Decision 2024 The Argument for Joe Biden Leaving the Presidential Race.

 

 

When William Henry Harrison contracted pneumonia and died just 31 days after giving his inaugural address the country had no idea what to do if the President died in office. When Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, the country had no idea how to react if our President was killed in office. But on July 2, 1881 when James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau the nation underwent an experience that should have forced it to confront a much larger difficulty – what do you do when the President is alive but incapacitated in some form.

It seemed likely after Garfield was shot that he would soon perish. Chester Arthur, the vice president was in New York at the time and ended up going to D.C to wait for him to pass. Arthur was terrified at the possibility of becoming President and prayed for Garfield’s recovery.

Within a week of Garfield’s shooting, his condition had improved and he spent the next several weeks convalescing. Arthur actually returned to New York in mid-August because he thought he would not be needed. However, the larger problem was that the President could not retain nourishment because of the wound in his stomach. Over the next two weeks his condition rose and fell. On August 26^th his cabinet met with Garfield’s surgeons and were alarmed by what they heard. But they made no effort to summon Arthur. For the next month Garfield’s condition continued to rise and in early September he rallied again. But on September 16^th, he suffered a relapse. Three days later, he died and it was only then that Arthur was summoned to the White House to assume the Presidency.

For more than two months the President’s health was such that he could not maintain his duties. But because the national opinion – and that of Garfield’s own cabinet – of the Vice President was so low, no one even considered either Arthur assuming his duties or even remaining in DC. Garfield’s shooting and the long lingering had laid bare a gap in the transfer of power. And because it was never fully dealt with no one knew what to do if the President was incapacitated.

Garfield’s shooting had come at a time when America was not only at peace but not a player in world affairs. During the 20^th century when America was officially taking its place on the world stage and at the height of the Cold War, there were no less than four times in our nation’s history when the President’s capacity to lead should have been questioned and this gap was never filled.

The first occasion came at the end of World War I. Woodrow Wilson, who had been in poor health during his second term, had travelled to Versailles and almost single handedly negotiated the Peace Treaty ending the war. His rigid nature and inability to compromise had led him to allow many of the so-called Fourteen Points to be set aside in favor of his one dream: The League of Nations. He refused to allow for the possibility of the treaty to be ratified without, despite the adamant opposition of Senate Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge.

Wilson’s refusal to bring Republicans to the talks had enraged the Party and a branch of ‘irreconcilables’ fiercely opposed the treaty unless reservations were involved. Several of the irreconcilables were bitter enemies of Wilson and rather than negotiate with them, he launched on a nationwide speaking tour in the summer of 1919 to refute them. The vigorous tour caused Wilson to collapse with a serious stroke that effectively ruined his skills at leadership.

The final year of Wilson’s presidency is one of the most controversial in American history. Wilson’s was almost entirely incapacitated by the stroke but this condition was kept not only from the public but his own cabinet. Furthermore the Vice President Thomas Marshall was never even considered to take over running the country in Wilson’s absence. The final year was managed by Wilson’s personal secretary Joseph Tumulty and his wife Edith. During that period that were essentially the only people Wilson even interacted with and what he was allowed to know. Almost no one from Wilson’s inner circle was allowed to even see the President. Because of this many believe that during that last year the First Lady was essentially running the country.

Wilson’s mental state was such at the time that not only was he unwilling to surrender leadership, he spent much of the lead up to the Democratic convention of 1920 not only refusing to endorse a successor but privately trying to convince many around him he was going to run for a third term. By this point he had already rejected a compromise to ratify his treaty and believed he need to win an unprecedented third term in order to bring the league to fruition and for his own redemption. He maintained that position up until the convention and even after James Cox of Ohio was nominated he gave it only lukewarm support. The Republican nominee for President, Warren Harding, won an electoral landslide with more than sixty percent of the vote.

The Democratic nominee for Vice President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy. The one time he had seen Wilson in 1920, he had been shocked by the man’s condition. Yet in what would be his final year as President, he and the Democratic Party engaged in a similar deception during an election year under far worse times.

