Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jared Cohen Accidental Presidents 20240714

The author but we are also on cspan to night. You do not want to be the person whose phone goes off on cspan. During the question and answer portion if you could come up to the microphone over here it is right here that way we can hear your questions and engage in a discussion afterwards. Our staff would greatly appreciate that the cofounder and ceo of jigsaw alphabet inc. As well as an adjunct senior fellow at the council of foreign relations. One of the great lessons of american politics that ive learned is the tale of two brothers Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, hairy truman and Lyndon Johnson sent to the presidency because of these unfortunate circumstances. The limited reading of the constitution, one of which Many Americans take for granted may not be the only way to handle succession. Walter isaacson, author of Leonardo Da Vinci writes jerrod coming treats us to some of the most colorful episodes in our history. The historic importance of the leaders and highlights the greatness of tr, truman and Lyndon Johnson. Why america is a resilient nation and the constitution living document lessons very powerful for today. Join me in welcoming jerrod cohen. [applause] thank you for having me. I cant think of a better place to give a talk about this book then this incredible bookstore. When i lived in dc it was my favoriteen placeere in some time and i love the backdrop of these books tonight. Before that, four years working at the foreign policy. Some people ask me when i told them im writing a book the past five and a half years they say is that it took about a cyber war, no, i you said about forein policy, no, what is it about, its about dead president s, and its confusing to them and anybody unless you grew up with me. When i was 8yearsold my parents bought me a Childrens Book called the buck stops here and there was one of these wonderful books a different page for each president. They didnt realize they were going to have eight different conversations with me about death and my poor parents it was bad enough they didnt know who mckinley was and they had to explain why he was killed over in this cartoon my picture. When you are an 8yearold you have to deal with topics like that and my parents just didnt quite figure out what theyve gotten themselves into. The interes interest sustained e when oliver stone came out for this film about kennedys assassination i decided i was going to solve the kennedy assassination. So i am asked some of the rooms and turned it into the kennedy room and i put pictures and xerox copies of the footage all across the walls they got into collecting the memorabilia and i have a strange sub collection president ial locks of hair which is geared up for you see it it is quite fascinating and this has been a passion trust me it is something. Its been an interest my entire life so i spent all day talking about innovation into this growing itch to want to dig into the past. When my wife was pregnant with our oldest daughter is now 5yearsold i needed a nesting project because i was annoying everybody. Finally, im going to write a book about the times in history that a u. S. President died in office and how history was transformed by a heartbeat. This history in addition to being something im deeply passionate about, it resonates with me on so many Different Levels because we are at a time where everybody is looking at the Leadership Qualities and assassination to be politics with history that our history is also anchored around the transition thats use that these been agreed ten to 20 years. Im going to do today, not every single one of them but leave you with some incentive to buy the book but im going to talk about the very first time it happened. Im going to share with you but i thinwhati think was the bigget catastrophe in the share who i thought was the biggest and most unexpected success and why. Of those who nearly died in office i should write you a president who died in office, six of the eighth ascended to the presidency upon the death of their predecessor also nearly died in office mostly through assassination attempts so we will get into that as well but i want to whet your appetite a little bit. Lets go back to the framers of the constitution who didnt want a Vice President who didnt think much about the vice presidency. They viewed as an electoral mechanism and so naturally it isnt something they thought about. He had given a little bit of attention but if you look at article two, what it says is in the event of the resignation of the president or inability to discharge the duties of the office to default the constitution is completely clear in the case of the vacancy of the presidency, the Vice President accessed and discharges the duties it isnt clear whether they become the president. So 1840, the famous catchphrase propels the famous general and the white house. They are so happy they finally got a president he dies 30 days later and despite the fact that history tells us he died of pneumonia, it was later proven that the systems around the white house was likely responsible for his death and by the way also later james and factories that we will sav but t for another personal lecture. So, john tyler was thrown on the ticket even though he was basically a democrat because they needed somebody who had givewhod giventhought to the ss skips town after the inauguration because he is prepared to accept the reality of how relevant it is. When a messenger shows up in his house in the middle of the night delivering the telegram the president