Who Becomes President? Succession, the Vice Presidency, and Executive Power

The most fragile part of the presidency isn’t the election. It’s the moment something goes wrong and the country still needs a commander in chief, a working cabinet, and a government that doesn’t freeze. That’s why we brought on Jordan Cash, assistant professor of political theory and constitutional democracy at Michigan State University, to walk us through presidential succession, the vice presidency, and what these rules say about executive power.

We start with a simple but underrated idea: the executive branch has to run all the time. Congress can recess and the courts can wait for cases, but enforcement, diplomacy, and crisis response don’t stop. From there, we dig into why the framers invented the vice presidency so late in the Constitutional Convention, why it originally helped the Electoral College function, and how it solved a very practical Senate problem with tie breaking without giving any state extra votes.

Then the history gets real. We unpack John Tyler’s 1841 showdown over whether a vice president becomes president or merely serves as acting president, and how the Tyler precedent shaped every transition after it. We also trace how Congress keeps reworking the presidential line of succession, and why debates over cabinet officials versus congressional leaders always come back to legitimacy and separation of powers. Finally, we break down the 25th Amendment’s rules for vacancies and presidential incapacity and why Watergate made those safeguards feel “just in time,” including Gerald Ford’s unique path to the Oval Office.

If you like constitutional history, the 25th Amendment, the Electoral College, and the real mechanics of executive power, this one will give you a clean map plus a few great rabbit holes. Subscribe, share this with a civics nerd, and leave us a review with your take: who should be next in the line of succession after the vice president?

The Isolated Presidency

Adding the Lone Star: John Tyler, Sam Houston, and the Annexation of Texas

Check Out the Civic Literacy Curriculum!

School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

Transcript

Welcome And Big Questions

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to Civic Sonir. I'm very, very excited today because we're talking about presidential succession, the vice presidency, executive power. And with me, we have a new guest, Jordan Cash. Jordan, welcome to our podcast. Can you introduce yourself for our listeners?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Absolutely. And first, thank you so much for having me. So yeah, my name is Jordan Cash. I'm an assistant professor of political theory and constitutional democracy at the James Madison College at Michigan State University. Those Spartans.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

So today we're talking about presidential succession. So why does presidential succession matter so much for understanding the nature of executive power, especially as we compare it to Congress and the courts?

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the issue of presidential succession really gets to the heart of executive power. Why is the executive different from the legislature or the judiciary, right? Because when we think about it, we don't have vice senators. We don't have vice Supreme Court justice. Even if you go to the state level, you have lieutenant governors, but you don't have lieutenant legislators, lieutenant judges on state courts. And I think that speaks to, again, the nature of executive power, right? So when we think through the basic school, you know, elementary school, what does our government do? Oh, you have the legislative power that makes the laws,

Why Executive Power Needs Continuity

SPEAKER_01 1:28

executive power enforces the laws, judiciary power interprets the laws. But when we really dig into, well, what does that mean? Well, that requires different functional attributes. Congress does not need to be in session all the time making the laws, right? They can, and they do. They come together for a session, they make the laws, then they go home. Right. In the 19th century, they'd come together for a few months, and then most of the time, Congress wasn't meeting. The Supreme Court, same thing. You need them to meet to adjudicate those disputes, to interpret the law, very important. But they don't need to be doing it 24-7. With enforcement, though, you do need somebody to execute, to enforce the law all the time. So there's a built-in continuity in executive power that requires somebody to always be there enforcing the law. And this really goes back even to John Locke. John Locke talks about this, the differences between executive and legislative, and that carries over into our constitutional system. We see with presidential succession, we also see it too in the fact that the president can make recess appointments, right? Why should he be able to do that? Why not just wait till Congress or the Senate in particular come back into session? Well, it's the same basic idea. If something happens to the Secretary of State, we need a Secretary of State. So the president can make a recess appointment, have a Secretary of State until they can more formally appoint one with the usual constitutional process of Senate confirmation. So because you always need somebody executing the law, and because the presidency is a singular office, which again goes to the nature of executive power. He can act as Hamilton says in Federal 70 with secrecy, energy, and dispatch, right? So executive power not only requires that there only be really one person, but then that there always will be that person to start with.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

It's so interesting then. So at the constitutional dimension, what problem were the framers try really trying to solve with the vice presidency? And how limited did they expect that role to be?

