Delores Landingham

Mrs. Dolores Landingham, played by Kathryn Joosten and Kirsten Nelson, is the fictional personal secretary for the President of the United States in the first two seasons of American serial political drama The West Wing. She was killed off in the second-season episode "18th and Potomac", but reappeared for multiple flashbacks afterwards. Mrs. Landingham is considered a beloved character whose influence on politicians has continued through to 2021. Character role On The West Wing, Mrs. Dolores Landingham is the secretary of Josiah Bartlet, the fictional president of the United States played by Martin Sheen. Having worked for his father, she has known Bartlet since he was in high school, worked for him as secretary while he was the governor of New Hampshire, and has a rare familiarity with Bartlet that few other characters can match. In the second-season episode "18th and Potomac", she dies from a traffic collision with a drunk driver on her way to the White House. In the next episode and season finale, "Two Cathedrals", Mrs. Landingham is shown in flashbacks meeting Jed Bartlet while he was in high school, and appears in the Oval Office to talk to him a final time. The character appears in 30 of the series' 154 episodes, with her last appearance occurring in a season-four flashback in "Debate Camp". A key moment for Mrs. Landingham's character comes in the first-season episode "In Excelsis Deo". In the episode, set around the holiday of Christmas, Charlie Young notices that Mrs. Landingham feels down despite the festive atmosphere of the day. Mrs. Landingham explains that she always felt sad around the holiday season, revealing that her two sons, Andrew and Simon, were drafted into the Vietnam War. Mrs. Landingham and the boys' father tried to convince them not to go, and instead take a deferment to finish medical school, but the boys insisted. The two boys were killed by enemy fire on December 24, 1970. "It's hard when that happens so far away, you know," says Mrs. Landingham, "because with the noises and the shooting, they had to be so scared. It's hard not to think that right then, they needed their mother." Later in the episode, Mrs. Landingham accompanies Toby Ziegler to a military funeral arranged for a homeless man. Martin Sheen later said that he was supposed to have been present in the scene as well, but the scene was changed to not overshadow Ziegler and Mrs.