McCain is an old man by any measure and you have to get to that age—I’m a few months older than he is---to know how fragile you feel at the simplest of symptoms.  But a review of  a recent study of medically and mentally impaired politicians in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine shows just how high risk his precarious health could be. 

Political leaders are notoriously secretive and misleading about their ailments and medications.    Reporters have been given only glimpses of McCain’s medical history after his serious setbacks with melanoma, not to mention his legacy of ailments from his prolonged captivity.   So what shape is he really in to cope with the high stress headaches of the presidency.?   

Lord David Owen, a physician who rose to become one of Britain’s leading Labour politicians, studied the medical records of John F. Kennedy and other leaders and found that their disorders were directly related to political debacles.  Kennedy was being injected with a cocaine derivative regularly for back spasms during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

"I couldn't understand how this man, who had handled the Cuban missile crisis so impressively in 1962, could have made such a monumental mess of the Bay of Pigs. I found it in his medical history. In 1961, a recreational drug user, on massive doses of steroids, he was completely out of control."

But you wouldn’t have known this from the White House press office, which was mum on Kennedy’s feel-good treatments for constant back pain and problems with Addison’s disease. 

Owen reconstructs the erratic judgments made by British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, the Shah of Iran, and French Premier Francois Mitterand, all while they were being treated with powerful drugs during crisis.   

His main thesis is even scarier---how leaders who consolidate their power acquire what Owen calls “the hubris syndrome”.    He singles out George Bush and Tony Blair as two recent cases of visionary delusions that blinded their judgment and led them into Iraq.   Hitler, the later day Margaret Thatcher, and Neville Chamberlain are other examples.   Lyndon Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt has plenty of symptoms too, he found, but along with Mussolini and Mao, their delusions were complicated by bipolar disorder. 

It’s hard to know what would be worse, a sick, sinking McCain, or a healthy heady Palin, but neither prospect fares well in Owens analysis, and thankfully, the public seems to get it. 

Owen's book is: In Sickness and In Power: Illness in Heads of Government During the last 100 years.