Presidents and health: History is replete with secrecy and lies
WASHINGTON » Throughout American history, an uncomfortable truth has been evident: Presidents have lied about their health.
In some cases, the issues wereminor, in others quite grave. And sometimes it took decades for the public to learn the truth.
Now President Donald Trump has been diagnosed with the COVID-19 disease. The White House initially said he had “mild symptoms.” By Friday evening, he was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. After a rosy press conference by the president’s medical team, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Saturday that Trump had gone through a “very concerning” period Friday and that the next 48 hours would be critical in terms of his care.
Parallels withWilson
Pandemics have cursed the presidencies of both Trump andWoodrowWilson. Each played down the viruses that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Both presidents got sick — and each had to decide howmuch to tell the public.
Like many administrations before, Wilson’s White House tried to keep his sickness secret.
He was at talks in Paris on ending World War I when he fell ill in April 1919. His symptoms were so severe and surfaced so suddenly that his personal physician, Cary Grayson, thought he had been poisoned. After a fitful night caring for Wilson, Grayson wrote a letter back to Washington to inform the WhiteHouse that the president was very sick.
Flash forward 100 years. In a tweet at 12:54 a.m. Friday, Trump told the world that he and first ladyMelania Trump had contracted COVID-19.
The White House initially shared few details about his condition. White
House press secretary KayleighMcEnany said he was taken toWalter Reedmany hours later “out of an abundance of caution.”
However sick he was or wasn’t, his COVID-19 was startling since Trump had been declaring almost daily that the nation had turned the corner on the disease, which has killed 208,000 people in the United States.
Trump has said he has played down the pandemic so as not to create panic, but there were political reasons for doing so. Seeking another four years in office, Trump did not want the U. S. economy to tank before the Nov. 3 election.
“The Wilson administration, for a very different reason, completely downplayed the pandemic,” said John Barry, an adjunct professor in public health at Tulane University whose book “The Great Inf luenza” chronicles the 191819 pandemic that sickened Wilson and killed 675,000 Americans. “Wilson was concerned that any negative news about anything would detract from the war effort — decrease the energy that people would put into winning the war. In this case, there aremore strictly political benefits.”
‘Good cause of real concern’
William Howell, professor of American politics at the University of Chicago, wonders how transparent the White House will be about Trump’s case of COVID-19.
“He is obviously going to be eager to get back onto the campaign trail,” Howell said. “He has all kinds of incentives to signal strength and to get back into the mix. He’s going to want to.”
But he added: “This is a president who’s been less than straightforward over the course of hispresidency about allmanner of factual issues. And so, is he to be believed is a good cause of real concern.”
He said the pathology of COVID-19 and the virus in 1918 are “very similar, and that’s a little scary.”
History is replete with examples of how presidents have kept the American public in the dark about their ailments and medical conditions.
President Grover Cleveland, fearing poor health would be a political weakness, underwent secret oral surgery late at night in a private yacht in Long Island Sound. The cancerous lesion taken from his mouth was displayed in 2000 in an exhibit by the College of Physicians, a Philadelphia-based medical society.
President Lyndon B. Johnson secretly underwent surgery for removal of a skin lesion on his hand in 1967.
FDR’s secret
After leading the nation through a decade of war and depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed early in 1944 as suffering from high blood pressure, hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure and acute bronchitis.
The problems also betrayed an underlying arteriosclerosis — hardening of the arteries. Roosevelt was put on a low-saltdietandordered to cut down on smoking. But with an election coming on, Roosevelt and theWhiteHouse staffissued a statement saying the problemwas far less serious.
“The stories that he’s in bad health are understandable enough around election time, but they are not true,” his doctor told a reporter. Historians now believe his doctors concealed all the facts from their patient and the public.
Roosevelt won reelection. Only months later, on April 12, 1945, he died of a stroke.
According to historian Robert Dallek, President John F. Kennedy suffered more pain and illness than most people knew and took as many as eight medications a day, including painkillers, stimulants, sleeping pills and hormones to keep him alive.