Jared Cohen on America’s “Accidental Presidents”

WALTER ISAACSON: Jared, welcome to the show.

JARED COHEN, AUTHOR, “ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENTS”: Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: We’re in a really weird period in this country with the Trump, the Mueller report, all these things happening. You have a new book out called, “The Accident Presidents.” Have we seen things like this before?

COHEN: Well, I think it’s telling that — when I mention to people, “I have a book called ‘The Accidental Presidents,'” the first thing they say is, “Is it a current events book?”

ISAACSON: Yes. Sure.

COHEN: And I say that, “No, it’s about the eight times in history a U.S. president has died in office and how the abrupt transfer of power changes history.” And the honest truth is, as Americans, we have much more experience and history with navigating what seem at the time like constitutional crises, navigating what seem at the time a lot of confusion, polarization, questions about what’s going to happen to the president, and we don’t reflect enough on those a experiences and learn from them and see how it informs today’s moment.

ISAACSON: How did this book come about?

COHEN: My parents bought me a book called “The Buck Stops Here,” it’s one of those rhyming history books for kids and it was supposed to be a cute little historical lesson for me, maybe I had memorized the presidents and I zeroed in on death and assassination. So, my poor parents had to have eight conversations about,” Mom, Dad, what is death? What does it mean when somebody is assassinated? What happens to them?” As I got older that evolved into an interest in collecting memorabilia around these transitions and I always said to myself, “At some point, I’m going to write a book about this.”

And each of the stories of the accidental presidents are told in different places. But what I really wanted to do was to put them together. And I wanted to put them together because I think that the story of the eight accidental presidents is one of the best-case studies for showing us that the constitution is a living document. There is a total randomness and allowing things to be left to chance associated with how we muddled through all this. Andrew Johnson was a complete catastrophe and you had some who were mixed. But by and large, we ended up navigating this pretty well despite the constitution being completely vague about what we do with a vacancy.

ISAACSON: Tell me how it talks about the living document of the constitution, how we get from a place where we don’t even know that John Tyler is officially the president today, just how we can adapt the constitution.

COHEN: Yes. And it also shows you how long it takes to get the point. So, on many levels, right. So, it took three presidential assassinations for the U.S. government to kind and Congress to get the point that the Secret Service should probably have a mandate to protect the presidency, not just fight counterfeiters. It took 8 presidents dying in office, four assassinated, for us to realize that we should probably have a provision for formalizing the Tyler precedent making it clear legally that the vice president assumes the presidency and becomes the presidency.

But there is also no provision for replacing the vice president of the United States. So, it’s not until the 25th Amendment that gives Richard Nixon the ability to pluck Gerald Ford out of Michigan’s 5th and make him vice president that such a thing was possible. So, every one of these eight accidental presidents leave the vice president vacant. That’s interesting because John Tyler nearly dies as president in an explosion that kills a number of members of the cabinet. Andrew Johnson a month into his presidency nearly dies from sickness. Teddy Roosevelt was flung from a carriage a year after he assumed the presidency and nearly died. His body guard was killed, the driver in the carriage with it was killed. Harry Truman was up against an assassination attempt by Puerto Rican rebels and so forth. So, the absence of a mechanism for replacing the vice president almost left us exposed to a very serious constitutional crisis.

ISAACSON: The most vibrant example, in some ways, of somebody assuming the reins of power in the presidency and then having a whole agenda that you didn’t expect is Teddy Roosevelt, the Antitrust Movements and things, how did that come about?

COHEN: So, in the case of Teddy Roosevelt, the irony is he had a complete pivot from McKinley’s administration of a big business, but it was very predictable because everybody who understood who Teddy Roosevelt was. Teddy Roosevelt ends up on the ticket in 1900 because the vice president dies in office. And the party bosses in New York are so tired of Teddy Roosevelt that they want to exile him to the political equivalent of Elba (ph). And Teddy has his own problems back home where it’s not guaranteed that he’s going to win reelection as governor of New York. So, he figures, “I’m young enough. I aspire to bigger things. I’ll bide my time here and I’m Teddy Roosevelt, so nobody’s ever going to make me irrelevant.” And, you know, other than one of McKinley’s closest advisors, a guy named Mark Hanna, nobody really thought about this. And Hanna used to run around saying, “Don’t you all understand how crazy it is to put this man just one heartbeat from the presidency,” and that’s the first time that heartbeat concept gets used. To me, the one that’s most extraordinary is Harry Truman because Truman, you know, as vice president, he meets with Roosevelt twice, he isn’t read into Yalta, he’s not briefed on the Manhattan Project, he’s not following the happenings of World War II, he’s basically out socializing.

In fact, you know, just six days before Roosevelt dies, somebody writes him a letter advocating a policy and he says, “I’m just a political eunuch.” And so, as late as, you know, six days before he ascends to the presidency, he’s viewing himself as kind of an irrelevant sidekick and thinks of himself as kind of an aw-shucks provincial politician from Missouri. And you look at what that man inherited. And on paper, he should not have been successful. Now, I believe Truman was successful because he was like-minded with George Marshall and likeminded with Dean Acheson, sort of Europeanness and they all wanted the same thing. So, the success of the world rested on helping Truman be successful. But what he inherited and the decisions he had to make in just his first four to nine months was unlike anything that we’ve seen in history.

ISAACSON: But do you think the Cold War could have taken a different course if Truman hadn’t taken the tough stand in Potsdam and others that Franklin Roosevelt might not have taken?

