Let’s hope President Trump’s health is as sound as he says it is and he’s well on the road to recovery. He certainly seems… chipper, at any rate. Still, you’d be a fool to take such professions on faith—not just because of the non-stop frenzy of dissembling and double talk we’ve seen since Friday, when the president revealed he was COVID-positive—but because of the long history of official lies about presidents’ health.
When I saw the headline “Medical Spin in Past Undermines Trust” in Sunday’s New York Times, I thought they’d go into some of that history. But the article’s mostly about past dissembling by this president’s doctors about this president’s health. Fair enough, but a longer view gives us still more reason to verify, instead of trust, official pronouncements about the state of any president’s health.
The best-known story is probably Woodrow Wilson’s massive stroke in October 1919, which left him bedridden and almost wholly incapacitated for the remainder of his term. His wife Edith essentially served as acting president, “shield[ing] Woodrow from interlopers and embark[ing] on a bedside government that essentially excluded Wilson’s staff, the Cabinet and the Congress.” But, as historian Robert Dallek recounts in his 2010 article “Presidential Fitness and Presidential Lies,” examples are legion. FDR managed to keep the public mostly in the dark about his partial paralysis from polio, aided by camera-snatching Secret Service agents who wouldn’t allow photos of the president in a wheelchair. While pursuing a fourth term in 1944, Roosevelt was “suffering from an enlarged heart and severe hypertension that threatened his life, [and] experienced significant weight loss, headaches, fatigue, and an inability to concentrate for sustained periods of time.” He died 82 days after inauguration. “In running for reelection under these circumstances,” Dallek writes, “FDR committed a terrible ethical breach.”
John F. Kennedy’s aura of vitality and “vigah” depended on deliberate lies about his massive health problems, including the adrenal-gland disorder Addison’s disease, for which he required regular steroid treatments. In 2013, after examining a raft of newly released Kennedy papers, Dallek reported that
“during his presidency—and in particular during times of stress, such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in April of 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962—Kennedy was taking an extraordinary variety of medications: steroids for his Addison’s disease; painkillers for his back; anti-spasmodics for his colitis; antibiotics for urinary-tract infections; antihistamines for allergies; and, on at least one occasion, an anti-psychotic (though only for two days) for a severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed had been brought on by the antihistamines.”
Kennedy’s regimen also included a potent cocktail of painkillers and amphetamines regularly administered by celebrity physician Max “Dr. Feelgood” Jacobson; “I don’t care if it’s horse piss, it works,” JFK said of the injections.
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