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Yeah, that's a great question. Because if you look at for as important as the vice presidency is now as we kind of think of him almost as an assistant president now, vice presidency is a very late creation at the Constitution Convention. For most of the convention, they kind of bounce between a few ideas on presidential succession. They all know, like, okay, somebody's got to, if there's a vacancy, somebody's got to step up. For most of the convention, president of the Senate, they'll they'll just do it. That'll be fine. Uh Governor Morris at one point says the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court should be the successor to the president in the event of a

Why The Framers Invented A Vice President

SPEAKER_01 4:14

vacancy. Uh so they're interesting. Yeah, they're playing with all sorts of ideas. And it's really at the very end in September, right? So last couple of weeks, where finally the vice presidency is introduced uh as an option. Actually, no, scratch that. I think it's a bit earlier. Committee of detail introduces the vice presidency. But again, it's late. And it's introduced really to solve a couple of problems. Because initially, the reaction to the vice presidency is, what is this thing? It's in the Senate as ex officio, president of the Senate, but he also succeeds the presidency. So some delegates, like Elbridge Gary, say, this is mixing powers, right? This is going to give the president a voice in the Senate. And they're already, some of those delegates are already concerned. The president and the Senate are too combined. They're going to be too aristocratic, too monarchical. So now the vice presidency is now the living embodiment of exactly what they're concerned about. But as they debate it, it becomes clear that the vice presidency really exists to solve two separate problems. One is a problem of not presidential succession, but presidential election. How are we going to pick the president? So this has been a big issue in the Constitution Convention. James Wilson of Pennsylvania says this is the most difficult of all the questions we've had to decide. How do we pick the president? And of course, they, the electoral college, like the vice president, is a pretty late addition. For most of the convention, they want to let Congress pick the president. There's a brief period where they say, we'll let the people vote, and then everybody says, nah, we won't do that. Let's do Electoral College. So Electoral College comes in, but and the way it's initially set up, so this is pre-Twelfth Amendment, is that you'll have the electors cast two votes. But part of the concern is, well, you're going to use one vote to vote for somebody from your state, right? If you're from Virginia, you'll vote for George Washington. Or actually, that's not a good example because everybody votes for George Washington. If you're from Connecticut, maybe you vote for Roger Sherman and then you vote for George Washington, right? But how do we make sure that second vote actually goes to Washington, right? If you're a really true patriot of Connecticut and you want Roger Sherman to be president, why not throw away that second vote on anybody else? So the idea was we have to make sure that that second vote has some stakes to it. So the way to do that is to say, well, the second place, second place finisher in the election, will become the vice president. So now there's something to that, right? You can't just throw away your vote. Because if you throw away your vote, if everybody throws it away on the same person, now that person might be vice president and they might actually have something to do. That's very risky. So the vice president is partially to solve that problem, to give the vice to give the presidential selection process a bit more integrity to make sure that second vote, because again, they all assume you're going to use your first vote on your home state hero or whatever, you'll use your second vote to actually vote for somebody who's worthy of it, who has that national, as Governor Morris says, a continental reputation. Because the risk is the vice presidency could that second place finisher will have now some power. Now, not much power. And that's what gets to the second part. If he's there to fix or help solve a problem with presidential selection, the third problem is in the Senate. So the big issue is the Senate needs to have state equality. Every state gets two votes. But if you have a president of the Senate who might be able to break ties, that creates some questions, right? Does that mean, say, you have two senators? I'm going to keep picking on Connecticut here. Two senators in Connecticut, one of them gets elected to be president of the Senate. Okay. Does that mean that they lose their vote unless there's a tie? In which case, Connecticut now only has one vote in the Senate? Well, that's not good. That's not equal. Okay, well then we'll let the president of the Senate vote in normal deliberations. But if he is called to break a tie, does that now give Connecticut three votes? Because this guy gets a vote twice. Well, that's not fair either. So part of the issue is how do we make sure that each state gets two votes and only two votes? Well, let's introduce the vice president as his outside office holder, not a senator, only gets to vote when he breaks ties or when there are ties to be broken. And that solves the problem, right? That each senate each state preserves their two votes, but we also have now have a mechanism for breaking ties. And because the vice president will be elected in the same way as the president, general national election, he's kind of representative of the nation as a whole, of the states, he's gonna be trusted with this authority. So, and this is pointed out in the convention that several delegates say, we don't need a vice president, he's only there to solve a problem. Or, in fact, I think it's uh I think it's Hugh Williamson who says the vice presidency is created only to solve this problem with presidential election. And then somebody else says if he wasn't the president of the Senate, he'd be without employment. Uh so as important of an office as the vice presidency is, it's simply it's a good example of the delegates just trying finding problems along the way and finding interesting institutional solutions to resolve those problems.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

