Clay Dockery
One of the things that makes The West Wing so special is that it can feel like a mirror of our own society. The show reflects our values, challenges, and failings, particularly in the political realm, which can be both great and terrible, especially now. This relevance also applies to many of the show’s central characters like Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney), and Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff). But there is a singular member of the cast, the one right there at the center of everything, that tends to hold the strongest of grips on our collective imagination: President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet (Martin Sheen).
President Bartlet embodies the ideals of authenticity and compassion that define the show’s idealistic heights. He can be a model for intellectual rigor and prudent judgment. But he also embodies the compromises, failings, and insecurities that befall a person in power. All of this just serves to deepen and enrich the experience of watching the show, showing the realities that threaten to eat away at the idealism the characters hold so dear. Throughout most of The West Wing, Bartlet is the person everyone else is reacting to, even when he is offscreen. He is also forced to confront his own morality in the face of conflicts and scandals, and bear the weight of his decisions as Commander-in-Chief.
The very best dramatic moments of any show are those times when we can see how the characters react in times of extreme tension and have to show their real strength and values. For Bartlet the man, and for Bartlet the President, these moments are often in conflict with each other. When he is at his best the entire world is at his command, and he is the realest of “real deals.” Bartlet endures because the show understands that even the fantasy President would still be a human being: vain, wounded, furious, loving, and sometimes catastrophically wrong. But even when he is at his worst, he can still be one of the best.
“I Am the Lord Your God”
At the start of the pilot episode, the President is mostly set up as a joke. He is the boss who was involved in the “sudden arboreal stop.” He may be a little feared and still respected, but certainly not someone we see the characters revere. But when President Bartlet enters the banquet near the end of the episode, and lets loose on Rev. Al Caldwell, Mary Marsh, and all the right-wing busybodies, letting them feel the full force of his wisdom and gravitas, the entire tone changes. And The West Wing never looks back.
Famously, President Bartlet wasn’t supposed to be the central figure on the series in the first place. In creator Aaron Sorkin’s original vision, the POTUS was going to be a figure on the fringes. We would spend our time with the senior staff, and the President would be a rarely seen figure who dominated the lives of the staffers from afar. Once they realized what they had in Martin Sheen’s brilliant and electrifying performance, though, the creators quickly decided to take an entirely different tack. And so they put the President at the center of the show. No matter how many scenes Bartlet appears in, and no matter how central and important the rest of the characters will remain, the story becomes Jed Bartlet’s story. While Jed Bartlet would change tremendously throughout the series’ seven seasons, he would remain a fully realized character, and one we never wanted to take our eyes off of.
Because of these qualities, it has often been the case that people in the real world list Jed Bartlet as their favorite President. This isn’t (just) because of how terrible things have sometimes been with the occupant in the real office, or about the actual political ideals of the character. In fact, I know just as many Republicans as I do Democrats who love President Bartlet (and plenty of Leftists who hate him, and everything The West Wing stands for). This is because it isn’t politics that makes President Bartlet loveable, and so desirable to be in a position of power, it is his extreme capability and his compassion. The people who love Bartlet do so because he feels like he should be the central figure in our lives, not because he is right, or even that we agree with him, but because he is the one person we can see who has that much intelligence and prestige but can still seem like a human being.
The Real Thing
That inherent and internal push and pull between his inherent goodness and his ambition is the essence of what makes Jed Bartlet such an affecting character. And Martin Sheen is the heart of why that works. Sheen, born Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez, was able to breathe life into Jed Bartlet like no other actor could have. Actors like De Niro and Pacino come up first in discussions of acting greatness in Sheen’s generation, but in my mind, Sheen could have had the same career successes as any of them. His performance in Apocalypse Now stands shoulder to shoulder with that of any actor, even if it’s not often acknowledged as being at that level. Yet, despite his decades-long career and undeniable talent, Sheen was always strangely overlooked, and underrated.
