What presidents, if any were drug addicts, alcoholics or mentally ill while in office

[Guinastasia]

@VOW

Didn’t Bush Sr puke in the Japanese Prime Minister’s lap?
~VOW

As Marley said, he had the flu. I think he fainted right after that.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Marley23

Please tell me you people are playing along and aren’t taking that whip-it joke seriously.

Don’t you remember the story of Willie Nelson and Jimmy Carter smoking doobies and doing whippets on the roof of the White House?

(Of course it is a joke. But someday soon the internet will use this thread as a cite for the truth of the matter.)

[Derleth]

@The_Second_Stone

Don’t you remember the story of Willie Nelson and Jimmy Carter smoking doobies and doing whippets on the roof of the White House?

(Of course it is a joke. But someday soon the internet will use this thread as a cite for the truth of the matter.)

Here I thought he was addicted to the dog breed because they could keep the aquatic rabbits away.

[Leo_Bloom]

@The_Second_Stone

…Someday someone will use this thread as a cite for the truth of the matter.)

Absolutely. And post it in Wiki, which will then be cited.

The sel-referential world of Internet bullshit.

[Diceman]

@Sister_Vigilante

And I also thought Reagan was pretty far gone even before he left the presidency and that his wife was purportedly using astrologists to make his presidential decisions for him.

Only people with an axe to grind say anything like this. The general view is that he showed signs of the early stages of Alzheimers in the latter years of his presidency.

[Machine_Elf]

@Diceman

Only people with an axe to grind say anything like this. The general view is that he showed signs of the early stages of Alzheimers in the latter years of his presidency.

Can’t speak to his Alzheimers disease, but it’s been fairly well-documented that Nancy Reagan worked with an astrologer to influence her husband’s schedule:

@Wikipedia

Eventually, this protectiveness led to her consulting an astrologer, Joan Quigley, who offered insight on which days were “good”, “neutral”, or should be avoided, which influenced her husband’s White House schedule.[114] Days were color-coded according to the astrologer’s advice to discern precisely which days and times would be optimal for the president’s safety and success.[8] The White House Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, grew frustrated with this regimen, which created friction between him and the First Lady. This escalated with the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair, an administration scandal, in which the First Lady felt Regan was damaging the president.[115] She thought he should resign, and expressed this to her husband although he did not share her view. Regan wanted President Reagan to address the Iran-Contra matter in early 1987 by means of a press conference, though Nancy refused to allow Reagan to overexert himself due to a recent prostate surgery and astrological warnings.[116] Regan became so angry with Nancy that he hung up on her during a 1987 telephone conversation. According to former ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson, when the President heard of this treatment, he demanded—and eventually received—Regan’s resignation.[117] In his 1988 memoirs, Regan wrote about Nancy’s consultations with the astrologer, the first public mention of them, which resulted in embarrassment for the First Lady.[118] Nancy later wrote, “Astrology was simply one of the ways I coped with the fear I felt after my husband almost died… Was astrology one of the reasons [further attempts did not occur]? I don’t really believe it was, but I don’t really believe it wasn’t.”[119]

[Gray_Ghost]

Reagan’s son, Ron, wrote a memoir last year with some claims that President Reagan suffered from Alzheimer’s towards the end of his presidency.

“My father might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.”

Ron Reagan writes that there is “no evidence that my father (or anyone else) was aware of his medical condition while he was in office.”

“Had the diagnosis been made in, say, 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have.”

Further, when the ex-President suffered a horse riding accident in 1989, he required surgical attention to relieve cranial pressure. Upon doing so, the doctors noticed “probable signs of Alzheimer’s Disease.” I don’t know whether they noticed it from a brain tissue stain, a spinal fluid test, or if his brain had sufficient plaques to be noticeable just from gross visual examination of the brain surface. Perhaps his Alzheimer’s progress accelerated after he left office? Then again, he did live until 2004.

FWIW, his biographer, Edmund Morris, disagrees with Ron Reagan’s statements about the President suffering from Alzheimer’s during his Administration, as do Reagan’s other son, Michael.

My guess? I think he did have it, and it was noticeable, from about 1986 on. From the Morris cite:

During one unhappy period, when the Iran-contra scandal coincided with prostate problems, the president was so withdrawn and confused that papers were surreptitously drawn up by staffers concerned that he might have to be declared “disoriented” and disabled under the 25th Amendment.

I can’t see staffers drawing up papers like that on a whim, or a feeling that the President might not be O.K. I’d think you’d have to be pretty certain he wasn’t.

[kayaker]

@ralph124c

Bill Clinton was clearly unbalanced (the Monica Lewinsky affair).

If enjoying sex makes someone “clearly unbalanced”, call the men in white coats and lock me up.:dubious:

[Derleth]

@kayaker

If enjoying sex makes someone “clearly unbalanced”, call the men in white coats and lock me up.:dubious:

I suppose you could argue that having sex in such a clearly inappropriate and dangerous fashion is a sign of some unbalance, but humans do stupidly dangerous shit all the time and, in particular, using power to get sex is so common it alone can’t be taken as diagnostic of anything beyond being human.

