Presidential Lies In the Time of Pandemics

 By Jack R. Johnson 10.2020

President Trump is certainly not the first commander in chief to try to hide a physical ailment from the nation.  FDR suffered from polio and was actually paraplegic, but was able to hide his condition with the assistance of aides and the press. Kennedy suffered from chronic back pain and Addisons’s disease. Eisenhower had Crohn's disease and a minor stroke. Reagan likely was in the throes of Alzheimer’s during his final term in office. But perhaps the most consequential presidential illness was that suffered by Woodrow Wilson in 1919 at the height of the Treaty of Versailles negotiations.

In full vigor, Wilson arrived in Paris with a plan to implement his Fourteen Points and provide for a lasting world peace.  At the same time, the Spanish flu was ravaging the world. Wilson paid little attention to this other global threat. Historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, writes, “There was no leadership or guidance of any kind directly from the White House. Wilson wanted the focus to remain on the war effort. Anything negative was viewed as hurting morale and hurting the war effort.”

Like the Trump administration, Wilson’s White House, and federal and local health leaders downplayed the severity of the virus from the beginning.  One Camp Dix health official said, “they have the epidemic under control”, even as the death toll was pushing 400,000 (eventually 675,000 Americans would die from the Spanish flu). Colonel Philip Doane, the head of Health and Sanitation Section of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, which was charged with building a fleet of merchant ships, said this strain of flu was “nothing more or less than old-fashioned grippe.”

It wasn’t as if they didn’t know of soldiers falling ill from this deadly flu virus. Despite this knowledge, Wilson continued active troop mobilizations “even as World War I was winding to a close,” thus contributing to the global spread of the disease. There were reports of illness striking young, healthy soldiers in military barracks and on troop transport ships.

And, of course, it wasn’t just the troops. Like today’s Covid-19, the Spanish flu was highly infectious and spread through the air. White House staffers started to come down with the contagious virus as well, including a Secret Service agent, the White House usher, and a stenographer.

Up until the Paris peace talks began, Wilson remained largely unaffected, but a young American aide in the peace delegation—25-year old Donald Frary—became ill with the flu and died.

Then Wilson caught the flu. He was struck with a 103 degree fever and spasms of coughing convulsions. He also exhibited severe disorientation; at one point becoming convince he was surrounded by French spies.

Wilson came down with the flu at a critical juncture of the negotiations. He was struggling to coax the allies into softening the terms of the treaty so that Germany would not be burdened for years with an unpayable debt. 

According to Steve Coll, writing in The New Yorker, the president had originally argued that the Allies “should go easy” on Germany to facilitate the success of his pet project, the League of Nations. But French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, whose country had endured much devastation during the four-year conflict, wanted to take a tougher stance; days after coming down with the flu, an exhausted Wilson conceded to the other world leaders’ demands, setting the stage for what Coll describes as “a settlement so harsh and onerous to Germans that it became a provocative cause of revived German nationalism … and, eventually, a rallying cause of Adolf Hitler.”

Weakened from the flu and probably not fully stable, Wilson abdicated on all but his last point for peace, his League of Nations.  He hoped to push this through congress once he was stateside.

Back in the United States, about six months after he had come down with the flu, Wilson embarked on a 27-day train journey to sell the treaty to live audiences; he cut the tour short due to exhaustion and sickness. Back in D.C., Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side and partially blind.  His wife, Edith Wilson, hid this last medical fact from the press, as well, and tried to ‘steward’ his presidency, herself.  (The 25th amendment, which outlines the procedure for an incapacitated President would not be ratified until 1967.)

Thanks largely to Republican resistance, Congress never passed the League of Nations. And twenty short years after the Treaty of Versailles was negotiated with its onerous debt penalty, Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II.

Instead of disclosing her husband’s stroke, First Lady Edith Wilson hid his life-threatening condition from politicians, the press and the public, embarking on a self-described “stewardship” that Howard Markel of PBS Newshour more accurately defines as a secret presidency.