The Court Physician

SCENE: A room of the presidential suite in a hotel in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles.

CAST: The Vice President of the U.S. and his personal physician. The Vice President is undergoing a massage after a strenuous day on the campaign trail.

The Vice President: Well, Edgar, how did we do today?

Doctor: Lousy.

V.P.: What do you mean by "lousy"?

Doctor: I mean lousy. That's what.

Lie down.

V.P. (wincing): Stop digging your fingernails into my back. O.K. So it was lousy. In what way?

Doctor: Any time you have a half-hour TV panel show and there is time for only four questions in a half-hour, it's lousy.

V.P. (wincing again): Four questions?

You don't mean it?

Doctor (pummeling the Vice President's back): I do so mean it. You talk too damn long.

No such conversation has been precisely recorded, but the dialogue is close to the truth. For if anyone can talk to Hubert Humphrey, it is Dr. Edgar Berman, 53, an ex-surgeon from Baltimore who is not only the candidate's physician without pay but also his close friend, campaign adviser and omnipresent critic. If a Humphrey administration were to have a Colonel House, a Harry Hopkins--or even a Svengali--some jealous campaign aides suggest it would be Edgar Berman.

Dour, brusque, blunt to the point of rudeness, Humphrey's private diagnostician is not easy to know or to like. Yet despite the suspicions he arouses as a result of his intimacy with the Democratic candidate, he is probably the most salutary influence within Humphrey's inner circle. "I have no ax to grind," says Berman. "I'm not after a damn thing. I have no intention of trying to become Surgeon General, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, or anything like that. That's why I can talk to the Vice President the way I do."

Though he is still officially on the staff of Baltimore's Sinai Hospital, Berman gave up his general practice in 1962. During a busy career as a surgeon, he pioneered such things as plastic replacements for worn-out human parts (he created a plastic esophagus for cancer victims), made one of the first heart transplants between dogs in 1957, and at the peak, earned $80,000 to $90,000 a year. After making big sums in Maryland real estate, he became bored with medicine. "I enjoyed it for 15 years," he explains. "Then I found I didn't enjoy it any more, so I turned to something else."

The something else was MEDICO, the CARE-sponsored health organization that helps develop clinics in underdeveloped countries. Berman met Humphrey in 1954 when he was called to testify on public health problems before a Senate subcommittee, of which the then Minnesota Senator was a member. Impressed with his presentation, Humphrey asked him to dinner. The two became close friends. A modern art buff with an impressive collection of De Koonings, Pollocks and Rothkos, Berman enjoys explaining his paintings to the Vice President, who likes abstract art but admits that he does not understand it. In 1965, when Berman was between careers, Humphrey asked him to become his personal physician and adviser. Berman immediately accepted.

Privy to all of Humphrey's top-level sessions and ultimate decisions, Berman, besides giving back rubs and advice, is keeping what he calls a "constant diary" of the campaign. Taking notes or, on occasion, using a tape recorder, he keeps an account of each meeting, then, as soon as he can, writes out what went on. With six weeks yet to go, his chronology already runs to 2,000 pages. If Humphrey should defy the odds and win the election, Berman would undoubtedly become Humphrey's Boswell, a physician-biographer with unparalleled access to the heart, mind and muscles of a President.

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