Look At Who Makes The Call.

Whose Word Do We Read?

In October of 1919, the President of the United States had a stroke.

His name was Woodrow Wilson. The stroke left him partly paralyzed, and it left the country without a working president.

The country wasn’t told.

For the next seventeen months, almost nobody saw him. His wife, Edith, decided who got into the room. His doctor, Cary Grayson, decided what the public heard.

Papers went into the sickroom, and decisions came back out. Nobody outside that small circle could say for sure who was making them.

His own Secretary of State tried to hold Cabinet meetings to keep the government running. Wilson fired him for it.

The country ran on the word of a wife and a doctor until the term ran out in March of 1921.

Hold that picture. Two people who loved the man, and who needed him to stay, kept the only record of whether he could do the job.

Earlier today I told you about my senior year at Lockheed. I told you how the installer never stamps his own work, and how an inspector who answers to somebody else looks and then signs.

That rule holds on an airplane line.

It doesn’t hold at the top of our government. It never has.

We did try to fix it.

After Wilson, after Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955, and after Kennedy was killed in Dallas, the country finally wrote a rule. It’s the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967.

It lays out what happens when a president can’t do the job. It’s a good amendment, and I’m glad we have it.

But look at who makes the call.

The vice president and the cabinet. The president’s own people. People he picked, who owe him their jobs.

That’s Edith Wilson and Doctor Grayson with better paperwork.

Now look at the other road.

In 1964, a magazine surveyed psychiatrists about Barry Goldwater, who was running for president. Many of them offered opinions on his mind, and none of them had ever examined him.

Goldwater sued and won. And the psychiatrists’ own professional group adopted a rule. You don’t diagnose a public figure you have never examined.

They call it the Goldwater Rule. It’s a fair rule. A diagnosis from across a television screen isn’t a diagnosis. It’s an opinion wearing a white coat.

So here’s where we stand, and have stood for a hundred years.

On one side are the insiders, who have seen the man up close but work for him.

On the other side are the outsiders, who work for nobody but have never seen the man at all.

We built both roads. We never built the inspector.

You’ve watched this play out in your own lifetime. Maybe twice.

In the summer of 2024, a lot of Americans watched a debate and asked a hard question about the man in the White House. For months before that, his people had told them not to worry. Trust us, we see him every day.

Now the question is being asked about the man in the White House today. His doctors say he scored thirty out of thirty on a cognitive test. His critics say they see decline. One recent poll says most Americans have their doubts.

I’m not going to tell you which of those men was fine and which wasn’t. I can’t. Neither can anybody writing about it from a distance, and that includes me.

That’s my whole point.

You shouldn’t have to guess. You shouldn’t have to pick the side you trust and believe whatever that side says.

On something this big, the record ought to come from someone who has actually looked and who answers to no one in the room.

I’m seventy-two years old, and I’ll speak for my own age for a minute.

I know what the years can take. I also know what they don’t take. There are men and women older than me with sharper minds than folks half their age.

Age isn’t the question. Being checked is the question.

And I’ll tell you something else from where I sit. A fair check isn’t an insult to an old man. It’s respect. It says your word matters enough to be backed up.

A man who is fit should welcome the inspector. The stamp is his proof.

So what would a real inspector look like at the top?

I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t have a bill written. But I know the shape of it from a lifetime of work.

The person doing the checking can’t be picked by the person being checked.

The findings go on a record that the checked man’s people can’t edit.

And the checker’s own work gets checked, so nobody gets to be the last word.

That isn’t a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. It’s how every trade in this country has kept people alive for a hundred years.

I spend my days writing about artificial intelligence. About how these new machines ought to be watched while they work.

And every road I walk down ends at the same place. The one doing the work can’t be the one who signs off on it, and neither can anybody who works for him.

It’s true for a machine running on a computer. It’s true for a kid running wire on an airliner.

And it’s true for the most powerful job on this earth.

Think about Edith Wilson one more time.

I don’t believe she was a bad woman. I believe she loved her husband and was scared for him, and she did what she thought was right.

That’s the danger. It doesn’t take a villain to keep the country in the dark. It only takes somebody close enough to care and nobody far enough away to check.

A hundred years later, we’re still reading the word of the people closest to the man. Then we argue about it on television with people who have never seen him.

Whichever party you vote for, you deserve better than that.

You deserve a ticket signed by an inspector.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing

This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.