Home » No, Paul Tsongas was not like Hillary Clinton

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No, Paul Tsongas was not like Hillary Clinton — 25 Comments

  1. In 2005, I think it was, my best friend came down with cancer. She underwent a course of chemotherapy, at the end of which the doctors said she was likely cancer-free; but just to be on the safe side, would she want to go for a course of radiation therapy.

    She decided she would. As a result, she contracted pneumonia and died of it in early 2006.

    I can well believe that Mr. Tsongas’ cancer cells had been killed, and that he died of pneumonia.

  2. I think that’s a fair distinction. Tsongas was putting the best spin on an ambiguous situation, and seems to have believed what he said. In retrospect, it wasn’t that far off the mark, though it was over-optimistic. I find that different than the Clinton camp saying “nothing to see here. Move along.”

  3. “… I don’t like to see him portrayed as a Hillary-esque liar.”

    Hear hear. I’m hard pressed to think of another American president as devoid of decency or morality as Obama and the Clintons.

  4. Tsongas’ onetime chief of staff was my landlord (and housemate too, briefly) in D.C. for a time — from ’79-’84. He had been hard at work fundraising for the ’84 Senate campaign when news came from Paul that he had been diagnosed. Difficult, hard, sad days, those, for thems that were close to the Senator. He was well loved by many.

  5. I remember Tsongas as an honorable politician. It yanks my chain whenever some wishy washy republican is compared to Reagan. And, comparing anyone in American politics in any manner whatsoever to hrc is an insult; so I understand your desire to set the record straight.

  6. I’d still give Tsongas the benefit of the doubt, as I did then. It seems that back then there were still democrat politicians who placed the nation’s welfare ahead of an ideological agenda. Still understood that “politics stops at the water’s edge”.

    I do not believe that to be the case today.

    No way does the DNC and democrat elite not suspect/know that Hillary is suffering from a debilitating illness that disqualifies her from the Presidency. As a party, the leadership and, much of the base, places ideology far above our national security. And of course, there are many other indications that this is the case.

  7. Tsongas was astute and personable; I liked him too. When he died there was some concern to the effect: “Was he hiding something?” But our minds expect hindsight to find causal connections to everything. Neo, how did Clinton try to exploit concerns on Paul’s fitness to serve in 1992? I’m not sure the 1992 electorate would consider attacks of that nature to be in good taste. Of course the 2016 electorate is expecting campaigns to be reality shows dishing out rumors, insults and scandals at regular intervals.

  8. The really ironic thing about this attempt to make Clinton look better by comparing to Tsongas is the fact that he died from pneumonia.

  9. Tsongas’ history:
    1983-initial diagnosis, large cell lymphoma. Rx Total Body Irradiation (TBI). 1987-recurrence, armpit, irradiated. 1992-intra-abdominal relapse, treated with chemotherapy. Died in 1997 of myelodyplasia (profound bone marrow derangement), said to have been ‘free” of lymphoma at death.

    I was an MD member of one of the early autologous bone marrow transfusion/TBI teams circa 1980.
    The treatment was extraordinarily hard on the patients, many of whom did not survive the therapy. Supportive care was less able than today, and marrow stimulating factors to speed marrow repopulation (Epogen and Neupogen were the first) had not yet been developed.

    TBI is a supra-lethal radiation dose, wiping out the marrow. The patient’s own marrow is re-infused as rescue. But since lymphoma often contaminates the marrow, the re-infusion then returns lymphoma cells to the patient. Which probably happened to Tsongas.

    Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) is profound derangement of bone marrow, inevitably fatal. In Tsongas’ case, the TBI may have been causative. In the absence of a thorough autopsy, his being free of lymphoma at death is less than certain. Lymphomas sometimes burn out as (fatal) MDS.

    With large cell lymphoma treated with TBI, Tsongas should never have run for president. It was vanity, as he himself later admitted. He was a nice enough guy, but mentally and biologically unfit for that office.

  10. Frog:

    The issue here isn’t whether he should have run for office; it is probably the case that he shouldn’t have. The issue is whether he and his doctors thought he could and thought that he would probably be okay.

