Then the First Lady got sick and the President dropped everything. It wasn’t subtle, either. My boss got called into a meeting by [White House Chief of Staff Kenny] Lamb, who told her that until Margie Haden got better the President’s attention was going to be elsewhere. This didn’t sit well with the Speaker, because we were in the middle of trying to hammer out a long-term budget deal instead of doling out extensions like we had been doing. But Lamb made it clear the President had other things on his mind. My boss said that if he was going to be that distracted maybe he should let Vice President Hicks take over as acting executive in chief. I don’t think that went over particularly well.
My boss was irritated enough to ready a few jabs at the President about it, but [Senate Minority Leader Gordon] Harmon and his people pointed out to her that trying to take a punch at a man whose wife was gravely ill was not going to go over well at all. The Speaker agreed that she would give him a week but that was it. Sick wife or not, she had budget priorities, and she didn’t want to lose momentum on the discussion.
As it turned out, a week later two of the Speaker’s granddaughters were sick and she didn’t give a crap about the budget either. Nor did anyone else—there wasn’t a Congressperson on the Hill who didn’t have family or friends who were sick. This plague hit everyone.
Phyllida Yang, Professor of Pathology, New York University:
Haden’s syndrome really was a universal disease, and that’s something that’s more unusual than you might think. Part of this was that the initial vectors of infection were mobile, relatively high-status individuals: those epidemiologists who traveled across continents and came home to hospitals and universities, infecting as they went. The infection traveled as easily upward, in terms of social and economic classes, as it traveled downward. It wasn’t an outbreak focused on one particular group, as, for example, AIDS was initially in the US, when it first spread among urban gay men, or as modern day outbreaks of communicable diseases are among upper-middle-class children whose parents refuse to have them vaccinated. It went far and wide.
One consequence of this was that when it struck, there was a considerable knock-on effect because it was so widespread. Medical resources were overwhelmed, of course, but that was only the most obvious effect. Businesses came to a standstill not just because people called in sick but because spouses and parents stayed home to tend to the afflicted. Enough truckers got sick that perishable goods went bad waiting for someone to deliver them. Nearly every corner of American life was touched—and usually brought to a halt—by the initial outbreak of the disease. And as bad as it was here it was often worse in other countries, many of which did not have the infrastructure the US had built up over the years.
The one silver lining, if you want to call it that, of this universality of illness was that because everyone was either sick or knew intimately someone who was sick, there was immense political will for both short and long term solutions to the problems Haden’s presented. And in terms of political impetus to find solutions, no one was more motivated than the President himself.
Wesley Auchincloss:
After three weeks it was clear that Margie wasn’t coming out of it. Doctors elsewhere were reporting other patients by the thousands with the same issues she had, so we knew that what was happening to her wasn’t isolated or unusual. And it wasn’t something we could keep hidden from the press or the American people, either. It was around this time that the term “Haden’s syndrome” started to be used in reference to the disease, particularly the third stage of it. We tried to keep that from the President as long as we could, but that was a futile gesture. He heard it.
Dr. Harvey and her staff confirmed by MRIs and other tests that Margie was awake and conscious, so the President spent much of his time with her at Walter Reed, talking to her and reading those mystery novels she had as her guilty pleasure. Kenny Lamb finally had to pull him aside and tell him that despite his personal pain, the country needed a President, and that President needed to be seen leading and reassuring the country in this moment of crisis. When Kenny said this, the President gave him a look that, if I had to guess, communicated supreme apathy about the needs of the rest of the country. But after a minute he nodded slowly and told Kenny that the next morning he’d be ready to resume full activity as President.
Col. Lydia Harvey:
I remember that the President stayed up with the First Lady that entire night. I suggested to him that both he and the First Lady needed their rest, but he said, more politely than I suspect he really wished to, that he was the President and that no one could stop him from speaking to his wife. I told the medical staff to give him and the First Lady privacy and to intrude only if absolutely necessary.
Nevertheless around midnight I came into the room just before heading home myself. The President was sitting on his wife’s bed, facing away from me, holding her hand. I could hear him talking to her quietly. Most of it I couldn’t make out, but once or twice I heard him say, “Tell me what I should do. Tell me what I need to do, Margie. Tell me.”
It was a strangely intimate moment and I felt that I had intruded on something that the President did not intend nor would want me to see. I slipped out of the room before he could notice I was there, waited a moment and then knocked on the door before entering a second time, to give the President time to prepare himself. The Secret Service agents guarding the door gave me a look when I did this but as far as I know they kept quiet about it, too. I think they understood what had happened.
Wesley Auchincloss:
Kenny and I came into the Oval Office at 8am the next morning and were surprised that the President already had the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Speaker of the House, and the Majority Leader of the Senate in there with him. We had been under the impression that the meeting would be the usual agenda setter between me, Kenny, and the President. The looks we got from every other member of the meeting suggested to us that they were at least as surprised to be at the meeting as we were. We found out after the meeting that the President called each of them personally at around 5am and told them to be in the Oval Office or face the consequences, “the consequences” being unspecified but dire. He didn’t call me or Kenny, I suppose, because he knew we were coming anyway.
When we were all there, the President looked at each of us and said something along the lines of, I’ll make this simple. We’re going to find out what this disease is, we’re going to cure it and we’re going to help the people who are locked in their bodies find a way to get out, because we’re the greatest nation in the world, and if we could build the atom bomb and put a man on the moon, we sure as hell can do this.
And then Speaker Cortez said, in that way of hers, “Well, Mr. President, that’s going to cost money.” The President said that he didn’t care. [Senate Majority Leader] Caleb Waters reminded him that he’d been elected on a platform of slashing taxes and cutting government expenditures. The President stared straight at Waters and said, and this a direct quote, “That was then.” Waters opened his mouth to say something else and the President said to him that he needed to listen very carefully, this was going to happen and that if anyone got in the way of it happening, regardless of party, regardless of position, he would screw them into the ground so hard that they would end up ass-first in China.