Even Sheen’s portrayal of Bartlet, while widely praised, and which won a Golden Globe and two SAG Awards, notably never won an Emmy. There are many different reasons for that, some more valid than others, but the portrayal transcends trophies anyway. What comes across most clearly watching Sheen’s best performances is his apparent indifference to artifice. With each character he embodies, Sheen delves deep into their psyche, infusing them with complexity and depth that transcend the screen.
After The West Wing ended, Martin Sheen has had another great and long-running part in a series, though it was much more niche, playing Robert Hanson in Grace and Frankie from 2015-2022. Otherwise, he has played some small roles in big films, including a key role in The Departed and turning in some time as Uncle Ben in the first Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movie. While his acting career has somewhat slowed down, whenever he does take a role, he makes it his own.
And in the real-life political sphere he has remained as active as ever. Sheen has always been as well known for his support of liberal political causes as he is for his acting or his famous sons (Emilio Estévez and Charlie Sheen). Whether on screen or advocating for social causes, every decision that Sheen makes seems grounded and real. During the SAG-AFTRA strike in the late Summer and Fall of 2023 it was a regular occurrence to see the statesman out on the picket line, giving speeches and leading the crowd. No matter the venue or project, Martin Sheen delivers gravitas. Which is, of course, especially prevalent when he is playing Bartlet.
“What is the Virtue of a Proportional Response?”
Beyond that gravitas though, Bartlet is not the idealist fantasy figure critics of the show seem to think he is. This is what makes him such a great character to me. President Bartlet is smart and capable and wants to do the right thing, but more often than not the stories deal with how all of those things are actually in conflict with the office of the presidency. The decisions that the President has to make, if the President is actually a thoughtful human being, are difficult and fraught. Choosing the right thing can mean political disaster and choosing the wrong thing can mean nuclear disaster.
In the first season, this underlying tension is also tied to Bartlet’s indecisiveness and inexperience. Jed Bartlet is a figure who is often prone to fits of righteous indignation.
In the third episode, “A Proportional Response” he rails in the War Room to the military bigwigs, “What is the virtue of a proportional response?” The feelings of rage are not with Bartlet the President; this is the anger and indignation of Jed Bartlet, the man. He has just learned that Capt. Morris Tolliver’s plane has been shot down and he wants to burn the world down in response. Unlike so many other powerful figures in film and TV, he doesn’t come into the situation fully formed. Bartlet has been President for nearly a year, but this moment tests and defines him.
After the initial rage has burnt away, Bartlet’s conscience compels him to pause and contemplate the broader implications of his actions. These moments of introspection and nuanced thinking are the essence of Bartlet’s leadership, and those moments are the ones that make the character beloved. Though it is only through his interaction with his Chief of Staff, and closest friend, Leo McGarry (John Spencer) that Bartlet is able to reach that state.
“You Got a Best Friend?”
There is no relationship on The West Wing more central than the friendship between Jed and Leo. There are meaningful connections throughout the staff, and the cast has great understanding and respect for each other, but Spencer and Sheen bring something different to these two. Their relationship is defined by a shared history, rooted in years of friendship and collaboration, but also in the singular ability that each has to see through and get to the heart of the other.
In “He Shall, from Time to Time…,” when Bartlet is walking the designated survivor (Secretary of Agriculture Tribbey, played by Harry Groener) through what he would need to do as acting president, he asks him, “You got a best friend?… That’s your chief of staff.” It’s not just about political operations, or even the fact that Leo is his friend and got him into this whole thing that is at the heart of the sentiment. It is that Leo is the only one who can truly know him, that he can trust him with any secrets, that Leo knows when and how to shove aside the President’s ego and call him “Jed.”