    No one ever said he didn’t have cancer, or covered up the type of cancer he had, or the fact that he’d undergone the transplant. This was all in the public domain at the time.

  11. Neo, you have your issue and I have mine. You don’t understand lymphoma. I do. It is a very complicated set of ailments.

    “In the 1991 Post interview, Tsongas noted that in 1987 “they found a node in my armpit, and to this day they disagree on what it was but they pulled me in for a mass of radiation.” That is fairly Hillaryesque, a vague partial truth.

    I guarantee he had normal tissue consequences of his TBI therapy.

    You cited his docs, who were were false and misleading: “his doctors declined to use the term “cured,” but they said (in 1991) Tsongas had been disease-free since he was discharged in October 1986 and that they could find no medical problems.” What happened to the 1987 lymph node mass that got irradiated? They could not find problems? How hard did they look?

  12. Frog:

    As I said before, the issue is not whether they put the best spin on it; they did. The issue is whether there is any analogy to Hillary’s lying about her situation; there is not. Tsongas was very upfront about the exact disease he had had. The only really controversial part was that lymph node, which was probably treated just a couple of months after the initial treatment ended in 1986 and was considered (as far as I can tell) to probably have been part of that initial presentation that they had somehow missed, and which was treated very very shortly after. So it would not technically have been a “recurrence” if they actually believed that, it would have been part of the original presentation. He was running for president in 1992, and it was approximately five years later.

    I am fairly sure that if they had been entirely upfront they would have said something like: his chances of a recurrence are (some sort of percentage), and his chances of filling out his term in decent health was (some sort of percentage). They didn’t do that.Full disclosure would definitely have indicated they say more than they did, with more exact figures (which are only general estimates for a general population, anyway). But they certainly said a lot about his illness that was accurate, and there was nothing like a coverup where they said he had one thing and he really had another.

    I have no idea how hard they looked after 1987, but that node was successfully treated and until August of 1992 there is no indication he had any health problems or any recurrences. Do you not think they would have been monitoring him all that time, according to the standards of the day? Of course they were.

    By the way, this letter to the Times from his wife makes a reference to the fact that the 1987 node was not kept a secret; it had been discussed openly by Tsongas in Boston some years earlier.

    See also this and this. And here’s some information that documents what Tsongas’ wife wrote to the Times, the fact that the 1987 biopsy had indeed been disclosed considerably earlier and was considered minor.

  13. Neo, you overlook my points. His only anti-lymphoma treatment in 1983 was TBI, so from then through 1986 his lymphoma was in remission.
    The docs in 1991 did not in their statement reference the 1987 relapse. An untruth.
    I have seen very bad medicine practiced then and today at Mass General and the big name academic centers where I once worked. VIPs get less good care, very often, than mere grunts. Who are we to assume he got great care?

  14. Frog:

    If you read my links I think a great deal of that is explained. You don’t have to accept their explanations, of course.

    Of course it’s possible he got care that wasn’t very good. I certainly don’t know his doctors, and I’ve had my own bad experiences with doctors, even once with a doctor at Mass General. But he went to a place with a very good reputation and supposedly got cutting edge care. More than that I cannot say, nor can you, since I’m assuming you don’t know his doctors personally, nor have I noticed you have any specific complaint about his actual treatment at the time.

  15. OK, Neo. I was addressing other issues in earlier comments, so here goes:
    The TBI treatment he got when first diagnosed with “large cell lymphoma”, of which there were/are several types, was totally inappropriate as frontline therapy in 1983.
    Totally inappropriate, as a matter of fact and of opinion.

    Certain types of “nodular” lymphomas run smoldering courses, and prudent practice then would have been multidrug chemotherapy for a “diffuse” large cell lymphoma, vs. observation if “nodular”. Whether he had nodular or diffuse was never stated. I presume it was diffuse.
    That’s what we do today, too. No one with lymphoma gets TBI going out the gate, not even in the earliest days of TBI, which is a scary, toxic treatment. Kills some, cures none.

