As Hillary Clinton convulsed onto the stage in seizures ahead of the debate, followed by her almost erstwhile foe Donald Trump, who sniffled and sputtered the last air from his lungs, what has hitherto been hidden on the tumultuous road to the 2016 United States presidential election at once became eminently clear. For to paraphrase Walter Sobchak, descendant of Polish-Catholic immigrants and converted Jew, I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life, these people are faking it.
Many of the most reputable and most loved presidents in United States history have suffered during their spells in office from ill health. Usually the extent and the specifics of their respective maladies have been concealed until long after their presidential terms have proved over and done.
A serious stroke in October 1919 left Woodrow Wilson incapacitated, and he secluded himself in the White House, having to battle the Senate from afar over the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles. Political matters were mediated by his wife until the end of his tenure in March 1921.
Diagnosed with polio the very same year, future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt was henceforth paralysed from the waist down. He taught himself to walk in public using braces and a cane, managing to hide his use of a wheelchair through the course of an unprecedented twelve consecutive years in charge, until in April 1945 he died in the hot seat, three months into his fourth term.
Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack and a stroke during his presidency, somehow sandwiching in between a major episode in his struggle with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestine which left Ike requiring surgery in June 1956.
In and out of hospital throughout his youth, John F. Kennedy thereafter experienced severe back pain and the pernicious effects Addison’s disease, which he sought to treat by exercise, but also an increasingly experimental cocktail of drugs. Hormones and animal organ cells overlapped with steroids and amphetamines, with some analysts suggesting that Kennedy’s judgement as president only improved after his White House physician took steps to decrease the dose. Fewer drugs may have been the difference between the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the relatively successful settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
And Ronald Reagan relinquished his presidential powers for eight hours in July 1985, when he underwent surgery to remove cancerous polyps from his colon. Reagan resumed his role later the very same day, but would endure two further surgeries through the remainder of his presidency, in order to remove cancerous cells from his nose.
So when – amid all the sexual groping, email server scandal, and anti-immigrant bile, peering through raised spectres of the Cold War past – the two candidates condemn each other’s health, don’t be taken in by the pretence. Clinton and Trump only appear to want to appear robust. The truth is that they crave the visible signs of illness, and an implicit association with the icons of glory times.
