ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
NOTE: Below
John Kennedy was shown as a man of vigor despite health problems that led priests to give him last rites before he bid for the presidency. Francois Mitterrand hid for years the cancer that killed him.
The discredited former denials about Russian President Boris Yeltsin's ailments may sound like something out of the Kremlin of old, when operatives insisted doddering leaders were robust until they dropped dead.
Even open governments have been led by the secretly sick, men driven by political sensitivities or pride to hide disability, deny ailments and grin through pain.
In France, a court has banned a book by Mitterrand's doctor telling how the president had ordered his 1982 diagnosis of prostate cancer kept secret and kept it that way for 10 years.
The Soviet Union had a long history of covering up ailments at the top, starting with founder Vladimir Lenin, who was incapacitated and quietly dying at a country resort without the country knowing it.
These days, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, 92, who hasn't appeared in public for more than two years, is believed to be afflicted with Parkinson's disease.
Eighty years after President William McKinley died from a bullet wound amid reports of his ``excellent'' recovery, buoyant accounts of Ronald Reagan's rebound disguised how close he had come to death after being shot in 1981.
Franklin Roosevelt concealed his paralysis from polio as long as he could, with the complicity of the press and his own conviction that spirit was more important than his wasted legs.
He also hid grave heart disease during his 1944 campaign, scholars have since discovered, in what may be the closest American parallel to Yeltsin's debilitating election-year woes.
At the time, Roosevelt's medical adviser told the public he was in ``splendid shape.''
In the United States, plenty of presidents until modern times misrepresented serious problems as little ones.
James Garfield was described as ``somewhat restless'' after being shot in July 1881 and as recovering nicely at the New Jersey shore that September. He died that month.
In the 1890s, Grover Cleveland had much of his jaw removed in a search for cancer; people were told he had teeth pulled.
Woodrow Wilson served out his term as an invalid, with his wife as de facto president, after he suffered a major stroke in 1919 that people were told was indigestion and nerves.
Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s is credited with making disclosure - sometimes graphic disclosure - the norm for American presidents and ending the history of shoving ailments into the shadows.
Eisenhower had a heart attack, a stroke and surgery for ileitis. The White House reported as often as hourly on his condition, even giving what scholar Stephen Hess calls ``state of the president's bowels'' briefings.
``Since then, that's been the rule rather than the exception,'' said Hess, of the Brookings Institution.
Still, Kennedy campaigned for the presidency and governed with Addison's disease, a chronic illness of the adrenal glands he had contracted years before and denied he had.
He almost died twice from infections from earlier back surgery. But the public saw only youthful energy - his touch football, his sailing.
``There was no question they were keeping this from the American people,'' Hess said. ``To that degree, they were pretty duplicitous.''
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB