Up from the Bungle

Almost 23 hours after doctors diagnosed the President's illness, the United Press and International News Service simultaneously (at 3:08 p.m.) flashed the first wire-service bulletins. Said the U.P.: "Ike has heart attack." Said the I.N.S. brain-twister: "Ike has a mild cerebral heart attack." The Associated Press lead, two minutes later, restrainedly quoted.the less dramatic verdict of a cerebral occlusion, but kept its weather eye on the headlines by explaining that "the White House called it 'a form of heart attack.' " Half an hour later, when all three wire services backed away from the heart-attack approach, many evening papers in the East were already on the streets with editions that bannered the bungle. Not until the third day of Eisenhower's illness did the press report as clear fact what the White House continued to deny: that the President had suffered a mild stroke.

The blame for this extraordinary tug-of-words lay not with the press but with an Administration that has shown notable candor in discussions of the President's health. Yet after each of Eisenhower's three illnesses, as the A.P.'s News Analyst James Marlow protested, the White House "first gave wrong information or only part of the truth and let it stand for hours." Last week's initial diagnosis of a "chill" was in force 16 hours longer than the announcements of "digestive upset" that preceded disclosure of Ike's heart attack in 1955 and last year's ileitis. But on both previous occasions Press Secretary Jim Hagerty made swift amends with a discursive, detailed flow of information on the President's progress. When Ike was stricken last week, Hagerty was in Paris.

Tidbits & Optimism. By contrast with Hagerty, his new associate press secretary, Mrs. Anne Williams Wheaton (TIME, Nov. 18), is not a party to top-level Administration decisions--and not an experienced reporter. Though disgruntled newsmen accused Pressagent Wheaton of holding out on them when she protested her inability to answer their questions, the fact was that Vice President Nixon, Sherman Adams and other White House aides neither informed her of the real nature of Ike's illness nor consulted her on the abstrusely worded report in which Ike's doctors tactlessly took credit for being right in their "original diagnosis." After staving off suspicious newsmen until midafternoon, matronly, silver-haired Anne Wheaton was red-eyed; she quivered with strain when the medical report was finally released at her third press conference of the day. To the jampack in Hagerty's office she said: "I will have no comment on its contents." Under the jackhammer questioning of men desperate to get the story straight, she did, in fact, hazard comment of harmful ineptitude ("That is a form of heart attack, as I understand it. . . . 'Cerebral' does have a connotation of something to do with the head"). Anne Wheaton's confusion was hardly less helpful than Major General Howard McC. Snyder's lofty insistence that a stroke is a "layman's word" implying brain hemorrhage or paralysis (see MEDICINE) and therefore not applicable to Ike.

Back from Paris, Old Reporter Hagerty breezed into his first press conference next morning with clear-cut answers and a passel of tidbits such as his report that Ike had shaved himself (safety razor) and eaten a hearty breakfast (grapefruit, creamed chipped beef, toast and honey, Sanka). In four more press conferences of his own, and in an informative, 45-minute press session with Richard Nixon, Hagerty skillfully conveyed in one day the upbeat picture of a cheerful, energetic President who could already laugh at his "slight" speech impediment. (Hagerty also allowed gallantly that he would not have handled the first-day situation differently from Associate Anne Wheaton.) By the end of his second day and seventh press conference, Hagerty was protesting affably to an overoptimistic newsman that Ike's attendance at church did "not close the medical case yet."

Arteriosclerotic Anomaly. To some newsmen and newspapers Jim Hagerty's bedside manner proved less persuasive than in either of Ike's other illnesses. Though the press secretary pooh-poohed the idea that the President was likely to resign from office ("Just say I laughed"), several correspondents, such as the Ike-minded New York Herald Tribune's Roscoe Drummond, implied that this was still a distinct possibility. Some influential papers, including Scripps-Howard's independent Washington News, argued that the President should yield to a younger, more vigorous man (see JUDGMENTS & PROPHECIES), and Norman Chandler's Los Angeles Times, the H.Q. of G.O.P. press sentiment for Richard Nixon for President, came very close to saying that it might be better if Ike were to bow out to the Vice President.

The sharpest suggestion that Hagerty was soft-pedaling worrisome details of Ike's condition came in a barbed New York Times dissertation after the press secretary had assured Timesman William Lawrence that Eisenhower showed no signs of having arteriosclerosis. Retorted the Times's Medical Writer Eugene Taylor: "Either someone has erred or the world has a new medical anomaly. It is quite inconsistent with all currently accepted medical knowledge to insist that President Eisenhower's condition gives no evidence of arteriosclerosis. The stroke and heart attack are evidence in themselves." Despite such evidence of euphemism, most newsmen agreed that the White House had not exaggerated the speed of Ike's recovery. At week's end the President, while not looking his best, looked healthier than many of the reporters who had had to cover his illness.

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