Abbey Bartlet - Overview

Overview

Abbey is a "world-class physician" (in her husband's words) and wife of more than thirty years to President Bartlet. In the first season episode "Five Votes Down," President Bartlet mentions to Charlie that they had been married 32 years, meaning they were married in 1967. Her maiden name is Barrington. The location of her undergraduate education is unknown. However, President Bartlet once confided in C.J. Cregg (his then press secretary) that he'd changed his mind about becoming a priest during his undergraduate years at Notre Dame after meeting Abbey.

She received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Although we are told that her specializations are in internal medicine and thoracic surgery, this is very unlikely since those are two distinct specialties and would require entirely different residencies. If she was board-certified in both, she would have spent nearly 15 years just in residency after medical school which is not only unlikely but almost impossible because the funding for residency programs makes this extremely difficult. She began practicing medicine some twenty-five years before the start of the series, and is on the staff of both Boston Mercy Hospital (fictitious) and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. She is Adjunct Professor of Thoracic Surgery at Harvard Medical School.

She and her husband have three daughters: Elizabeth, Eleanor (called Ellie), and Zoey. At the beginning of the series, Zoey is said to be 19 but this was retconned at the end of season 2 to being closer to 17. In season 2, Ellie is in medical school at Johns Hopkins University. Elizabeth is probably quite a bit older than Ellie because she's the only one who is married with a 12-year-old daughter in the pilot. Ellie was only 24 in season two, making her 23 in season one and only 11 years older than Liz's daughter. Ellie eventually marries "the fruit fly guy" (Abbey once said in "Isaac and Ishmael" that she had Liz very young). In the Season 2 episode "Ellie", President Bartlet wistfully says that his middle daughter is "all Abbey's" and hasn't been close to him. In the fourth season episode "Inauguration: Over There", it is established that Abbey never let the children have sugar (specifically candy) growing up, but that Jed gave it to them all the time behind her back.

To protect the secret of her husband's multiple sclerosis, Abbey gives the President doses of betaseron, which help keep his MS in check. It is only after he collapses and is confronted by Leo that she reveals their secret to a member of the White House senior staff. Her decision to medicate her husband, in violation of several American Medical Association rules, leads her to voluntarily give up her medical license for the duration of her stay in the White House. However, she later begins doing some volunteer work at a clinic in a rough part of Washington, D.C. When Leo McGarry questions her about this, she firmly tells him that she plans to continue this work and that any political issues it creates are not part of the discussion.

Abbey had a "deal" with her husband that he would only run for one term because of his MS. She is distraught and very angry with Jed when he breaks this promise and proceeds to run for reelection anyway. Things are tense between the two for the latter half of the second season, but as the third season progresses they worked through it. When she discovers that Jed had ordered the assassination of a foreign diplomat who was also a terrorist, and this eventually led his followers to kidnap Zoey, she is so angry that she leaves the White House and returns to New Hampshire with Zoey after her daughter is rescued. She eventually returns to help out during a Federal government shutdown, and when Jed asks bluntly if she will be by his side as his MS progressively worsens, she becomes noticeably upset and says she will be. In Season 6, Abbey is devoted to her husband when he is stricken with a horrifying MS episode during a summit trip to China, but later argues with him because he wasn't getting enough sleep in the course of his duties.

Abbey is a recurring character during the first two seasons, and the seventh and last season. She appears as a regular during the third through sixth seasons, despite the fact that there are many episodes in which she does not appear, a fact consistent with real life, where the First Lady must perform official duties all over the country and therefore cannot stay constantly with her husband at the White House. Various episodes mention that she is away in such locations as Pakistan and Argentina.