Harkens back to the day they decided not to prosecute Alan Cranston for the S&L debacle because he had prostate cancer.
The news cheered him up so much that he was cured.
After leaving office, William Howard Taft wrote of the practice of pardoning convicts in ill-health:
“When a convict is near his end, it has been the custom to send him home to die. So, after having all the surgeons in the War Dept. examine them to see that the statements made to me about them were correct, I exercised the pardoning power in their favor. Well, one of them kept his contract and died, but the other seems to be one of the healthiest men in the community today.”