Why America Had a Secret President for 17 Months

On the second of October 1919, Woodrow Wilson had a massive stroke on the second floor of the White House. His left side was paralysed. He could not walk, he could not sustain a conversation, and for a period he could not see properly out of one eye. He did not resign, nobody removed him, and there was no procedure in the Constitution that anybody was willing to use. He held the office of President of the United States for another seventeen months. In those seventeen months one person decided which papers reached his bed, which men were admitted to the room, and what came back out of it. Cabinet members were turned away. Senators were turned away. A new British ambassador waited months to present his credentials. When the Senate finally sent two of its members to see whether the President was functioning, his wife arranged the room, put his paralysed side under the covers and kept the lighting low, and they went away satisfied. Edith Wilson had two years of formal schooling and had run a jewellery business alone for seven years before she ever met a president. She called what she did a stewardship, and she insisted for forty-two years that she never decided anything. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, which sets out what happens when a president cannot discharge the office, was adopted six years after she died. Sources Contemporary records of Woodrow Wilson's collapse in Pueblo, Colorado, in September 1919 and the stroke that followed in October Edith Wilson's own memoir, My Memoir, published 1939 Cabinet papers, letters and diaries of officials who were refused access to the President between October 1919 and March 1921 Records of the December 1919 Senate delegation visit to the White House Senate records of the two votes on the Treaty of Versailles and the reservations attached to it The legislative history of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, adopted 1967