About: Ill-Advised

Ill-Advised: Presidential Health and Public Trust is a 1992 book by historian Robert Hugh Ferrell examining politically motivated cover-ups of serious medical issues afflicting U.S. presidents while they were in office. Although Dwight Eisenhower is the main focus of the book, it covers the presidency for a century, from Grover Cleveland's mouth cancer in 1893 to the health of George H. W. Bush, then-current president when the book was first published. All of these instances, Ferrell argues, raised serious questions about the fitness of each president to hold office, as well as whether the presidents and their physicians violated the public trust in keeping the incidents secret.