Olmert’s frankness about cancer breaks new ground

The text message from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office conveyed a sense of urgency: The Israeli leader was calling a news conference in less than three hours. Reporters were told the topic -- his health -- but were instructed not to mention it in advance.

Tired of being misled about the medical condition of the country’s leaders, the Israeli journalists rebelled. Within minutes, the airwaves and newspaper websites were churning with speculation about a mysterious illness and a looming change at the government helm.

The ailment turned out to be early-stage prostate cancer, and Olmert’s calm and forthright disclosure of his treatable condition this week has been widely welcomed as a watershed in the political culture. His fiercest critics acknowledge the value of his precedent: He is the first Israeli leader to fully disclose the details of an illness threatening his life.

But did he really have a choice?

Perhaps not. Israel’s hyper-competitive, free-wheeling press feels burned for swallowing official disinformation that depicted Olmert’s predecessor, Ariel Sharon, as bouncing back satisfactorily from a stroke in December 2005. Sharon’s second stroke, the following month, put him in a coma from which he has not recovered.

Sharon was simply following a tradition of secrecy that Israel has shared with many other countries.

The late Golda Meir, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, among other Israeli leaders, concealed ill health to protect their effectiveness in office.

But they ruled in a different era. The speed of the Internet has eroded the cult of secrecy. So has the growth of public interest in the health of leaders, a trend accompanied by increasingly open discussion of cancer and the ways to detect and treat it.

These changes would have made concealment risky for Olmert, Herb Keinon explained in the Jerusalem Post.

“Journalists, because of what happened to Sharon, would have doggedly pursued any scrap of information about Olmert’s health -- information that inevitably would have leaked out -- and would have thought, broadcast and written the absolute worst,” Keinon wrote. “Had he not given a full revelation, then rumors would have spread, and a tiny growth on his prostate would have morphed into something much larger and more serious in the media.”

That, in turn, might have undermined Olmert’s fragile coalition government and his ability to negotiate with Palestinian and Arab leaders at a U.S.-brokered Middle East peace summit expected by year’s end.

One of Olmert’s advisors offered an explanation for his decision to open up -- the influence of America’s candid treatment of politicians’ ailments and particularly the example of Rudolph W. Giuliani. While mayor of New York, he dropped out of the U.S. Senate race in 2000 to be treated for prostate cancer.

“Olmert saw how his predecessors wriggled when they were asked to tell about their state of health,” the unnamed advisor told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “He decided instead to act like his friend Rudy Giuliani, who told the American public when he became ill.”

To dispel skeptics, Olmert brought two of his doctors to Monday’s news conference and allowed them to answer reporters’ questions in minute detail.

“The general tone of the questions was: This time you’re not going to trick us,” said Sima Kadmon, who covered the conference for Yediot Aharonot.

Many Israelis were reassured by the answers. Opinion surveys showed that large majorities believed the doctors’ statements that Olmert’s tumor had been detected early, that his chances of being cured by surgery were high and that he could continue to perform his duties before and after hospitalization. Olmert’s approval rating shot up 6 points, to 41%.

Thelma Jacobson, a Jerusalem Post reader in the town of Petah Tikva, was less impressed.

“There’s no way, in this age of instant communications, that Olmert could have kept his illness a secret. So he spoke up. Big deal,” she wrote to the newspaper’s letters column.

“I wish him good health so we can defeat him in the polls,” she added.

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boudreaux@latimes.com