  16. Frog:

    If I’m reading your comment correctly, it seems you think that Tsongas had TBI and a transplant shortly after diagnosis—am I understanding you correctly? Actually, he was diagnosed in 1983, and received the TBI and transplant in 1986. See this as well as this. From the latter source (according to which, his original diagnosis was small-cell rather than large-cell lymphoma):

    In fall 1983, Tsongas, then the freshman Democratic senator from Massachussets, noticed a lump in his groin as he was showering. In the book he wrote two years later, “Heading Home,“ Tsongas remembered thinking that with a re-election campaign looming and his intention to compete in the Boston Marathon, a hernia was just what he didn`t need.

    But it wasn`t a hernia. It was a swollen lymph node, the sort of thing that usually turns out to be a minor infection. However, to be sure, his doctor suggested a visit to the naval hospital in Bethesda, Md.

    A biopsy was taken. The result was announced to him in words Tsongas remembers still, “It is not benign.“

    Small-cell lymphoma, one of a variety of malignancies grouped under the term non-Hodgkin`s lymphoma, was not only in his groin but had spread to other lymphatic tissues, impairing his body`s ability to fight infection…

    In Tsongas` case, doctors told him that with conventional therapy he`d have a handful of years to live. There was an option, however, an experimental medical procedure that would be risky and painful but might snatch him from the grip of death.

    In 1986, Tsongas became one of the first lymphoma patients to be treated by a transplant of his own bone marrow.

    It was the later recurrence (late in 1992) that was described as large-cell lymphoma. The initial manifestation of lymphoma in Tsongas was the small-cell variety.

    Here’s another article that states the history fairly clearly:

    [In December of 1992, Tsongas described his recent recurrence as] large-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which affects the lymph glands that produce a type of white blood cell the body uses to head off disease.

    [Dr.] Takvorian said Tsongas will undergo full-dosage radiation therapy beginning late this week. He said Tsongas’ ”excellent underlying health should allow him to withstand the physical and mental rigors of therapy.”

    But, in an interview, Takvorian added, ”We’re on new territory here, so it’s impossible to make a prediction.”

    Tsongas has reacted positively to treatment in the past, and the [new] lymphoma was caught during one of his frequent routine check-ups and didn’t have time to spread, his doctors said…

    Tsongas [had] ended his Senate career in 1984 after he was diagnosed [the year before] with small-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. His condition worsened despite conventional treatment, and he underwent an experimental operation in July 1986 in which some bone marrow was removed and treated to kill the cancer cells.

    In 1987 doctors removed a node from Tsongas’ armpit…

    In his medical summary, Takvorian said the latest cancer [the 1992 large-cell growth] is probably an outgrowth of Tsongas’ prior bouts with cancer. But he added that it could also be an entirely new outbreak.

    Apparently the 1992 treatment for the large-cell growth was successful in terms of the cancer recurrence, but it was after that (I don’t have an exact date) that he developed myelodysplasia. It was the myelodysplasia and treatments for that (and complications from that treatment, too) that led to his death.

  17. Neo, the dates I used were from your prior reference (The Tech-online ed.), which stated,
    “In September 1983, while serving as a freshman senator, Tsongas was diagnosed with lymphoma, a form of cancer that affects the lymph system. Citing his desire to be with his family, the young Democrat chose not to seek re-election to a second term in 1984.
    “Instead, he returned to Boston and underwent a then-experimental form of treatment known as “autologous bone marrow transplant.” Under the care of Drs. George Canellos and Tak Takvorian, Tsongas had marrow removed from his hip and purified. With his marrow out, he was treated with whole-body radiation in an effort to kill all the cancerous cells in his body.”

    Now you cite a new reference, with different dates and somewhat different story. Ah, well.
    My remarks about Tsongas, TBI and lymphomas will stand.

  18. Frog:

    No, it’s not a new reference. It’s two new references that clarify something that was left unstated in the old reference.

    The facts are that he was diagnosed with small-cell lymphoma in 1983, and had the transplant in 1986, and had a recurrence of lymphoma in late 1992 but this time it was of large cell lymphoma in the abdomen. There is no source I could find that says otherwise. The one you quote—the first one I offered—is merely less detailed.

    Take a look at that first source. It says he was diagnosed in 1983 (does not specify small or large cell, so that part is ambiguous). It says he quit Washington in 1984. It says that some unspecified time later he had the transplant. In fact it was in 1986, and you can find source after source that specifies that. In fact, it’s an undisputed fact. Nor does that first source contradict it; it merely leaves it out.

