Candidates Coming Clean on Health

Hillary Clinton, 68, was recently diagnosed with pneumonia, and the public didn't know about it until two days later, when she abruptly left a Sept. 11 memorial ceremony feeling unwell and needing to be helped into a vehicle.

If Donald Trump, 70, were elected, he would be older than any previous president at the start of his first term — and, like Clinton, he hasn't released detailed records about his health beyond a doctor's letter. Both candidates promised Monday to release more detailed medical records soon.

But the idea of presidential candidates, or sitting presidents, disclosing their health history is relatively new. And though recent presidents have released detailed updates about their health, there is no law mandating disclosure.

America has a rich history of presidents and presidential candidates hiding their health problems from the public, sometimes successfully and sometimes with serious consequences.  The first well-documented instance of a presidential campaign affected by health disclosures was the 1960 campaign between Kennedy and Nixon.

There has been lingering questions whether full disclosure of Kennedy's Addison's disease, which was kept under control by replacement hormones, would have thrown the election to Nixon. 

Kennedy suffered from adrenal insufficiency since he was 30 years old.  

Journalists who covered Kennedy said years later that the news of Kennedy's medical condition would have swung the election to Nixon.  "A statement like that would have been fatal to his campaign," Russell Baker, a columnist for The New York Times, said.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, burglars ransacked the office of Eugene J. Cohen, a New York endocrinologist who had been treating Kennedy for Addison’s disease. When they failed to find Kennedy’s records, which were filed under a code name, they tried unsuccessfully to break into the office of Janet Travell, an internist and pharmacologist who had been relieving Kennedy’s back pain with injections of painkillers.

During the 1960 campaign, aides to Lyndon B. Johnson told reporters that Kennedy had Addison's. The Kennedy campaign flatly denied the story, saying later that their candidate was "the healthiest candidate for President in the country" 5  in obvious comparison to Lyndon Johnson, who had suffered an almost fatal heart attack five years earlier in 1955. 

Kennedy's brother Robert denied that he had the ailment, issuing a statement  saying his brother "does not now nor has he ever had an ailment described classically as Addison's disease."   This semantic dodge relied on Thomas Addison's original 1885 description of the disease as being the result of  adrenal glands destroyed by tuberculosis.  John Kennedy, whose Addison's disease was caused by unknown factors, did not have tuberculosis.  At a news conference on November 10, 1960, Kennedy again denied that he had Addison's disease. 


Of course, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's successor, flouted that type of discretion. After Johnson had gall bladder surgery in 1965, he lifted up his shirt to show reporters his scar.



Former White House physician Lawrence Mohr has said, "Just because a president has an illness doesn't mean that's a disqualifying factor if that illness can be effectively treated," pointing to Roosevelt's long years in office.  The things that are really important, according to Mohr, are not the name of the illness or the specific diagnosis, but whether the president can think clearly, act appropriately and communicate effectively.