So when John Tyler becomes president in 1841, what is at stake when he or in how he interpreted the Constitution and how did that moment kind of shape the presidency going forward?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah, that's a very good question. So I do want to briefly touch on that there's between the convention and 1840, we do have a shift here, right? Because I said initially the vice president was a second place finisher, and we obviously don't do that now. It'd be interesting if uh Kamala Harris was Donald Trump's vice president. That could that could cause some issues. And it did at the time when we introduced political parties, John Adams becomes president in 1796, he's a federalist, and then Thomas Jefferson as his vice president. So it quickly becomes apparent that once you have parties

John Tyler And A Constitutional Gap

SPEAKER_01 10:18

in the mix, we got to change not working at all. So the 12th Amendment changes that, right? So now the way vice presidents are elected, instead of electors in electoral college having two votes both for the presidency, now one vote for president, one vote for vice president. So Jefferson pushes through this change, partially due to the famous tie with Aaron Burr, immortalizing the musical Hamilton. Although, you know, the musical makes it sound like Jefferson amended the Constitution. Technically, he but Congress did. But we'll we'll give him a pass on that. That's fine. So the 12th Amendment, and I should say too, part of the issue with the 12th Amendment that it has some opposition because some delegates think now the vice president is going to be a secondary character, right? Whereas before, when the vice president's vice president is a second place finisher, they have national support. John Adams is a significant figure. Now that the vice president is really just picked by the party to run with the pre with the president, you know, you get all those names that we don't actually think about that often. A Daniel Tompkins and a well, I mentioned Elbridge Gary, so he's somewhat significant. Yes. All those vice presidents that just kind of fade into the background. Some people say during the debates over the 12th Amendment, this is what's going to happen. Arguably, John Tyler is one of those cases. He's picked at the Whig National Convention in 1840 because he is part of one faction of the party and he represents Virginia. And so once they get William Henry Harrison, they're like, well, this guy's good enough. He'll be fine. Right. So even Tyler himself, not the prominent national figure, certainly of the stature of Adams and Jefferson, that you would expect. Which makes it problematic then when he becomes vice president. William Henry Harrison dies in office after 30 days, and we have a constitutional crisis over who becomes the president. And part of the complication is that the constitution only says the powers shall devolve upon the vice president. It doesn't, it doesn't specify: does the vice president become president? Is he the acting president until a new election can be held? It's very unclear. So to your point about Tyler, he interprets the Constitution to say, no, I become the president when there's a vacancy. I assume the office in totality, all of its powers, all of its duties and privileges. I am now president of the United States. And he Tyler, notably, he's at his home in Williamsburg, in Virginia. And when he gets news of Harrison's death, he rushes up to Washington to get inaugurated by a circuit judge as soon as possible, so he can assert this. But throughout his presidency, his opponents will say he gets the nickname his accidency as the first accidental president. He is his accidentcy. And his opponents, like including Henry Clay, a prominent senator at the time, former president John Quincy Adams, will both say he's the acting president. He was not meant to be the president. He should be the acting president. But Tyler, even when he gets mail that says to the vice president or to the acting president, he sends it back. He refuses to acknowledge those statements or correspondence that will not address him by what he believes is his official title. But in doing that, he does set what's called the Tyler precedent because after him, every vice president who faces a presidential vacancy became the president. So Tyler kind of endured the slings and arrows of his opponents, but he fundamentally was not challenged in a significant way. His legitimacy was questioned, but he asserted in such a way and used the power of his office in such a way that it solidified the vice president becomes the president.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

It's so interesting because you don't, you know, especially with John Tyler, like you don't realize there are problems with something until this happens, right? Until a sitting president doesn't put a coat on for his inauguration and dies. So over time, Congress has expanded this line of succession beyond the vice president. What debates or concerns have surrounded who should be included in that line?

