, secretly governed by Ivy League philosopher kings and California movie moguls.

Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar was seriously validating. Monkey pus on a sugar cube was acceptable because Julie Andrews sang about it. And won an Academy Award for it. She seemed so pure. And, she was British. Thalidomide aside, they seemed so smart over there. They knew some big words. And they could even pronounce them.

Little Matthew Garber was the British child actor who played Michael Banks. He died when he was twenty-one. He didn’t die of polio or cancer. He was from one of those cultured civil service families that enjoyed the exotic life in the colonies. That was a British thing. He contracted hepatitis in India in 1976. He didn’t realize it, though, and he kept slugging it out. Very bad if you have hepatitis. By the time he made his way back to London, he had necrotic pancreatitis. There was no spoonful of sugar for that.

His brother told the press that little Matthew had gotten sick from eating rotten meat in India. Blame it on the colonies. But you don’t get hepatitis from eating rotten meat. You get food poisoning, or a bad stomach ache. You get hepatitis from eating shit. Especially if you are British, clean, godly and not accustomed to eating shit on a daily basis, as Rusty Henderson from Ingram had so judiciously recommended.

I got hepatitis in Chile in 1980. It was bad, but I didn’t die. I just got mean. My innocence was gone for good. Sooner or later, you get tired of eating shit. Even with a spoonful of sugar. You learned to distrust sugar altogether. And all the shape-shifting peddlers of sugar, success and the cult of shining sweetness and light. Fool me once, fuck you. Fool me twice, eat shit and die. 

Why did that never happen to Clayton? Or, did it? He seemed to have an innocent trust in science, rocket ships and government. In later life, he was well-regarded, a prophet of sorts, the role model for doing the right thing. But it wasn’t just old-fashioned ethos from the good old days when shoes were made of leather and telephones had rotary dials. Clayton had something like wisdom, held in an unlikely combination with boyish optimism. He was not as simple as he might have seemed. One of his skiing buddies, after shots of tequila, put it this way: We want to hear what’s on the flip side of Clayton. In the old days, singles were released on 45 rpm vinyl records. There was always another song on the flip side, one that most people rarely heard. But it was there.

The specter of global thermonuclear annihilation in October of ’62 might have been the first inkling of contradiction. The seed of doubt. The first serious blow to Clayton’s worldview surely came while watching JFK with his brains blown out get loaded onto Air Force One and flown back to Washington on November 22 of ‘63. And, certainly, the final blow was cancer. So, what went in between? Who turned that lamb into a tiger? What immortal hand or eye?