Hugh Sidey The Presidency:The Doctor and the Ideal Patient

Buried beneath our prejudices and the actuarial tables is a fact: Ronald Reagan, at 70, may have been the healthiest man to assume the presidency since Harry Truman.

Eisenhower had his ileitis symptoms, and Kennedy went into power with a form of Addison’s disease. Johnson had suffered his first heart attack, and Nixon was shadowed by phlebitis. Ford’s otherwise robust physique was flawed by old football injuries. Carter came to the White House with his record showing a period of depression after a race for Governor of Georgia in 1966.

But Reagan, the old man of the bunch, had somehow stayed together. The White House physician, Dr. Daniel Ruge, put it this way three days before the shooting: “What can I tell a man who is 70 and in better shape than I am?”

Ruge is 63 and a farm boy from Nebraska, where they claim that if you make it through your first year you live almost forever.

Ruge, stately and cautious, had been chatting on a Friday evening in his small White House office about how to sustain Reagan’s good health—and to prepare for emergencies, the kind that would occur in just 70 hours.

Ruge had been chosen White House physician because of his association with Loyal Davis, Nancy Reagan’s father. A neurosurgeon, Ruge had met the President in earlier years but had not known him as a patient. Bit by bit, he was accumulating medical data and his impressions of Reagan’s lifestyle, these observations perhaps more revealing than any statistics.

Ruge had watched Reagan around the White House, seen him at state dinners, traveled with him aboard Air Force One.

When Reagan went horseback riding at Quantico, Va., Ruge, who spent some of his boyhood on the backs of his father’s Percherons, watched with a certain nostalgia from the fences. “The President is a marvelous physical specimen,” he said. “His very demeanor shows that he is healthy.”

From that conclusion, Ruge’s approach to White House health was plotted. He would not stalk the President, believing that an overzealous doctor can create a dependent patient.

Reagan was his own best doctor in many ways, Ruge noted. The President could pace himself, discipline his appetites, his activity. “He simply knows how to take care of himself,” declared Ruge. That is in marked contrast to the excesses of work and indulgence seen in other Presidents, notably L.B. J. Ruge has studied carefully the White House environment, Reagan’s state of mind, any symptoms of stress. What he found was reassuring. He noted that those who traveled with the President, whether staff or Secret Service agents, genuinely liked him. That aura, created in large part by Reagan’s humor and courtesy, was a great health benefit. Ruge was also convinced that Nancy Reagan’s dedication to her husband was another element in his excellent state of mind and body.

The greatest concern of the President’s physician was somehow devising outlets from the White House cloister for the President. Reagan is not a golfer, a jogger or a tennis player. He likes to ride, but that is not enough. Reagan’s therapy, Ruge noted, came from messing around outdoors. It takes a small-town boy to understand that. Woodchopping, planting, pruning, fixing up and just moving around, doing something useful, can keep the eyes clear, the heart vibrant, the muscles taut. That poses a challenge in the White House, where all the chores are done and the President’s exertion is walking from meeting to meeting.

Dan Ruge has been diverted for the moment. But he will soon be back, gently urging the President to keep chopping wood on his California ranch and canter off over the Virginia hills whenever he can. Doctor and patient are in harmony about what keeps a President going.