Steve Coll writes in the New Yorker how President Woodrow Wilson contracted the “Spanish Flu” more than 100 years ago, and was so weakened that he was unable to block a settlement to the First World War “so harsh an onerous to Germans” that it eventually gave a rallying cause to Adolf Hitler.
A fascinating read!
On the evening of April 3, 1919, in Paris, President Woodrow Wilson began to cough; he soon took to bed, feverish and unable to move. He had contracted what had become known as the Spanish flu, the President’s physician wrote confidentially to the White House, and it had made Wilson “violently sick.” By then, the influenza had rampaged around the world for more than a year and was on its way to killing at least twenty million people, including at least six hundred thousand Americans. Wilson was in Paris for the treaty negotiations following the end of the First World War, which sought to shape the postwar global order and settle the status of the defeated Germany. He became ill at a decisive moment, making the virus an insidious actor in one of the twentieth century’s most consequential episodes of great-power diplomacy.