John McCain’s high risk health diagnosed

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:10:27 -0400

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.

Yale Reunion: 50 Years and Counting

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 19:07:17 -0400

I’m still recovering from our grueling 50^th at Yale. And it wasn't just the old boola boola that tested our ebbing endurance. The image of drunken guys swaying in unison down the streets of New Haven is as poor an illustration of the university today as “God and Man at Yale”.

You show up Thursday or Friday and throw yourself into a dizzying, full immersion memory trip with a whole lot of people you haven't laid eyes on in 50 years. The first challenge is to package your career and family history into a compact story as palatable as possible. The shock is how many fresh, young faces float up from long closed memory compartments, made indelible by four years of inbred living in an all male campus. The connections are still there, embedded bonds strung out across years of separation. Is it possible there are only six degrees of difference in how work, wives, children, accumulated joys and sorrows, washouts and small triumphs have played out with all of us?

Ours was the first Yale class to enroll more high schoolers than preppies. Alumni whose sons were presumed to automatically qualify for Yale admittance were displaced by ambitious but unpolished kids like me from way west of the Hudson. We were insecure and unprepared for those first year classes; the Andover and Hotchkiss men looked and dressed like they belonged; they had already read the books and knew how to write the papers.

The idea seemed to be to foster a new national (male) elite, drawn from a larger SAT gene pool no longer clustered along the Eastern seaboard. Our college years came just after the Korean War, but the draft was still a threat as we discovered at graduation time. Ike was the distant leader who provided our era one of the quieter periods of postwar domestic politics. McCarthyism was marginalized, but Adlai Stevenson was less than wildly received in a witty campus campaign speech.(captured on the Sounds of Yale CD produced by Courty Bryan and the late Doug Daniels.) The menacing background noise of the Cold War and the bomb was mostly cancelled out by raucous weekends of what you would expect when 4,000 guys are confined to 50 square blocks with alcohol always on hand and girls nowhere in sight. But the launch of Sputnik punctured our contented notion that we were growing up in the American Century.

Probably our greatest advantage was to arrive at Yale's doorstep just when the nation was entering a new age of middle class affluence, distributed along the geographic lines of our new Yale class. The updraft of demand for educated graduates with expanded horizons (Yale’s well-rounded generalists were presumably specially equipped to take advantage of this) made for upward mobility that seems effortless compared to what today’s graduates invest in their careers.

The Dean of Admissions for our class, Arthur Howe, made the point: Very few of you would get accepted at Yale today, said this spry, forceful advocate for Yale at age 92 in an evening gathering. One good reason is that half the class are Women! Here I go out of my way to point out that Book and Snake, my own secret society, a Yale institution that used to define senior year status, was the first to accept women the first year they were eligible, while the venerable Skull & Bones took another 30 years.

Yale classes now are composed of gender balanced, achievement-driven, increasingly diverse kids from the U.S. and abroad (5%), but they are at least as much of an elite as we were. They come from the wealthiest and best educated families in the U.S., that produce the perfect SAT scorers and all around overachievers that now are the norm. So Yale picks from more than 20,000 applicants and accepts fewer than 2,000 kids to yield a class that usually runs about 1,325 freshman. Yale showed off some of the shining stars of its expanded intellectual firmament for the reunion returnees of all classes. They kept us busy for most of two days with lectures by some of the exciting and yes, entertaining professors, who challenged us with these heady topics. http://www.aya.yale.edu/reunions/ayaReunionInfo.asp?itemType=0&itemID=2521

Our own very knowledgeable classmates kept us challenged for an afternoon with a panel led by David Greenway, longtime foreign affairs columnist for The Boston Globe, on the (dismal) prospects for the Iraq—Iran—Pakistan triangle, with contributions by Persian scholar Marv Zonis and former Pakistan ambassador Tom Simons. And Fritz Kinzel and David Sparks, our psychiatric team, updated us again on the geriatric future we face, with a few upbeat forecasts of treatments that might help.

In between times were taken up with standard queries about what we were (still) doing and how many grandchildren, to more worldly concerns, particularly the presidential election. Interesting that there wasn’t much enthusiasm for our age cohort’s John McCain, while I counted a strong contingent opting for a new age of Obama, whatever it means---anything to get past the Bush years and change the agenda. But maybe that’s my bias.

One of the pleasurable discoveries of advancing age--knowing I’m so old I can stop caring about issues that are going to outlive me---seemed to evaporate when my pet issues arose. Or maybe it was the chilly to sweltering temperature change that ruined my thermostat over the weekend. My wife was astounded when I leaped into conversations, more voluble, if not coherent, than I had been in years.

One inescapable theme was Yale’s compounding wealth and ambition. With an endowment of $24 billion, growing in recent years at 20% annually under the guidance of its investment guru David Swenson, it now produces enough tax free income to cover all operating expenses. It's capital program has turned the campus into a boomtown of new building, refurbishing, greening and beautifying, so that the dingy dorms and common rooms of memory now look more like the better clubs that Yalies are supposed to frequent.

