Incumbent Donald Trump is now hospitalized with a potentially fatal disease; and may have been infected for days prior. As bad as this is for all concerned, the president (and the downplay of his symptoms) put him in good (if rarefied) company.
On a summer's day in 1893, the yacht Oneida departed New York harbor for Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Newly re-elected President Grover Cleveland, was onboard: ostensibly for a much needed cruise and fishing trip.
To the public it seemed like a well-needed and well-deserved vacation. The country was in financial turmoil, and Cleveland (who was narrowly nudged out of re-election by Benjamin Harrison in 1888) had been called back to fix it. Our first (and hitherto only) non-consecutive re-election of a president.
However, this cruise was not really a vacation. The President of the United States had cancer; the disclosure of which he feared would move the Panic of 1893 into an even deeper depression, and crash not only Wall Street but the European markets as well. So in a move worthy of the best conspiracy theorists of today, the yacht of his friend Commodore Elias Benedict was converted into a floating operating room, and the rest, as they say-- is history.
However, it was nearly a quarter-of-a-century before the American public knew anything about this history or in fact, how close they were to loosing the president, or the additional fact that for at least 90 minutes the president was anesthetized on a private yacht off the coast of Connecticut.
We may never know if Vice President Adlai Stevenson (not that one; his grandfather) had any idea of what was going on; or if the president had died, how it might have been explained to the American people. But the fact of the matter is this: Presidential health is a state secret of the highest order and always has been for both political and national security reasons.
Take Woodrow Wilson as our next example. The first siting president to visit Europe, Wilson and his Fourteen Points (“Fourteen Points? The Good Lord only gave us Ten, and do we abide by those?” Georges Clemenceau) plowed into Paris after"The War to End All Wars." But whereas the idealistic Wilson may have been adored by the Parisian crowds, the more seasoned statesmen of Europe found him a tiresome neophyte; an assessment shared by his own senate when he returned with a treaty that included the sovereignty-threatening League of Nations.
Ever the stubborn academic, Wilson set-off on a lecture tour to sell his treaty. However, the president (who never had a strong constitution to begin with) finally succumbed to his limitations in Pueblo, Colorado on September 25, 1919, when it was believed he had a TIA (mini stroke). Rushing back to Washington under the cover of "nervous exhaustion" the president greeted folks at the station and retreated hastily to the White House. However, the true crises came a week later when a big stroke paralyzed the president and left him greatly if not entirely diminished.
What occurred in the months to follow, could only be described as a coup, even now. For the next 18 months the first lady, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson acted as president. The U.S. Constitution’s Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 on presidential succession offered no help for this type of incapacity, a fact that left Vice President Thomas Marshall and the president's cabinet in a perturbed quandary, and was ultimately a major contributing factor in the formation and ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution later that same century.
The amazing thing about all this was how the public had no clue. Even congress was clueless for the most part. Granted, the United States was just on the cusp of being a major world power, but the ramifications of an infirm president holding onto power, even then, were grave.
Which leads us to Franklin Roosevelt. Arterial sclerosis, hypertension, congestive heart failure, and a heavy smoker besides; Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term. The Second World War was nearing completion, Yalta loomed, and his personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntire was either a first-rate enabler or an irresponsible co-conspirator-- depending on your point-of-view. (Most scholarship leads to the later rather than the former, since FDR's medical records, of which McIntire had access, have never been fully recovered). Not only was the public not informed of this during the campaign, it was even kept from the Vice Presidential candidate, who garnered his own grave concerns about his chief, the first time they sat-down together at lunch to discuss campaign strategy.
Historians will debate for centuries the impact Roosevelt's health had on the war, the Manhattan Project, Yalta, the Holocaust and myriad other factors. However, his re-election months before his death, and with the full knowledge of his imminent demise is unsettling in the extreme. Now the U.S. was a world power, and within the year would be the first nuclear power (a secret known to only a few dozens of people in 1944). The impact of concealing Roosevelt's true condition from the electorate, the military, and the government was immeasurable.
Finally, good old Ike (Dwight Eisenhower) broke the mold. A man prone to heart attacks, the former general known for his logistic genius, had his Attorney General, Herbert Brownell Jr. draft an agreement whereby the Vice President (Richard Nixon) could act as president, at least so far as heading-up cabinet meetings in the president's absence. Although this provision lacked legal standing, it did at least allow the Vice President to be aware of what was going on in the government, and more importantly-- the world.
All four of these cases (and many more suspected but not proven) show that the first rule of presidential illness and incapacity is denial (followed by secrecy) or in the case of Eisenhower, a questionably legal downplay and circumvention of events. However, after the reckless and self-destructive Lyndon Johnson had a heart attack (after he himself had recently succeeded to the presidency due to the death of the president by assassination) and was photographed speeding around his Texas ranch with wild abandon, congress got busy at last with the writing and ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which presumably makes the unpalatable idea of loosing the presidency due to a temporary medical condition a bit more palatable.
With this said, it is hoped that Mr. Trump will have a safe and speedy recovery. But the need to hide conditions and mislead the public is behind us. In my opinion Mr. Trump would be doing himself and his country a great service by turning the presidency over to Mr. Pence for the time being as prescribed by law. As for the election: political parties are super-legal entities; they and their campaigning are superfluous to the election of the president, especially with a month left until voting. Much like Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft did when Teddy Roosevelt took an attempted assassin's bullet in the chest just before a campaign speech (he finished the speech by the way, and then collapsed) Mr. Biden should call a halt to the campaign while the president is recuperating.
Subterfuge and slight-of-hand will always surround a president's health; but we the voters should always remember a useful Latin phrase:"caveat emptor,"
Let the buyer beware!
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