COHEN: The big question that I raise in the FDR and Truman chapters is around how they interacted with Joseph Stalin And, you know, FDR, there are varying theories on this but FDR certainly was predisposed and want to believe he could work with Stalin. There are examples where he questioned that. particularly, towards the end of his life but by all accounts, he believed there was — he knew Stalin, he could work with Stalin. He stopped getting advice from the advisers and people with deep expertise on Russia and you could argue he was too close to it.

I think some of this had to do with the fact that, you know, I don’t think Roosevelt was in denial about his health. I think Roosevelt knew he was dying but he wanted to beat the clock, finish the war, maybe become the first secretary general of the U.N. but finish the job while he was still on Earth. What impresses me about Truman is the fact that unlike, you know, LBJ, who buys into the argument that Ho Chi Minh is somebody we can maybe get a better compromise with by over eagerly negotiating and so forth. Truman doesn’t buy any of that with Stalin on day one. And he has no institutional knowledge which would lead him to this conclusion. It’s pure instinct. And he’s getting all sorts of advice from people pushing a Roosevelt agenda, people pushing their own agendas. And for somebody who’s following the great FDR to be able to assert themselves so early on without neglecting the legacy of FDR during such an important moment in history, it’s nothing short of extraordinary.

ISAACSON: Is there a common set of mistakes that these accidental presidents have made?

COHEN: To me, the common thread across each of these accidental presidents is it all comes down to the people they surround themselves with. So they’re all confronted with the same problem of inheriting somebody else’s advisers. You get accidental presidents like Millard Fillmore who fire everybody on day one. So Fillmore fires the entire cabinet at arguably the most polarized moment in American history which is the moment where they’re figuring out what to do with all the land that was ceded to the United States following war with Mexico. You have John Tyler who probably should have fired some portion of the cabinet early on or he wouldn’t have gotten kicked out of his own party. You get people like LBJ who was — LBJ was very sensible with the domestic side of his cabinet but he couldn’t bring himself to question the Harvard’s, as he called them, the intellectual foreign policy elite and they led him down a very different path. So, the president —

ISAACSON: In Vietnam.

COHEN: In Vietnam. So the presidents who iterate on their predecessor’s cabinet without going to one extreme or the other, meaning keeping all of them or getting rid of all of them tend to be the ones who fare the best.

ISAACSON: So what are the lessons in the accidental presidents that help us say we were in really turbulent times and now we’re in turbulent times again? What lessons do we have for how we navigate out?

COHEN: Well, I think — I mean there’s — in terms of the lesson from the book, a starting point would be we should give more thought to how we choose the vice president of the United States. You know, when Lyndon Johnson decided to leave the most powerful seat in Congress to run with Kennedy, there was a 20 percent chance that he would become president. If you look at all the close calls and combine them with the presidents that actually died, today’s vice presidents have a 42 percent chance of becoming president, if all those close calls had actually happened. Those are pretty high statistics. And yet we still choose vice presidents as political marriages of convenience to win a state, appease a constituency, neither of which happen consistently. And we don’t think about the person who’s the sort of the understudy to the highest office in the land as somebody who can actually lead this country. So that’s a starting point. But I would say the other is, you know, we should anticipate gaps in our system and experiment with solutions along the way. So the 25th Amendment was the culmination of various experiments with succession laws where first it was the president pro tem followed by the speaker. Then they got rid of both and it was just the cabinet. Then they restored the president pro tem and the speaker but they flipped the order. We don’t — we should resist the urge to answer every single question at the moment. Instead, allow ourselves to try different things. Had we basically tried to comprehensively solve the succession crisis in the Constitution, I’m not sure we would have been better off.

ISAACSON: Which of the moments from your study of history of our country is [13:35:00] most analogous to today?

COHEN: There are so many parallels to the Harding administration that it’s astonishing. So Warren Harding, when he ascends to the presidency, he’s the unexpected candidate. His administration ends up being the most scandal written administration in history. It has all the — I mean it has teapot dome, there’s murders, there’s suicides, tons of corruption, manipulation, et cetera, so it’s a very colorful administration. The Harding women, there’s a lot of affairs, including Nan Britton, who he has an illegitimate child within a five by five hat closet of the Oval Office. Harding, when he’s in the Senate, has a love affair with a German spy. So you have all of that. But it was also an administration that had the wealthiest cabinet in history. People like Andrew Mellon. It was incredibly anti-immigrant and particularly related to Chinese immigrants. And you had a lot of cronies and friends on the government payroll in very high positions and ambiguous adviser positions. The difference is Harding dies enormously popular. The whole image of Silent Cal — this was one of the surprising things. With the whole image of Silent Cal is a fabrication.

ISAACSON: Calvin Coolidge, to make clear who takes over.

COHEN: Yes. So Calvin Coolidge is a man who’s so boring, his image is, that nobody remembers him. And there’s a great story when there was a fire at the Willard Hotel while he’s vice president, he doesn’t evacuate and the hotel manager comes up to him and says, “Excuse me, sir. You have to evacuate.” And he says, “I’m the vice president.” He goes, “Oh, OK, proceed.” The manager then turns around to him and says, “Wait, the vice president of what?” He says. “The United States.” And he says, “Oh, you have to evacuate. I thought you were the vice president of the hotel.” But Coolidge, the scandals break three months after Coolidge ascends to the presidency and you’re very close to the 1924 presidential election. And so, Coolidge cultivates this image of a man so silent and so boring that he couldn’t have had anything to do with the scandals. In fact, he engages in more radio broadcasts than any president who came before him but just interpersonally he’s kind of quiet and shy. And so if you look at parallels to today’s moment, there’s something kind of silent Cal-ish about our current number two.

ISAACSON: Michael Pence, yes. Well, it may be nice to get to a time when we have silent and boring and calm leaders again. Jared, thank you for being with us.

COHEN: Thank you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Appreciate it.