President Rick Levin, an economist who has mastered keeping alumni with big checkbooks excited while fulfilling faculty agendas and rebuilding an antiquated physical plant, has led Yale to its new eminence. He announced during our weekend that Yale would spend $500 million to build two new residential colleges to expand undergrad enrollment. He was proud of Yale's recent purchase of the nearby Bayer R &D labs valued at $700 million--a steal at $109 million, which would provide a complete new campus for growing the sciences. Expanding the university’s global reach is the next challenge he’s tackling, to position Yale on the larger map of dominant centers of learning. Isn’t that ambition enough?

I’ve lived my adult life after Yale outside academe, and made little effort to keep up with its ups and downs since my day. So I was surprised to come around to this as my major takeaway of the weekend: Yale and its rich sister institutions--Harvard ($35 billion), Stanford ($17B), Princeton (16B) and Universities of Texas (almost 16B) combined, more than $100B and many more in the $1B plus brackets—could be poised to eclipse major corporations as the most influential institutions in American society.

My impression is that the universities have preferred to be quiet movers of policy narrowly affecting their interests, internally focused on faculty issues, averse to public scrutiny and so, muted in their impact on the big issues of the day. With accumulating assets that outstrip many companies and nations, exemption from most taxation and regulation--except for the government funds they increasing attract as they vie with companies for the research and development dollars that drive our new economy—no shareholders to answer to, no short term stock price to worry about or buyout funds to M&A them out of existence, they have a growing opportunity to influence the direction of our future.

Could Yale be more ambitious in influencing the national agenda? It is committing R & D resources to lead the way on critical global issues such as climate change. The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies has taken a leading international role in policy development, the science and engineering of sustainable products and services, and influencing opinion, with its new Environment 360 website. And the new Kroon Hall building, which we toured, will exemply the school’s mission of sustainable development, as a platinum certified LEED building, the closest to energy neutral they know to build at this scale.

Yale seems less bold on more political fronts, where the universities may fear to tread. In the Washington trench warfare between the Bush White House and Congress over habeas corpus and eavesdropping on our citizenry without authorization, the serious trampling of scientific evidence and other critical “open society” issues, is the university’s voice heard? These values are critical to Yale’s mission, but the flack may have been too heavy, given that the violator is the legacy of one of Yale’s iconic families.

I tried to hold those thoughts as the weekend waned. I finished the final round of the contest I dreamed up to jog my memory on first meeting. Who among us looked the most like they did 50 years ago, without surgical intervention? My awards went to Bob Morgan, Pete Spellman and Dr. Sherm Bull, who pulled off the astounding feat of becoming the oldest person to climb Mount Everest, and has the taut look of someone practicing caloric restriction to outlast us all.

At our 60^th or 70^th, would anyone know or care what we had done? We hadn’t produced any great captains of industry or contributed life changing medical or scientific breakthroughs far as I know. Lots of solid bankers and brokers, doctors and lawyers, managers. I counted a lot of us who wound up in the media, as it came to be called. Brandon Stoddard of ABC Entertainment and Jim Hoge, still reigning at Foreign Affairs, approached mogul status while quite a few of us toiled at Time, Newsweek, and major newspapers when they were still influential voices. Dave Burke made a long, happy transition from 60 Minutes producer to Paris, where he became an expert on Writers in Paris, the title of his latest book. The media types among us can probably count themselves lucky to be on the sidelines as “alt media”, the Internet and electronic distribution, fragment audiences and destroy the profits of what is now “old media” .

In this current age of celebrity our only nominee with some remaining name recognition would be Dick Cavett, who spent an hour regaling us at our final Saturday night conclave, with impeccably timed one liners wrapped around a bittersweet recital of his own odyssey. This high school boy from Nebraska, whom I don’t recall crossing paths with in four years on campus, whatever that means, had us in the palm of his hand. He name dropped with the best of them---hanging out with Marlon Brando, writing jokes with Woody Allen for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson---finally getting the recognition he craved from his idol Groucho Marx, the thinking man’s comedian. But it wasn’t just laughs in the spotlight, his talented actress wife Carrie Nye whom he met at the Yale Drama School died young, he endured a long bout of depression, and when the lights moved on, he resorts to promoting DVDs of his old shows. He loved his performance too, as you can read in his blog… http://cavett.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/good-to-see-you-is-it-you/index.html

Mortality is much on our minds now, a substitute for ascending status as good cocktail conversation. I had an amazing talk with Jonathon Foote about his recovery from multiple strokes with the help of a new wife and a passion for cutting horses. I couldn’t help being fascinated in a morbid kind of way by the medical luck of the draw that seems to dictate so much of what amounts to the good life at this age--remarkable recoveries from deadly infirmities, others struck down suddenly, some slowly suffering from fleeting faculties.

By Sunday morning, at the memorial service for fallen classmates, I was balanced between feeling lucky to be alive with bodily functions intact and mental skills only mildly impaired and identifying with those, some long gone, and the newly departed, who for no particular reason that I can divine, are the ones no longer with us. As we said their names and lit candles for them, I counted 35 who died in the last five years, not a big number. As we head toward our eighties, who would be there to share these times?

Not the feel good take home I was looking for. So I settled for this: Yale will be around when we aren’t. Yale’s new generations ought to be better trustees of the fragile future than we were. That’s a legacy I hadn’t thought much about or counted on.

Bob Ellis's Open Salon Blog

John McCain’s high risk health diagnosed

Yale Reunion: 50 Years and Counting