That is the great gift Leo gives him in “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet.” At that point in the first season, Bartlet is in danger of becoming exactly the kind of president Toby and Josh fear he will be: decent, brilliant, morally serious, and still somehow too cautious to do the thing he was elected to do. Leo sees this and understands that it is all of them that are holding the President back, especially Bartlet himself, because he has become so tied to wanting to be sure he doesn’t do anything wrong, he can’t unleash his true self. When Leo writes the words “Let Bartlet Be Bartlet” on a legal pad, the point is clear: if they are supporting the right man for the job, they have to allow him to be himself, and no one needs to hear that more than Bartlet himself. That this turns out to be an echo of the central moment in both of their lives, when Leo similarly wrote “Bartlet for America” on a napkin to encourage Jed to run for President in the first place, only makes it all the more resonant.
That is also why the rupture in their friendship during Season 6 hurts in the most foundational of ways. The post-Sorkin years are often more interested in breaking the central relationships of The West Wing for dramatic weight, and sometimes that works better in theory than in execution. With Jed and Leo, there is something genuinely painful in watching these two people, of all people, lose their ability to understand each other. In “Memorial Day,” when Leo suffers a heart attack after fighting with Jed, the show does not have to overstate the guilt Bartlet feels. Jed fired Leo, and then Leo almost died, so Jed sees it all as his fault.
By the end of the series, and especially after Leo’s death and funeral (which was more of a celebration really), Jed Bartlet is not the same man. How could he be? Leo was not just his Chief of Staff, or even his oldest friend; he was the keeper of the flame. Without him, Jed seems older and lonelier, and, as all Presidents eventually do, he starts to think of his life and work as a matter of legacy instead of action.
Jumping Off a Cliff
When Leo tells Bartlet he needs a new Chief of Staff, he has only one name. C.J. Cregg. This affects all three of them considerably. For Leo, it means he understands the job is not only about politics or seniority. Josh and Toby both make a certain amount of sense on paper, in very different and probably disastrous ways. But Leo chooses the person he believes has the most prudence judgment. He chooses the person who can see the whole board like he can and like the President can. He chooses the person who he knows can actually reel Bartlet in when he goes too far, and push him hardest when he falls into “Uncle Fluffy” territory.
For Bartlet, accepting C.J. is also an act of trust. In “Third-Day Story,” Bartlet officially offers the job to C.J., asking her to “jump off a cliff,” and in doing so echoes how he first offered the job to Leo. Leo and Jed are together in seeing C.J. as the one person who could take on his role not just in the Oval Office, but in life. And for C.J., this changes everything. She has spent years translating the Bartlet administration to the world.
As Press Secretary, her job was to stand at the podium and create a story that makes everyone else’s choices make sense after they have all been made. As Chief of Staff, she has to make those choices in the first place. And she has to both lift up and constrain the President. Leo knew Jed’s greatness, but he also knew that Jed has to be reminded that public service is not the same thing as being loved. C.J. inherits part of that work, but she does not have Leo’s shared history with Jed. What she has is a clear eye and a spine. She can serve Bartlet without worshiping him. She can protect the office from external conflicts without pretending the man inside it is always right.
“It’s Seventeen People, By the Way”
Of course, “conflict” is at the heart of President Bartlet’s relationship with Toby Ziegler. I’ve written before about how I think the two characters are intentional mirrors of each other, each showing each other, and the audience, fundamental truths that would not be possible to see otherwise.
When Bartlet reveals his multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis to Toby in “17 People,” it has profound implications for both characters. On one hand, Bartlet grapples with the weight of his secret, torn between his duty to lead and his desire to shield those closest to him from the political fallout. On the other hand, Toby is thrust into a moral quandary, torn between his unwavering loyalty to Bartlet and his commitment to transparency and honesty in governance. And those are just the external “plot mechanics” parts of the revelation. The interplay between the two in these scenes goes much, much deeper.
For Toby, the fact that the President hid this, not from the country, but from him, is a bridge too far. When Bartlet asks, however sarcastically, “Are you pissed because I didn’t tell you, or are you pissed because fifteen people knew before you did?” The answer is clear to everyone: it is both. Toby is enraged and devastated and feels his trust has been broken, and Jed both knows this is a normal reaction and hates both Toby and himself in the moment because of it. For Jed, he sees this whole thing as unfair, that the world, or God, is conspiring against him. Richard Schiff and Martin Sheen playing these two characters in these scenes together through to the scene of Jed at the National Cathedral at the end of “Two Cathedrals” is perhaps the height of television writing and acting.
