The President Who Wasn't There

We button up the astounding year with the scandal of 2024, which won't take on its true size and historical significance until some time passes. Its facts-who did what, starting when, how it worked-will be fully reported not by journalists but by historians.

The story is the decline of Joe Biden's mental acuity, a word we use because it sounds both clinical and polite, and by which we mean the president has been in apparent cognitive decline for some years, perhaps since before taking office, and wasn't fully up to the job. His family and friends, top White House staff and other administration officials covered it up. Some no doubt thought his presidency was good for the country and some, perhaps, good for them.

In a front-page story this month, the Journal's Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer and Siobhan Hughes spoke to nearly 50 people in and around the presidency and outlined how the White House adapted to the needs of "a diminished leader." He met infrequently with cabinet members and congressional leaders, and the president's staff seemed to be running things. This system "insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public." The whole thing came crashing down on June 27, during the presidential debate in which the country finally saw what those in the White House saw every day: Mr. Biden had lost more than a step. He was too old to function as a fully engaged and handson president.

This resurrected the story of Woodrow Wilson, who in 1919, almost three years into his second term, was incapacitated by what was likely a series of strokes. His wife and top aides misled the public as to his condition, which forever colored Wilson's legacy and darkened the historical reputation of First Lady Edith Bolling Wilson.