McCain's Age and Past Health Problems Could Be An Issue in the Presidential
Race
A hard life has taken its toll, but is it an issue that matters?
By Liz Halloran
Posted May 9, 2008
Just days before his expected nomination at the Republican National
Convention, John McCain
will celebrate his birthday. But don't bet on seeing a prime-time bash
during the GOP's
September get-together in Minneapolis: a presidential nominee blowing out
72 candles is not an
image party bosses want to see on YouTube going into the fall battle.
McCain had a bout with skin cancer in 2000.
(Jim Lo Scalzo for USN&WR)
Related News
Especially when that nominee visibly wears the toll of a long and, at
times, extraordinarily
difficult life. One that has included surviving a bone-crushing ejection
from his Navy jet,
torture during 5½ years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, major surgery to
remove a dangerous
skin cancer from his face, and the stiff and sometimes pained bearing
shared by many of his
contemporaries. If elected, McCain would steal Ronald Reagan's record as
the oldest first-term
president in the nation's history.
While questions of age and health have shadowed McCain, they have largely
remained under the
radar. His staffers respond to queries about his condition by pointing to
the demanding
campaign schedule he has maintained for many months. But with his doctors
at the Mayo Clinic in
Scottsdale, Ariz., poised to release his current medical records before
Memorial Day, and polls
showing that a significant number of voters (32 percent in one survey) say
that McCain is too
old to be president, those back-burner issues are about to move front and
center.
Top McCain aide Charlie Black says that the candidate's records will prove
that he is in "good
health." But their release is bound to reignite the debate over how much a
candidate's age and
health history should or could factor into the November contest, including
how they may
influence McCain's choice for vice president. And it will very likely
renew discussion about
the public's desire to know versus its right to know the full scope of
nominees' medical
conditions. The genie of disclosure will never be put back in the bottle,
says Brian Balogh of
the University of Virginia's Miller Center. When Thomas Eagleton's history
of depression and
electroshock therapy forced him to step down as Democrat George McGovern's
running mate in
1972, "everyone became pretty self-conscious about candidates' past
medical history," Balogh
says. And post-Watergate, disclosure became de rigueur. "This was what the
press demanded and
what the American public expected and wanted to know about their
presidential candidates," he says.
Presidential health. It wasn't always so. In the pantheon of presidents
beset by maladies,
deadly conditions, and some truly off-the-wall medical histories (Grover
Cleveland had a
cancerous lesion secretly removed from his jaw while in a chair lashed to
the mast of a yacht
plying the East River in New York),McCain's health trials don't look all
that exceptional. Take
Andrew Jackson, who suffered a head wound at age 13 during the
Revolutionary War, was shot at
least twice in gun battles, and carried in him at least three bullet
fragments—one near his
heart. It's most likely that Jackson suffered from malaria, lead
poisoning, parasites, chronic
diarrhea, depression, and was "swimming in heavy metals," notes H. W.
Brands, a University of
Texas historian, from the "cures" of mercury and a brew called "sugar of
lead." (Family
members, rather indiscreetly, also reported that as a youngster he
"slobbered.") "In the early
19th to the early 20th century, people had a lot of things wrong with
them, doctors didn't know
how to fix them, and so they lived with them," Brands says. But Jackson
lived to 78—at the
time, a "good long life."
John Kennedy hid his diagnosis of debilitating Addison's disease—while in
Congress, he had once
been given last rites—and Chester Arthur kept secret his struggle with an
incurable kidney
disease. Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack and stroke while in
office—"the public was
told about all of this," presidential historian Henry Graff says—and
Lyndon Johnson survived a
massive heart attack before he became president and another while in the
Oval Office. He died
of a third after leaving office.
But the history of presidential health is marked by bigger lies,
subterfuge, and what
historians characterize as flat-out medical malpractice. The two most
notorious, says Graff,
involve the conspiracy between Woodrow Wilson's wife and his doctor to
keep the president's
strokes and in-office incapacitation a secret from Congress and the nation
and a similar
connivance to keep Franklin Roosevelt's life-threatening high blood
pressure under wraps while
he ran for his fourth term during what would be the final months of World
War II. In both
cases, Graff says, "the public was ill-served."