is dead, john tyler who has in fact studied the constitution understand the fight that is about to ensue because he determined that as he is now the president and he understand the cabinet is going to agree and congress will disagree that he reaches back and any combination of horse and carriage and boat and train to get into a fight with the cabinet. He spends the first between them is arguing with congress about whether he was the acting president or the president. Ultimately he wins but thatll. He set the precedent and now whats interesting is that you dont have a mechanism for replacing the Vice President of the United States at the 25th amendment is ratified in 1967. So, you have john tyler at the nations first come he set a precedent that carries all the way through lbj. He becomes president upon the death of john f. Kennedy based on the precedent set by john tyler in 1841. So, weve never had a situation where a president has died in office and the 25th amendment has made him president. That only happens with nixon and ford and im sure during the q a sessions ansession from the peoe why it wasnt a separate chapter. I will beat you to the punch and answer that. The reason the vacancy is important is because its a disaster for the party because again hes basically a democrat. He doesnt subscribe to the agenda at all. Like most of the accidental accl president s, they came after him and had a completely different set of policies using his predecessors are taken in a completely different direction. They didnt have a good sense of what was happening in the administration he was part of and now for hi the administratin was only 30 days. So, as he sort of subverts the agenda of most prominently with the National Bank ends up getting excommunicated from the party and henry clay leads the charge to kick john tyler out of the party, so the nations first accidental resident becomes president without a party. He, like all accidental president s becomes obsessed with this idea determined the only path for him to win the election of 1844 if he cant run if the democrats dont want him anyway because they outed him as running. It changed the political discourse and completely annex texas. So if we look at the behavior of the current president , i would remind you that john tyler in a moment of political impulsiveness decided to cover this and precipitated more with mexico which brought us one step closer to the civil war. Going back to the vacancy and the vice presidency, this is important because on february 28, 1844, john tyler is feeling on the potomac on the uss princeton, and it is, on the potomac on the stateoftheart nautical wonder designed to celebrate that naval palace and the fact that he was on the verge of the annexation. So, they fired the stateoftheart gun called the peacemaker in tribute to the grade of George Washington and the gun explodes and kills the secretary of state and secretary of the navy and multiple ambassadors and ministers and kills john tylers favorite leaves his mother was compensated 200 a number of of senators and congress and would have killed john tyler had he not been downstairs flirting with a woman half his age he was desperately in love with as a aa widow president that was more interestebut was moreinterested. As they heard the explosion, they came out and her name is julia gardiner. Shshe is often among the dead ws her father, the new york state senator laying on the ground. She faced into his arms, he pickpicks her up and carries her down again and shes startled and wakes up and doesnt realize that its its president kerryd hurt and you read about this in a letter that she later writes. John tyler writes that had she not they both would have died. He ends up marrying her and they had eight children and in the administration of George Washington there were two grandsons still alive. The child 15, fathered a child in his 70s and then the child fathered two children in his 70s who are now in their late 90s so that is the story of the offspring. Fun fact use it in a hotel party. Had i eve ever died in that explosion othe explosionor had e nations first accidental president s would have been that. And i believe very strongly that the tyler precedent which was already controversial and already hotly contested would have been very unlikely to hold. What that means is that fillmore, who im sure youve spent time thinking about, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, harry truman and Lyndon Johnson very well could have ascended to the role of acting president instead of president. So, that is the story of the first accidental president s at what happened. Now what i want to do is juxtapose what i think is the biggest catastrophe and biggest Success Story of an accidental president s. Despite the fact we more or less waiting for succession and despite the fact that the founding father gave a guide but nothing close to a blueprint, im tempted to say we navigated through pretty well and we got pretty lucky. Its a remarkable story. And i can almost say that except for the fact when abraham Abrahm Lincoln died of Andrew Johnson and weaverand we were supposed t Abraham Lincolns vision of reconstruction. Instead of a lot of John Wilkes Booth gives us Andrew Johnson a man nor a racist, who died a racist, the last to own slaves who didnt emancipate his own until seven months after the emancipation proclamation and a man who as president and to the resurrecting almost every old elements of the confederacy paving the way for the black codes which paved the way for the jim crow law and gave segregation. If i look at the story of postcivil war america, to me it can