As she’s saying this I can see the First Lady greeting some of the Girl Scouts. Margie Haden was very good at the public appearance face—the look of being interested or excited about something even if you don’t care—and she was doing her best to use it. But you could see it slip the second she lost focus. I can’t say she looked like she was in pain, but I can say that she looked very, very unhappy.
Elizabeth Torres:
By the time we arrived to the campground she said her headache had become a migraine. I was worried because as long as I knew the First Lady she had never gotten a headache that would qualify as a migraine. I asked her if she wanted to back out but she said no, she could get through it. Celia Williams and Davis Armstrong, who were in charge of her security detail, also suggested that she cancel or at the very least limit her public time at the event. She didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to disappoint the scouts.
Ann Watson:
About a half hour before the closing ceremonies were supposed to start, the organizers started trying to herd all the Girl Scouts into the bleachers. They were being told that the First Lady had had something come up and she would have to give her speech early. I could hear the youngest Girl Scouts complain, because they were there for the other activities. They hardly knew who the First Lady was at all. But they were all pushed along to the bleachers.
We set up at the front with the other media and had to do a little elbow throwing because we’re a small market crew, but got a good spot. Off to the side we could see the First Lady, in her winter coat, conferring with a young lady I think was her assistant and with what were obviously her Secret Service people. By now the First Lady’s public appearance face was long gone. But she wasn’t on stage so it probably isn’t fair to note that.
She was introduced very briefly by the head scout, I think, and then she came on. The Girl Scouts started cheering and screaming for her, and if you look at the video feed and know the context, you can tell for her it was like being stabbed in the eardrums. But she smiled and waved and got out her notes and talked like a trouper for five minutes. Then she stopped, smiled and looked off stage.
Elizabeth Torres:
She looked over directly to me, said, “I think I may be having a stroke,” and collapsed.
Ann Watson:
I don’t think I have ever seen people move as fast as I saw those Secret Service people move when she hit the floor up there.
Col. Lydia Harvey:
When I learned that the First Lady collapsed in Maryland, after having been sick and without a member of my staff being present, I, after an appropriate time, tendered my resignation to the President. He refused it, on the basis that the First Lady did not check in with the staff to let us know she was feeling poorly. Nevertheless, it was made clear to me immediately afterwards that the refusal came counter to the suggestion of some of the top members of his team. They had questioned my treatment of the First Lady’s earlier phase of the disease and blamed me for her progressing to the second, meningitis-like phase.
Of course we know now that there was nothing that I or any physician could have done that could have changed the progression of the disease. But this is the wife of the President we’re discussing. As ridiculous as it sounds, within the White House itself, it became political, quickly.
In any event, within minutes of her collapse she was on her way to Walter Reed, and so was I.
Wesley Auchincloss, Deputy Chief of Staff for President Haden:
The President was in Arizona for a meeting with western governors when he’d gotten word his wife had collapsed. They were discussing the border wall with Mexico when [Presidential Assistant] Clay Strickland leaned in and told him. The President stood up immediately and started to exit the room. The governor of Texas, who had been a primary opponent of his, started to complain, and the President held up his hand and said, “Bill, at this very moment, I could not give a single god damn for your miserable wall,” and walked out. I’m certain the governor of Texas never forgave the President for that comment. I am equally certain the President did not, as he put it, give a single god damn about that.
Neal Joseph:
What was really underappreciated at the time—even after that bruising election cycle—was how much Benjamin Haden relied on Margie Haden. Much was made of the closeness of their relationship, and how it humanized him despite him being a generally unlovable character. But most people missed just how deeply he needed her, both politically and emotionally. He wouldn’t have made it into the White House without her, simply put. And when she collapsed and it looked like she might have had a serious stroke, you could not have more effectively pulled the rug out from under the man than that. People were surprised that he literally put everything on pause to get back to her. They shouldn’t have been surprised. It would have been surprising if he hadn’t.
Col. Lydia Harvey:
The President’s face when he got to Walter Reed and saw his wife in the hospital bed. You would have thought someone had torn out his heart and stamped it into the floor.
Benjamin Moldanado:
Around the time the First Lady was struck with the meningitis phase, some of the phase’s earliest victims were moving into what we began to recognize as a third, distinct phase of the disease. In this phase, for all intents and purposes, the victim’s voluntary nervous system shuts down—the victim can’t move, can’t speak, can’t even blink intentionally. The autonomic systems in most cases continued to function, so people could still breathe, and all the other critical life functions would continue more or less as they normally would. Cognitive function was likewise unaffected, to the extent that it had not been earlier affected by meningitis.
The short form of this was that people suffering from the third stage were essentially trapped inside their own bodies. They were conscious, awake and able to think, feel, and perceive the world around them. They just weren’t able to tell us they could do all these things. They were locked in.
At first, we only had a few reports of “lock in,” and we thought it might be the rare but not entirely surprising end game for a small handful of meningitis-phase sufferers, the next step beyond those who had developed significant cognitive impairment from the disease. But then the number exploded, and we realized that many of those who were experiencing lock in weren’t otherwise cognitively impaired—that there was no real correlation between cognitive damage and lock in. Like the first two rounds, some people got it and some people didn’t.
And one of those who got it was Margaret Haden.
Duane Holmes, Legislative Aide for Lynn Cortez, Speaker of the House:
Nothing got done. I mean nothing. To be fair to the President, very little was getting done anyway: The Republicans had the Senate and we had the House and neither chamber was passing much of anything that would get past the other. But each of us had our legislative agendas, and of course the President had his own, largely in line with the Senate’s. So we were all keeping busy.