Barron H. Lerner Quotes
There is no clear relationship between a president’s performance and his well-being. For instance, Dwight D. Eisenhower had a series of medical issues while in office, including a heart attack, a bowel obstruction and a stroke. But historians have written approvingly of his presidency and his ability to achieve consensus. In a 2015 ranking of the presidents from a survey of political scientists, he came in seventh. Perhaps one of the sickest presidents in the country’s history was John F. Kennedy, who suffered not only from a failure of the adrenal glands, known as Addison’s disease, but also from debilitating back pain. A physician, Janet Travell, treated Kennedy with narcotics, stimulants and various hormones. Most worrisome, Kennedy retained the services of a shady physician named Max Jacobson, who injected him with amphetamines. Yet while some of Kennedy’s decisions, such as the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, involved poor judgment, Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek found no definitive evidence that the illnesses or medications were the cause. And historians have praised many aspects of Kennedy’s tenure.
Barron H. Lerner, “Five myths on presidential health”, The Washington Post, September 16, 2016
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He was right. Even the vaunted Southern Filibuster was broken by the strategy and tactics Johnson and Senator Humbert Humphry, the Floor Leader for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.
Commenting on his selection of Dan Quayle as his Vice-Presidential running mate:
MacArthur was astounded that the country turned to Eisenhower rather than him. He actually did not think much of Eisenhower. Eisenhower, was very critical of MacArthur. See
President Kennedy was an inveterate womanizer both before his presidency and during it.
He was very critical of Arraham Lincoln even though he was a Republican. Many percieved that Lincoln's administration could not get anything done. Lincoln might have lost the 1864 campaign but for the great victory that General Sherman's troops had in taking Atlanta. This changed a lot of mionds about Lincoln's War strategy. Actually, in the first 2 years of the Civil War, Lincoln could not get his generals to fight his preferred kind of war until he appointed Grant who brought Sherman to high command.
The CIA has never denied this, and it seems to be corroborated in that none of the CIA reports to the Presidents ever mentioned the failures and there is no CIA official who ever claimed that they informed either of the Presidents. In particular, when Kennedy initially went along with the ill-fated CIA Bay of Pigs invasion plan not realizing that the CIA had a dismal record of major misjudgments and failures of covert operations.
Expert and political opinion is divided on this view. Kennedy himself did not hold it. His first year in the White House was a triumph of oratory, but he felt privately that he had failed thus far in his Presidency.
Barron H. Lerner is a member of the faculty at the New York University Langone School of Medicine. He received his M.D. from Columbia in 1986 and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington in 1996. In addition to his research, Lerner practices internal medicine and teaches medical ethics and the history of medicine.
