Doctor Zebra > Presidential health > Other notables > Candidates
	Medical Histories of Presidential Candidates

• 2008
• John McCain - The Senator's extensive medical history, plus some opinion, is discussed in a series of web pages.
• Barack Obama - There has been little reported about Senator Obama, other than his smoking history.
• 2004
  • Howard Dean - congenital malformation of the back; unable to serve in military.
  • Bob Graham - late start in the Democratic race, owing to cardiac surgery on January 31, 2003 involving: (1) replacement of his aortic valve with a porcine graft, (2) two-vessel coronary bypass, (3) closure of a "pinpoint" atrial septal defect.
  • John Kerry - underwent prostatectomy on Feb. 12, 2003 at Johns Hopkins because of prostate cancer. The diagnosis had been made Dec. 24, 2002. Kerry's father died at age 85 from prostate cancer.
• 2000
  • Bill Bradley - atrial fibrillation interfered with his campaign for the Democratic nomination.
  • John McCain - had malignant melanoma on his shoulder removed in 1993. Malignant melanoma was found on his left temple and arm in August 2000. A malignant melanoma was removed from the left side of his nose in Feb. 2002. He has had numerous basal cell carcinomas removed. Several pages discuss his medical history.

Highlights - 1900s:

• 1996
  • Two article on age and the presidency, with special attention to Bob Dole's age
    • Bob Dole's Age and Health in the 1996 Election: Did the Media Let Us Down? Herbert L. Abrams and Richard Brody. Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 113, No. 3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 471-491. Available here.
    • Can the Nation Afford a Senior Citizen As President? The Age Factor in the 1996 Election and Beyond. Working Paper. Herbert L. Abrams, April 1997. Available here.
• 1968
  • Partly to avoid hurting his Presidential campaign, Vice President Hubert Humphrey did not undergo an aggressive medical evaluation when he passed blood in his urine in 1968. This was an early symptom of the bladder cancer that ultimately killed him in 1978.
• 1912
  • Theodore Roosevelt's bullet wound all but stopped his 1912 "Bull Moose" campaign for the Presidency.
  • Vice President James Sherman was renominated as William Taft's running mate in 1912, but died before the election. Taft went into the election with a deceased running mate (and lost). Sherman had been ill as early as the 1908 campaign. His death in 1912 followed a lengthy illness.
  • The 1912 Republican convention pitted an ex-President, Theodore Roosevelt, against a sitting President, William Taft. The possibility of a compromise candidate was discussed, one of them being Herbert S. Hadley, the Governor of Missouri. TR thought highly of Hadley [3b] but was shocked to find that Hadley had tuberculosis [3c] .

    In talking with Roosevelt, Hadley "mentioned the possibility that the presidency, if he should be nominated and elected, might kill him. [Roosevelt] replied that in his judgment it was worth the sacrifice; that the presidency of the United States was the greatest task that could be laid upon any man, and that to fulfill it worthily was paramount to every consideration of personal welfare." [Davis p. 303]

    Ultimately, the Republicans in 1912 could not agree on a compromise. The party split, enabling the victory of Woodrow Wilson.

• 1996
  • Bob Dole - had been treated for prostate cancer before running for President. It is well known that he was severely wounded in World War II and had mininal use of his right arm.
  
   
• 1992
  • Paul Tsongas - was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1984 and underwent bone marrow transplantation. Won the New Hampshire primary in 1992. Claimed to be cancer-free during the campaign. Ads showed him swimming. In fact, cancer had relapsed. He was supposedly cancer-free when he died (on inauguration day 1997), but the liver failure and pneumonia that killed him were results of his cancer treatmemnts. Comment: Had he been elected in 1992, the subsequent revelation of his cancer recurrence and the resulting treatment would have become a major factor in his administration, and a severe test of the 25th Amendment.

• Although fatally ill, Secretary of State James G. Blaine resigned from Benjamin Harrison's cabinet two days before the 1892 Republican national convention, in order to run against his chief [1c] . Newspaperman Henry Stoddard later recalled:

  My last meeting with him was in the spring of 1892 in the Secretary of State's office. I saw plainly that he could not stand the strain of official duties -- certainly not the Presidency.

