With just weeks to go before a national convention, Democratic Party officials refuse to address the elephant in the room: their presumptive presidential nominee’s health.
Virtually everyone who has seen the candidate has walked away alarmed at his physical state, wondering if he is able to assume the burdens of high office at such a crucial point in history. In private, they question how he will make it through a whole term.
These circumstances beg a deeper question, which is that with Joe Biden in such questionable condition, are the Democrats setting up the vice presidential nominee to be a future president? It’s hard to avoid the question, but avoid it they will, and swapping presidential candidates this late in the game would be disastrous in a general election with so much at stake.
This might sound like the 2020 election, but it actually describes the situation in 1944. That year, President Franklin Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented fourth term but had been bedridden for much of the year with severe heart issues. There are multiple accounts from those who saw Roosevelt in 1944 expressing alarm at his moribund appearance. In fact, cardiologist Frank Lahey, who examined FDR, wrote his doctor telling him that the president wouldn’t survive a fourth term, making the 1944 vice presidential selection of critical importance.
Although some commentators were raising questions about Roosevelt’s physical state because he had already served for so long, the public was largely ignorant of the president’s true condition. Roosevelt and his staff, after all, were masters at obscuring the facts about his health, having successfully hidden the extent of his paralysis throughout his presidency. At one point in 1944, FDR’s doctor declared, “The president’s health is excellent!”
At the time, Roosevelt’s vice president was Henry Wallace, a Democrat who, through political ineptitude, alienated large sections of the party. Party officials feared that renominating the hapless Wallace was effectively making him president in the event of Roosevelt’s death. Driven by this fear, the party forced Roosevelt to replace Wallace with a choice more palatable to the various wings of the party: Missouri Sen. Harry Truman.
That selection changed the course of history. The following year, Roosevelt died, vindicating Lahey, and the people found themselves with a new commander in chief — a man they barely knew. Now, Truman would lead the nation during the momentous years at the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. He would make the fateful decisions to use atomic weapons on Japan and to confront the Soviet threat.
The vice presidency can sometimes be a pathway to obscurity, as it was for George Dallas, Henry Wilson, and Thomas Marshall, or it can be a launching pad to historical significance, see Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. And that launch need not come through the death of a president. Nixon’s 1952 nomination as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president positioned him to seek the presidency in 1960 and attain it in 1968. Reagan’s selection of George H.W. Bush positioned, not one, but two Bushes to eventually become president, with major historical implications.
Even losing the vice presidency can have the same effect. FDR was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1920, lost in the general election, but won the presidency in 1932. John F. Kennedy sought that same nomination in 1956 and failed but gained national exposure in the process, helping him win the presidency in 1960.
Just as in 1944, the Democrats have an incentive this year to downplay their nominee’s age and health issues. In many ways, it echoes Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation about her husband: “All of us knew that Franklin was far from well, but none of us ever said anything about it.”
Ironically, Democrats had no issue with bringing up these issues against Reagan, Bob Dole, and John McCain, all of who were younger in their White House runs than Biden is today. These efforts underscore the point: The physical well-being of the candidate matters, as does the choice of a vice president — not only because of the human frailty of all presidents but because of the new platform that person will have on the national stage. History shows that, Democratic politics aside, Biden owes the nation someone ready to serve as commander in chief from day one.
Richard Lim is the co-founder and host of the This American President podcast.
