I've heard that near the end of the Reagan administration the president was beginning to show signs of cognitive decline (early stages of Alzheimer's), is this true? If so, how did the press deal with this?
Edit: I know that Reagan's tenure was recent enough for this to be a touchy subject, but I'm honestly a few years too young to remember him in office.
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Thanks all!
If you're interested in this topic, I recommend All the Truth is Out by Matt Bai, which describes what Bai sees as the end of this "gentleman's agreement" in the candidacy of Gary Hart in 1984.
Can we get someone to actually establish that there was such a gentleman's agreement (or at least that the media knew about and purposely avoided these subjects), first? I mean do we know for sure that the press had hard evidence of these things and decided not to pursue them for whatever reason? I'm sure they knew about FDR, but I'm not so sure about the others mentioned. I can think of a fairly well-known counter example involving Grover Cleveland and his secret oral cancer surgery.
In 1893, Cleveland discovered that he had a cancerous tumor in the roof of his mouth. This was a very touchy subject at the time, especially following Grant's public battle with cancer in the 1880s. At the time, cancer was pretty much a death sentence. Knowing this, and the delicate political situation of the day, due mostly to the Panic of 1893 and issues surrounding the bimetallism debate, Cleveland and his staff sought to keep his illness out of the press. An added cause for concern was that the President and his Vice President, Adlai Stevenson disagreed on bimetallism (Cleveland being for the gold standard, Stevenson for free silver). If something happened to Cleveland, Stevenson could not be trusted to support the gold standard. Even Stevenson was not let in on the illness.
The administration secretly organized a scheme to have several skilled doctors perform surgery on him on board a ship off Long Island while billing it as a vacation to the press. It was the first time known that a President had been put under general anesthesia and was effectively incapacitated. The surgery was a success, but when the press started asking questions, they eventually said the President had two bad teeth removed. This mostly placated them, until one of the doctors leaked the story to a member of the press.
Expecting that everyone else would run with it and wanting to be the first to break the story, a reporter, E. J. Edwards, went with the story and published it. No other reporters did and the Cleveland administration flat out denied it. Edwards' career took a nose dive after that, because people felt he had made up the story, and newspapers didn't want to hire him anymore. It wasn't until 25 years later, years after Cleveland was dead, that one of the doctors, William Keen came forward and admitted it and all of the details came out.
There was a pretty good book written about the whole thing a few years ago called The President is a Sick Man. It also talks about other presidential illnesses, like Wilson's, being kept out of the press, which if I recall correctly, it attributed more to the administration and his wife keeping him away from the press, rather than the press not pursuing the story. Now that I think about it, Garfield's worsening condition following his shooting was also kept out of the press, but that seems to be another case of the officials lying to the press, rather than the press trying to avoid the bad news or paint a rosy picture for the public.
I can't give much info on Wilson's stroke of Roosevelt's wheelchair, but the view put forward in Michael O'Brien's JFK biography is that his infidelity, and in particular how brazen it was (eg, in Seattle, he straight up had prostitutes brought into his hotel straight off the street, not even checked by Secret Service.
According to this view, Kennedy in particular is guilty for abusing the trust of this gentleman's agreement and this, in large part, led to future generations of journalists disregarding it, like with what happened to Nixon and Clinton.
Source: Michael O'Brien, John F. Kennedy
That FDR thing is a complete myth. The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency refutes this strongly. It seems people took the fact that people from the time said they “didn’t know how crippled he was” (pg 8) and ran with it.
Tobin put said there were three general categories.
We knew he was crippled, but people didn’t talk about it
We knew, but we forgot about it.
We knew, but we didn’t think of him that way.
Also pg 8
Pretty much everyone knew that he couldn't walk and his disability was talked about a lot when he was mounting a comeback. It’s true that he wasn’t seen in a wheelchair in public, but it was common knowledge that he used one. And it wasn't some gentlemen's agreement kept pictures of him in his wheelchair out of public eye. The Secret Service confiscated film. Time magazine had an article that included some times major publications mentioned his wheelchair indirectly or directly. Here are some quotes:
[He] wheels around in his wheelchair.
NY Times Magazine 1932.
Because of the President-elect’s lameness, short ramps will replace steps at the side door of the executive offices leading to the White House.
Time 1934
by 11 o’clock he is up, dressed and on his way in a wheel chair down the long passageway to his office
Life, 1941