[Dogzilla]

According to a movie trailer I saw the other night, Abe Lincoln also hunted vampires in his early, pre-White House years.

[TruCelt]

I met Ronald Reagan the same day that the Contra funding went up for vote. I asked him about a small point related to the Contras, and he had no idea what I was talking about. He looked up at Admiral Poindexter with the look of a deeply concerned but confused four-year-old.

He was in the process of walking to the helicopter for the first leg of a trip to his ranch to “rest.”

When I heard about the Alzheimer’s, I just thought “Oh, so that was it.”

[ralph124c]

@Derleth

I suppose you could argue that having sex in such a clearly inappropriate and dangerous fashion is a sign of some unbalance, but humans do stupidly dangerous shit all the time and, in particular, using power to get sex is so common it alone can’t be taken as diagnostic of anything beyond being human.

I really don’t understand this attitude. Clinton was the PRESIDENT-he should have had some respect for the office. Doing what he did was childish and self-indulgent.
But heck, maybe I’m wrong-maybe the White House should be visited by hookers-is that OK?

[md2000]

@ralph124c

I really don’t understand this attitude. Clinton was the PRESIDENT-he should have had some respect for the office. Doing what he did was childish and self-indulgent.
But heck, maybe I’m wrong-maybe the White House should be visited by hookers-is that OK?

“The man with two brains…”

Obviously his sex antics were something pathological, beyond the desire for pleasure. (Although that’s always a good motivator). It’s like he needed to prove something. Note that Wag the Dog, and True Colors, both written as thinly veiled take-offs of Clinton, also make allegations of sex with underage girls.

But then, it seems JFK had a similar need to prove something. As did many other men…

Maybe I don’t understand this because I’m nobody important or charismatic and women don’t throw themselves at me…

[handsomeharry]

@Derleth

I suppose you could argue that having sex in such a clearly inappropriate and dangerous fashion is a sign of some unbalance, but humans do stupidly dangerous shit all the time and, in particular, using power to get sex is so common it alone can’t be taken as diagnostic of anything beyond being human.

Wrong!
It wasn’t *what *he did that prove his madness, but with whom!

[santosvega]

@Clothahump

Not so much for those reasons; people drank more because they didn’t have clean water. The boiling and fermentation process killed off germs, which is why light levels of alcohol (“small beer”, etc.) were so popular.

Nitpick: primarily going off of UK history here, but low alcohol levels were never popular. Small beer was for servants, brewed from the leavings of the regular beer; think reusing the same coffee grounds for a second pot. We have records from the major breweries starting nearly from the time it was possible to accurately ascertain the alcohol content of beer back in Victorian times, and they place the average ABV of beers consumed at around 6-7%. It’s likely that the ‘Dinner Ale’ that most breweries produced, at around 3-4%, was what would have been served to children, as much of the water at the time was indeed undrinkable. It wasn’t until the lean times of the First World War that alcohol content as a whole began to drop.

So prior to the twentieth century most Britons were probably properly tipsy much of the time. There is some evidence to suggest that it wasn’t quite at the same level in America. Colonial America didn’t have a brewing industry, favoring cider and rum. And they had likely had access to drinkable water, as Benjamin Franklin, during his time in Britain, was frequently the subject of mockery over his desire to drink water. He earned the hilarious nickname ‘Water American’, proving that the famous British wit has made some advances over the last few centuries.

More to the subject of the thread, the point is that alcoholism was and is a tricky thing to judge, given different tolerance levels between individuals and different standards of consumption over different societies. Nixon and Kennedy were pill-poppers, Reagan may or may not have been suffering the early effects of Alzheimers. Anything else is pure speculation.

[Marley23]

@ralph124c

I really don’t understand this attitude. Clinton was the PRESIDENT-he should have had some respect for the office. Doing what he did was childish and self-indulgent.

This is getting off topic, and none of those things indicate mental illness.

[Guinastasia]

@ralph124c

I really don’t understand this attitude. Clinton was the PRESIDENT-he should have had some respect for the office. Doing what he did was childish and self-indulgent.
But heck, maybe I’m wrong-maybe the White House should be visited by hookers-is that OK?

So was JFK – what’s your point? (The guy was banging one chick after another, including Marilyn Monroe. Bobby Kennedy was even worse.)

[etv78]

With regard to early Presidents driking: remember, drinking water wasn’t universally safe until about 100 years ago.

[Derleth]

@ralph124c

I really don’t understand this attitude. Clinton was the PRESIDENT-he should have had some respect for the office. Doing what he did was childish and self-indulgent.
But heck, maybe I’m wrong-maybe the White House should be visited by hookers-is that OK?

You’re shoving words into my mouth, which, all things considered, is better than some of the alternatives.

I never defended any of what Clinton did with Lewinsky as moral, intelligent, or anything any other leader should emulate. I merely noticed that, since time immemorial, people have had sex even when it wasn’t a good idea, and that people in power have used their power to have sex.

Hell, Clinton’s practically a celibate monk compared to what was happening in the Vatican in the 1500s. Sex, power, and bad judgement have always gone together.