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Yeah, that's a very good question. So the initial line of succession set in the 1790s, in a way, kind of followed what the delegates at the convention were thinking, because it was, of course, president, vice president. But then the initial succession act had it be the Senate, president pro tempore, then the speaker of the house, and then it might go through some cabinet offices. You jumped to 1886, and they change the succession act. Now it's not going to be president, vice president, and then the leaders of Congress. Now it went to cabinet officers

Who Belongs In The Succession Line

SPEAKER_01 15:33

in order of their creation. So Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of War at that time, and so on. 1947, changed it again, this time under another accidental president, Harry Truman. And part of Truman's argument was that you needed the presidency to go to somebody who had electoral legitimacy. So obviously the president and vice president, elected by the nation as a whole. Truman changes the order, though, from what it had been initially. So now it's Speaker of the House, then the Senate pro tem, then various cabinet officers. So in that case, part of Truman's argument is that the Speaker of the House, being elected by the representatives of the House, served as its own kind of indirect national election, right? That those representatives are the branch closest to the people in terms of their election, you know, localities and districts and things. And then because they're electing the speaker, that's as a kind of approximation of an electoral college of a popular vote. We might even think of it as a kind of prime minister sort of situation that they would have in Britain, right? That the members of the legislature elect their leader. So Truman took that as well, the Speaker is the closest to a national officer after the president and vice president. So that's why he changes the order. But it does raise some questions about, you know, especially if Congress is of a different party than the president, same issue we saw with Adams and Jefferson, but now if the Speaker of the House, say the Speaker of the House right now was a Democrat, something were to happen to President Trump or Vice President Vance. Would it the Democrat have the legitimacy to use the office of the presidency in the same way? Or would they, would there be some expectation that they should carry out the Trump agenda? That obviously would create a lot of political problems for them and probably for the country as a whole. Indeed, this is part of what happens during the Watergate scandal, where uh I'm sure we'll talk about this more in a minute, where President Nixon is Republican, Spear Agnew becomes one of the first, becomes the second vice president to resign the office after he gets into some legal trouble. We don't need to go into detail on exactly what tax evasion, I think, is yes and bribery. So Spear Agnew resigns, that means the Democratic speaker, Carl Albert, is next in line. And there was some discussion of well, should Congress maybe not fill the vice presidency? So if something happens to Nixon, the Democrats now get a president. And to I think his great credit, Speaker Albert said, no, that's not how this works. We shouldn't try to seize the presidency by these means. We need to follow constitutional procedures. Um, so it raises those partisan questions, but there are also questions about the legislative branch being involved in the executive branch. Does it make more sense for cabinet officials who are involved in executive branch policy to be the successors to the president as they were in 1886? Are they more properly officers of the United States in the legal sense than legislative officers? So, would it make more sense for Secretary Rubio to be the next in line after Vice President Vance? So those are the kind of the debates that Congress has had to deal with here on thinking through what might happen in the terrible event that both the vice, both the presidency and the vice presidency are vacant.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

And that, I mean, the Spiro Agnew and Nixon and Gerald Ford, like that's its own very interesting case study. So the vice presidency has really evolved from this marginal role to kind of a central part of executive leadership. What drove that transformation?

SPEAKER_01 19:25

Yeah, that's a very interesting story because you do see the early vice presidents. Well, as John Adams said, that the vice presidency is the most insignificant office that the mind of man has conceived or his imagination contrived, or something along those lines. It goes from this kind of stopgap to solve problems, but pretty insignificant. Because most vice presidents just presided over the Senate and were very rarely needed to do much of anything until you get to the 20th century. And then there's this slow development as the vice president's vice presidency starts to move into the executive

