Jared Cohen - Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America

Lee Harvey Oswald A former marine who had spent time in the Soviet Union before killing President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. He was shot and killed by nightclub owner Jack Ruby two days later.

My office renders me so completely insignificant that all Parties can afford to treat me with a decent respect which accordingly they do, as far as I observe, or hear or suspect. They all know that I can do them neither much good nor much harm.1

John Adams as the first vice president

J ohn Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson: Eight times a vice president has become president upon the death of his predecessorhistory altered by a heartbeat. This is the story of how these eight men, neither the voters nor their partys choice, dealt with that power and changed history, for better or worse.

These men ascended to the presidency without the Constitution having specified an order of succession. The founders didnt think of everything. They made compromises to get things done, such as giving each state two senators to get the smaller states to sign on to proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Succession was no different, particularly given how little thought had been given to the vice presidency itself. The fact that the country navigated these abrupt transfers of power eight times during a one-hundred-and-twenty-two-year period and amended the Constitution only after John F. Kennedys assassination in 1963 offers a powerful response to the originalist, or literal, interpretation of the Constitution.

In many cases, the men who came to fill the shoes of dead presidents had been spouses in a marriage of political convenience for a president to win a state or appease a particular constituency. Only fiveJohn Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, and George H. W. Bushcompleted terms as vice president and went on to win the presidency. Their election relieved them of that vice-presidential image of irrelevance. In the eight instances when the vice president succeeded to the office, a set of common challenges made the path to success much harder. Each had to earn the respect of the men loyal to his predecessor, or find a way to discard them. They had to honor the loss while at the same time getting back to governing. All had to find the balance between continuing the policies of the man who was elected (including navigating the ambiguity left behind) and responsibly fulfilling their present duties. Each had to step out of the shadow of his predecessor and earn the presidency in his own right.

Each transition is treated as its own chapter, with the exception of FDR, where the combination of high stakes and certainty of death warrant extra attention. There is no strict pattern that determined performance, although in two of our most extraordinary casesAbraham Lincoln and Franklin Rooseveltthey made poor choices, given the wartime context. In Roosevelts case, he got lucky because Harry Truman proved up to the job, the best of the lot other than the great Theodore Roosevelt. Lincolns vice president, Andrew Johnson, proved the biggest catastrophe of the eight.

We cant understand what a miracle Truman is without understanding both the lackadaisical effort that went into FDRs choice of a 1944 running mate and the extraordinary performance of Harry Truman as president. Truman had big shoes to fill, but so did the other seven. They had their own biases. Most had been excluded from their predecessors inner circles. Their ambition to make their own mark led them down very different paths. Some rose to the occasion, others failed. The chapters show mixed performancessome started and ended wars, while others accelerated and slowed social progress. Each story also raises questions about how history might have been different had the president survived.