Today (Jan. 11) in 1964 U.S. Surgeon General issued the first government report saying “smoking may be hazardous to one’s health”, 14 years after the landmark article of “Tobacco smoking as a possible etiologic factor in bronchiogenic carcinoma” by doctors at Barnes Hospital St. Louis in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) on May 27, 1950.
Unlike Winston Churchill, Eisenhower was rarely seen smoking cigars or cigarettes, but he was a chain smoker at least during the years of Crusade in Europe. He had his first major heart attack at age of 65 in 1955 or even earlier.
It is well known that Ike and British General Bernard Montgomery couldn’t get along because of personality and strategic clashes. And their first meeting in London in 1942 didn’t help. Ike took out a cigarette upon entering Monty’s office and Monty told him sharply that he did not permit anybody to smoke in his presence and to put out the cigarette immediately. “That son of a bitch” Ike said, according to Kay Summersby. Only King George VI and Churchill had the 'privilege' of smoking in front of Monty.
In reading Kay Summersby Morgan’s Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, I found numerous passages suggesting Ike had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) with frequent exacerbations, such as:
“His office was probably the worst place possible for a man with Ike’s tendency to catch cold.”
“He had a series of colds, one of which turned into the flu [while in France].”
“Ethel and I described how it felt to be torpedoed, and we heard how Ike had caught a terrible cold in Gibraltar.”
In the Editor’s Note of
Letters to Mamie, John Eisenhower [Ike's son] wrote, “He [Ike] kept to a grueling schedule, constantly traveling to where he was needed, if only to show himself to the troops, and carrying with him a cold or mild case of flu much of the time, encouraged largely by his formidable consumption of cigarettes.”
A cigar in the mouth, like his “V” sign, is Winston Churchill’s trade mark. Churchill did have a heart attack while staying at the White House (on his fist visit to the States shortly after the Pearl Harbor Attack.) His physician, Sir Charles Wilson thought he had a heart attack, but didn’t tell him or anybody else then.
Being a reputed heavy smoker, Churchill must have been very lucky to live beyond 90 years of age, I wondered and found some answers in Harry Butcher’s My Three Years with Eisenhower (his diary of August 26, 1942, London),
“
Asked [Ike] if the PM [Churchill] drank as much as is reputed. Was told he had only a glass of sherry. He smokes a terrifically long and big cigar, but plays with it more than he smokes. After dinner, he lit one of these, and during the evening, it burned about an inch, dying out frequently. Ike had the impression that the PM rather relishes his reputation as a heavy smoker and drinker, but actually is much more moderate than rumor would indicate.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer was also a heavy smoker and was diagnosed to have throat cancer at age of 61 and died two years later. The picture is the cover of his biography by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Sir William Osler, the father of the modern internal medicine, is my “American idol”. When I began to read him thirty some years ago, I found in him the characteristics of a good general internist. Using him as my 'model', I never quit reading; and I am not talking about readings in medicine.
He died, in 1919 at Oxford, of empyema, a common complication of pneumonia in the pre-antibiotic era, and his life long smoking made him vulnerable to pneumonia. As wise and knowledgeable as he was, he never talked about the vice of smoking.
Today is indeed a sport day: Steelers vs. Ravens today (4:30 PM). That’s enough to burn all the fire inside the Steelers fans. Even the TV weather report reported the kick off temperature (30 degrees F) at Pittsburgh, but it obviously has reached the boiling point inside the hearts of the Steelers fans.
