Jonathan Zimmerman: One president's struggle to focus after wife fell ill

So let's suppose John Edwards becomes our next president. If his wife becomes seriously ill, will he be able to concentrate on his White House duties?

That's what Katie Couric asked Edwards on 60 Minutes, after Elizabeth Edwards announced that her breast cancer had returned.

John Edwards never wavered in his answer: Yes.

"I care about her situation. I love her," John Edwards said, as Elizabeth looked on."But I understand that I have a responsibility to this country, and that responsibility includes the ability to focus and have clarity when hard judgments have to be made. I am completely convinced that I can do that."

I hope he's right. I have enormous admiration for the grit, courage and optimism of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Despite the long odds against her, I hope and pray that Elizabeth gets well. Even if she doesn't, I hope her husband can stay focused on what he has to do.

But history gives me pause.

I'm thinking especially of Benjamin Harrison, who was elected as our 23d president in 1888. Like George W. Bush in 2000, Harrison won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Grover Cleveland. So he knew he'd face a tough reelection bid in 1892, when the Democrats nominated Cleveland again.

But Harrison found that he couldn't concentrate on the campaign, for one big reason: His wife fell ill with tuberculosis. Charming and vivacious next to Harrison's chilly demeanor, Caroline Harrison had been a major asset in his prior political victories. When she started to experience respiratory problems in the summer of 1892, Benjamin Harrison moved her to a cottage in the Adirondacks. Then he tried - as well as he could - to focus on the forthcoming election. It didn't work.

"Politics and business have been crowding me day and night," Harrison wrote to his daughter, Mary, in July 1892."And this with the anxiety about your mother makes life just now a burden and ambition a delusion."

In September, fearing that the end was near, Caroline Harrison asked to return to Washington. She was carried on a stretcher into the White House, where Benjamin Harrison and several other family members took turns sitting vigil at her bedside.

Aides asked the president to return to the campaign trail, but he refused. Even Mary pleaded with him to get back to work."I so regret Father's inability to help at this time, for if he was able to receive some delegations and make some speeches it would be a powerful factor," she wrote."Father would not think of leaving Mother now for anything."

Caroline Harrison died on Oct. 25, 1892, just a few days before the national election. After taking his wife's body home to Indiana for burial, Benjamin Harrison could not take himself back to Washington to vote in his own reelection bid. He got drubbed by Grover Cleveland, who won a sound plurality of the popular vote and two-thirds of the Electoral College.

Looking back on the election, Harrison admitted that he had forfeited it."I was so removed from the campaign that I can scarcely realize that I was a candidate," Harrison told one supporter. Even if he had won, Harrison added, he would not have performed well as president:"It does not seem to me that I could have had the physical strength to go through what would have been before me . . . with the added burden of a great personal grief."

Like John and Elizabeth Edwards, whose 16-year-old son died in a car accident, Benjamin and Caroline Harrison had lost a child - a baby girl at birth. But that was a grief they shared together, as a couple.

Benjamin Harrison had to face the loss of his beloved spouse alone. He was"a leader in prison," Harrison later recalled. And there was no way out.

How will John Edwards respond if his own wife's condition takes a sharp turn for the worse? We don't know. But if the example of Benjamin Harrison is any guide, he might not be able to muster the focus and the resolve to keep going.

If that happens, I have just one request: Please, John, stop. Right away. Elizabeth will understand. And so will the rest of us.