How Nixon changed it all
WATERGATE SCANDAL CHANGED AMERICAN PUBLIC’S PERCEPTION OF PRESIDENTIAL TRUTHS
here’s a huge gulf between how we look at medicine now and in, say, the 1950s,” says William Hitchcock, a University of Virginia history professor and author of a forthcoming Eisenhower biography. “Then, when a doctor, a figure of authority, said the president’s going to be all right, it was the end of discussion.”
There was no Sanjay Gupta in the press briefing room, using his own medical knowledge to fact-check the White House physician’s report. There was no phalanx of talking-head surgeons on CNN.
And if the public had known better, it’s possible they would have viewed these health issues as merely a matter of course.
The history of the American presidency has been a history of older men. For the first half of the 20th century, the life expectancy for American males hovered in the 50s and low 60s. The average age of American presidents is 55. Perhaps the country was more forgiving of ill health in the presidency when it was seen as something unavoidable, a by-product of age, rather than something to be railed against and overcome.
The 25th amendment — codifying protocols for when a president dies or is unable to serve — wasn’t even ratified until 1967. That was after Dwight Eisenhower had suffered a major heart attack, which left him recuperating in Denver for several weeks in 1955. (His press secretary first reported it as indigestion before coming clean).
It was also after John Kennedy was assassinated. In life, Kennedy presented an image of healthful vigour, but “his ailments were legion,” says Barbara Perry of the University of Virginia’s Miller Centre, which studies the American presidency. Among them: Addison’s disease, crippling back pain, colitis — not to mention a physician nicknamed “Dr Feelgood” who prescribed the president amphetamines.
Public didn’t know
Some historians posit that the public never would have demanded a detailed rundown of the president’s health were it not for Richard Nixon and Watergate. The scandal was a light switch flipping in the American brain, a realisation that the president might not necessarily be an honest man. That the president might be orchestrating break-ins, and the president might also be having major surgery, on a yacht, out to sea, and dismissing it as tooth pain.
“Presidential physicians find themselves in a very difficult position,” says US historian and author H.W. Brands. “They have taken a vow, as physicians, to protect the privacy of their patients, and to ask a physician to break that bond would feel very strange.” Many White House doctors — a title that wasn’t created officially until 1928 — were simply personal friends of the president until they acquired the most visible stethoscope in the land.
The big question
Would Americans have elected these ailing men if their doctors had been honest? Would they have re-elected them? And what about those doctors? Who are they really working for?
“Increasingly, we’ve gone toward the idea that the physician is actually working for the American people,” Brands says. “But we’re not there yet. I don’t know if we’ll ever get there, or if we should.”
Presidents are not required to release their health records, just like they’re not required to release their taxes. In the modern era, many have done so anyway, resulting in the 1992 revelation that Bill Clinton suffered from allergies, a mild hearing loss, and a left knee ligament strain. When, 24 years later, Hillary Clinton was caught on camera stumbling, a doctor released a statement saying the cause had been pneumonia. Was there more that doctors weren’t telling us?