Woodrow Wilson and Hillary Clinton: When a President Keeps an Infirmity Hidden from the Public
Mike Konrad | American Thinker
Sep 9, 2016
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Joseph Patrick Tumulty is a name that every American should know; and yet so few do. He may have helped run the country for the last two years of Woodrow Wilson's Administration. This is what a Hillary Clinton presidency portends.

Joseph Tumulty was born in New Jersey in 1879. His parents were middle class ethnic Irish, and he became a lawyer, and later a state representative. However, Tumulty was an accomplished wheeler-dealer, and Woodrow Wilson called upon his services when he started his political climb from Princeton University academic to Governor of New Jersey and then President. Tumulty was Wilson's private secretary, a position that would morph in time to become the White House Chief of Staff, though in 1913, it bore a more humble title.

Wilson was a sturdy WASP, from a Southern Confederate background; yet he needed Tumulty, the ethnic Irish-American from the urban northeast to navigate his way through machine politics if he were to win a Democratic presidency.

Joseph Patrick Tumulty was secretary to President Woodrow Wilson, and no man since his time has ever held a comparable position of influence. Mr. Tumulty had no corps of "administrative assistants" such as supplied nowadays at the White House. He handled all press relations himself. He was not a member of the cabinet but had more influence than all of them combined. - Toledo Blade - 1954 (upon Tumulty's death)

As anyone knows, such a man can become a gatekeeper, and often becomes the power behind the throne.

Nor was Tumulty unscarred in his ascent. Tumulty was opposed to Wilson's second marriage to Edith Bolling Galt, another Southerner, in 1915, a year after Wilson''s first wife's death; and Edith took it personally. She wanted Tumulty removed. On top of that, there was a vicious strain of anti-Catholicism sweeping the country at that time; and Wilson, a dour Presbyterian, was susceptible to it. He was pressured to ditch Tumulty.

Tumulty appealed to Wilson for a reciprocation of the loyalty that he had shown to Wilson when Wilson was a nobody in politics. Wilson kept him.

When Wilson had his stroke in 1919, it was Tumulty and Edith who kept the news under wraps with the connivance of Dr. Grayson, the president's physician.