As early as April of 1944 the worst kept secret in Washington was that there was a dying man in the White House. FDR’s health was in such wretched condition that his personal physician gave him at best a year to live. But with World War II raging there was an understandable terror of what would happen if it was known that one of the key leaders in the Allies was a dying man.

I have written in previous essays about how afraid many Democratic leaders were at the possibility of Henry Wallace, FDR’s second Vice President ascending to the office after Roosevelt’s inevitable death. There was a long period in which the elders tried to convince FDR to take Wallace off the ticket. But during this period FDR seemed absolutely indifferent to the idea of who would succeed him. To one potential listener, he would suggest a man such as Jimmy Byrnes, the head of the War Mobilization Office and ‘the Assistant President’. To another group of meetings, he said Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas would be a good choice because he played a good game of poker. When Wallace himself came to him with a poll showing him comfortably in the lead among nominees, he told Wallace he was behind him. FDR could have solved this problem by just saying something but he didn’t seem inclined to care one way or another.

Harry Truman of Missouri was one who many thought would be the best choice no matter how adamantly he refused the offer. When the Democratic convention actually met, Jimmy Byrnes supposedly called him and asked Truman to put his name into nomination. Truman agreed. A moment later Alben Barkley, senate majority leader, called asking Truman and he apologized saying he’d just promised Byrnes.

Truman spent the convention in a place between stubbornness and denial. Then he was summoned by several of the nations most powerful bosses into a suite where they bludgeoned him into taking the job. He refused. Then the phone rang. It was FDR. Roosevelt said: “Well, tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.” Reluctantly Truman surrendered and he was nominated for Vice President on the second ballot. He was referred to derogatorily as ‘the second Missouri Compromise.’

Truman and FDR met only once for a lunch before the fall campaign. One of FDR’s Secret Service men saw his boss and thought FDR wouldn’t even make it to election day, that Henry Wallace would be President after all. Truman told the reporters (who didn’t the ceremony) “the President ate a bigger lunch that I did.” In truth, his hands had shaken so badly FDR couldn’t get cream in his coffee. Truman knew he’d be in the White House some day and as he told a wartime buddy “it scared the hell out of him.”

FDR conducted a vigorous campaign during the  final six weeks of the campaign but Thomas Dewey his Republican opponent and many others made an issue of the President’s health. Despite the reassurances of his personal physician that the President was ‘perfectly okay’, many Republicans wanted to make it the major story. Dewey refused, thinking it might backfire. There is an argument he should have.

Observing him on inauguration day Edith Wilson was reminded of her own husband after his stroke. Nevertheless FDR continued to be active in the campaign for the end of the war, including the infamous meetings at Yalta. Truman was given no information about anything the President was doing and received no real briefings. When FDR passed away on April 12, 1945, it was only then that Truman learned of the Manhattan Project.

Meeting with Eisenhower after the war in Berlin, Truman said he would do anything for the hero of Normandy ‘including giving him the Presidency in 1948.” Eisenhower was shocked by this and told him so. Nevertheless when Truman’s popularity dwindled (as I’ve talked about before) both the Republican and Democratic Party sought him out as their nominee for President in 1948. Eisenhower turned them both down. He was more willing in 1952. (I’ll get to that in a different article.)

When Eisenhower was elected President in 1952, he was 62 the oldest man to begin his term in the White House since James Buchanan in 1856. No one considered that a real issue until September 24, 1955 when he suffered a serious heart attack. While he was convalescing his personal physician misdiagnosed the symptoms as indigestion and failed to call in help that was urgently needed. For the next six weeks he was hospitalized.

During this period, however, it was unclear who was in charge. Administrative duties were split between Vice President Nixon, his secretary of state John Foster Dulles and his chief of staff Sherman Adams. His physician recommended a second term as essential to his recovery and there was no real talk of this being an obstacle to his running for reelection, certainly not by the GOP elders who had no intention of letting the man who had returned them to the White House after twenty years not run for reelection.

