Last week, we celebrated another anniversary besides the 250th birthday of Mr. Jefferson’s big idea. Just prior to the Declaration’s 113th birthday, and almost 133 years before its most recent one, there was a yacht called the Oneida was a moored offshore in the East River.
Its captain, Commodore Elias Benedict, was a prominent New York banker as well as an accomplished yachtsman. He’d made his original pile in what we would today call the energy extraction industries—to wit, oil and gas production. He also was deeply involved in Arctic exploration. Famous explorer Robert Peary named a fjord in northern Greenland after Benedict.
This being the aftermath of the Gilded Age, Benedict was politically wired. He was a friend of the incumbent president, Grover Cleveland. This also being the golden age of tariff-based boom-and-bust economics, the country was in the middle of a murderous panic. Unemployment hit 35 percent in New York and 43 percent in Michigan. Five hundred banks folded. Cleveland was widely held to be responsible.
Shortly after he was inaugurated for his second, nonconsecutive term, Cleveland discovered a rough area in the roof of his mouth. He had his personal physician, an Army major named Robert O’Reilly, examine the area. O’Reilly was sufficiently alarmed and sent a sample of the area to two different experts. It was, as O’Reilly feared, a carcinoma in the president’s mouth. It needed to be excised, quickly and, given the jittery national economy, quietly as well. Two of the best surgeons were brought in on the QT. And it was determined that they would perform the surgery secretly aboard Commodore Benedict’s yacht. According to a study of the events from the University of Arizona, not much was left to chance.
Besides O’Reilly, Bryant, and Keen, the surgical team would consist of a dentist, Ferdinand Hasbrouk, Edward Janeway, and J.F. Eidmann. Hasbrouk would be the one who would administer anesthesia to the president, a not-uncommon practice at that time. His presence proved useful at a later point when rumors circulated about the surgery; White House aides said that the president’s only problem was the removal of a tooth and fortunately, a dentist was on board.
The surgery was performed on July 1, 1893. The president’s mouth received disinfectant. Hasbrouk administered anesthesia and removed two of the president’s teeth. Cocaine was used as a topical anesthetic as Bryant and Keen, making use of a French made cheek retractor began the surgery. Ronald Spiro describes the work:
“(A)n incision was made through gingival and palate mucosa to the underlying bone. Supplemental ether inhalation was then used to facilitate a partial maxillectomy, including the left upper alveolus from the first bicuspid to just behind the last molar tooth, the hard palate to the midline, and a small portion of the soft palate.
“Only at this point was it appreciated that the tumor had extended into the antrum, involving the floor around the roots of the molar teeth. For this reason, the remaining left maxilla, exclusive of the medial was an infraorbital plate, was apparently removed in piecemeal fashion, and the cavity was packed with iodoform gauze.”
The operation took about 90 minutes. Cleveland was able to deliver a State of the Union address the following December, but not before a Philadelphia newspaper got hold of the story.
News of presidential disability and political security have collided often down through the years. Political security almost always has won, at least in the short-term. A year after his ascension to the presidency, Chester Arthur, Cleveland’s predecessor, was diagnosed with the Bright’s disease that eventually would kill him. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson had what we later learned was the most massive in a series of strokes that had begun as early as 1896. From the UA study:
In 1919, after World War I, Wilson was trying to convince Congress to approve United States entry into the League of Nations. Some in the Senate opposed the idea while others would be willing to go along if certain reservations were included in the treaty. Wilson went on a public speaking tour but suffered a collapse at Pueblo, Colorado. The presidential party returned to Washington, and soon after, the president suffered his most serious stroke. At this point, a cover-up began, led by Dr. [Cary] Grayson and the president’s second wife, Edith. They thought that it would be best if Wilson was not informed of just how serious his condition truly was. When Dr. Grayson briefed the Cabinet, the question of succession came up but he refused to sign any official notice of disability. He also discouraged letting the public know the extent of the president’s condition.
There followed the gentleman’s agreement among the press not to acknowledge Franklin Roosevelt’s disability, which morphed in his fourth term into a gentleman’s agreement not to acknowledge the fact that the president was clearly a dying man. Behind the scenes, the president’s doctors knew that he had returned from the Tehran summit in terrible shape. His heart was barely functioning. In fact, it was the president’s obviously failing health that led Democratic politicians to replace vice president Henry Wallace on the ticket with Harry Truman.
John F. Kennedy was affected by chronic disease almost from birth. His school years were continually interrupted by attacks of “blood diseases.” In World War II, he injured his back severely when his PT boat was rammed. The country knew about this because his heroism in the aftermath of the incident was a political gift from heaven. However, while he was laid up, Kennedy was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a serious disease of the adrenal glands. When Kennedy ran for office, his political team explained the strange yellowing of his skin as “malaria” contracted in the South Pacific. However, during his first term in Congress, Kennedy was told that, because of the Addison’s, he might only have a year to live. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy’s aides hand-waved any questions about his Addison’s disease. In office, he was kept functional by a staggering regimen of pharmaceuticals, from steroids to amphetamines. From PBS:
The chronic use of steroids over his lifetime likely caused osteoporosis of various bones in his body, most notably his spine, where he suffered from three fractured vertebrae. During his presidency, Kennedy was also treated with a slew of opiate pain killers, local anesthetic (lidocaine) shots for his back pain, tranquilizers such as Librium, amphetamines and stimulants, including Ritalin, thyroid hormones, barbiturate sleeping pills, gamma globulin to stave off infections, as well as the steroid hormones he needed to keep his adrenal insufficiency at bay. According to The New York Times, during the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962, the president was prescribed “antispasmodics to control colitis; antibiotics for a urinary infection; and increased amounts of hydrocortisone and testosterone along with salt tablets to control his adrenal insufficiency and boost his energy.”
The American public knew nothing about any of this until decades after the president’s murder. More recently, I will go to my eternal reward believing that Ronald Reagan was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient throughout his second term.
(In his first 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, which was held in Louisville, I swear if a panelist had asked him what city he was in, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them.)
Which brings us to the present day, and the fact that the current president is self-evidently debilitated, if not entirely disabled. This is not a good thing.
Over the past month, the president has publicly lost the plot with scarifying regularity. His gait is erratic. He gets lost in the middle of every speech now. His demeanor at last week’s NATO summit was so flatly bizarre that one wonders whether or not they ought to initiate the Edith Wilson protocol and keep him isolated in the White House and just lie to the world about his condition.
Instead, the administration is using only part of Edith’s game plan. They are lying their withered hindquarters off about the president’s physical and gognitive health, and their lies are growing more and more heroically by the day. However, they have done the exact opposite of what the Wilson people did. They keep trotting him out in front of the world and then, when his behavior goes to the zoo, they simply tell the world that it is not seeing what it is clearly seeing. The new presidential motto is, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” And it gets wilder almost by the day.
It’s true that the Kennedy people made sure that the country saw JFK as a man in full—all those touch football videos and accounts of his golf game. But they didn’t put him out behind a podium during an Addison’s flare-up and tell the country that he was in tip-top condition. Let’s face facts. We’re all passengers on Commodore Benedict’s Oneida now, and nobody is at the wheel.
