Soon after her husband was sworn in as president of the United States in 1989, Barbara Bush began losing weight, 18 pounds in all, sudden progress after a lifelong struggle. “I convinced myself it was because I was eating smaller portions and working so hard,” she said in her 1994 memoir. But she also was having trouble with her eyes. They were inflamed and bulging, and sometimes she was seeing double.
In public, Bush dismissed the notion that anything was seriously amiss. “She’s just fine; piece of cake; never broke her stride,” her press secretary, Anna Perez, breezily assured reporters after a treatment at Walter Reed that involved drinking a radioactive substance. In her memoirs, Bush expressed more concern about her dog’s medical plight than her own. Her beloved Millie had developed a different autoimmune disorder, lupus.
The underlying problem was diagnosed as Graves’ disease, the same disorder his wife had, although it affected them in different ways—his heart, her eyes. Like her, his treatment included drinking radioactive iodine. Doctors began drawing blood every day as they tried to carefully moderate his hormone levels. Too little would leave him lethargic; too much risked tripping his heart into fibrillation.
Barbara Bush told me she was inclined to see it as just one of those weird coincidences in life. At the time, she reported that George W. Bush jokingly had called to say she “could end all the talk if his dad and I would just stop drinking out of Millie’s bowl.”
Ross Perot tilted the election. He took 20% of the conservative votes
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