The subsequent fallout from Bartlet’s confession hurts because the viewers and the staff are all confronted with a real ethical dilemma. Is it right to keep the job because he is the best person for it, even if the circumstances are wrong? As Bartlet confronts the consequences of his actions, viewers are confronted with the stark realities of power and accountability. We want Jed to be President, to be in our lives. To be right and true and wise. But instead, we see him unfocused, angry, and proud, and we still want him anyway.
Father of Daughters
If the relationship between Jed and Toby is about morality and the compromises one makes in pursuit of power, Jed’s three daughters represent a much more personal question: “What happens when the life of Josiah Bartlet, President, collides with the life of Jed Bartlet, father?” In “Abu el Banat,” the title itself means “father of daughters,” and the episode understands that this is not a sentimental label. Being a father of daughters is at once a job in itself, a source of pride, and something Jed has never been able to do as cleanly as he would like.
That is clearest with Ellie (Nina Siemaszko), because Ellie is the daughter he has the hardest time understanding. In “Ellie,” she publicly says that her father would never fire the Surgeon General for telling the truth about marijuana. Politically, she has boxed him in. Personally, she has somehow said exactly the thing he needed to hear. The whole episode turns on the fact that neither of them knows how to talk to the other. Bartlet is angry with her, but what really shakes him is the realization that Ellie may actually believe in his goodness more clearly than he does in that moment. That is why his admission that it is “the nicest thing she’s ever said about me” lands so hard. Ellie does not flatter or worship him. She looks at him and sees how there is not nearly as much distance between the aloof dignitary and the loving father as he thinks there is, which may be why it hurts him so much to connect with her.
Liz (Annabeth Gish) reflects a different kind of failure. In “Abu el Banat,” Bartlet can see the political talent in his oldest daughter, but he cannot quite see the life she has built outside of his ambitions for her. His instinct is to tell her that she should be the one running for Congress instead of Doug, and he is almost certainly right about that in terms of ability. But Liz is not having the fantasy version of this conversation. When Bartlet insists that Abbey (Stockard Channing) was able to manage family and public life, Liz pushes back with an authority she never seems to have shown with him before. He believes that by supporting her husband and not being in the spotlight she is squandering her potential, but she wants to have control in her own life, a control that she knows he has never been able to have.
Zoey (Elisabeth Moss), of course, is the daughter most directly pulled into the machinery of the presidency. She is also the most directly a part of the plot mechanics of the show, connecting with the staff and forming a relationship with Charlie Young (Dulé Hill). From the beginning, Jed is protective of her, and the show uses that protectiveness both to deepen the relationship and show the real terror of being a father in such a dangerous position.
By “Twenty Five,” after Zoey is kidnapped, the nightmares that lie under all of that protectiveness become real. The President can command armies, but he can’t bring his daughter home. That powerlessness breaks the wall between Bartlet the President and Bartlet the father. His decision to invoke the 25th Amendment is not taken out of fear of what has been done, but out of fear of what he might do, which is a really fascinating thread that unfortunately gets sort of abandoned in Season 5 and beyond.
Together, Liz, Ellie, and Zoey show the cost of making the choices that Bartlet has made. He is proud of them, frightened for them, confused by them, and, at times, wounded by the fact that they do not experience him the way the country does. The public gets the speeches, the intellect, the grand Bartlet of it all. His daughters get the father who loves them but still misses things. They get the man who wants to protect them but can’t figure out how to reach them. They get the whole Jed Bartlet, with the greatness and the damage mixed together.
