Reagan has surgery

One day, the president woke up with a sore throat. It bothered him on and off and he called in his doctor who looked things over and called in another doctor and it was decided that the president had better take a little excursion on the presidential yacht – a holiday down the Potomac and out to sea.

What nobody knew was that the doctors and a nurse went with him and way off the coast, in the Atlantic blue water, the president was operated on for cancer of the throat. A few days later, he sailed back, he resumed his duties at the White House, he saw few people and came back to health, lived out his term and his life or, if you prefer, his life's span. And that was that.

Very many years later, when he was dead and gone, the historians dug out the interesting facts. To this day, I don't suppose one American in 10,000 knows the story, for it all happened just about a hundred years ago. In those days and on, I should guess, into the 1920s, people, let alone the press, did not talk aloud about cancer. It was actually in shocking taste to use the word in a drawing-room or parlour and if any member of your neighbour's family, say, started having a hacking cough with no evidence of the flu or a runny nose, gossipy people might whisper to each other that the cougher could be, in the vernacular of the day, a candidate for consumption.

How different it is today. You must wonder at the silence of the press in those far-off days when a president or a prime minister could have a successful operation and not only did the press not write about it, they didn't know about it, any more than most members of the Congress or parliament knew about it.

Now, jump to 1919 and the arrival, to worshipping crowds, in Paris of the sainted president, Woodrow Wilson – one of the three main architects of the League of Nations. The charter was written and Wilson sailed away from Europe with another crowd waving him Godspeed on the docks. His reception back in America was less than worshipful. He'd come home to persuade the Senate to ratify the League of Nations and join it. He had tough, entrenched opposition which, in the end, could not be overcome.

So, he decided to take the issue to the people and he went off on a speaking tour on a transcontinental train. Along the way out West, he fell ill. He had a massive stroke and came back to Washington a shell of a man which he remained for 18 months, sitting frail behind shaded windows, powerless in all but name, while his wife saw the politicians, the statesmen, the seekers of favours.

It seems incredible to us that a President of the United States, especially in the first flush of America's rise to world power, should have gone on, theoretically, leading the government and the country for 18 months, actually listless and impotent, with no provision made or executed for a transfer of power. And, I believe, with no newspaper letting off anything so coarse as an appeal for an acting president or somebody who could actually take charge.

All the constitution did was to lay down the line of succession when a president died in office. First to the vice president, then to the Speaker of the House and on, in descending order, of the Cabinet officers, in the historical order of the establishment of those posts.

There was something – I leave it to the social historians to discover. It has never, so far as I know, been done – to discover what it was, in our society, and I'm thinking of Europe as well as America and, no doubt, the Empire and the Commonwealth, what it was that started and maintained the strong tradition of keeping the serious illnesses of heads of state and government from public knowledge and why it broke.

I think I know when in America the turning point came. It was in the 1950s, when President Eisenhower had an attack of ileitis, an infection of the small intestine and was operated on. And with no sense that we had moved into a new age of public relations, so far as presidential illness was concerned, there appeared before the White House press corps for an open press conference one Dr Paul Dudley White. He was a distinguished physician and had been brought down from Boston to confirm the diagnosis, order the operation and take care of the president.

Dr White went before the press and didn't just make a short, cryptic statement, but gave a clinical rundown of the nature and treatment of ileitis and a record of the president's post-operative condition – respiration, blood pressure, blood tests, sedimentation rate etc. etc. – down to, if you'll excuse the thought, the texture of the bowel movement.

I remember that we were shocked, not that all this was being said, but that we were suddenly expected to know and report all these expert findings. How long had this been going on? It hadn't. That was the beginning. Not remarked on at the time.

