President Joe Biden’s performance at the Atlanta debate last Thursday offered fresh evidence of what many Americans have suspected for years: The 81-year-old current president appears to be battling severe age-related cognitive decline.
In the wake of the debate, new reports suggest that Biden’s aides have gone to great lengths in recent months to shield the aging president from reporters, the public and even White House residence staff. He is reportedly most engaged between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when aides are likely to schedule his public events.
And while the president is known for making gaffes in public appearances, “people who have been around him more recently say the lapses have become more frequent, more pronounced and more troubling,” the report said. New York Times.
He is often surrounded by staff as he walks to Marine One — where the official helicopters that carry the U.S. president are stationed — and now wears sneakers with thick soles in an apparent effort to avoid tripping. He has given far fewer press conferences than his recent predecessors and has avoided seated interviews. And when he does appear at public events, Biden almost always uses a teleprompter.
“They always watched him – not just him, but [a primeira-dama] too,” Michael LaRosa, who previously served as special assistant to the president and press secretary for first lady Jill Biden, told National Review on Monday. “They’re very aggressive about protecting their privacy and access to it and limiting access to it. But I didn’t think of it as an age thing, to be honest.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that White House officials have worked to hide evidence of a president’s illness from the American public: Throughout U.S. history, when a Washington official has become physically or mentally ill, those around him — family members, advisers and staff — have employed a variety of tactics to shield the administration from the resulting fallout while keeping voters in the dark.
“Grover Cleveland was probably the most egregious, because he had an actual cancer operation in 1893, on a yacht, of all things — a mobile operation that was completely hidden from the press and where he lost much of his upper jaw,” says Jerald Podair, a professor of history and American studies at Lawrence University. “There was a real report about this operation, and it was just denial, denial, denial from the White House. The rest of the press conspired with the White House and kept this secret.”
President Thomas Woodrow Wilson suffered a series of strokes that left him bedridden for much of his presidency and left the country with a secret president – First Lady Edith Wilson.
“Mrs. Wilson, legendarily, is not only his guardian, but to a large extent the real decision-maker during the last year and a half of Thomas’ presidency,” Podair says.
Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921, and his recovery helped him mount a political comeback that took him to the governor’s mansion in New York and then to the presidency.
He succeeded Herbert Hoover, who was “not a bright, happy, smiling kind of politician” to the media, Podair notes, and the press “almost fell in love with Roosevelt.”
“After he became president, the media began to conspire to hide the extent of his illness,” he continues. “He was rarely photographed in a wheelchair. He was rarely photographed from the waist down, and that, of course, was the work of a media that knew he could not walk but gave the impression that he could walk with assistance.”
By the mid-1940s, Roosevelt was suffering from high blood pressure, hypertension, and heart disease—a difficult scenario for his inner circle to deal with, given the president’s importance to the war effort. White House doctors were well aware of his ailments and kept them from the public while he was running for a fourth term. He died three months later of a massive stroke.
Both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Lyndon B. Johnson also had a history of heart disease, with Eisenhower suffering two serious heart attacks while in office.
When President Ronald Reagan was shot, the public was not informed of the severity of his wound. The bullet was just inches from his heart, and the White House downplayed the seriousness of the assassination attempt.
This trend dates back to the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, who suffered from “prolonged and incapacitating” headaches, especially in his last year in office. Meanwhile, President Chester Arthur knew he had a fatal case of Bright’s disease when he succeeded President James Garfield.
“There is a bipartisan tradition here of covering up presidential illnesses,” Stephen Knott, a historian and professor emeritus of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, told the National Review.
President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign went to great lengths to hide the fact that he was quite ill with Addison’s disease.
He had colitis and a degenerative back disease, for which he underwent at least three operations that were considered so serious that even a Catholic priest was called in to administer extreme unction – a sacrament dedicated to the sick.
Medical records released decades after his death revealed that he was constantly taking medications before and during his presidency, including painkillers, stimulants, antispasmodics and sleeping pills.
The public did not have a clear understanding of all of Kennedy’s illnesses until 2003, when historian Robert Dallek published An Unfinished Life, which presented previously unpublished medical records from the Kennedy Library that proved just how ill the young president had been.
Likewise, it was not until decades after Roosevelt’s death that the public learned the extent of his illness.
However, in today’s 24/7 media environment, it’s harder to keep secrets when every reporter and citizen has a cellphone camera to capture a president’s every gaffe and misstep.
“One of the things about that debate last week was that Biden just looked old. When it comes to Franklin Roosevelt, the only thing you would see is a grainy black-and-white picture in a newspaper,” Knott said. “It’s much harder to tell if someone is failing when you look at a grainy black-and-white photo in a five-cent newspaper, as opposed to today’s high-powered cameras that can detect every new line and wrinkle on a president’s face.”
Before Watergate, there was a “high wall of separation” between “what was considered public and what was considered private,” Knott said. Health issues were viewed by the press as a private matter. “The press was reluctant to report on things like alcoholism, for example, until modern times.”
“There was an older notion that what was in the public square was fair game and what was private was considered private. Now, I grant you that the health of a president should be considered a public matter, but I think for much of the 20th century it wasn’t,” he said.
The biggest challenge for Democrats right now is that the American public is now well aware of Biden’s illness. Keeping him as a candidate at this point is a huge risk.
©2024 National Review. Published with permission. Original in English: How Past Presidents Have Hidden Their Infirmities, Just Like Biden
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