“That Was My Son”
Just as Jed Bartlet has three daughters, President Bartlet has three staff members who function almost as surrogate sons: Charlie, Josh, and Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe). This is most explicitly conveyed in “Two Cathedrals,” when Bartlet stands in the National Cathedral and throws the full force of his grief back at God. In the middle of that monologue, while raging over Mrs. Landingham’s death and his own sense of cosmic betrayal, he brings up Josh. “What was Josh Lyman? A warning shot? That was my son.”
Jed’s love for Josh is messy. But the love is always on display, especially after Josh is shot and has to deal with his PTSD all the way through “Noël.” Bartlet is not the person who fixes Josh, because that is not how trauma works, and, thankfully, the writers know that and send Josh (and later Jed) to therapy. But the President’s concern hangs over the entire arc. Josh matters to him in a way that has gone beyond staff utility. By the time Bartlet calls him “my son,” the moment has been well and truly earned.
The relationship between Charlie and the President is quite different. Charlie was primed from the start to play the part of surrogate son, being younger, dating Zoey, and, by virtue of being the President’s “body man,” always with Jed, even in his private moments. In “Shibboleth,” when Bartlet gives Charlie the Paul Revere carving knife, which had always been passed down through his family, this connection is once again given explicit evidence. Jed is taking something that belongs to his family history and making Charlie part of that history. Then the line, “I’m proud of you, Charlie” feels just like another way of saying, “you are my son.” Charlie lost his mother. Bartlet has daughters, but no son, and now they have each other.
Sam is different again. Bartlet does not need to rescue Sam in the same way, and their relationship is not as intimate as his relationships with Charlie or Josh. But Sam represents something just as important to Bartlet: the young believer. We see Jed and Sam connect through words and their political ambitions, though since Rob Lowe left the show during Season 4 it definitely seems like this was the relationship most cut short. Still, Sam is the staffer most likely to still believe the speech can matter, the sentence can matter, the shape of a thing can matter. Bartlet responds to that because some part of him still believes it too.
Together, Charlie, Josh, and Sam let us see Bartlet’s paternal instincts beyond his family. With his daughters, he is often trying to protect or understand them, and often winds up failing to do either, while with the younger guys on the staff he seems to be trying to pass something on.
“If You Can’t See That… I Don’t Even Want to Know You”
Mrs. Landingham is one of the few people we see in The West Wing who directly shaped who Jed is. And who can speak to President Bartlet as though he is still just Jed if she has to. (This group is really just Mrs. Landingham, Abbey, and Leo.) This is not because she fails to understand the office; she understands the office perfectly well. She just also understands the boy inside the man who holds that office. Nearly everyone around Bartlet is responding to the President, the professor, the Nobel laureate, the governor, the man who can make a room feel smaller just by starting a sentence. Mrs. Landingham is the one who took the boy and made him ready to be that man.
In the flashbacks in “Two Cathedrals,” we can see that Young Jed (Jason Widener) is already brilliant, and a little impossible. He already knows that he is smarter than almost everyone else, but he also knows that doesn’t particularly matter to his father (Lawrence O’Donnell). Mrs. Landingham immediately sees through him, she calls him a “boy king” and pushes him to be even better, and to confront his father. She challenges Jed to ask for equal pay because she wants him to take a side, to put his charisma and intellect to work. Jed has all the potential in the world, and Mrs. Landingham is the one who first pushed him to do something with it.
Decades later, that is still the role she plays. She knows when he is posturing. She knows when he is hiding behind vocabulary. She knows when he is enjoying himself far too much. Their last conversation in “18th and Potomac” is devastating because it is so ordinary. She has bought her first new car. He teases her about it. There is nothing grand or sweeping in the moment, and there is also the pain that Jed doesn’t come clean to Mrs. Landingham. He doesn’t tell her that he thinks he has failed her. That he has lied to her and kept secrets from her. Then a drunk driver runs a red light at 18th and Potomac, and she is gone. And we see the scene, silently, through a window, just the reflection of Sheen and Spencer reacting with singular power to a loss that’s so deeply felt for the President, it will reshape him.
