Not the historical analogue the Bidens were probably hoping for….
Democrats have been running around with their hair on fire ever since last Thursday’s Titanic-sized disaster of a presidential debate. It was 90 of the most consequential minutes in recent U.S. political history. Some are trying like dynamos to spin the event, while others have succumbed to a sort of walking political depression. Republicans seem to be following the adage that you don’t get in the way when your opponent is destroying himself.
On one hand, the situation is positively cinematic, if not Shakespearean, the most powerful man on earth clinging to the delusion of his own invincibility. Biden is King Lear holding onto power as age and infirmity consume him, only instead of Regan and Goneril it’s Kamala and Gavin trying to outdo each other flattering him to his face and before the public, while scheming to succeed him as his health declines and he loses his grip. To mix the metaphors, First Lady Jill Biden is playing the role of Lady MacBeth, goading the king not just to stay in power but to seek vengeance on his enemies (let’s hope Jill avoids the Scottish queen’s fate). Hunter fills the role of Prince Hal, preferring the company of wastrels and criminals as he debases himself for all to see. Biden fils even has his own Falstaff in the form of his “sugar brother,” attorney Kevin Morris.
It’s a political and family drama playing out in real time. Someone should pitch the idea to Martin Scorsese.
All of which is why we need to talk about Woodrow Wilson. The historic parallels, including the role played by a global pandemic, are disconcerting.
At the outset, there are, obviously, differences between the two Commanders in Chiefs. Unlike Biden, Woodrow Wilson was a frail man for most of his life, suffering from asthma, migraines, and stomach ulcers. Biden was physically robust until very recently. Still, the parallels are striking. Biden suffered two brain aneurysms and a pulmonary embolism in February, 1988 at the age of 45. He required two brain surgeries that nearly killed him. It took him most of a year to recover. Wilson suffered his first stroke in 1896 at the age of 40 and had at least three more of varying severity over the next 25 years. A second stroke in 1913 left him debilitated for an extended period, and it’s likely he never fully recovered. The last one, on October 2, 1919, permanently debilitated him. He had almost exactly 18 months left in office.
Thus began one of the most infamous political cover-ups in U.S. history. Wilson would skirt death at least two more times after the stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side and blind in his right eye. A few weeks after the stroke he suffered a severe urinary tract infection that nearly killed him. In January he contracted the Spanish flu for the second time, barely surviving. Like COVID-19 in the current context the worst years of the Spanish flu pandemic were over by the time of Wilson’s final decline, but it was still a danger to older people and sick people. Check and check. So far we have been lucky that Biden has avoided the novel coronavirus.
Throughout 1920 and 1921 First Lady Edith Wilson personally orchestrated the cover-up. According to author and University of Michigan Professor Howard Markel, “Protective of both her husband’s reputation and power, Edith shielded Woodrow from interlopers and embarked on a bedside government that essentially excluded Wilson’s staff, the Cabinet and the Congress.”
Remind you of anyone? Two days after last week’s debate an op-ed in the UK Guardian – hardly a bastion of right wing conspiracy mongering – noted that Jill Biden is “a key player in the administration – and critics fear she has been shielding her husband beyond a reasonable point.”
More parallels they’d rather avoid: Edith Wilson and Jill Biden.
Even as Wilson deteriorated Democratic Party loyalists continued to vouch for his good health. Two months after Wilson’s final stroke two U.S. Senators met with him in the White House. Before they arrived Edith arranged the President’s paralyzed left arm under blanket. After the meeting the two men declared that while Wilson was physically in bad shape he was mentally “clear as a bell.” Over the last few months Biden’s inner circle have publicly described him as “sharp as a tack.”
The parallels are cautionary, not least of all for Biden himself. Like Joe, Woodrow Wilson was an infamously recalcitrant man. Historians generally have concluded that, against the advice of his doctors, he literally worked himself to death. Between April 1917 and November 1918 Wilson was a wartime President, with the almost incomprehensible additional responsibilities and stress that come with that role. After the war, in the space of time between Germany’s surrender and his final, debilitating stroke Wilson was criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean by ship and the United States by rail, tirelessly promoting the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations to a skeptical world and country.