be described in some respects a story of two president ial assassinations beginning of Abraham Lincoln and ending with James Garfield which i will come back to. When i set out to write the chapter about lincoln and andrew thomson, you think to yourself what can i write all the great e great scholars havent written about in this sort of seminal moment in history and i decided i wanted to vindicate the one state on the record which is putting johnson a heartbeat away from the president. Back then he didnt choose the running mate but its an important moment and lincoln was certain he was going to lose because he engaged in a massive entry outside of his circle to move him let off the ticke one d replace him with Andrew Johnson. If you look to Andrew Johnson was in 1864 versus what he was later as president , its a remarkable contrast and you feel some degree of empathy for lincoln having made such a bad decision because at the time he was one of the poorest effort to rise to the presidency and he owed everything he had to the union and despite the racist sentiment and belief, he cared more about the union than anything else so when the first shots were fired on fort sumter, all he cared about was breaking the confederacy to reunite the union. The best way was to punish every trader in brutal fashion and to force civil rights upon them. Johnson is the only southern senator to stay loyal to the union. He gives up of the seats in the senate to take a very dangerous job as military governor of tennessee and in 1864, his rhetoric on civil rights is more forward leaning than Abraham Lincoln. The rhetoric is even more forward leaning and aggressive than Abraham Lincoln and he is so feared by the south because he seems like such a radical republican despite being a war democrat from a border state itself is so much more terrified about the idea of Andrew Johnson as president than Abraham Lincoln and when Jefferson Davis is accused of plotting to kill Abraham Lincoln, he reminds people that would be insane because anybody that hears or listens to Andrew Johnson knows that would be a far worse situation for the south. Andrew johnson has the worst debut of any Vice President in history. Hes completely hammered while being sworn in and getting his inaudible address. Hes supposed to speak for 30 seconds maybe a minute at most and put his hands on the bible and be sworn in. Instead it turns into a 17 minute drunken tirade which he criticizes every member of the cabinet and pauses when he cant remember the secretary of the navy. Lincoln said is buried in his hands and chant antiproceeds to smaller over the bible and is too drunk to swear in the new senators he asks and equivalent of the interim to do that and im not sure that legally you can do that so than in walks sidebyside with an outside right before lincoln gives arguably one of the best out Frederick Douglass who is the most famous ex slave at the time and douglas in his autobiography describes a man with his eyes glazed over sort of stumbling with hatred and when you realize hes describing a drunk person doesnt realize Andrew Johnson is drunk but draws to the conclusion hes no friend of mine race and we should thank the heavens he isnt the president of the United States and of course six weeks later when dennis koplan Andrew Johnson becomes president. His views are not transformed becomes president. Its when the civil war is over and all the sudden the best thing from his perspective for the union is to get the southern elected officials reintegrated back into congress, but the states deal with civil rights and so forth. He goes back to what he thinks are the best tactics. Whats interesting about johnson is the plot to kill not just lincoln but Andrew Johnson and a number of others. The first time the cabinets these Andrew Johnson after the tirade is when he shows up at the peterse Peterson House and d by one of the cabinet members hes making Mary Todd Lincoln uncomfortable and needs to leave. Everybody knows hes about to die and by all accounts he should have been treated as president at tha the time that e was asked to leave because he was making the first lady uncomfortable. The first reason i say to assassinations is because it isnt until 1876 that you have the end to reconstruction so thats when you really start to get jim crow and the active segregation laws. Fastforwarfast forward to the n of 1880 and it is a duel between uss grant for a nonconsecutive third term and james bland. All the delegates get tired of it and am a thirtysomething dollopim a thirtysomethingdownt James Garfield. He was there as a campaign chief for somebody running third or fourth in the delicate debate could delegate count and eventually he gets the nomination. He jumps up and says i protest. How can you give the nomination to a man who doesnt seek it but he ends up with it anyway. He then has a man that embodies all elements of the spoils system, but garfield was a man that was completely detached from Party Politics who made a pledge. He was born in a log cabin in his big issues were universal education and universal suffrage and to the creation of the modern Civil Service we are supposed to get the vision before the presidency. He is shot by an Office Seeker that met with Chester Arthur who writes in his letter of declaration that he killed garfield and said arthur could be president and his expect it to be rewarded. And obviously that didnt happen. Arthur ends up having a somewhat respectable presidency in part because a mentally ill woman on the Upper East Side of manhattan started his male male trolling him telling him how lonesome he was. She described him in