1969, July 1: (Ginen — Rockefeller Holds Up a Dying President: The Photograph That Concealed What the Cameras Missed, May Day’s Unreadable Speech, the Conges…

1969, July 1: (Ginen — Rockefeller Holds Up a Dying President: The Photograph That Concealed What the Cameras Missed, May Day’s Unreadable Speech, the Congestive Heart Failure, and the Prostate Surgery at St. François de Sales): When Nelson Rockefeller, smiling broadly, was photographed virtually embracing President Duvalier on July 1, 1969, the cameras failed to capture that the broad-shouldered New York governor was all but holding up a frail and debilitated dictator. Rockefeller’s staffers afterward confirmed that Duvalier, who had not appeared to the public — not even from his palace balcony — since early May, was gravely ill and had literally to be supported. On May Day, Duvalier had proved unable to read his speech and handed the script to Paul Blanchet; his hands and ankles were swollen, his face puffy. Nine days later he complained of barely being able to breathe and of an intolerable weight across his chest, like a heavy stone. Heart specialists were summoned, but Papa Doc hardly needed their diagnosis — he could identify congestive heart failure as well as any of them. Digitalis, diuretics, and an indomitable will to cling to power pulled him through for the time being. Then on May 20 the president faced another adversary: in the old French hospital St. François de Sales, where he had interned so long ago, he secretly underwent excruciating prostate surgery, the ailment as mortal as that of any other sixty-three-year-old man. Confined to a hospital bed inside the palace, Duvalier convalesced feebly until he forced himself to rise for Rockefeller — the photograph of their meeting, an image of diplomatic warmth concealing the physical collapse of a dictator propped upright by the very American emissary whose visit was intended to rehabilitate the regime, became the definitive icon of Washington’s relationship with Duvalier: a policy that required its practitioners to literally hold up the man they had spent a decade trying to bring down.