How The Vice Presidency Became Powerful

SPEAKER_01 20:01

branch. So you start to see in Woodrow Wilson, when he goes overseas after World War I, allows his vice president to oversee cabinet meetings. But really kicks off in the 1950s when Dwight Eisenhower starts to give vice then vice president Nixon things to do. So really it comes about from presidents being willing to delegate executive power to their vice presidents. It really begins with Nixon, expands through the 1960s until you get to Walter Mondale in the 1970s under Jimmy Carter, where he has a memo that he sends to Jimmy Carter that says, this is what I envision the vice presidency to be. And of course, a much closer relationship to the president, getting intelligence briefings, all these sorts of things. So the modern vice presidency, as we think about it, comes about from presidents being willing to bring the vice president in and give them more to do. Because constitutionally speaking, all the vice president's authority is legislative, their constitutional authority. Any other authority that they have, task forces they run, policy agendas they pursue, all these sorts of things is really at the discretion of the president. Hubert Humphrey, who was Lyndon Johnson's vice president, had the slide about the president giveth and the president taketh away. For the vice presidency, in terms of its authority, that's exactly it. If Donald Trump today decided, yeah, I don't really want Vance doing much of anything, he could do that. He could just say, I'm taking away all your portfolios, go preside in the Senate. Because that's your only real job. If the president wanted to do that, they could do that. But of course, it's very helpful to have vice presidents acting in this assistant president role that we tend to think of. But again, that's a very modern conception of the vice presidency.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

So you know, the 25th amendment really kind of Of clarifies and also reshapes our understanding of presidential succession and also incapacity. So, how does it do that? Because when you brought up Dwight Eisenhower, I remember reading a story about how, you know, he had had a heart attack and he was in the hospital. And, you know, we've all seen these dramas on TV, right? On the West Wing, on any other show that shows, you know, if the president has to go under general anesthesia, like how does this 25th Amendment kind of clarify and reshape this understanding?

SPEAKER_01 22:32

Yeah. It's funny when you watch these political shows, it's always usually you can almost guarantee they're going to have some kind of election thing where there's a contingent election in the House and some crisis over the 25th

The 25th Amendment And Incapacity

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Amendment because those are interesting things and we don't see them. Thankfully, we don't see them, I think. Yes. As much as a the political scientist part of me sometimes thinks it'd be great to just kind of see what that looks like. But then citizen me thinks, no, it's probably good that we don't see these things. I mean, for the 25th Amendment, Eisenhower, I think, is a good example of this. He has these heart attacks, and while he's incapacitated, he has some letters that he just puts in his desk that says, you know, Nixon can do this, that, and the other while I'm incapacitated. But that's not a formal process, right? That's that's a very risky thing. Just like, oh, did the president happen to sign a letter before he had an unexpected heart attack? Or, you know, I think what really clarified things for people was the Kennedy assassination in 1963. What if instead of dying at the time, Kennedy had slipped into a coma for perhaps months on end? In fact, you kind of see this earlier with James Garfield back in the 1880s, when Garfield is uh shot, he lives for several months. And the cabinet really doesn't know what to do because Garfield really can't do anything in terms of presiding over meetings, but also his vice president Chester Arthur doesn't have the authority to do anything either. So the administration kind of freezes up. And I think that realization after the Kennedy assassination in the context of a Cold War, where you need especially a powerful executive to perhaps respond to nuclear questions that come up. You just had the Cuban Missile Crisis the year before, really highlights the need for this continuity that we're talking about, not just in the event of a vacancy, but in the event of incapacity. So what you see is Indiana Senator Birch Bai introduces the 25th Amendment, but notably too, back to this idea of the assistant president, he argues for it partially on this basis of the vice, the conception of the vice presidency as an assistant president. So he's kind of bought into this modern understanding of the vice presidency. And the 25th Amendment, in some ways, is constructed to assert that conception of the vice presidency. And I should note too, part of the 25th Amendment is to do with vice presidential vacancies. It's kind of surprising. A lot of vice presidents, maybe not a lot, but more than you would think have died in office. And because there was no vice presidential succession or method of I mean, there's vice president of succession, turns out to the Senate pro tem or something else. They just it remained vacant. So when John Tyler became president in 1841, he just didn't have a vice president. Andrew Johnson, when he's being impeached in 1868, there's speculation that part of the reason he doesn't get removed is because his successor would have been the Senate president pro temporor, Benjamin Wade, who is a very radical Republican. So part of the issue the 25th Amendment has to deal with is, you know, maybe we should actually fill in the vice presidency if there's a death in office, or if the vice president becomes the president. Maybe they need a vice president now. So the 25th Amendment does several things. One, it codifies the Tyler precedent. So now it's not just practice, the vice president becomes president, set in the constitution. Two, it creates that process for filling a vice presidential vacancy, that the president would be able to nominate somebody and they'd have to be approved by both houses of Congress. Three, this question of incapacity. If the president is incapacitated, the vice president can become the acting president. Now, this is where it does get a little tricky in terms of, well, who declares incapacity? So the president, of course, can do it himself. And we've seen that a few times, like you mentioned earlier, uh, various presidents going under general anesthesia. I think President Biden did this, so Kamala Harris was acting president for a while, the first woman to serve as acting president during her term as vice president. So I mean, usually you see that like I think Dick Cheney said when he was acting president while George W. Bush had some kind of uh medical operation, he just wrote letters to his grandkids or something. You know, there's that's nice. But of course, if there had been a crisis, he could deal with it. Yes. Yeah. But then there was this question of well, okay, what if the president surgery is one thing, of course, medical emergencies are another, but who gets to declare incapacity? So there is a procedure in the 25th Amendment that the vice president and a majority of the cabinet could declare the president incapacitated. The president could, of course, respond, no, I'm not, in which case it goes to Congress to decide who's right and who's really in charge. Thankfully, we haven't had that. But at the same time, too, I think thinking through the institutional incentives, it's unlikely you would see that because the vice president and the cabinet are so tied to the presidency. So it strikes me that only in the most extreme cases of true presidential incapacity would you see a vice president and cabinet, all of whom owe their positions, and the cabinet officials at least are removable by the president to actually act against the president. So, you know, you've heard in recent years people saying, oh, the 25th Amendment should be invoked, but the political incentives really are set up in such a way that it has to be the most extreme case to actually convince a vice president and a cabinet to do that to the president.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

