Bit of Privacy for Any President

President Clinton, according to a summary of his health records released by the White House, has mild osteoarthritis in his lower back, some high frequency hearing loss and occasionally takes a prescription medicine for adult acne. OK, but so what? Is this really information that cries out to be put on the public record? Do Americans learn more about what manner of man their president is by seeing every little notation in his medical file? Of course not. What people need to know is whether a president or a candidate for the presidency has any medical condition--heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, for example--that could be life-threatening, disabling or likely to affect conduct in office. The rest, for the most part, is of small importance.

Clinton released a resume of his health records under prodding from Republicans who increasingly questioned whether his reluctance to do so wasn’t evidence that he was trying to hide something. Presidents and presidential candidates have on occasion indeed sought to keep certain facts about their health secret. Woodrow Wilson’s incapacitation from a stroke in the last 18 months of his presidency was hidden from the public by his wife, doctors and aides. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s visible deterioration from advanced heart disease in the year preceding his death in 1945 was masked in part by wartime censorship. Few people knew during his lifetime that John F. Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, brought on by failure of the adrenal glands. These are conditions that the public should have been made aware of in every case. More recently, 1992 presidential candidate Paul Tsongas misled voters about his treatment for cancer.

Any illness that strikes a sitting president of course ought to be made known immediately, simply because the importance of the office demands it. But when it comes to such things as routine tests and procedures, the details are less important than the essential diagnosis that the public has a right to know: whether a president or potential president has a clean bill of health.