Then in the summer of 1956, Eisenhower needed surgery for a bowel obstruction which led to much of his small intestine being bypassed. A meeting with Prime Minister Nehru was cancelled so he could recover at its farm. He was still recovering from that operation during the Suez Crisis but no one was told that either.

The year after he was reelected Eisenhower suffered a mild stroke during a cabinet meeting in November of 1957 when he was suddenly unable to move his right hand or speak. This episode convinced Eisenhower the stress of his Presidential leadership was taking a toll on his body and he wrote ‘secret letter’ to Nixon outlining procedures to be followed in the case of his incapacity that would designate the Vice President “explicitly and exclusive responsible” for making that determination. For all Nixon’s numerable flaws, it’s worth noting that in none of the three occasion Eisenhower was incapacitated did he make any attempt to look power hungry or assume power he didn’t think he had no earned.

In 1963 Senator Kenneth Keating of New York proposed a Constitutional amendment which would enable congress to enact legislation proving how to determine when a President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. This proposal was based on a recommendation from the ABA in 1960. Senators raised concerns about Congressional abuses. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee spearheaded the effort until his death in August of 1963. Keating lost reelection to Robert Kennedy but Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska took up the question.

JFK’s assassination underscored the need for a clear procedure determining Presidential disability. On January 6, 1965 Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana and Representative Emmanuel Eller proposed a process by which a president could be declared ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, thereby making the Vice President acting President. Their proposal also provided a way to fill a vacancy in the office of the Vice Presidency before the next Presidential election. This was the beginning of the process that led to the passage of what we now know as the 25^th Amendment which was ratified in February of 1967.

Nixon invoked it in 1973 to nominate Gerald Ford for Vice President after Spiro Agnew resigned. When Ford became President after Nixon’s resignation, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller for Vice President. The third section of the amendment in which the President declares his inability was contemplated several times by various Presidents when they underwent surgeries but they never did.

The fourth section is one that you might be familiar with from TV shows such as 24, The West Wing and Scandal, all of which used it as plot devices, frequently for nefarious purposes. You might have heard more about it during Trump’s Presidency. Here’s the lettering:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or such other body as Congress may as by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office of President.” In layman’s terms, there has to be a vote declared and if a majority of the cabinet agrees the Vice President becomes acting President.

The President also has a power of appeal: within four days he must make his appeal to the Speaker and President pro tempore that he can resume the duties. It then falls to Congress to assemble within 48 hours to vote on the issues. If 2/3 of both houses vote that the President can’t assume his duties, the Vice President continues to hold them.

This is why, despite all of the spinning by the media, even if either Trump or Biden’s cabinet had thought the President was incapacitated, discussion of invoking this section of the 25^th amendment couldn’t be seriously considered. The President would have had a right to appeal his decision to Congress and the battle would have taken weeks to settle. Things are rarely as simple as they look on TV. (January 6^th is a different story but I’m not sure about the circumstances had it been used.)

That doesn’t mean; however, it shouldn’t have been tested and in fact a very real reason was given twice in the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. After the attempt on his life, George H.W. Bush didn’t assume Section 4 because Reagan had been rushed into surgery with no opportunity to invoke Section 3. (The practicality of this actually was called into question on The West Wing after Bartlet was shot and went into surgery: “He’s hemorrhaging and he’s supposed to draft a memo?) His physician later said he erred by not having the President invoke.

The more serious occasion occurred in 1987 when there was a possibility that Reagan’s was showing signs of Alzheimer’s. It’s never been clear when the symptoms of the disease began to manifest (Reagan’s children have since confirmed it may have happened in 1987 or earlier) but it doesn’t seem like anyone even considered invoking the 25^th Amendment. This led to extended discussions that during much of Reagan’s second term, Nancy Reagan was essentially running the country.

