Transparency about the president's health is rare
Throughout history, presidents who have suffered health crises have tended to conceal what’s occurring, writes Barbara Perry
In the 1993 romcom Dave, the President of the United States suffers a stroke while in flagrante delicto. His chief of staff, attempting to seize power from the comatose president, finds a POTUS doppelganger, the titular Dave. A principled mensch, Dave bucks the malevolent chief of staff and promotes his own policies to help the masses whence he hails. Meanwhile, the president remains on life support in a secure room on the White House’s third floor.
Secrecy about Presidential health starts in the nation’s early years, and has included such extremes as President Grover Cleveland having cancer surgery on a boat to avoid detection.
Dave is obviously not a documentary—but it’s accurate in at least one aspect: throughout American history, presidents who have suffered health crises, even in the mass media era, have tended to conceal what’s occurring. The unprecedented Trump presidency, made more surreal with his being whisked to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday after a COVID-19 diagnosis, as he tries to assure the nation in a Twitter video that he thinks he is “doing very well,” proves that this is the rare presidential norm that Trump is ready to follow. However, history also shows just how much the public can benefit from transparency about presidential health.
Secrecy about presidential health starts in the nation’s early years, and has included such extremes as President Grover Cleveland having cancer surgery on a boat to avoid detection. Not even a deadly pandemic has been enough to induce deviation from that unwritten rule. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson contracted what many historians believe to have been the so-called Spanish flu; he took to his bed, fevered and delirious, at the Versailles Treaty negotiations in Paris. After recovering, he returned to the U.S. and undertook a draining and unsuccessful whistle-stop tour around the nation to promote the treaty. When he suffered a debilitating stroke once back at the White House, though he never recovered from its paralytic effects, the First Lady and his physicians insisted on maintaining secrecy about Wilson’s condition.
