Health & Politics

Once again the question that had tantalized the world and haunted politicians for months was fuzzing the U.S. political picture. Will Ike run? His doctors said he could and some of his aides said he would, but until the President spoke for himself, the lingering doubt would be on the minds of most U.S. politicians.

Republicans, who felt sure of victory with Eisenhower, would certainly have their uneasy moments until they were again sure that they had Eisenhower. Democrats, who even before the operation had dreamed of winning against the President (by cutting into the Republican farm states, seizing at least one heavily urban state and winning back the South), were certain to place new hope in this arithmetic now. Moreover, if Ike runs, Democratic campaigners will be tempted to harp on the health issue. At a Democratic policy conference in Des Moines last week, Oklahoma's U.S. Senator Robert Kerr tried the tune: "There is danger and insecurity in uncertainty. The country already has suffered enough under a part-time Chief Executive. We know we cannot hope for security and stability in the future on such a basis."

Republicans were quick to point out that there are two sides to the issue, that the leading Democratic candidates have had their own bouts with illness and the surgeon's knife. In the past four years, Adlai Stevenson had had four stints in hospitals: for removal of a kidney stone a month before the Democratic National Convention in 1952, for treatment and then surgery for a second kidney stone in 1954 (he takes pills in the hope of preventing more stones), for a bout with bronchial pneumonia (five days in the hospital) in 1955. Missouri's U.S. Senator Stuart Symington underwent a nerve operation for the relief of high blood pressure and hypertension in 1947; New York's Governor Averell Harriman is now convalescing from a prostate operation that kept him in the hospital for 15 days.

New York's G.O.P. State Chairman L. Judson Morhouse tried this tune: "From all indications, the President's operation apparently was no more serious than the kidney surgery undergone by Mr. Steven son or the prostate surgery undergone last month by Harriman." One point was clear: for the rest of the season the U.S. will have a new appreciation of the old uncertainties of health and politics.

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