And it is worth noting that this discussion probably should have made repeatedly during Reagan’s Presidency. He was sixty nine when he took office, the oldest President to that point in history to do so. His age should have been a concern and during the 1984 election, there were two separate occasions – most prominently during his first debate with Walter Mondale – where he looked particularly unable to function. Yet when this question was posed to him in the second debate Reagan passed it off with a  joke saying: “I will not exploit for personal gain my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Even Mondale laughed at the line – but no one should have. Reagan was seventy-three and there had been private talk of his own capability. He had already laughed off the idea of taking naps while in the Oval Office. These were the kind of conversations that both the press and Americans should have been having about a man in his seventies who had shown sign of mental instability and who had few press conferences during his administration. Yet not only was the suggestion cast aside at the time, Reagan’s legacy was such that he was considered one of the greatest Presidents in history by many and was in the ten greatest of all time until fairly recently.

Yet all of this has been ignored during the Presidency of the hero to conservatives who they say won the Cold War single-handedly. That Democrats never truly made enough of this an issue particularly during Reagan’s run for reelection is a huge of fault of theirs. This decision should have been at the forefront during an election year.

Because of a series of younger Presidents America basically chose to ignore this as an issue over the next thirty years. It didn’t seem to be a disqualifier for Joe Biden even though he would be 78 when he was sworn in. In large part built on the desire to deny Trump a second term, many Americans chose to nominate the candidate they thought would be the most likely to defeat him and let the age question wait until later. That question was going to surface almost immediately when Biden had to be asked if he run for reelection.

Perhaps the best answer would have been for Biden to say he would only serve one term but it is likely that would have created even more problems for his administration then it had. The country was in a fragile enough state after he was sworn in; the last thing we needed was the newly elected President to declare himself a lame-duck within days of taking office. The conversation probably should have taken place behind closed doors, but in Washington there’s no way it could have been kept private for long.

It certainly couldn’t have happened until after the midterms when America was sure the red wave would overwhelm us. When that didn’t happen and Biden enjoyed the best midterms of any Democrat in nearly sixty years the President would have had even more of a reason for Biden to stand for reelection. By that point the discussion of his age were coming out – it would have been inevitable – but with Trump seeking the nomination, the Democrats were in a bind.

Having a primary challenger – a legitimate one, not one the level of Dean Philips or Marianne Williamson – might have been a better option for the party. Had a candidate such as Gretchen Witwer or Gavin Newson been willing to make a run in New Hampshire, it would have given a clearer perception of Biden’s popularity. The problem was that there was no really reason to merit one aside from concern over Biden’s age and unless the candidate had a Eugene McCarthy like showing there would have been no real merit to it.

Of course Biden could have resolved the issue himself had he chosen to step down at any point prior to the start of 2024. But the fact remains there would have been a hint of cruelty to tell a man who had served the country for half a century to step aside for the next generation – particularly considering there was no precedent for it in our long history to point to.

In short Biden was compelled to stay in office despite his health because the Presidency had given us no clear examples of doing so. The fact remains all of the Presidents in the 20^th century I suggested are or were considered among the greatest in our nation’s history. It might have been better for the nation had they been willing to admit their weaknesses but history had proven that they had been on the right side.

And it is a failure of our country that, despite the existence of the 25^th amendment and the remedies of impeachment, we still have no clear definition of what it means for a President to be ‘incapacitated. But that’s not so much our failure as the changing times. Lincoln spent much of his Presidency quietly suffering from depression and we didn’t learn of it because in the 1860s, it would have been considered a reason he was unfit to lead. FDR being in a wheelchair would have been an automatic disqualifier in the age of television. And in an era of partisan politics where every single gesture is considered a failure of leadership worthy of unfitness, there may be no true standard that can stand the test of time.

So perhaps it was wrong to ask Biden to stand down as a symptom of ageism and infirmity. But it was just as wrong that nearly 250 years after our country was founded, we still can’t have come to an consensus of what makes anyone in Washington as ‘unfit’ to lead. It’s terrible that we are in such a critical time when the conversation had to happen. But there’s never a good time to have this conversation when you’re the President and it doesn’t seem like its been considered seriously before. For that reason, we probably owe a debt to those individuals in the party for having forced this conversation upon us, despite everything.