banners but kept telling him theres still hope. He gets in his president ial carriage and shows up on the Upper East Side so we know as early as 1881 that you control the president. It becomes one of the reason that they embodied the system ended up signing the act that creates the modernday Civil Service but he was a pretty mediocre man who didnt like working. He literally didnt work and they were embarrassed to tell people he didnt work so they would create this is a lot of important stuff going on but they didnt push for the agenda. The one that is the most unexpected and the biggest successes. Truman. Its to take a provincial publication from missouri who hasnt thought much about the world whos kind of a local machine character and threw him on the ticket without thinking whether he could govern or lead that he was the best shot at making sure wallace wasnt on the ticket. Fdr didnt really care as long as he was thrown on the ticket didnt prevent him from winning the election. Deep down he probably knew he was going to die. I think that he thought he could cover through and win the war if it ended before his term he could resign and be the first secretarygeneral of the united nations. During the 82 days as Vice President he meets with fdr twice. And it doesnt get a single intelligence briefing or a single foreign leader he isnt briefed on the atomic bomb or right into the house. Hes basically out of socializing. April 12, 1945 comey takes his last breath into truman inherits one of the most overwhelming portfolios of the crises of any president in history with less preparation than any president in history. He gets briefed on the Manhattan Project and has to figure out what he is going to do with the destructive weapon that may or may not work. Work. Stalin is reneging on promises from yalta. Churchill is complex and doesnt know where the countries on the map he spent his first several days in the map room was really getting smarter on whats happening in the war. He has to deal with the reality that he might have to move a million men from the european theater to the theater there is a battle between the arm the ard the navy that threatens the entire effort and again in the first four months he makes the most important decisions to the history of the republic i argue that its a combination of truman stepping up to the job and then mike dean acheson and George Marshall they dont have the luxury of acting on the great. He fires the cabinet and his left without the cabinet had for some time so the current moment isnt the first that we have had a lot of vacancies in the cabinet. So when they told truman leads asia to macarthur and the focus on europe, he listened to them. They are going to miss the questions shortly but i want to talk about the close call because to me it is fascinating. I found myself overwhelmingly frustrated in this book because i dont understand why we dont get the importance of figuring out the succession. It takes three president s to be assassinated to desig decide ita good idea to protect. If i was the target i wouldnt want my buddies from home protecting me. What frustrated me as a close call with James Madison James Madison was instrumental in writing the constitution and nobody bothered to ask him what does it mean when you said that the same show evolve and the man who believes hes the king of englanking ofengland they are ly touching him then he proceeds to beat the assailant and some of the Founding Fathers were still alive nobody bothered to ask what did they mean by default to the Vice President. By the time he dropped a bit in 1841 of the last founding father James Madison had been dead for four years and theres nobody to ask. One is the constitutionally cheeky now for a minute so what the constitution said in 1855 when lincoln was assassinated is that if there is a double vacancy then the bartender at ends uatends up as an acting pr. And the secretary of state has the Constitutional Authority to make that happen it called a special election for the following november. You go back to the evening another part of the conspiracy of state. And he was in his bed and stabbed him repeatedly. So then what happens is the secretary of state to make the president pro tem the acting president and call a special election. The constitution is pretty clear about this, th the assistant secretary of state has the authority to do this, since he was the assistant secretary, it is the sum of William Seward who nearly bludgeoned to death by the handle of the gun and knife on the way into his bedroom to stab him. Had the conspiracy brought to fruition you could have had a situation there was no president or Vice President at no secretary of state or assistant secretary of state for the Constitutional Authority to make the pro tem the acting president or to call a special election. And that sounds like wild conspiracy theories, but it actually happened. It was then to give the first speech as the president elect on the park in miami. They deliver the speech and 15 seconds they would have hit fdr. They saw them pul him pull of h2 caliber with enough force. It killed four people including the mayor of chicago was visiting. Now more remarkably, what happens if the president elect in office the 20th amendment was ratified 90s before coming among other things, it said that if there is a vacancy in the president elect for the Vice President elect takes the oath of office on inauguration day. The last i will tell you about for the question and answer is the suicide bomber that nearly killed jfk as president elect. We remember obviously the assassination but how many remember he was killed