When Bartlet rages at God in “Two Cathedrals,” part of the fury is that she was given such a small happiness and then it was instantly taken from her. But even the Mrs. Landingham he imagines (Or is it actually her ghost? The question is forever unanswerable.) does not come back to comfort him or assure him that things will be alright. She comes back to push him to do what must be done now. That is the essence of her relationship with Bartlet. She sees him. She understands him. And then she tells him to get to work.
“Let Me Tell You Something, Jackass!”
Doctor Abigail Bartlet holds a different authority over her husband. The dynamic between the two is what makes Abbey so essential to understanding Jed. She is not simply the First Lady who occasionally comes in to scold him, flirt with him, or remind the audience that the President has a home life. Abbey protects him, treats him, hides the truth with him, and then pays for that choice in ways he cannot fully absorb because the scandal still mostly bends around him.
In “18th and Potomac,” Abbey’s interview with Oliver Babish is tense because for all the ways in which she believes they did the right thing in the way they handled Jed’s MS diagnosis, the hurt she feels at being pulled into all of this is also real. The moment when Oliver calls her “Mrs. Bartlet” and she snaps back, “Dr. Bartlet. When did I stop being ‘Dr.’ Bartlet?” contains more than disdain at her profession being erased. In all of the scandal, and even in the entire decision Jed made to run for President, she seems to have lost some of her own identity. She is angry because she gave away a part of herself to allow him to be who he is. She is angry because the Bartlet presidency, for all its beauty and idealism, has caused deep fissures in both her own life and their relationship.
As a doctor, Abbey is also the person who knows and understands the implications of Jed’s MS better than anyone else. She monitors his symptoms and works to reduce his stress knowing that while it is true he can handle it, and live fully with it, it is still something that he needs to be cognizant of. Stress and lack of sleep can make it worse, and those are a given for Jed as the President. Only by working together and understanding each other are the pair able to make the actual idea of being President with a chronic illness bearable. (And of course the fact that the show wound up portraying that Jed is still quite capable even with MS is another of its great strengths.)
This makes her relationship with Jed so much more interesting than the simple “supportive political wife” or “controlling harpy” dynamic that it could have been. Abbey loves him, but she does not exist to make him feel better about himself. Sometimes she is unfair. Sometimes he is. They fight and flirt and love each other, and they seem to be made better by each other, but each is also a difficult part of the other’s life. After Zoey’s kidnapping, Abbey blames Jed, but she also blames herself because they decided to go into this together.
The affection between Jed and Abbey feels real. They are funny together. They are attracted to each other. They know exactly how to wound each other because they know exactly where the soft spots are. Abbey is not immune to the Bartlet charm, but she has lived with it too long to be fooled by it. She knows when he is being the genius, and she knows when he is being full of it. The relationship is deep and well established in the characterizations we see from them both.
“What’s Next?”
After Sorkin left the show, many things changed, and President Bartlet’s characterization was no exception. The new writers were much more interested in the flaws and foibles of the characters, creating a much greater separation between them. This included misguided antics such as the firing of Leo and the Toby leak plotline. Thankfully, in Season 7, with the shift of focus to the presidential race between Santos (Jimmy Smits) and Vinick (Alan Alda), the show regained its footing. But all of that definitely changed the nature of Jed Bartlet’s character and his place in the show as well. Yet, despite these changes, Bartlet remains fascinating. The character may be different, but the power he holds over the viewer is constant.
President Jed Bartlet, from his early days in the Oval Office to his guilt and redemption, all the way through his reflections on mortality in the wake of Leo’s death, undergoes a remarkable evolution that mirrors the complexities of the human experience. When the series finale ends with Jed and Abbey finally flying away from the White House and into history, the closure feels earned. This is, of course, only made possible through Martin Sheen’s masterful portrayal. Through it all, President Jed Bartlet endures not only because of a fantasy or what could be, but because he makes us all want to keep asking, “What’s Next?”
Every time we think we’ve measured our capacity to reach a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that capacity may well be limitless. – President Jed Bartlet
