Chuck Todd
speaker
183,203 appearances
218 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard yesterday
Chuck Todd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 187 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 39.
Appearances
For weeks, almost no government official saw the president and presidential business increasingly flowed through Edith.
She determined which documents and questions were important enough to bring to her husband, she claimed, and which ones weren't.
Now, this is where the story frequently gets turned into a bit of historical trivia with Edith Wilson described as America's first woman president.
I think that description is a little much because it makes the whole thing sound almost amusing.
Edith always insisted she wasn't making presidential decisions.
And she there's an important distinction here.
But years later, when she described this period herself, she acknowledged that she decided what was important and what was not, which felt like a presidential decision.
Right.
Which matters should be presented to him.
So you don't have to be the person making the final decision to have enormous power if you're the person deciding which decisions ever reach the president.
And nobody elected Edith Wilson to anything.
Inside the administration, the Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, recognized the constitutional problem almost immediately.
And in fact, on October 6th, he raised the question of presidential incapacity.
The Constitution at the time said that if a president was unable to discharge the powers and duties of the office, those powers could pass to the vice president.
But the Constitution did not explain how or who got to decide that the president was unable to do the functions.
Wilson's doctor wasn't going to declare him incapacitated.
His family certainly wasn't going to do it.
The vice president, Thomas Marshall, was extremely reluctant to assert presidential authority.
He didn't want to look like he was taking advantage of a sick president and didn't want people thinking this was a coup.
And most of the people who might have challenged any of this couldn't even get into the room to see Wilson.
Showing 3981–4000 of 183,203 · page 200 of 9161
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