They Can ana Do Come Back

HEART ATTACK VICTIMS

They Can and Do Come Back

As the possibility that President Eisenhower might run increased in speculative calculations last week, attention inevitably turned on other busy men who returned to their jobs after heart attacks. The value of these cases as precedents is limited by the fact that there is no job comparable to that of Chief Executive of the U.S.

AMONG the most robust of U.S. politicians is Mississippi's 74-year-old Governor Hugh White, who was stricken with coronary thrombosis in 1938, while serving his first term in office. (He was elected again in 1951.) Eleven weeks later, White went back to work. "I had a special session of the legislature on at the time," White recalls, "and the next year I was out stumping all over the state, trying to get Senator Bilbo's seat in Washington. That was no easy job. I lost the election —but it wasn't because I wasn't speaking in every little town in Mississippi." Says White today: "My health is perfect—couldn't be finer." Another governor, Colorado Democrat Ed Johnson, had a heart attack last September, has since resumed most of the duties of his office, while Texas' Democratic Senator Lyndon Johnson is again a man in motion after a severe coronary last July. Johnson has every expectation of returning to his post as the Senate's majority leader, although he plans to delegate more of the work than he did before.

Some foreign political leaders have also returned to action after heart attacks. Pakistan's Prime Minister Chaudhri Mohamad Ali* had a heart attack in 1952, when he was Finance Minister. Brazil's João Café Filho has recovered from his November heart attack at least to the point of demanding— without success—that he be given back his job as President. Canada's M. J. Coldwell, leader of the CCF (Socialist Party), was a heart patient three years ago, stayed in politics, and just last week completed a tour in which he made 50 speeches in eight of Canada's ten provinces. Says Coldwell: "My medical reports are excellent, and I never felt better in my life."

It seems more than possible that Joseph Stalin survived to trouble the world for at least eight years after a heart attack. Recalling a banquet at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Harry S. Truman wrote in his recent memoirs: "I was seated next to Stalin, and I noticed that he drank from a tiny glass that held about a thimbleful. He emptied it frequently and replenished it from a bottle he kept handy. I assumed that it was vodka, which everybody else was being served, and I began to wonder how Stalin could drink so much of that powerful beverage. Finally I asked him, and he looked at me and grinned. Then he leaned over to his interpreter and said, 'Tell the President it is French wine, because since my heart attack I can't drink the way I used to.' " Stalin died March 5, 1953—of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks was stricken twelve years ago with angina pectoris, a condition less likely to cause permanent heart damage than coronary thrombosis. Weeks now considers himself fully recovered, works a five-day week from 8:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.