by a suicide bomber before he ever took the oath of office. Shockingly, none of you. He had enough dynamite to blow up the home in West Palm Beach and ended up he was ready to do it but then he caught a glimpse of John Standing right next to kennedy and decided he would doo it later said he followed kennedy to church the next day, fills up his pants with the same amount of dynamite, standing 4 feet outside with his hand in his pocket and on the trigger ready to pull it. Had he done that he would have blown up himself, kennedy, a number of people but he caught a glimpse and decided he would wait another day to do it. Youd think that you are writing a president about book about the president buying an office and you might be left with a feeling of a deep melancholy. But strangely ended up feeling optimistic about it. Congress is today in 1850 he tried to shoot him and it sounds pretty nasty. Today they will call each other liars but it doesnt get much worse then that although the one that bodyslammed somebody. But it doesnt compare to what we saw in the 1850s. I tell you the example of annexing texas in terms of the constitutional crises if you look at the history of the president ial succession publicly one of the most sustained vulnerabilities we have had. So its not like everybody else i dont look at some concerns i tell you ive loved the last five and a half years spending my day focus on the future and innovation in all of my evenings kind of digging into the past and the contrast between the two is exciting. You get really obsessed with it. I got stuck on the Garfield Arthur chapter when my wife was pregnant with our second daughter so her middle name is garfield. [laughter] and with that, i will take your questions. [applause] fun story, thats for sure. I wonder why the Supreme Court didnt get more involved in any of these things in particular, the thai n. 41 or at any point say prior to the place where the amendments made things clear. We are dealing with the constitutional interpretation issues. Why is that tax its a great question. On the case of tyler, they tried to seek out the insight that the chief justice hated henry clay and heated tyler. He didnt want to get involved because he was going to make them happy one way or another so he advocated for the responsibilities. Is in the book. [laughter] the constitution is clear that it is regardless you call it. Can you spell out what is at stake with the call of the acting president or the president if he has all of the same powers i understand there is a different image but it seems a littl little ephemeral d people perceive it is usually different. I think that there is the reason its important i can answer this by talking about why it was important. The likely person to win the next election. A on Lafayette Square is reenacts the events of apri april 1865. Is it still true that no one has ever served two terms having been elected president . George h. W. Bush served two terms as the Vice President and ended up being elected so that would be thene van buren served as Vice President s before. The vice presidency isnt a path to the presidency if you look at it throughout history. The other thing you mentioned youve heard of lafayette the president pro tem of the time of lincolns assassination. Theres another interesting twist and piece of this, Andrew Johnson , after ascending to the presidency is on his deathbed and nearly dead and fostered out west to make nice with the various native american groups. He gets a telegram saying the president is dying and he basically ignores it and goes on the next leg of the journey. They say if you wont come back to washington, we need you to at least stay near a telegram office, so that happened. Theres another that became a very formidable president and that was Theodore Roosevelt in his own light. Did you agree with that . Theodore roosevelt is the only one who likely would have be basically three reasons people become Vice President in history that i write about. One is they are available because nobody wants the job, or number two, to win the state were three as punishment. In the case of Teddy Roosevelt, the party bosses couldnt stand him, he was a complete pain. So they exiled him to the political equivalent of a thrusting him into the 1900 election. The Vice President dies in office so theres this vacancy and whats interesting by the way hes the only Vice President in history that enjoyed a really close and intimate relationship with the president because he did a lot of his Financial Planning which turns out it is convenient. In the case of Teddy Roosevelt, whats interesting the first reference i could find heartbeats away from the presidency comes from one of the mckinleys most trusted confidant and when Teddy Roosevelt ends up as Vice President the only vote against him is Teddy Roosevelt as a delegate. Mark hanna said mr. President , your only responsibility the next four years is to live and of course mckinley shot and killed in september of 01. An interesting part of the story whenever i talk about accidental president s who die in office, people love to say the story when he shot into the bullet penetrates the speech and his skin and he looks at it and declares i can survive an hour before it becomes fatal and he gives a speech and then goes to the hospital that he wasnt present when that happened and thats when he came back to one to try to torpedo William Howard taft at the republican preside president. A year almost today after hes campaigning for the midterm and a trolley slams into his carriage and tells his driver and bodyguard and it would have killed Teddy Roosevelt as