American Notes

THE PRESIDENT Back to Bethesda

In a regularly scheduled six-month follow-up to his surgery for colon cancer last July, President Reagan paid a return visit last week to an operating room in Bethesda Naval Hospital. What had been billed as a routine examination proved to be a complicated series of tests. Doctors clipped three tiny polyps from the wall of the President's colon and shipped them off for examination. A surgeon shaved off a tiny growth on the right side of Reagan's face and sent it, too, for a biopsy. The six-hour medical work-up also included X rays, blood tests and a CAT scan, which provides images of internal organs.

To the waiting press corps, White House Spokesman Larry Speakes issued a one-paragraph statement, including the assurance that "all indications are that when the lab results are in they will confirm the President to be in excellent health." Next day the results were released: all the growths were found to be benign. That came as no surprise to Reagan. When he departed from the hospital the day before, he said he felt "just fine" and flashed the thumbs-up sign as he and Nancy boarded a helicopter and headed off to Camp David for the three-day weekend.

When the plain-paper copying process was discovered in 1938, its revolutionary potential was so little appreciated that Inventor Chester Carlson wound up selling it to the Battelle Memorial Institute, a research foundation in Columbus. In 1947, Battelle in turn sold the technology to the company that eventually became Xerox. Now Battelle has warned that Carlson's invention, which has become not only an office fixture but something of a technological wonder, will by the end of the decade be capable of duplicating the delicate shadings of U.S. currency. In a study for the Federal Reserve, Battelle predicts that as many as 20% of those with access to the super copiers will use the new machines' extraordinary color capability to roll off near-perfect counterfeits of paper money.

Worried about the funny-money threat, the U.S. Treasury is considering plans to issue harder-to-copy greenbacks. Some proposals: subtle watermarks and plastic security threads woven into the currency. But Treasury Secretary James Baker still must approve the changes, and it will be at least a year after that before new bills are printed--on legitimate Government presses.

The President Taylor, a U.S. merchant vessel with a small cargo of cotton, was cruising in the Gulf of Oman 26 miles out of the United Arab Emirates port of Fujaira when it happened. An Iranian frigate warned the Taylor to prepare to be boarded. The U.S. captain reluctantly consented. For 45 minutes an Iranian officer and six seamen, three equipped with submachine guns, searched for matériel that might be destined for Iraq, Iran's enemy in the five-year-old gulf war. Finding none, they departed.