How Past Presidents Have Hidden Their Infirmities, Just Like Biden

President Biden’s onstage performance in Atlanta last Thursday offered fresh evidence of what many Americans have suspected for years now: The 81-year-old incumbent appears to be battling severe age-related cognitive decline.

In the wake of the debate, new reporting suggests that Biden’s aides have taken great pains in recent months to shield the aging president from reporters, the public, and even White House residence staff. He is reportedly more engaged between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., when aides are likely to schedule his public events. And while the president is known to make gaffes in his public appearances, “people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome,” the New York Times reports. He is often surrounded by staffers on his walk to Marine One, and he now wears larger-soled sneakers in an apparent effort to prevent tripping. He holds far fewer press conferences than his recent predecessors and avoids sit-down interviews like the plague. And when the president does appear at public events, he almost always relies on a teleprompter.

“They were always gatekeeping him — not just him but [the first lady], too,” Michael LaRosa, who previously served as a special assistant to the president and a spokesman to first lady Jill Biden, told National Review on Monday. “They’re very aggressive in safeguarding their privacy and their access to him and limiting access to him. But I didn’t think of it as anything to do with his age, to be honest.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time White House staff have worked to conceal the evidence of a president’s infirmity from the American public: Throughout U.S. history, when the commander in chief has become physically or mentally diminished, those around him — family members, advisers, and staff — have employed a variety of tactics to protect the administration from the resulting fallout by 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 moving operation that was completely concealed 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 an actual report on that operation, and it was just deny, deny, deny, from the White House. The rest of the press colluded with the White House and kept it secret.”

President Woodrow Wilson suffered a series of strokes that left him bedridden for a large chunk of his presidency and left the country with a secret president — First Lady Edith Wilson.

“Mrs. Wilson, legendarily, is not only his gatekeeper, but to a large extent, his decision maker over the last year and a half in the presidency,” Podair says.

Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio in 1921, and his recovery helped him mount a political comeback that vaulted him to the governor’s mansion in New York and then the presidency. He succeeded Herbert Hoover, who is “not a bright and breezy, smiling kind of politician” with the media, Podair notes, and the press “almost fell in love with Roosevelt.”

“Once he becomes president, the media starts to collude in terms of hiding the extent of his illness,” he continues. “He is very rarely photographed in a wheelchair. He is rarely photographed from the waist down, and that, of course, is the doing of a media that pretty much knows that he can’t walk, but gives the impression that he can walk with assistance.” 

By the mid 1940s, Roosevelt had high blood pressure, hypertension, and heart disease — a tricky scenario for his inner circle given how indispensable the president was to the war effort. White House physicians were well aware of his infirmities and hid them from the public while he was running for a fourth term. He died three months into that term from a massive stroke.

Both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Lyndon B. Johnson also had a history of heart disease, with Eisenhower having experienced two serious heart attacks while in office. 

When President Ronald Reagan was shot, the public was not told how serious the wound was. The bullet was an inch from his heart, and the White House played down the seriousness of the assassination attempt. 

This trend dates back as far as the country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, who experienced “prolonged, incapacitating” headaches, particularly in his last year in office. President Chester Arthur, meanwhile, knew he had a fatal case of Bright’s disease when he succeeded President James Garfield. 

“There’s a bipartisan tradition here of concealing presidential infirmities,” Stephen Knott, historian and emeritus professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College tells NR.

President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign went to great lengths to conceal the fact that he was quite sick with Addison’s disease. He had colitis and a degenerative back ailment for which he had gone through at least three operations that were considered so serious that a Catholic priest was called to administer last rites. Medical records disclosed decades after his death revealed that he was constantly taking medication before and during his presidency, including painkillers, stimulants, antispasmodics, and sleeping pills. 

The public didn’t get a very clear sense of all of Kennedy’s ailments until 2003, when historian Robert Dallek published An Unfinished Life, which featured previously unreleased medical records from the Kennedy Library that proved just how sick the young president had been.

It similarly took decades after Roosevelt’s death before the public realized the extent of his illness. 

In today’s 24/7 media environment, however, it’s tougher 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 would be a grainy black-and-white image in a newspaper,” Knott said. “It’s a heck of a lot more difficult to determine that somebody’s failing when you’re looking at a grainy black-and-white photo in the five-cent newspaper, as opposed to high-powered cameras today that can detect every new line and wrinkle in 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 matters were seen by the press to be somewhat private. “The press was reluctant to report things like alcoholism, for instance, until modern times.”

“There was this older notion that what was in the public square was fair game and what was private was considered private. Now, I grant you the health of a president should be considered a public issue, but I think for a good part of the 20th century it was not,” he said.

The problem for Democrats is that the American public is now well aware of Biden’s infirmity. Keeping Biden as the nominee at this point is a major risk.

Around NR 

• Looking to gain insight into what post-debate damage-control conversations might look like at the White House, Audrey Fahlberg spoke with Michael LaRosa, a former special assistant to the president and a former campaign and White House spokesman for Jill Biden:

“Their biggest mistake, from the beginning, was to alienate reporters by treating them as the enemy and losing all goodwill and trust through various small-ball tactics that really poison the relationship between the reporter and the spokesperson,” LaRosa tells National Review. “Had he been more exposed to the public and the media, nights like Thursday night would have been less jarring for everybody. And they might have been given the benefit of the doubt that it was a bad night.”

• “Perhaps the last bulwark standing between Joe Biden and a mob of petrified Democrats demanding his ouster is the general perception that his most likely successor, Kamala Harris, would underperform even the incumbent president in a general election against Donald Trump,” Noah Rothman writes. But as Noah notes, a new CNN post-debate poll throws cold water on that assumption.

• The dam has broken; Democrats are becoming more willing to publicly raise concerns about President Biden’s ability to be the party’s nominee, writes Philip Klein:

The only plausible explanation as to why Biden isn’t doing more things to appear vigorous and tamp down concerns is that he cannot. As a result, I expect that the pressure to get Biden to drop out will only grow in the coming weeks.

• Democrats have become what they claim to hate, Noah Rothman writes:

Joe Biden’s infirmities and their contributions to the president’s maladroit performance have imposed a paradox on the country. The Democratic Party has been reduced to making the negative case for Biden — not that he is a particularly adept president or that his presence in the Oval Office is desirable in itself, but that he is a better steward of the executive branch than Donald Trump. That wouldn’t be a remarkable strategy for an unpopular incumbent save the fact that the incumbent and his movement increasingly mirror all that they despise about Trump.

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