The former Foreign Secretary and SDP Leader, David Owen, riveted his audience in his discussion with John Miller of his just-published book In Sickness and in Power. He gave them an initial jolt with his claim that no fewer than seven Presidents in the last hundred years had been mentally unfit in office.
As a trained doctor and neurologist, he was careful not to overstate his case, which made it all the more disturbing.
He dismissed the charge that Roosevelt was too ill at Yalta to function properly in negotiations with Stalin and Churchill.
However, he said he had uncovered medical evidence that the drugs prescribed for President Kennedy seriously impaired his judgement both at the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco and the subsequent meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961.
The contrast with Kennedy's consummate skill in handling the Cuba Crisis the following year is explained by the acquisition of a much better medical consultant, who took a strong line with his patient over his prescribed medication.
Churchill's heart attack in 1941 was hushed up for security reasons, and so were his two strokes in the early 1950s. More damaging for the country's reputation was the secrecy surrounding Eden's serious illness at the height of the Suez Crisis of 1956, compounded by his medication which led him into uncharacteristically reckless behaviour in his conduct of foreign relations.
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If Jinnah's cancer had been known in 1947 by Nehru and Mountbatten they would not have brought forward the date of independence for the Indian sub-continent, and thus its bloody partition could have been avoided.
Another might-have-been was over the Shah of Iran's secret cancer treatment by two French doctors.
As Foreign Secretary at the time, Lord Owen said that if he had known of it, he and the Americans would have pressured the Shah to leave the country and hand over to a Regency, which might have forestalled the Revolution of 1979, the return of Khomeini and all the subsequent crises produced by the new regime.
The wide-ranging discussion also covered the 11 years cover-up of President Mitterrand's cancer, whether President Nixon was a psychotic, and the hubris syndrome which the author ascribed to both President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
A thought-provoking evening for every member of the audience.
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