And it's so interesting, too, when you talk about, you know, the Kennedy assassination and how essentially the Tyler precedent is what I don't want to say made everybody accept Lyndon Johnson, but it just at the time, you know, felt like this is what needs to happen. There needs to be somebody who's at the helm. But then again, it's not really codified until the 25th amendment. And then I do want to just talk about the little story because I think my students always really loved learning about how Gerald Ford became president. And she was, he is the only president that we have had that has not been elected to the presidency or vice presidency. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Oh, absolutely. Now being in Michigan, I'm obligated to tell board stories as much as I can. Also, I have to say he was born in Omaha, Nebraska, which I'm also from Omaha, Nebraska. So Midwest. Proud member of the Omaha to Michigan club here. So yeah, the 25th Amendment really comes in just in time in the late 60s. All the we'll just say shenanigans

Watergate And Ford’s Unelected Presidency

SPEAKER_01 29:29

that are Watergate and Spear Agnew. So, you know, Nixon, Richard Nixon, and Spear Agnew re-elected to the presidency of vice president in 1972. Of course, the issues with Watergate. And as I mentioned earlier, Spear Agnew has his own legal trouble. So he resigns in 1973. Now, with the 25th Amendment, Nixon is able to appoint his own vice president, right? So this is what I mean by it came just in time. Only a few years before had the 25th Amendment been ratified. So Nixon is able to pick his own vice president. Now, what's interesting there is we have memos of who Nixon is looking at. And at one point, House Speaker Carl Albert, who I mentioned earlier, saying, No, we actually do need a vice president. Because here's where some of the Democrats went to him and said, if you just don't confirm anybody, and something happens to Nixon or he has to leave due to Watergate, you're the guy. And Albert says, I don't want to be the guy. That's not how this is supposed to work. So but he kind of puts Nixon in a bind. So later he'll say, Congress made Jerry Ford president, because Gerald Ford is the House minority leader at the time. So long-standing member, served a quarter century in Congress by this point, member of the leadership. So he's in terms of getting somebody through, and a hostile Congress. We have to remember Congress is heavily Democratic at this point against Nixon, the Republican. So the kind of Republican that Nixon could get, kind of similar to a Supreme Court justice nomination, really. The kind of Republican that Nixon could get, he's a bit constrained. So Gerald Ford was probably the best he could do to have a relatively easy confirmation, which Ford does. I mean, his nomination hearings are fascinating because you do get an insight into his constitutional thought. But Ford becomes vice president, long story short, Ford becomes vice president. Less than a year later, Nixon resigns the presidency. And so Ford goes right up the chain, becomes president without ever having faced a national electorate. And then, of course, he is forced to nominate his own vice presidential pick to fill the spot that he had just vacated. So a similar issue. He has to figure out who's acceptable to Congress, who will help shore up his political position, and he goes with New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who's considered more of a liberal Republican at the time. So it's an interesting thing that the 25th Amendment, the only two times it's been used really for presidential succession and then vice presidential vacancies, were less than 10 years after it was ratified in the quick succession of the Nixon Ford and then Ford Rockefeller vacancies.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