Biden is also a wartime President. He has involved the U.S. all but directly in the Russo-Ukraine War and the Israel-Hamas War. Simultaneously, U.S. forces are engaged in shooting conflicts with Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, fighting ISIS terrorists in half a dozen countries, and playing an extraordinarily dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with Chinese forces in the western Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. A nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia and China (or, horror of horrors, both) is no longer inconceivable. All of that is on Biden’s desk, every single day. And while he’s not promoting anything like the League, he is the titular leader of a fragile coalition of allied nations, many of whose leaders are increasingly skeptical of U.S. strategy and objectives.
Like Biden, even in his infirmity Wilson was hell-bent on running for another term. It would have been his third (the 22nd Amendment, which limits Presidents to two terms, wasn’t ratified until 1951). Professor Markel notes, “By February of 1920, news of the president’s stroke began to be reported in the press. Nevertheless, the full details of Woodrow Wilson’s disability, and his wife’s management of his affairs, were not entirely understood by the American public at the time.”
Swap out the dates, replace “stroke” with “dementia” and “Joe Biden” for “Woodrow Wilson,” and that description fits the current situation. Wilson’s White House physician, Dr. Cary Grayson, refused to administer cognitive tests to the President or sign any official notice of disability. Again the parallel: Current White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor so far has not evaluated Biden’s mental state.
There’s a final cautionary lesson in Wilson’s story, this time for the Democrats as a party. In 1921 the strongest candidate the Democrats could have run for the presidency was Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, who selected a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Secretary of the Navy, as his running mate. It was a formidable ticket.
Instead, Wilson’s conviction that he could win a third term, coupled with McAdoo’s and his party’s loyalty, meant McAdoo was unable to launch the all-out campaign required to get the nomination. By the time Wilson’s incapacity became impossible to hide it was too late. The nomination went to a floor vote at the Democratic Party Convention in San Francisco. On the 44th ballot the party finally nominated a compromise candidate, Ohio Congressman James. M. Cox. He went on to lose by a landslide to Warren G. Harding.
That election ushered in 12 years of Republican Presidents. And while I personally don’t view Donald Trump as the fascist-in-waiting or the cartoonish demagogue that many liberals and Democrats do, neither am I eager for four more years of Orange Man chaos. I’m with the plurality of Americans who are surveying the scene and asking incredulously, “Seriously, this is the best we can do?”
Wilson and Biden are two very different figures. Wilson was an intellectual, a scholar, and President of Princeton University who evinced aristocratic disdain toward average working Americans. Biden was a C student who graduated at the bottom of his classes from the University of Delaware and Syracuse School of Law whose magic power has always been his ability to connect with average Americans. Wilson was physically frail; Biden was a star high school athlete. Wilson was a somber, often dour man who seemed preternaturally incapable of smiling. Biden is a hail-fellow-well-met who is always ready with a Reagan-esque dose of blarney and a megawatt grin. At least, until recently.
But the parallels between the two of them, particularly their obstinance in the face of severe and obvious impairments at the ends of their terms and the lives, are impossible to ignore. That’s bad news for the Democrats going into one of the most consequential elections in modern history.
However, there is good news for the country. We survived the Wilsons’ deceit, just as we would survive similar machinations by the Roosevelts amid FDR’s physical and mental decline in his fourth and final term (though it must be noted that both men’s incapacity had profound ramifications for history: Wilson’s inability to convince the U.S. Senate to join the League of Nations was a key factor leading to the Second World War, and Roosevelt’s vascular dementia limited his ability to negotiate the contours of postwar Europe with Stalin at Yalta; for example, Poland never should have found itself behind the Iron Curtain). We survived JFK’s debilitating physical ailments and drug addictions. We survived Nixon’s delusional paranoia. Nancy Reagan guided the Gipper through his final months and years as Alzheimer’s slowly consumed him. In every case the country was fine, even if world history was not.
We will survive this moment as well. The biggest questions are how much uncertainty, anxiety, and pain the Bidens are willing to put the country and the world through before they too accept reality, and how their stubbornness may affect wider global affairs. Will they continue living in denial long enough to secure a Trump victory in November?
One way or another, buckle up, because it’s going to be one hell of a ride.
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