Nation: The World at His Bedside

Not until the illnesses of Dwight Eisenhower was the world treated to the intimate, suture-by-suture reporting of presidential ailments that characterized the official treatment of Lyndon Johnson’s operation last week. When Grover Cleveland had an operation for cancer of the jaw in 1893, he slipped away for surgery aboard a boat off Long Island. During the five months when Woodrow Wilson lay paralyzed by a stroke in 1919, the nation was scarcely aware that he was sick. Franklin Roosevelt had been ailing for months before his cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Ga., in 1945, but the public was told nothing of his condition until after he was dead.

Though foreigners deplore the clinical candor of White House bulletins on Ike and L.B.J., the Chief Executive’s health is no longer his private business. Nor should it be, for since World War II the U.S. President’s role in world affairs, and his ability to discharge it, have become matters of global concern. With television and jet planes to thrust him into homes and home towns the world over, the President is also much closer to the people than ever before. This was recognized by Jim Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press secretary, who with Dr. Paul Dudley White was largely responsible for the detailed exegesis of the President’s September 1955 heart attack and seven-week recuperation. “Every American family has had a heart attack in it,” reasoned Hagerty. “People are deeply interested in the President’s recovery.” Thus, White House aides released such minutiae as his rectal temperature and bowel movements, embarrassing as many citizens as they reassured.

Public Detail. When Ike had his ileitis attack in June 1956, there were not many Americans who could boast that they had an inflammation of the lower intestinal tract in the family. It was potentially dangerous in view of the President’s heart condition. Yet, curiously enough, Ike seems not to have been unduly disturbed by the attack or his operation. In the second, concluding volume of his presidential memoirs (The White House Years, 1956-61: Waging Peace), out this week, he devotes only one paragraph to that illness, recalls: “Strangely enough, although I was truly miserable for several days, I was never disturbed by the doubts that beset so many others.”

Eisenhower’s third illness in office, a minor stroke suffered in November 1957, kept him inactive for no more than 72 hours. Nonetheless, this “spasm” was clearly an awesome experience for him. In Waging Peace, a book that is generally short on personal insights and long on familiar facts, Ike discusses his reactions in detail.

As he was about to sign some papers, he writes, “I experienced a strange although not alarming feeling of dizziness. Since the sensation lasted only a moment, I reached for another paper. Suddenly I became frustrated. It was difficult for me to take hold of the first paper on the pile. I found that the words on it seemed literally to run off the top of the page. Now more than a little bewildered, I dropped the pen. Failing in two or three attempts to pick it up, I decided to get to my feet, and at once found I had to catch hold of my chair for stability.” When an aide arrived, the President could not speak coherently: “Words, but not the ones I wanted, came to my tongue.”

Private Test. Shortly after the attack, the President underwent exhaustive clinical tests (“all over my head electrodes were held in place by small mudballs”). The results were reassuring, but he continued to agonize over the possibility that he might not be fully capable of expressing himself or making decisions. So Ike devised his own “simple, logical test to see whether I was physically and mentally capable of serving as President”; he decided to attend a “presumably strenuous” NATO conference in Paris in December, 1957. “If I felt the results to be less than satisfactory, then I would resign,” he recalls. All went well, and he even made a speech.

Thereafter, he says, “no question of the kind again occurred to me.” Nonetheless, Eisenhower never fully overcame his speech difficulty, confesses that “even today I occasionally reverse syllables in a long word, and at times am compelled to speak slowly and cautiously if I am to enunciate clearly.” In every other respect, however, Ike today seems as chipper as ever. This week, in appreciation of his present vigor and past feats, Republicans will gather to salute the former President at banquet tables from Alaska to Connecticut. The occasion: Dwight Eisenhower’s 75th birthday.