    I have no idea why you are having trouble assimilating this. I offered this facts to you because, with your background, I’m curious—now that the facts have been clarified and detailed for you—what you think.

    You were basing you old opinion on assumptions about Tsongas’ medical history that turned out to be incorrect, based on an ambiguous account. Now you have new facts that clarify things for you.

  19. Your first source read, “Instead [of running for re-election], he returned to Boston and underwent a then-experimental form of treatment known as “autologous bone marrow transplant.” Why should I have looked into it further when I responded to your essay? That’s a pretty clear statement.

    I considered him a (medical) fool back then for reasons I think I have made clear. That opinion stands. He was a Mr. Rogers kind of fellow. Maybe likable, but not presidential in fiber.

  20. Frog:

    No one’s saying you should have looked into it.

    However, you had misconstrued that quote as meaning that Tsongas’ transplant had happened more quickly after his diagnosis than it actually did, although the quote didn’t give a date. You seemed to have based your opinion of his medical treatment on the fact that you thought he had the transplant quickly, and also on a misunderstanding of what his diagnosis back then was (large vs. small-cell?). At least, that’s how I interpret your earlier remarks.

    I then offered some more information that should have clarified both points for you—the fact that the transplant was in 1996 and that his diagnosis at the time was small-cell lymphoma. How on earth do you interpret that as meaning you should have done your own extra research? I neither said that nor implied it. I merely did the research for you, later, and asked for your opinion based on the added information. Instead, all you say about it is you considered him a (medical) fool back then for reasons you think you have made clear, and that that opinion stands. But why do you say that? If he had small-cell lymphoma and all other treatments were unsuccessful for three years, do you still think a transplant was stupid? I’m curious why you say that. One of the articles I quoted in this comment of mine had stated:

    Tsongas [had] ended his Senate career in 1984 after he was diagnosed [the year before] with small-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. His condition worsened despite conventional treatment, and he underwent an experimental operation in July 1986 [he had the transplant].

    If his condition had worsened despite conventional treatment, why was it stupid to take that option?

  21. One did not do autologous marrow transplant and total body irradiation (TBI) for progressive lymphoma. The “body burden” of disease is too high for any honest hope of success. One did it for consolidation of a good response to chemo.
    This is the first I’ve heard his conditioned worsened in 1986.

    Lymphoma, as I said earlier, is a complex spectrum of complex diseases.

    Large cell v. small cell? Who knows? Very different diseases. Lymphomas can morph from bad to worse over time, and morph in biopsy appearance also.

    As a result of our tete-a-tete re Tsongas and his illness, I now think we do not know enough about the actual medical facts, since they come from non-medical sources. But I do know as a medical expert that electing Tsongas to the presidency after TBI was a bad idea. As I said, the bad normal tissue consequences of TBI are many and some quite slow in developing. Never mind the disease recurring in office. Tsongas’ remarks and those of his docs are reminiscent of Hillary and her doc’s BS, putting a good spin on stuff.

    Tsongas was a hard guy not to like, or so I remember him. But that was in my squishy semi-liberal days, when I was more gullible politically. I now remember him as a Mr. Rogers for adults. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Will you be my neighbor?” Part of our national emasculation.

  22. Frog:

    Then I think we are finally in agreement on Tsongas’ medical situation—we just don’t know enough. I think he acted in good faith, though. And I agree that it would have been a bad idea for him to have been president, because his health declined after the campaign and he would have been ill a great deal of the time.

    However, on Tsongas’ personality—we very much disagree on that. I remember him as a highly unusual combination of extremely likeable and also quite tough. Did you watch the video? He doesn’t seem the least bit squishy or sanguine to me—no Polyanna there. He was a straight talker, actually. Nor do I see anything unmasculine. He’s not a blusterer, but he’s straightforward.

  23. Neo-
    Haven’t watched the vid. Was just remembering my impression of long ago! I thought he was likable enough.

  24. Frog:

    Why not watch it, then, to refresh your memory? You may or may not change your mind. I’d be curious to know what you think.

    The video is rather short.

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