Candidates' health can decide an election

While a candidate’s belated disclosure of his medical history can be disastrous, no disclosure at all sometimes has helped a candidate skate past Election Day successfully.

Kennedy's disease in 1960
At the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Kennedy, 43, sought to portray himself as more physically fit than his rival Sen. Lyndon Johnson, 52, who’d suffered a heart attack in 1955.

In an implied contrast with both Johnson and with President Eisenhower, who himself had suffered a heart attack in 1955 and a stroke in 1957, Kennedy said the next president needed to have “the strength and health and vigor” of a young man.

In a last-ditch effort to block Kennedy from winning the nomination, two Johnson supporters called a press conference to reveal that Kennedy had long suffered from Addison’s disease, an ailment that, left untreated, could have killed him.

(One of those Johnson allies was John Connolly. In a twist of history, Connolly was in the limousine with Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 and was wounded in the assassination that killed the president.)

Kennedy’s campaign manager, his brother Robert, devised a statement from his doctors which denied that Kennedy had Addison’s disease, but instead suffered only from an “adrenal insufficiency.” It was “a remarkable piece of political double talk,” said Kenneth Crispell and Carlos Gomez in their book "Hidden Illness in the White House." But it helped muffle the controversy.

Even more successful than Kennedy in 1960 in keeping his medical condition secret was President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.

Roosevelt's ill health in 1944
A cardiologist diagnosed FDR with extreme hypertension and heart disease eight months before the 1944 election. But this was known by only a few people in the White House.

In the fall campaign, Roosevelt's Republican opponent, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, made jabbing references to “the tired old men” in the White House.

And voters who watched Roosevelt on newsreels at their movie theaters could see he was thin and tired, not the ebullient crusader he had been in 1940, when he won his third term. But they did not know how sick he was. Roosevelt won a fourth term on Nov. 7, 1944, and died just five months later.

In 1992, Democratic presidential contender Paul Tsongas opted for partial disclosure.

The former Massachusetts senator told voters that he had recovered from the lymphatic cancer that he’d had seven years earlier. Tsongas invited the news media to photograph him swimming laps in a pool to demonstrate his good health. He accused his rivals of “trying to spread (false) stories” about his health.

"I don't believe even if it came back it would kill me in a four-year period," he said in March of 1992, a few weeks after beating Bill Clinton in the New Hampshire primary.

Belated disclosure about Tsongas
Tsongas soon ran out of money and dropped out of the race. Shortly after his exit, his doctors admitted that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer in 1987, less than a year after undergoing a bone marrow transplant.

Tsongas had another recurrence of cancer in November 1992 and died of pneumonia on Jan. 18, 1997.

The episode raised questions: What if Tsongas had beaten Clinton in ’92 and gone on to win the presidency? How would a fatally ill president have functioned? Could he have done his job while undergoing chemotherapy?

The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, sets up a procedure for a president to temporarily step aside and have the vice president serve as acting president.

It also allows for a two-thirds vote by Congress to decide who should serve when there's a dispute between the president, on the one hand, and his vice president and cabinet officers, on the other, on whether the president is able to serve.

Reagan's mental acuity questioned
In 1984, the issue wasn't so much physical fitness as mental acuity.

At age 73, Ronald Reagan was running for a second term against Democrat Walter Mondale, a man 17 years younger than he. Reagan's mental sharpness became a concern after his answers in their first debate came across as muddled.

Two days after the debate, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Until Sunday night's debate, age hadn't been much of an issue in the election campaign. That may now be changing. The president's rambling responses and occasional apparent confusion injected an unpredictable new element into the race.”

But Reagan defused the controversy by using humor in his second debate with Mondale: “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Reagan ended up winning 49 out of 50 states.

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