Medicine: Fit for the Presidency?

Medical profiles raise questions, but are reassuring

When photographers are allowed to snap Jimmy Carter jogging, John Anderson swimming and Ronald Reagan riding horseback or climbing a tree barechested, the object is not simply to provide some lively pictures to spice up a dull campaign. The presidential contenders are not-so-subtly showing the electorate that they are hale and hearty, up to the physical rigors of the country's highest office.

But just how healthy are they? That question was raised last week at a press conference called by Dr. John Roglieri of Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. An ambitious New York internist, who took advantage of the meeting to make available to reporters copies of his latest book on health risks, Roglieri complained that voters are forced to rely on assessments made by each candidate's physician, and that these are not standardized.

Though Roglieri's complaint is valid up to a point, Americans now have far more intimate medical knowledge of their leaders than have citizens of other countries, or than Americans had in the past. When Grover Cleveland was secretly operated on for cancer of the jaw and mouth on board the yacht Oneida as it cruised on Long Island Sound, the public was told that the President had had some bad teeth extracted. The public did not know about Woodrow Wilson's stroke, nor were voters told about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's failing heart. John F. Kennedy spoke to intimates of "my Addison's disease," but the public was told that he had "a partial adrenal insufficiency." Dwight Eisenhower was the exception. After he was felled by a heart attack, he and his physicians chose full medical disclosure, issuing daily bulletins that went so far as to describe presidential bowel movements. Lyndon Johnson was generous with details of his 1965 gall bladder operation—and, as a now-famous photograph attests, he even showed off his scar for the nation to see.

This year all three presidential candidates seem remarkably fit.