a yacht, a mustache_ how a president hid his tumor _ npr
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< A Yacht, A Mustache: How A President
Hid His TumorJuly 06, 2011 12:01 AM
Copyright 2011 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See
Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
The president of the United States remains easily the most watched
person in America, and possibly the world. It's been that way for many
years.
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
President Ronald Reagan waved on his way to a helicopter, and it
appeared on TV screens all across the nation.
MONTAGNE: President Bush paused between words, and the
camera lingered on his every breath.
INSKEEP: And it was national news when President Obama swatted
a fly.
MONTAGNE: Yet, presidents have also managed to keep many
secrets, and that includes a health secret that one president kept all
through his administration. In July of 1893, President Grover Cleveland
disappeared for five days. The writer Matthew Algeo explored what
happened in a book called "The President is a Sick Man."
INSKEEP: What was wrong with Grover Cleveland?
Mr. MATTHEW ALGEO (Author): Well, shortly after he took office for
the second time in 1893, he noticed a little bump on the roof of his
mouth, and there was a lot going on in the country at the time. The
country was actually entering a depression. Understandably, he didn't
think too much about it. He had bigger things on his plate.
But around June, this lump in his mouth, he had noticed it had grown
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quite large, and the doctor diagnosed it as cancer. And he said it's a
bad-looking tenant, and I would have it evicted immediately. But
because the country was in such a panic at the time financially,
Cleveland was afraid if it came to be known that he had cancer that
Wall Street would panic, the markets would crash, that there would be
terrible repercussions for the country and the economy. So he decided
that he would have the tumor removed, but in secret.
INSKEEP: You've explained why it's a big deal that the president
would be seen as being ill at this time of crisis. The very nature of the
disease, I wonder if that's worth talking about. It would be a big deal
today to have a sitting president diagnosed with cancer.
Mr. ALGEO: It would be a big deal today. It was an ever bigger deal
then, because at the time, there was a stigma attached to cancer.
Newspapers would call it the dread disease.
INSKEEP: How do you take a president of the United States, who is in
such a public position, and perform an operation on him without
anybody knowing? How do they go about trying to keep this a secret?
Mr. ALGEO: This was a matter of much discussion. They came up
with an interesting plan. Cleveland had a friend who owned a yacht.
The yacht was called the Oneida. And so they decided what we'll do is
we'll say we're going on a fishing trip. And so they boarded this yacht.
It was late June, in 1893. They boarded the yacht in New York and
took four days to sail up to Buzzard's Bay on Cape Cod, where
Cleveland had a summer home. And it was on that yacht this
operation was performed.
They assembled a team of six surgeons. It took about 90 minutes.
They used ether as the anesthesia, and they removed the tumor, along
with about five teeth and a large part of the president's upper left
jawbone.
INSKEEP: But it was all inside the mouth.
Mr. ALGEO: Yes. There were no external scars, because they were
able to pull the mouth open wide enough to get to the tumor. Cleveland
also had a very distinctive mustache. And he was very afraid that if
anything happened to the mustache, people would know right away
that something was up. So it was very important to Cleveland that, A,
there be no external scars and, B, save the mustache.
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INSKEEP: Isn't this an incredible risk? I mean, the president - I mean,
even the most basic nature of this, if there's a sudden squall, you're
trying to operate on a man, and suddenly there's choppy seas. Or if
there's some complication, you are far away from a hospital. I mean,
this is a big risk.
Mr. ALGEO: The doctors took incredible risks. I mean, it was really
foolhardy. I talked to a couple of oral surgeons researching the book,
and they still marvel at this operation, that they were able to do this on
a moving boat. They did it very quickly - a similar operation today
would take several hours. They did it in 90 minutes. So it was really an
extraordinary achievement in American medicine, but it was a
complete secret. Nobody ever knew it happened. Nobody knew what
happened at the time, anyway.
INSKEEP: How did the secret get out?