well if not for a few inches of law. Water. He flies about 30 feet, his glasses are broken coming in he ends up having to get emergency surgery but not before threatening with a fist in the face and flashing his epic teeth. He ends up in a wheelchair for six weeks so hes the first to the wheelchairbound while president , not fdr. This week biden declared he is running for president. One year is not enough time to do that. What i will say, when the longest period of time in history without a president dying in office, the previous august. Was George Washington. So we have the oldest president in history of the republic in at least two of the serious contenders on the democratic side in their 70s and were still treating the Vice President like a political gimmick. The danger with how we think about the vice presidency is the seriousness and the recklessness which we choose Vice President by the fact that several Vice President whether you like them or not are capable of leading the republic. So we dont pay a lot of attention. But look no further back than sarah palin in 2008 and he realized we learn nothing. So i think its a terrible idea to let candidates choose who they run with because what it says is them against the ropes and i need ten points in the polls in this particular week and chapter of the campaign which would have absolutely nothing to do with whether somebody can lead in a crisis. A followup question, something you talked about and retained for something im working on. I cannot relieve that roosevelt would have truman as vp and not tell him about the Manhattan Project. Roosevelt did not think about the Vice President , he was just try to pull through. He was either an warm springs and georgia recovery or he is traveling. Ierviews that i could for this book given that most chapters of history the people are dead. Although the grandsons are very useful for stories and antidotes of john tyler. But i asked george h. W. Bush this question because they did a number of interviews with him before he died. They all had the same, about the vice presidency, i asked them about the context of fdr and kinzingers remark was quite music, if fdr knew hughes dying in a denial why would you want the person who is most likely to benefit from your death lingering around and fdr did not want to set eyes on truman. If you know youre dying in a denial you dont want to look at the guy whos about to take over. You mentioned you tell us about nixon and ford so please do. , revisionist, and i want to be funny i would say i got tired and did not want to do an extra chapter. It was a deliberate decision that at the beginning, what i was captivated by my entire life was his idea of how a 70 whos not the voters choice and nobody wants as president , how to delete something that is not theirs whenever buddy misses the predecessor. The idea of death in office comes with a sense of deprival. You depriving the voters of the person that they choose and whoever ascends to the presidency has to deal with the reality of the country in mourning and they feel no obligation to continue at least pain homage to some elements of the predecessor policies where if you look set nixon resigning, ford was under no obligation by any stretch of the imagination. So it really feels different to me, i talk about the nixon to for transition and i talk about in the context of discussion toward the end of the book about the 20 for the moment. The first time the 20th amendment is put into practice is when Richard Nixon plucks gerald ford for michigan fifth to replace as Vice President. And are we glad he did. Because it was certainly needed. The interesting thing, you would think that the 20 for the amendment wouldve been put into practice when regular shot in 1981. It was not because james baker and others around reagan did not want to set the president of making it to her termination that the present was unfit for office per and theres no evidence they reflected back on James Garfield being on his deathbed for 80 days or Woodward Wilson and mr. Craig but i wondered who was in the back of their minds, the only time the 27 amendment had ever inability to the president to discharge their duties, the only time it was put in practice for colonoscopies. [laughter] searcseriously. One more story, Vice President cheney told me, he was deputy of chief of staff for general corporate what people dont realize about poor, he had to assassination attempts and 35 days. , they fired a shot him at pointblank and the gun malfunctioned and 35 days later he was giving a speech outside hotel and comes on the elevator, one of the elevators open vertically instead of horizontally and he talked about how the elevator door hit him on the top of the head and cracked a school open, he went upstairs to the room got stitches and came back down and then he was far taught that. A secret Service Agent got his finger between the assassin and the trigger and prevented her from killing gerald ford but he described it as a bad day for the president. [laughter] the question is, what is a process for the appointment of the Vice President with accidental president. We also ended up with rockefeller as Vice President which was an accidental Vice President i guess you can say. So once the Vice President , the elected Vice President has sent to the presidency, what is a process for a new Vice President to be selected or appointed . It is the same its no different. The 20 for the moment says the president of the United States gets to pick 70 they can nominate and they go through an approval process. Its the same process whether its accidental if somebody ends up as an accidental