Claude and Colorblind Questions

BILL: Lance, I have a question and a meta question:

a) List all the presidents and vice presidents who were colorblind.

b) Do you know this sort of thing since you are colorblind, and hence

might have looked this up in the past?

LANCE: (b) No. And if Marco Rubio runs for president in 2028 he will need to earn my vote. He won't get it just for being colorblind. As for (a) I asked Claude.

Only one case is reasonably well documented, and it isn't a vice president. Bill Clinton is red-green colorblind: during the 1996 presidential debates, both Clinton and Bob Dole needed a modified cue-light system, since individual colored lights would have been hard for either of them to read, so a three-light arrangement was used instead — an anecdote that traces back to the Encyclopedia of Genetic Disorders and Birth Defects. Dole, of course, was Ford's running mate in 1976 and lost, so he never made it to the vice presidency.

Eisenhower is the other plausible case. His grandson David wrote that Ike confused browns and greens, sometimes asking for a brown suit when he meant green, and couldn't tell what color his golf balls were — someone had to write "DDE" on them. That's a family recollection rather than a diagnosis, but it's the kind of detail people don't invent.

Everything else you'll find online — Madison, Chester Arthur, Washington failing to distinguish crimson from scarlet, Lincoln calling lavender blue — comes from content-farm pages that cite nothing checkable, and I'd treat it as noise. Lincoln's documented eye problem was strabismus (eyes do not line up), not color vision.

As for vice presidents: I can't find a single one with any credible claim. That's a bit surprising statistically — roughly 8% of men of Northern European descent are red-green deficient, and with fifty-odd vice presidents you'd expect several. The explanation is almost certainly that nobody was looking. Color blindness is invisible unless someone asks, the Ishihara test only dates to 1917, and a nineteenth-century politician had no occasion to disclose it. Clinton's case surfaced only because television lighting forced the issue.

BILL: They left out Hubert Humphrey whose colorblindness was well known and well documented. It was why he was unable to serve in WW II. His not serving was used against him early in his career.

LANCE: I asked Claude about that and here is what it said:

Good catch — that's the vice-presidential case I missed, and it's better documented than anything on the presidential side. Humphrey tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor and was turned down three times, twice by the Navy and once by the Army, on account of color blindness along with other physical problems. Biographical accounts add that he also had a double hernia and lung scarring, possibly from unpasteurized milk.

This one holds up because it left a paper trail: military induction physicals in the 1940s included Ishihara-style screening, so his condition was formally tested and recorded rather than inferred from someone's recollection about suits or golf balls. It also mattered politically — the failed enlistment dogged him, since he was a young man of draft age who spent the war teaching and working for the WPA, and opponents used it against him in his early Minneapolis campaigns.

So the honest tally is one vice president (Humphrey), one president (Clinton), plus Eisenhower as a plausible unconfirmed case. Which, incidentally, undercuts the "nobody was looking" explanation I gave a moment ago — the real filter was that the condition surfaces only when an institution forces a test, and the military did that for exactly the cohort of politicians who came of age around the world wars.

BILL: SO, why did it get it wrong? This is not something  obscure which requires guesswork like speculating on whether Washington was colorblind (I can't tell scarlet from Crimson either).

LANCE: Google AI did even worse.

BILL-AI can solve Erdős problems, but it can't track down that Hubert Humphrey was colorblind. Why is that?

LANCE- Claude was just too lazy to check over the military records of every vice-president. AI are people too!