And then in 1956 at the climax of the Suez affair, Eisenhower's Secretary of State Mr John Foster Dulles rose well after midnight, I recall, in the security council of the United Nations and made a moving speech regretting that, for the first time in more than a hundred years, the United States felt bound to condemn its old ally Great Britain. Mr Dulles left the rostrum and we learned next day went straight to the hospital and the day after that – I can see the harsh, black type now – the New York Daily News came out with a front-page banner headline, 'Dulles has Inoperable Cancer'.

That was shocking, I mean the public mention of it, to old people and middle-aged people, but not apparently to the young. An American woman reporter and a young British correspondent saw nothing odd about it. It mattered, did it not, to the conduct of American foreign policy and the running of the government? Yes, it did. Well, then...

And since then, the health of presidents and presidential candidates has become a matter of continuous interest. A man no sooner announces that he's going to run for president than he feels bound – bound, that is, by the prodding of his rivals – to take a medical examination and publish the general result. During the early months of the 1960 campaign, when Lyndon Johnson was hoping to swipe the Democratic nomination from the – to him – young and bumptious, Senator Jack Kennedy, the Johnson camp put out snide reports that Kennedy was suffering from Addison's disease, a form of anaemia which usually gives the skin a brownish tinge.

The Kennedy camp replied – and this battle, by the way, was underground, it didn't get into print – that the Johnson people were vicious slanderers, though we were confidentially told that Kennedy, for some recurring trouble after his back had been damaged in a ship-ramming in the Pacific war, yes, his skin was brownish and yes, he did have, from time to time, noticeable jowls and a sort of hump. He was on cortisone. The readers, viewers, people never knew about this. Some lingering vestige of the old tradition of press restraint held us from printing or broadcasting it.

But it must be obvious that those days are over – the tradition of media restraint when only the family knew the worst and a man might die in dignity has gone for ever, because, I suppose, such today is the speed of communications, both news and, I might add, of intercontinental missiles, that the serious illness of a world leader has to be known about, except in the Soviet Union where, from recent experience, the leader has a succession of puzzling colds and then is suddenly dead.

But in what we call the Western world, I'm sure that President Reagan's illness, the operation, his prospects have been voluminously reported with charts and anatomical sketches ever since the remarkable moment when six – was it six? – doctors, in white coats yet, appeared on a stage as if in some modern opera with a sombre theme.

After President Eisenhower's two illnesses, a new constitutional amendment was passed by the Congress and ratified by the states which makes provision first for a president to declare himself disabled from executing his office and, secondly, a trickier provision, in case he goes mad or stubborn, to have a committee drawn from the Cabinet, the Senate and other officials, to declare that he is incompetent. Happily, nothing like that is in the cards.

As it was, this time, the succession was an issue that burned or flickered for only about seven hours when Vice President Bush, having received the delegation of powers from the president, himself, had them grabbed back again by a president already feeling spry and competent.

I think it's idle now to say how quickly Mr Reagan will recover, if he does. His remarkable robustness, if the spirit can, as many doctors believe, powerfully affect the flesh, Ronald Reagan is one patient who will soon be back in rude and rollicking health. We didn't know he'd had for days a tube running from his nose into his stomach, until he had it taken out on Wednesday and said, 'It's Christmas in July!' He then took off for a morning walk around the corridors, crying, 'Tennis, anyone?' And this, with him, I'm sure is not a facetious effort at bravery. It's a returning sign of his chronic cheerfulness.

Of course, constitution or no constitution, the succession of actual power, while a president is disabled by illness, does not pass these days to a vice president or the Speaker of the House, but to the senior member of the president's cronies,or staff, or kitchen Cabinet.

It's odd to citizens of parliamentary countries that, invariably, the man who runs things – I mean the country, the government – when the president is indisposed it is always an old friend, unelected, never in politics, until the day after the inauguration, the president summons his old buddies and usually picks the closest to be his so-called White House chief-of-staff. Mr Donald Regan is it and we can talk more about him the more he appears to be in charge.

In the meantime, watch out that you keep clear and distinct the difference in pronunciation between President Reagan and, in effect, Acting President Regan.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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