Presidential Health Quotes

Many people were grateful that President Johnson had not had hemorrhoid surgery.

The Vice President has two duties: To daily inquire about the health of the President and to attend the funerals of third world dictators, neither of which interest me.

I don’t care if it’s dog piss. It makes me feel better.

During Grover Cleveland's second term, in the 1890s, the White House deceived the public by dismissing allegations that surgeons had removed a cancerous growth from the President's mouth; a vulcanized-rubber prosthesis disguised the absence of much of Cleveland's upper left jaw and part of his palate.

In practice … presidential physicians have lied, often blatantly. Ross McIntyre, Roosevelt’s first White House physician, continually characterized his patient’s shortness of breath — from congestive heart failure — as a sinus problem. The most egregious lie, perhaps, was one of omission. When Paul Tsongas was running for president in 1992, his hematologist confirmed his patient’s history of lymphoma but not that the disease had recently recurred and thus probably was incurable. Tsongas died two days before what would have been the end of his first term in office.

William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties.

… being healthy at one point in time may have little relevance to what happens during a future presidential term. George H.W. Bush was healthy when he assumed office in 1989, but in 1991 he developed atrial fibrillation, a potentially dangerous heart rhythm. Doctors subsequently diagnosed Graves’ disease, an excess of thyroid hormone that had caused the heart abnormality.

Dick Cheney and Al Gore have redefined the role of the vice president in the minds of the public. It should be a big job, beyond simply checking the health status of the president.

Declassified papers report that John Kennedy was taking eight different medications a day. He was so wasted, his Secret Service code name was Ted Kennedy.

The president was madman Reagan who's got Alzheimer's and has lost his mind. He now crawls on all fours.

The role of the vice president is to break ties in the Senate and inquire daily into the health of the president.

There is nothing about the President's health that should be secret—that includes baldness.

Roosevelt intervened very little in the discussions. . . . I doubt, from what I have seen, whether he is fit for his job here.

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.

If the ... President has much more than a hangnail, the stock market goes crazy.

When you're running for president, I think you have an obligation to be healthy. I just don't think you can do the work if you're not healthy.

Because of the increase in life longevity, America can now assume that at any given time three, and perhaps four, former presidents will still be alive, even when the current president is occupying the White House.

Concealing one's true medical condition from the voting public is a time-honored tradition of the American presidency.

I was on stage last night, and I gave a medical report about Donald Trump. I said he was hospitalized for an attack of modesty.

America's presidents tend to die young. Maybe it is in the nature of the men who reach such heights, or of the job once they attain it.

Politics aside, you look at Barack Obama, he is ripped.

The only President who clearly died of overwork was Polk, and that was a long time ago. Hoover, who worked intensely and humorlessly as President, lived for more than thirty years after the White House; Truman, who worked intensely and gaily, lived for twenty

The President is suffering from nervous exhaustion….He needs to rest for a considerable time.

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States? The vice president has two duties. One is to break a tie in case of a tie vote in the United States Senate... The other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. Neither one of those are very challenging as compared to being able to live for a good part of the time in the state of Arizona.