THE ASTROLOGER'S MEDICAL CHART

President Reagan's doctors may have provided the care, but Nancy Reagan's astrologer says she's the one who provided the advice for the timing of his medical treatments.

Joan Quigley, the San Francisco stargazer whom Mrs. Reagan secretly consulted about her husband's schedule from 1981 to 1988, says she'll spell out the details in the book she's writing, which Birch Lane Press will publish next spring.

What Quigley describes as "a matter of history" may offer medical experts answers to some of those nagging questions they've been asking since July 1985, when Reagan was found to have a tumor that required removal of a two-foot section of his colon.

In announcing that "elective procedure," as the White House called it, on July 10, 1985, spokesman Larry Speakes said: "The president decided that now would be the convenient time to do so. He could have waited later, he could have done it earlier, had he felt it fitted into his schedule properly."

A few days after the July 13 surgery when pathology reports revealed that the tumor was malignant, some in the medical establishment debated why Reagan's own doctors hadn't been more aggressive after the first benign polyp was found and removed in May 1984. By March 1985, when the second one was found, many in the medical profession believed that Reagan's doctors should have immediately ordered either a barium X-ray enema or a colonoscopy or both.

In their 1987 book, "Medical Cover-Ups in the White House," Edward B. MacMahon of Middleburg, an orthopedic surgeon, and his coauthor Leonard Curry quote Donald O'Kieffe, a Washington gastroenterologist and colonoscopy expert, who said: "Nothing was gained by waiting. There is no real defense for the timing."

MacMahon and Curry, who studied the health care of a number of American presidents, write that some experts were hesitant about criticizing Reagan's doctors on grounds they didn't know all the circumstances. "Did the president's staff, for example, contribute to the delay by raising scheduling obstacles to proposed examinations?" the authors ask.

MacMahon is no closer to the answer today than two years ago. "It was an unexplained delay, and one would take a lot of detective work to figure out why because everyone has a vested interest in saying it was due to someone else," MacMahon said last week.

Quigley contends that astrology is a "scientific discipline of many branches." But until Nancy Reagan's memoirs, "My Turn," confirmed the former First Lady's close association with the astrologer, the possibility of Quigley's involvement in Ronald Reagan's medical care was hardly one that would have occurred to medical scientists.

Writes Mrs. Reagan: "While astrology was a factor in determining Ronnie's schedule, it was never the only one, and no political decision was ever based on it."

But medical decisions? Were those based on astrology?

"Yes," Quigley said in a brief telephone interview last week, declining to elaborate.

All of which may contribute to the ongoing dialogue about who "owns" the president's health, the president or the people he serves? First Ladies may think First Ladies do, and White House physicians and staffs may think they do.

But there are others who think the public does. They propose more stringent ways of overseeing the president's health, advocating everything from the appointment of a blue ribbon panel of medical experts to the confirmation of all White House physicians by the Senate.

So far nobody has said a thing about astrologers.

Was Joan Quigley's access to President Reagan's schedule a breach of White House security?

In a word, no, since despite elaborate precautions by the Secret Service to protect Ronald Reagan, his schedule was not classified information.

Nevertheless, Quigley says she kept that information, from which she figured her astrological predictions, "confidential all the time. I never mentioned it to anyone. Nobody knew what I was doing. I was absolutely silent." What's more, though Quigley worked out her predictions on her personal computer at home, she says not even the "computer people" who serviced her machine knew what she was doing.

A former Reagan aide, who asked not to be identified, says the presidential schedule started taking shape about three months in advance of an event but would remain private and uncirculated except among certain key staffers. As plans progressed, events would be revised or expanded so that about 10 days before the date in question a detailed schedule, with names, places and times, would be circulated within the White House.

The former aide says had he known about the astrologer he would not have been terribly concerned about security risks. "You assume Mrs. Reagan may tell her best friend about something coming up and that the friend might mention it to somebody at a fashion show. But the Secret Service is very confident about its arrangements and its ability to secure."

At what point in the schedule's metamorphosis Nancy Reagan consulted Quigley isn't clear from the former First Lady's book. She writes that "once or twice a month I would talk with Joan (sometimes by appointment, sometimes not). I would have Ronnie's schedule in front of me, and what I wanted to know was very simple: Were specific dates safe or dangerous? If, for example, Ronnie was scheduled to give a speech in Chicago on May 3, should he leave Washington that morning, or was he better off flying out on the previous afternoon?"

Mrs. Reagan continues that once Quigley got back to her with advice on specific dates she might call then-deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, who had charge of Reagan's schedule during the first term. "Sometimes a small change was made," the former First Lady writes. In the second term, when Donald Regan became chief of staff, he worked on it with Mrs. Reagan.

There is no suggestion in Mrs. Reagan's book that either Deaver or Regan was ever concerned about the possibility of security leaks even though neither of them knew the woman with whom the First Lady was discussing the schedule.

If Raisa Gorbachev goes to sea with her husband next month off Malta it's not unlikely that Barbara Bush will go with hers.

"I think it would be a consideration," Anna Perez, Mrs. Bush's press secretary, said yesterday.

So far nothing has been decided about the wives' role -- if any -- in the shipboard meetings President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev are planning in the Mediterranean. But the Reagan White House found that Mrs. Gorbachev didn't really need a role when, a few days before the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, the Soviets announced that she was going even though wives hadn't been invited. Since it was too late for Nancy Reagan to change her Washington schedule, she stayed home.

Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Gorbachev haven't had a lot of time to get acquainted, but they have met -- in Moscow in 1985 at the funeral of Gorbachev's predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko. They saw each other again at the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev summit here, and a third time last year in New York.

Seven years ago when Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos paid a state visit to Ronald Reagan, Philippine-born David Valderrama was among a small crowd of Philippine Americans demonstrating in Lafayette Square. Among other charges, they accused the Marcos government of spending $5 million on the trip while some people back home in the debt-ridden Philippines hardly had enough to eat. For that, Valderrama was labeled subversive and linked to opposition leader Benigno Aquino, who was murdered a year later.

Tomorrow night Valderrama will be out front again as proud introducer of Aquino's widow to 1,000 Philippine-Americans at a Capital Hilton dinner for her. This time he'll have a title: Prince George's County Probate Judge Valderrama -- the first such Filipino judge in the United States.

Corazon Aquino, of course, has a title, too: president of the Philippines.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.