president as long as its post when he for the moment it is the same as if there was a president who became president based on that. Other questions . I can also tell more stories. [laughter] the stories are in thusly incredible. I will tell you my favorite quote from the book, most of the president , accidental president who ended up as president never spent much time thinking about it. They expected to be irrelevant, Teddy Roosevelt spent his entire life think about being president so when mckinley dies he can hardly contain his enthusiasm for the idea that he is president he is conflicted and has an amazing quote he says its a terrible thing to come into the presidency this way but far worse to be morbid about it. [laughter] i am thinking truman would be in this category, are there any others for the Vice President actually is politically aligned in a continuation of the policies because i think as you made the point often, they are being picked for the balance and the differences et cetera. Are any of the others people tried to fulfill the aspirations . The perfect example is Calvin Coolidge. This is an interesting one, the transition has the most can person with a presentday moment. If you look at Warren Harding as a most scandalous administratio scandal which is oil scandal, a huge scandal at the Veterans Bureau and the attorney general and Justice Department from bootlegging, stock manipulation, there were suicide within the rank and fishing murders, it was a nasty Justice Department and corrupt attorney general. Harding dies in a popular man in Calvin Coolidge is only accidental president to attend the presidency without the near to go before the president ial election election of 1924. So he knows what the Harding Administration was all about and is terrified that they will break on his watch. The republicans will lose in 1924 and he will be handed over to the democrats. He is a very self effective moment where he recognizes he is quite boring. There are many stories about his insignificance, my favorite is when hes at the Willard Hotel and the hotel is on fire and he told he needs to evacuate and he says on the Vice President and they say you can stay. [laughter] and then they turn around and said the Vice President of what needs has United States and they said no you need to evacuate we thought you were the Vice President of the hotel. [laughter] what is interesting, he developed an interesting strategy, he takes the truth which is boring and insignificant and cultivates an image of silent cow. A man so boring and insignificant that it cannot be relevant in any of the scandals. It works. He does more engagement with the public than any president who came before him because you have the advent of broadcast radio and he goes into peoples living rooms in the way no president had before. But to answer your question, im not sure he needed to do that because the economy was booming the americans were economically drunk on the idea that eskimo pies, consumer products, tablets, good Economic Times and they do not care if the president was Warren Harding, or who but herbert until the economy crumbled. To the extent they had a Vice President that continued business as usual, he is probably the closest example. Just on that note, i was curious based on your research, which Vice President exercised an influence on policy such that the president might as well have been absent in your opinion . Teddy roosevelt was the most annoying of all the Vice President. Nobody could control him, mckinley cannot control him, nobody could control him as Vice President , theres a great story of assistant secretary of the navy, theres a great story of the navy where he goes on a six hour break get the equivalent of a spot treatment, and he is so worried about Teddy Roosevelt will do of the navy in six hours that he instructs him not to take the country to war. While he is getting that treatment Teddy Roosevelt mobilizes the country for work. In six hours. But what is interesting, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt, a recent one of accidental president s get selected in their own right. And then you have way more reelections as president in the post 1900s then you do in the period before, i attribute a lot of that to the fact that foreignpolicy plays a more pronounced role in the president asserts a normas amount influence on foreign policy. And to answer your question, the Vice President that exerted the most amount of influence, the last three or four Vice President , a lot of them have played pronounced foreignpolicy rules. Other questions . Tell another story. Ill have to pull into the reservoir. All share a personal story about the writing process of this because it was really tricky because i had a day job also but i wanted to do this in a way that i got my hands on proper archival research, every time i went to write in a chapter and went to the same emotional period of volatility where i determined i cannot do it, nothing new to write and i felt the challenge was daunting so i decided with each chapter to approach it like i was playing accidental president and apply so i would read all these assessments of their personality and read their letters and try to get in the head and i got stuck in nature johnsons head, it was a disturbing experience. I really dont like him. But when you encounter a disagreement in the scholarship or in the history, if you can sort of get yourself to imagine what it wouldve been like to be that particular person, you can make or form an opinion about what they mightve done. Andrew johnson was one of the hardest president to be impeached. They tried