Last week it was known that President Donald Trump, 74, and first girl Melania Trump, 50, tested positive for COVID-19, and the virus forced both of them to isolate themselves in the White House. The former first girl dealt with her husband’s fitness crisis, and knowing that it can’t happen again.
Critics have already begun to question the conflicting messages and lack of transparency of Trump, his doctors and White House officials about the precise state of the president’s physical condition and how the government is directing his illness.
But they are role models for former first lady Edith Galt Wilson and the doctors of President Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a paralyzing stroke in October 1919 at the age of 63.
Significantly, President Wilson suffered a stroke after getting sick a few months earlier with what was then known as the Spanish flu, the 1918 virus pandemic that wiped out the world and killed millions of people, but Americans were never informed of the full history of this. episode neither, even though it affected Wilson’s ability to negotiate in the Paris peace talks after World War I.
Modern historians now argue that Edith Wilson was the country’s de facto director general until the end of her husband’s term in March 1921, who died three years later.
“It’s a conspiracy not to let the country know how weak HeArray is,” says first girl historian Myra Gutin, a professor of communication at Rider University in New Jersey.
The first girl closed Wilson’s room in the White House, took letters and other documents and came out claiming that he had consulted and signed them, doubts arose as to whether it was her handwriting, Gutin said.
“Do I think this can happen today? Frankly, no,” Gutin said. “Yes, there has been so much data lockdown through this specific administration, so who knows? But I don’t think that’s possible” in the era of trendy media and social media and the inevitability of leaks .
Wilson denied taking the exhibition backstage, insisting that her husband had fulfilled all of his presidential duties after his stroke. Everything he did, he says in his 1939 book, “My Memoir,” went to which questions and documents were important enough to be presented. to her husband.
Official access to the White House’s online page about Edith Wilson says he was suggested to do what he did through White House doctor Cary Grayson. “Ms. Wilson has assumed many of the responsibilities and details of the day-to-day life of the government, but she has not. initiated primary programs or made primary decisions, nor has he tried to reach the executive branch,” reads in the article.
Even if one accepts this more benign description of what the former first girl did, most Americans would find it unacceptable today. Withholding information would be a smart style for a fashionable first girl to get attached if a president has a fitness crisis.
Nancy Reagan had some things that are not unusual with Edith Wilson, in the sense that she was a momentary and hyperprotective wife with her husband, says Katherine Jellison, the first historian and professor of history at Ohio University. When President Ronald Reagan was seriously injured in an attempted assassination in March 1981, he may not have concealed it, even if he wanted it.
The Reagans also sought to hide it when he underwent colon cancer surgery in 1985 and both were photographed greeting the hospital window after the procedure.
“In a close marriage, the herbal tendency is for the healthy wife to protect the wife in poor health and make sure he or she does everything possible, whether you’re president of the United States or a plumber,” says Jellison. given the time when the two women grew up, it was also a “wait for your man” mentality because that’s what a woman does. . . But there was no way to hide what was going on. “
The Reagans’ daughter Patti Davis spoke Tuesday with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, acknowledging that Reagan had made “mistakes” and made a mistake in publicly responding to the near-murder crisis, but noted the “total panic” that prevailed that day.
“I didn’t hear a cry when my father was shot, saying we don’t get all the data or that we’re not informed of the truth, even in the middle of the panic,” Davis said. “This White House knew it had to honor and respect the rights of other Americans to know what was going on with the president of the United States. “
Eleanor Roosevelt, the first girl in the country (1933-45), concealed the fact that her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, in a wheelchair after contracting another fatal virus, polio, in 1921?”No, he didn’t, but he did. It’s not necessary because everyone did it, adding the reporters,” Gutin says. To date, only a few pictures of him have been taken in his wheelchair.
Gutin says he once interviewed cable reporter Helen Thomas, who worked at Roosevelt’s White House and remembered seeing wheelchair ramps there.
“I asked her, why didn’t you say anything, and she said they were asked not to report it,” Gutin says. “Today, that wouldn’t happen. “
Nor did she state the evidence, including Eleanor Roosevelt, that her husband appeared to have died, judging from photographs, for months before he died in April 1945 (of a brain hemorrhage). She said in her post-White House memoirs that no one sought to acknowledge the president’s illness at the time.
“With any husband and wife, when your spouse is sick for many years, you think you will recover. It’s very human,” Gutin said.
The public had no idea that President John F. Kennedy, who seemed so healthy and vigorous, was not. He spoke openly about his chronic back disorders (the famous mecedora), but never said anything about the adrenal disorder of Addison’s disease he had or the amount of medications he was taking.
But he and his circle of relatives hid his fitness for years before marrying Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953 or being elected president in 1960.
During the 1960 crusade between Kennedy and then-Vice President Richard Nixon, Nixon hit his knee on a car door and had to be hospitalized for 12 days. “There is no attempt to hide that,” says Gutin. “Kennedy even went to do a layover in him. At the hospital. Talk about a replacement in politics (from then on). “
President Lyndon Johnson had a history of attacks on the center, but neither he nor his first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, tried to hide it. In fact, after undergoing gallbladder surgery in 1965, he lifted his blouse and jacket to show off his abdomen. scar to hounds and photographers. Maybe too much information.
Instead of hiding the president’s physical fitness crisis, some former first girls have used their own physical fitness crises to draw more attention, and less stigma, to their afflictions, even though the first girls do not have the legal, moral or legal political responsibility to talk about their personal problems. medical problems.
Betty Ford has made public her fight against addiction and breast cancer, and has probably helped save countless lives. Barbara Bush has not concealed her fact that she has thyroid disease, Graves’ disease, which emerged from a 1989 radioactive remedy with jokes for hounds. and then arrange a reception at the White House for the Queen of Sweden.
In November 2006, her daughter-in-law, former first girl Laura Bush, had a cancerous tumor removed from the malignant skin of her right tibia, but she did not announce it until reporters interviewed her in December.
In 2018, Melania Trump spent five days at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with mild kidney disease. She had what has been described as a successful embolization procedure followed for nearly 3 weeks of recovery in which she was not seen, which caused many “Where is Melania?”Tweets.
Trump’s East Wing has publicly said what afflicted him in particular, and he probably won’t either in the future: Melania Trump has made it clear that this is nobody’s business.
But President Trump may have a backlash if he insists on the same thing in relation to his own health.