  Blaine was then within a year of his death. He would not have lived to enter the White House, had he been nominated and elected. His candidacy was a dying man's last grasp at a lifetime's ambition. [1b]

  Blaine sought the Republican nomination for President in 1876, 1880, 1884, and 1892, but gained it only in 1884. He then lost the general election to Democrat Grover Cleveland.

• At one point in the 1876 Republican convention, Blaine was within 27 votes of getting the nomination. The Sunday before the convention, he had had a fainting spell while walking into church. This proved his undoing when the Kentucky delegation learned what happened just after Blaine's faint:

  Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow learned of Blaine's illness and came to the Blaine home to express his sympathy. Mrs. Blaine did not admit him, and Bristow was told that Mrs. Blaine was "out." Mr. Blaine was not informed that Bristow called.

  Bristow, a Kentuckian, also sought the nomination in 1876. Until this incident, he was a natural ally of Blaine (both were opposed to the Ulysses Grant administration). When the Kentucky delegation heard of the Blaine rebuff to their candidate, they switched their votes to Rutherford Hayes, enough to give Hayes the nomination [1d] .

• In 1852, Daniel Webster was over 70 years old and desperately ill. Nevertheless, he was a candidate for President [1e] .

  What could be more pathetic than the picture of Daniel Webster, while still Secretary of State in the Fillmore Cabinet, too ill to attend to his official duties and within five months of his death, as a rival of Fillmore for nomination in the Whig convention of 1852? There were forty-seven ballots before General Winfield Scott was nominated. Through all of them the President and his Secretary of State led contesting factions [1f] .

• William Crawford, a leading candidate for the upcoming election of 1824, was incapacitated by a stroke. As a result, none of the three candidates that year received a majority in the electoral college. The election was ultimately decided by the House of Representatives in favor of John Q. Adams over Andrew Jackson.

  The derailing effect of the stroke on Crawford's campaign is given below:

  Crawford, too, was losing ground. To the structural defects already discernible in the Georgian's political edifice was added another, as he failed to develop that secondary strength deemed so important in a crowded contest where last-minute horse trades might tell the tale. Granted the Secretary of the Treasury was first in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and New York. These states could not elect him, and in what states was he the runner-up? While grappling for a solution of this difficulty, Crawford's campaign organization was staggered by the most overwhelming personal calamity which has assailed a pilgrim toiling the steep slope toward the presidency.

  In August or early September, 1823, Mr. Crawford left Washington, his jovial mood unruffled by the clouds upon the horizon of his fortunes, his enormous frame apparently bearing with ease the burden of fifty-one years. A fortnight later a form under a sheet was carried into a house in the Virginia hills. The Secretary of the Treasury was paralyzed in every limb, speechless, nearly blind and nearly deaf. Friends, whom it was indispensably necessary to inform of the tragedy, waited anxiously to ascertain whether his mind, too, were gone.

  So closely was William H. Crawford guarded during the next year and a half, so many were the tricks to dissemble his true condition, so few, and they so close-mouthed, knew the facts, that even now it seems impossible to reconstruct what had happened. The most probable story is that a paralytic stroke had been induced by an overdose of lobelia prescribed by a country physician treating an attack of erysipelas.

  The stricken man rallied and the bedside watchers learned that his mind was unimpaired. Nor was this all. The blow that had prostrated the flesh could not prevail against the spirit of William Harris Crawford and, as soon as his thick tongue could mumble a word, it was for his friends to carry on the fight because he would get well. Then the world received its first news of the affliction that had befallen the candidate. A paragraph in the Crawford press announced that the Georgian was convalescing from the painful illness. [4a]

  Had Crawford died from the stroke, or been forced to withdraw from the campaign, it is possible the election would have gone to Jackson.

1. Stoddard, Henry L. It Costs to Be President. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938. [a] p. 11 [b] p. 187 [c] p. 5 [d] p. 192 [e] p. 1 [f] p. 4



2. Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. ISBN 0-316-17238-3 @ Amazon [a] p. 504 - Dallek attributes the remark to President James Garfield in 1881



3. Manners, William. TR and Will: A Friendship that Split the Republican Party. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969. [a] p. 283 [b] p. 249 [c] p. 253



4. James, Marquis. Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a President. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, unknown year (originally published in 1937 by Bobbs-Merrill). [a] pp. 376-377/59-60