Mr. ALGEO: Even in 1893, for the president to disappear for four days
was rather unusual. So rumors began spreading that he was in bad
health, and maybe there had been some sort of operation on the boat.
It wasn't until about two months after the operation that a reporter for
the Philadelphia Press found out about it through a friend of a friend,
and he confirmed it with one of the doctors. And this reporter, E.J.
Edwards, published a story about this.
But Cleveland denied it, and so nobody believed E.J. Edwards. He
was dismissed as a disgrace to journalism.
INSKEEP: It wasn't just a matter of saying, oh, this isn't true. There
was a whole campaign against the reporter.
Mr. ALGEO: To discredit the reporter.
INSKEEP: Well, how did the secret finally get confirmed? There was
this report, but it was knocked down and denied. Nobody believed it atthe time. How, ultimately, did it become a part of history that it
definitely did happen...
Mr. ALGEO: Well, we wouldn't...
INSKEEP: ...that this president had cancer and was operated on?
Mr. ALGEO: We wouldn't know about it at all if it wasn't for one of the
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doctors. There was a doctor who took part in the operation. His name
was Keen, William Williams Keen, and he was from Philadelphia.
Twenty-four years after the operation, when all of the other principles
were dead - there were only three witnesses left to the operation - and
he decided it would be the right thing to do, to publish an article to
explain what really happened and to vindicate E.J. Edwards.
INSKEEP: It is really interesting, though. You do uncover a letter here
in which President Grover Cleveland wrote privately to a friend and
essentially confesses to the fact that he lied. I wonder if I could get you
to read a couple of paragraphs from that letter.
Mr. ALGEO: Yeah. Cleveland we don't know a lot about, but he was an
inveterate letter writer. And this is the only letter I was able to find that
talked about the operation. He wrote it to his friend, Thomas Bayard.
He was the American ambassador to Britain at the time.
And Cleveland writes: The report you saw regarding my health
resulted from a most astounding breach of professional duty on the
part of a medical man -that's the doctor who admitted that the
operation had taken place. I tell you this in strict confidence, for the
policy here has been to deny and discredit this story. And he ends the
letter and says: You have now more of the story than anyone else
outside of the medical circle.
INSKEEP: Well, now, what does this story from 1893 make you think
when you read about modern White Houses?
Mr. ALGEO: There's an interesting history of presidents and health.
Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in his second term and was more
or less completely incapacitated for the last 18 months.
INSKEEP: Covered that up.
Mr. ALGEO: Yes. Warren Harding had a terrible heart disease thatwas covered up, Kennedy with Addison's Disease. And it was
interesting: I was researching Ronald Reagan. He had a couple
operations for cancer. But Nancy Reagan insisted that the
spokesperson, Larry Speaks, not mention the word cancer in any
release or any statement anywhere. And this was a matter of great
debate within the White House at the time. So even as late as the
1980s, this idea of the president having cancer carried some sort of
stigma with it.
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The other thing that's interesting is you think, wow, it would be
impossible for a president to just go away and have a major operation
like that and nobody know about it. And I did a little research, and
apparently there is a fully-equipped operating room on Air Force One.
So if a president did want to disappear for a little bit and have an
operation, it actually might be easier to do today than it was in 1893.
INSKEEP: Air Force One might be a little smoother than being out on
a boat.
Mr. ALGEO: I guess you would want to avoid turbulence, definitely, if
you were doing a sensitive operation on Air Force One.
INSKEEP: Matthew Algeo is the author of "The President is a Sick
Man." Thanks very much.
Mr. ALGEO: You're welcome.
(Soundbite of music)
INSKEEP: Of course, the secret was a little bit easier to keep before
the 24-hour news cycle and the minute-by-minute, even second-by-
second updates of social media.
MONTAGNE: President Obama takes on that reality today in his very
first Twitter town hall meeting. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey willmoderate the event, turning tweets into questions for the president.
(Soundbite of music)
MONTAGNE: And this is NPR News.
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