Woodrow Wilson and His Incapacitation


“Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House” (Phyllis Lee Levin)

Utterly fascinating essay by Errol Morris, which dwells a bit on Woodrow Wilson and his wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, who seems to have been the de facto President for quite some time. I’m moderately well read in American history, and I did not realize quite how incapacitated Wilson actually was.

Wilson described himself as “lame” and referred to his cane as his “third leg,”[43] but otherwise he considered himself perfectly fit to be president. There was even talk of a third term. Yet his close associates noticed a change in his personality. He became increasingly suspicious, even paranoid, without having the dimmest awareness of the fact that he was perhaps becoming a different person from what he once was. Stockton Axson, his brother-in-law from his first marriage, wrote that “[Wilson] would be seized with what, to a normal person, would seem to be inexplicable outbursts of emotion.”[44] He was furious at anyone who suggested that he had physical and mental problems, and the last months of his presidency became a graveyard of fired associates. Edith Bolling Wilson, his second wife, had already deposed many of the president’s closest and most effective associates, including Colonel Edward M. House, who had played a major role at the Paris peace talks. Wilson also forced the resignation of Robert Lansing, his secretary of state, who had dared to call a cabinet meeting to discuss the president’s illness.

Phyllis Lee Levin delved into the medical records (with some pushback from Princeton University’s Wilson Papers)

In the preface to her book, Phyllis Lee Levin suggests a counterfactual history, a history with a League of Nations that included the United States. It is one of history’s great what-ifs. What if Edith Wilson had allowed her husband to hand the reins of government to his vice president, Thomas R. Marshall, in 1919? Would there have been no second world war?

Given Marshall’s reasonable temperament, is it not possible that he might have reached a compromise with Henry Cabot Lodge over the degree to which Americans ought to involve themselves in foreign wars, and have thus led the United States to membership in the League of Nations? Such great questions are central to my reconsideration, in the present book, of the role and influence of Wilson’s wife during “one of the most extraordinary periods in the whole history of the Presidency.” Edith Wilson was by no means the benign figure of her pretensions; the president far less than the hero of his aspirations. On closer examination, their lives are a sinister embodiment of Mark Twain’s tongue-in-cheek observation that he “never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”[50]

What if the truth of Wilson’s condition, his anosognosia, had been more widely known? Was it just that the facts of the illness was suppressed? Or did the public want to believe that the president was healthy, that nothing was wrong. That even if the president was paralyzed, “. . . his mind was clear and untouched.” Edward Weinstein also weighed in on these questions. His view was unequivocal. The president had become intransigent, inflexible. There was no willingness to compromise and hence the Treaty [ratifying the U.S. participation in the League of Nations] was doomed.

It is the author’s opinion that the cerebral dysfunction that resulted from Wilson’s devastating strokes prevented the ratification of the Treaty.

(click to continue reading The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 3) – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.)

I have to read Ms. Levin’s book, sounds fascinating…

ERROL MORRIS: Did you feel, from the very outset, that there was something inherently dishonorable about what they did?  That they should have been completely transparent or forthcoming about the extent of his illness?  The idea that perhaps they were preserving his policies, a chance for world peace, that it was critical to —

PHYLLIS LEE LEVIN: But, they weren’t doing anything.  They weren’t executing anything at all.

ERROL MORRIS: So it was just a grab for power, power for its own sake, by Mrs. Wilson?

PHYLLIS LEE LEVIN: She was probably a very limited woman, intellectually. I’m being very kind.  She wasn’t a very educated woman.  And she was a very vain woman.  She honestly felt that her husband was the only one in the world entitled to be president, even in the shape he was in.

ERROL MORRIS: But who was in control?  Was it Wilson?  Was it Edith?

PHYLLIS LEE LEVIN: It was a conglomerate of people.  Republicans are always blamed for the failure of the peace pact.  When the vote came there had to be compromises.  But Wilson’s mind was so damaged by his illness that he had to have peace on his terms or not at all.  So we didn’t have the peace pact because of him.  Henry Cabot Lodge [the leader of Wilson’s Republican opposition] has been made the villain of all time for this.  Whereas, he had offered a compromise.  What the Wilsons did was just desperately terrible.  It was really the grandest deception in the world.   It’s really a very shocking story.

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