Let's start with a piece about the piece.
Newsweek:
Current and former staffers to Democratic Senator Jon Fetterman raised
concerns about his health in an article published by
New York Magazine's Intelligencer on Friday, with Adam
Jentleson, his former chief of staff, telling a Walter Reed medical director
last year that he worried the senator "is on a bad trajectory."
In the article, Fetterman called the various concerns and allegations raised
by staffers "past and present" as "disgruntled employees saying things that
are either untrue or, so, that's kind of the business that we are in."
So the basic frame is that Jentleson (and some others) assert and Fetterman
denies.
You can find the article here.
Here's how it begins:
When John Fetterman was released from Walter Reed hospital in March 2023, Adam Jentleson, then his chief of staff, was proud of his boss for seeking help for what the senator’s office and his doctor had said was a case of clinical depression. His six weeks of inpatient care had been the latest medical setback for the Pennsylvania Democrat, who had had a stroke mere months before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, nearly derailing his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz. But a year after his release from the hospital, Fetterman’s behavior had so alarmed Jentleson that he resigned his position. In May 2024, he wrote an urgent letter to David Williamson, the medical director of the traumatic-brain-injury and neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed, who had overseen Fetterman’s care at the hospital. “I think John is on a bad trajectory and I’m really worried about him,” the email began. If things didn’t change, Jentleson continued, he was concerned Fetterman “won’t be with us for much longer.”
His 1,600-word email came with the subject line “concerns,” and it contained a list of them, from the seemingly mundane (“He eats fast food multiple times a day”) to the scary (“We do not know if he is taking his meds and his behavior frequently suggests he is not”). “We often see the kind of warning signs we discussed,” Jentleson wrote. “Conspiratorial thinking; megalomania (for example, he claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos); high highs and low lows; long, rambling, repetitive and self centered monologues; lying in ways that are painfully, awkwardly obvious to everyone in the room.”
After reading the piece, I'm worried about John Fetterman, too.
What follows in the piece fleshing out the concerns. For example:
Former and current staffers paint a picture of an erratic senator who has
become almost impossible to work for and whose mental-health situation
is more serious and complicated than previously reported.
And:
Many of the staffers I spoke with are angry. They are troubled. And they
are sad. These were some of Fetterman’s truest believers, and they now
question his fitness to be a senator. They worry he may present a risk
to the Democratic Party and maybe even to himself.
This makes it clear that it's not just Jentleson.
Let's look at a few episodes from the piece. The Senate Retreat in February 2023:
Members of his team told me this was an early warning sign that something was off with their boss. In early February 2023 — after Fetterman had indeed been sworn in — members of the Senate gathered at the Library of Congress for a caucus retreat. Fetterman, fresh off a hard-fought victory in the cycle’s marquee race, should have been riding high. Only he wasn’t. A staffer recalled getting a text from a person at the retreat asking if their boss was okay. Fetterman was sitting at a table by himself, slowly sipping a Coke and refusing to talk with anybody. Later that day, another staffer heard an alarming report from a journalist: Fetterman had just walked, obliviously, into the road and was nearly struck by a car.
An aide found Fetterman wandering on Capitol Hill a short time later. Worried that he had suffered another stroke, the staffer whisked him to George Washington University Hospital. Doctors there determined there had been no new stroke and that the “dizziness and confusion” he’d experienced was partly owed to severe dehydration. Fetterman also consulted with a psychiatrist there and, according to someone briefed by doctors, was prescribed medications for depression. Doctors discharged Fetterman, and his team told the press that he had been briefly hospitalized after “feeling lightheaded while attending a Democratic retreat.”
For the record (this image is from Google Maps) The Capitol is just across First Street from The Library of Congress:
It's a pretty good guess Fetterman was walking across First Street (or possibly East Capitol Street) on the way to The Capitol.
Some of the details conflict with some of the contemporaneous reporting. For example this from NPR:
Fetterman was at a Senate Democratic retreat when he started feeling
unwell, his communications director, Joe Calvello, said in a statement
to journalists. That retreat was reportedly held at the Library of Congress.
"He left and called his staff, who picked him up and drove him to the George Washington University Hospital," Calvello said.
And this from The New York Times:
He attended President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday
night and was participating in a daylong party retreat at the Library of
Congress when he felt lightheaded and decided to seek help at George
Washington University Hospital.
So Fetterman called his staff to pick him up? So no journalist with the alarming report he'd almost got hit by a car crossing a DC street? I suppose the aide who found him "wandering on" The Hill could have been answering Fetterman's call. But did the staffer or Fetterman himself made the decision to go to the hospital?
Minor point, to be sure. Chalk it up to the contemporaneous news being the first rough draft of history and Terris' piece being a somewhat later draft.
Read the piece for yourself. It's a long hard slog.
It's also worrisome and unsettling and alarming and saddening and disturbing and troubling and distressing and depressing.
John Fetterman needs help. He needs help, in part, in order to do his job. If he refuses to get that help, he should step down from that job.