Wilson, elected president in 1912, had been suffering strokes since
1898—before he was governor
of New Jersey, says Graff, 86. As a young code breaker during WWII, Graff
says he witnessed
firsthand the international concern over Roosevelt's failing health and
attempts by his doctor,
Ross McIntire, and aides to keep it hidden. (In an interview with U.S.
News six years after
Roosevelt's death in 1945, the now discredited McIntire insisted the
president's health had
been fine, that only a persistent cough and flu had depleted his
reserves.) "We read the codes
of many nations who thought Roosevelt was too ill for another term, and
they were concerned he
wouldn't live out his term," Graff says. The president died three months
after his
inauguration; the war ended four months later.
In 1999, during his first run for president, McCain released 1,500 pages
of medical and
psychiatric records that detailed his POW experiences and found him in
good physical and mental
health. But he now has a visible scar and puffiness on the left side of
his face, evidence of
surgery in 2000 to remove what doctors classified as a Stage IIA melanoma.
Stage IV is the most
serious. During the five-hour procedure, surgeons as a precaution removed
lymph nodes near the
cancer, and part of his saliva-producing parotid gland. It was McCain's
fourth bout with skin
cancer or lesions—the others, dating back to 1993, were successfully
removed from his left
shoulder, arm, and nose.
Meenhard Herlyn, a researcher at the Wistar Institute at the University of
Pennsylvania and
member of the Melanoma Research Foundation's scientific advisory
committee, says that melanoma
"continues to be a bad cancer—diagnosed in 60,000 new cases each year."
The biggest factor in
successful treatment is early diagnosis, before the cancer penetrates the
deeper part of the
skin where it could hit a lymph or blood vessel. The cancer mass McCain
had removed in 2000 was
2 centimeters in diameter and 2.2 millimeters deep. "That's relatively
thick," says Herlyn. In
estimating risk, he says, any primary tumor in the skin thicker than 1
millimeter is considered
at an increased risk for "having dissociated," or moved to other parts of
the body. McCain's
doctors reported that his cancer hadn't penetrated his lymph system.
Though McCain is at
greater risk for recurrence because of his age, gender, and multiple bouts
with melanoma, he
has been cancer free since 2002. There currently is no cure for melanoma
once it spreads.
Age debate. The issue of McCain's age has been a touchy one—some who have
raised it have been
tagged as ageist. Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has pledged not to
make an issue of it
(insiders say they don't have to—it's already an issue), and Black, the
campaign aide, has
asserted that 70 just isn't what it used to be. So, is 70 the new 50?
Karlene Ball says there's
some truth to what Black says. "I've been studying cognitive aging for 30
years, and it is
definitely the case that the 70-year-olds in our research now are
cognitively younger than
those we studied 20 years ago," says Ball, who directs the University of
Alabama-Birmingham's
Roybal Center for Research on Applied Gerontology. Improved healthcare and
knowledge about the
benefits of nutrition and physical activity have contributed to that
trend, she says. But Bell
adds this caution: There is a downward slope in memory as a function of
age, though there are
enormous individual differences. McCain likes to point to his 96-year-old
mother as proof of
his with-it genes. That may be stretching things a bit, says Ball. "Saying
that your parents
are free of dementia doesn't mean you won't get it," she adds, "but,
still, it's good that they
are because you don't have that risk factor." (McCain's father died of
heart failure at 70.)
Voters may need to be reminded, says Brands, that presidential candidates
are human, a package
of both good and bad—health histories included. McCain can take
inspiration from Jackson, he
says, who though beset by illness and considered old for his time, "was
clearheaded and
forceful until the last day of his presidency." But there's little doubt
that what McCain's new
medical records reveal and whether youth will be a quality he seeks in a
vice president will
both prove crucial to the case he'll make to the demanding American people
about his own health
and ability to serve. A case that becomes even more critical with
46-year-old Barack Obama as
the Democratic front-runner.
With Stephanie Salmon
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/campaign-2008/2008/05/09/mccains-age-and-past-health-problems-could-be-an-issue-in-the-presidential-race.html
|
