Trump’s COVID-19 Diagnosis Recalls History Of Secrecy On Presidential Health

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President Trump exits Marine One at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday in Bethesda, Md. He is staying at the hospital while receiving treatment for the coronavirus.





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None of opaqueness should come as surprise, though. Few occasions of historical importance have been so shrouded in secrecy — and even outright deception — as the health emergencies of world leaders. The U.S. may have been more transparent about these events than most countries, but, even here, the truth has only come to light over time.

«This is one precedent this president is following, says Barbara Perry, director of Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Perry says the American public has a right to know the health of their presidents, especially now, given that voters are also just weeks away from deciding at the ballot box who is most fit to inhabit the Oval Office.

«They used to say when the president gets a cold, the stock market drops, Perry says. «It really has an impact on people’s lives, whether it’s the economy, or in this instance, it would help us to know, is he now even capable of governing?

Here are a few of the more egregious cases of obfuscation in the past, when the health of the president was in question while he was in office.

Exhibit A: The incapacity of Woodrow Wilson





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President Woodrow Wilson and his wife, first lady Edith Bolling Wilson, in an undated photo.





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Newspaper reporters who cover President Roosevelt work in the temporary press room at the White House in July 1934.





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The idea of the White House as a «beat did not begin until late in the 1800s. The nascent White House Correspondents Association had just 11 members at its birth in 1914, and there would not be a formal position of White House press secretary until 1929.

There had been earlier cases of individual reporters who strove to find the truth about the physical condition of various presidents. In one notable case, a Philadelphia newspaper reporter named E.J. Edwards learned that President Grover Cleveland’s 1893 «fishing trip on the yacht of a friend had in fact had a different purpose.

A team of surgeons had accompanied the president on the four-day excursion and removed a cancerous growth from the roof of his mouth. The public was never told. And when Edwards learned the truth from a medical professional involved, his reported story was flatly denied — and his reputation assaulted — by the president himself.

The hidden conditions of FDR





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President Franklin Roosevelt is seen shortly before addressing the public in one of his «fireside chats from the White House in June 1944.





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President John F. Kennedy and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy head to a state dinner in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, France, in June 1961.





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Rarely has the actual condition of a president’s health been more at odds with his image than was the case with President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Just 43 when he was elected president, JFK made youth and «vigor themes of his campaign and early months in office.

But Kennedy himself was far from the physical ideal he sought to project. As biographer Michael Kazin has noted, the young JFK «suffered from a variety of ailments that frequently confined him to bed and plagued him throughout his life. Many of these were typical childhood ailments such as chicken pox, measles and ear infections. But he also contracted scarlet fever, a life-threatening disease in 1920.

Historian Robert Dallek devoted an entire book to JFK’s medical history. He detailed how Kennedy had dealt with fevers as well as issues of the stomach, colon and adrenal glands. At 30 he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, an endocrine disorder that could have ended his life even earlier than an assassin’s bullet did in 1963 — especially given the added presence of hypothyroidism. The contentions between his doctors and their competing prescriptions were also a factor in his performance in office.

But absolutely none of this reached the public during Kennedy’s active years in politics, nor in his three years in the White House. When he needed treatments, reporters were told it related to chronic and severe back pain, which could be vaguely attributed to his exploits as a Navy hero in the Second World War. The full story of JFK’s illnesses would not be told for decades.

The near-death of Ronald Reagan





President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan are pictured at George Washington University Medical Center, where he is recovering from being shot, on April 3, 1981.





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President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981 and just two months later was shot at close range by a deranged young man outside a Washington, D.C., hotel. Reagan was rushed to a nearby hospital, where TV cameras recorded him walking in the door — but did not see him collapse a few steps inside.

At that point, a bullet in his chest was close to costing him his life. According to Del Quintin Wilber, a Washington Post reporter who wrote a book about that day called Rawhide Down, Reagan lost almost half his blood volume and came within seconds of dying.

What the public saw and heard, however, was far different. White House spokesmen described a plucky patient who bantered with the surgeons («I hope you’re all Republicans, he reportedly said) and his wife («Honey, I forgot to duck).

In reality, the president was desperately close to death. But that went largely unreported for nearly 30 years, while the tale of his miraculous resilience persisted throughout his lifetime.

Later, in Reagan’s second term, there were signs of deteriorating mental acuity. In his reelection campaign of 1984 he showed lapses of memory and awareness. In 1988, he mispronounced the name of George H.W. Bush, his vice president, who had been nominated by his party to succeed him.

But that story, too, went largely unreported. The former president was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 1994, five years after leaving office.

NPR producer Sam Gringlas contributed to this report.