The President: Keeping His Nose Clean

It was a repeat performance, but this time the Administration was more forthcoming. When Ronald Reagan walked into the press conference he called to discuss the denouement of the Achille Lauro hijacking, he was wearing a flesh- colored bandage on his nose. He opened with a jocular announcement: another cancerous growth had been removed, and “I can stand before you proudly and say my nose is clean.”

The up-front and offhand nature of his statement was intended to dispel the sort of confusion that attended the Administration’s handling of the President’s previous nose operation last July. Then it was six days before Reagan took questions on the subject. The diagnosis, now as then: basal-cell carcinoma, the most common and least dangerous form of cancer. The second lesion on the President’s nose was removed by a Washington dermatologist, whom the Administration refuses to identify, in a short operation performed in the White House doctor’s office under local anesthetic. Reagan explained that his doctors had been “keeping track” of his skin since his last operation. The latest surgery revealed “no sign of spreading,” said a White House spokesman after the press conference.