several times and why was congress so reluctant to impeach him customer. Thats a great question. Ultimately he does get interesting about him, when people talk about what a catastrophe he was, they point to the fact that he was impeach, theres many reasons to critique him, the irony is, the thing he was impeached for was violation of the tenure of office act which is later deemed unconstitutional. It trivializes the catastrophe of Andrew Johnson when we focus on impeachment but instead we should focus on the fact that he talks about North Carolina and he makes no mention of civil rights and gives amnesty to every single trader he allows the Vice President of the confederacy to be reelected into congress. Those of the reasons to criticize Andrew Johnson. In terms of impeachment, the threshold was pretty high. Impeachment has been used as applicable toll. The only time where you have serious impeachment proceedings if they were allowed to play out it wouldve resulted in the impeachment of the president was Richard Nixon. Thats only time it doesnt take a political flavor. The proceedings against president r against john tyler. And theyre totally politically motivated. The proceedings are politically motivated by radical republicans when johnson offended the presidency he thought he was one of them because of his rhetoric on civil rights and punishment of traders and when the war ended they find out he is nothing like them. So they basically trying to get him on technicality and i think the difficulty in impeaching him in some respects reflected a lack of comfort in the house of representatives with the idea of impeachment taking on a political flavor but he does get impeached and he escaped conviction by a single vote. On lbj, thats one we go to write anything, what an earth can i write that robert caro has not written. [laughter] this is what amazing about history, theres plenty to capture and plenty to write about, there still a lot of unsolved mysteries and missing puzzle pieces in the reconstruction of our history. When i focus on lbj, i believed that he was either going to have to resign as Vice President or be kicked off the ticket the week after kennedy was assassinated. The reason was he was engulfed in a scandal named bobby baker who is in aid in the senate and he was under investigation and what i learned in talking to tom brokaw. Members of. Quite well that both cvs have the goods on lbj, then the full dossier and ready to go public with it. When he was assassinated they made a decision to put her back in the box. This is really important because the country is been through such a dramatic transition that you cannot have a situation where he was assassinated, scandal breaks and at the height of the cold war the president of the United States has to resign. There is noteworthy for the moment so theres no provision for replacing the president , they had flipped the speaker in the president and it wouldve gone to the speaker of the house as acting president and then the secretary of state would had to schedule a special election. So this is an interesting ethical issue to debate in the context of history. I should have the name but the country has been through dramatic transition and what was also fascinating, we all know the story how Bobby Kennedy hated lbj, what was very clear to the kennedys when they took the final trip to texas was lbj did not have this right in texas that they thought he did. Even if hes not willing to resign you could speculate they wouldve found a way to rotate him off of the ticket. The conventional wisdom about jfk and lbj is if kennedy is not assassinated you dont get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the subsequent acts either. But you also get vietnam. I dont subscribe to that view. I subscribe to the view that i do not think you wouldve gotten the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because i think kennedys were prepared to pay lip services but not prepared to take the electoral risk. Its hard to speak after even one reelection. With vietnam, i think the guardians of kennedys reputation have reconstructed a narrative that quickly settles lbj with responsibility and culpability with vietnam but also parchments responsible to. He doubles a number of advisors and doubles a foreign assistant budget and turns the other way which cast support for the beat many president beatminis presidet of a normal troop rotation. I dont think kennedy was as predisposed to get on the same escalation path as lbj but everyone was scared of the big red arrow and they may have found themselves going down the same super slow. People i interviewed were incredibly divided. Its a big game of maybe yes, maybe no, is my personal view of their wouldve been some form of escalation under kennedy as we well. Can you comment on cheneys vice presidency . What is interesting about that, if you look at his background hes one of the most extraordinary records of any man ever ascended to the vice presidency. His before Vice President and after Vice President is a very different narrative. There is no doubt that he was one of the most influential Vice President in history particularly in the first term but i also think you see the limits of the vice presidency by evaluating his second term as vp. Thank you. [applause] we have copies of his book available behind the register if you could form a line to the right of the table and please up your tears. Thank you. [inaudible conversations], theyo extensive coverage of the National Book festival and is always a terrific job of letting you know whats going on at the book festival even if you cannot be there. [applause]