Today, no presidential wart, hemorrhoid or ulcer is too personal for public scrutiny.
But who can tell how the course of history would have gone had people known in 1919 that Woodrow Wilson was mentally disabled from a stroke during his failed attempt to bring the United States into the League of Nations? Or that Franklin D. Roosevelt hung on the verge of death from heart disease when he negotiated with Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill over the future of Europe in 1945?
An exhibit that opened this month at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia tracks the history of disease and death in the White House and examines the role of physicians who treat presidents.
Throughout U.S. history, these physicians have hidden debilitating and deadly health troubles in the nation’s leaders, says Marc Micozzi, executive director for the college. “Strength and fortitude were the images people expected in the president.”
Micozzi says he hopes to use the exhibit to help settle lingering questions over the physician’s responsibility for disclosure. “We need to resolve what the doctor’s role is. Is the duty first to the president, or first to the public?”
Micozzi also hopes the exhibit will open discussion of the 25th Amendment, which allows the vice president to take over if the president becomes disabled. The amendment has never been implemented, and no one agrees on the definition of disabled, or whose duty it is to declare that a disability exists.
Micozzi and his colleagues began planning for the exhibit last year, when they knew that Bob Dole, at 73, would be trying to become the oldest person elected president. Little did they know that President Clinton’s reticence about releasing his medical records would make presidential health a topic of controversy.
The exhibit begins with George Washington and other early presidents, most of whom were war heroes who “brought a history of illness” in the form of malaria, dysentery, cholera, and other battlefield diseases, says curator Thomas Horrocks.
In hindsight, early presidents often suffered more than their fellow citizens. The extra medical attention they received meant more blood draining, purging, blistering, and other now debunked treatments.
According to the exhibit text, a long tradition of faking good health began with William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840. At 68, he was the country’s oldest president up to that point, and in an attempt to prove his age wouldn’t handicap his abilities, he held to a grueling campaign schedule.
His attempt failed when he began slurring his inaugural address. He died one month later.
The second president to die in office, Zachary Taylor, 64, was known as “old rough and ready” before he suffered a sudden illness during a heat spell around the 4th of July, 1850. The cause of his death is still unclear, however, and several years ago a group of researchers exhumed his body to test a theory that he had been poisoned. They found no such evidence.
Chester A. Arthur, elected in 1882, was diagnosed with the incurable kidney disorder called Bright’s disease. Though the press suspected an illness, Arthur’s spokesman called their report “pure fiction,” says curator Horrocks.
Grover Cleveland was so secretive about his mouth cancer in 1893 that he submitted to surgery strapped to a chair aboard a private yacht headed down Long Island Sound. Though a newspaper broke the story of his cancer surgery, the president’s staff staunchly denied it, telling the public that Cleveland was having a tooth removed.
The exhibit gives a detailed history of the decline of Woodrow Wilson, calling him “the disabled President.” In 1919, following World War I, Wilson traveled to Paris and helped create the League of Nations. But soon after returning home, he suffered a stroke that left him dependent on a cane and unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. In this condition, Wilson tried but failed to get the Senate to approve U.S. membership in the League.
Only a tiny inner circle of people saw Wilson after the stroke. “Even the vice president didn’t know how sick he was,” says Horrocks. The public seemed to be content to keep their image of a healthy leader, says Micozzi. “It was a mass illusion — people were willing to see the president’s new clothes, so to speak.”
The exhibit also details the most infamous health coverup in history — that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, dubbed “the dying President.” Throughout his 12-year presidency, Roosevelt and his staff tried to hide the fact that polio had left him unable to walk unassisted.
It was a cerebral hemorrhage that killed Roosevelt early in his fourth term in office, which began at a pivot point in history, with the previous world order shattered by World War II. Apparently Roosevelt’s doctor was so secretive that the president himself didn’t know how gravely ill he was when he went to Yalta for a summit meeting with Stalin and Churchill. A Navy cardiologist had diagnosed arteriosclerosis, hypertension and imminent cardiac failure.
Roosevelt died two months after Yalta.
The taboo against discussing presidential health began to break down after that. Dwight Eisenhower instructed his staff to tell the public every detail of his heart attack and intestinal surgery. Still, John F. Kennedy kept secret that he suffered from Addison’s disease — a rare disorder of the adrenal glands that destroys the body’s ability to cope with stress.
“Kennedy might not have been elected” had the public known of this disease, says Horrocks. Addison’s is a serious condition that was fatal until the 1950s, when doctors began to treat it with cortisone drugs, which made Kennedy’s face look bloated in some pictures.
The exhibit also shows pictures of Jimmy Carter running in a race at Camp David and President Clinton jogging on a beach — both illustrations of the way presidents now strive to convey an image of robust health.
Clinton — under pressure to release his full medical records as Dole did — last month issued an 11-page summary that says he has no history of major disease such as cancer or heart disease. He revealed that he suffers from allergies and gastrointestinal reflux (which causes heartburn), but he doesn’t give complete information about other ailments he might have.