And it's again, like you said, like just in time, because I cannot imagine the political upheaval that that would have caused if the 25th Amendment wasn't there as a guide. I have one final question, and it might be a very unfair question, but you're, you know, we talk so much about vice presidents. Do you have, and I'm not going to say a favorite because I hate that question, but do you have a vice president that you feel is really interesting to study or to research? Because I am the kind of listener that when I listen to podcasts like this, I'm like, I want to go down a rabbit hole, but I need a vice president to start with. Who would you suggest?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Obviously, I've studied John Tyler quite a bit. In fact, in my book, The Isolated Presidency, it looks at presidents who are unelected, face divided government, and were opposed by uh major factions of their political parties. So Tyler is one that's obviously there. But also I've looked at Andrew Johnson and Gerald Ford. But of course,

Which Vice Presidents Are Worth Studying

SPEAKER_01 33:18

what I look at with them is their presidencies, not their vice presidencies. So usually when people talk about interesting vice presidents, it's because they became president later. That's what makes them interesting. So I'm going to try to focus on just folks who stayed vice president or didn't go up the ladder, so to speak. And I think in that case, if we're just going to look at vice presidents who never became president, I think probably the most interesting for your listeners would probably be John C. Calhoun. And I'll explain that. So John C. Calhoun was vice president from 1829 to 1832. I'm sorry, from 18. Excuse me. He was vice president from 1825 to 1832. What makes Calhoun interesting is in the election of 1824, you have four candidates running, right? So really a single-party system of the Democratic-Republican Party. John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, who's Secretary of the Treasury, and Henry Clay, who's Speaker of the House. John C. Calhoun, in some ways, is everybody's second pick, right? He's everybody's second choice. So he becomes the vice presidential nominee effectively for both Adams and Jackson. So when Adams and Jackson go to a contingent election in the House, Calhoun's set. He's basically been elected vice president before the president has been chosen because he's both of their nominee, their vice presidential running mate. The thing is, though, it quickly becomes apparent that when Adams wins the presidency in 1824, that Calhoun doesn't actually agree with Adams on a lot of stuff. And Calhoun actually starts acting against Adams. So if you look at tie-breaking votes, Calhoun is casting quite a few against the priorities of the Adams administration. And at the time, the Senate rules allowed vice presidents to choose committees. And Calhoun would make sure they're that committees were equally balanced between anti-Adams people and pro-Adams people, which of course, if you're supposed to be working with the administration, you want to stack those committees. So Calhoun gets on Adams' bad side pretty quick. Well, when Jackson runs against Adams again in 1828, Calhoun is right there, ready to run with him. So Calhoun actually becomes vice president for both John Quincy Adams and for Andrew Jackson. He serves under two different presidents. But then he doesn't get along with Jackson either. You have the whole nullification crisis that's really manned by Calhoun. And Andrew Jackson later says he has two regrets in life. One was uh not shooting Henry Clay and not hanging John C. Calhoun. So you can see how that relates to a little, a little, but I suppose that those are your only two regrets in life. That's that says something about you. So Calhoun is a very interesting figure because he's so prominent. Everybody thought he was going to be president. And he serves as vice president under these two pretty historic figures, John Quincy Allen and Andrew Jackson. And he, of course, goes on, Calhoun goes on to have quite a career really representing the South and to be kind of the embodiment of that the antebellum Southern thought and Southern political structure. So continues as senator, continues as a secretary of state uh at least once. So a very prominent vice president, who, in a way, the vice presidency is just part of his general profile. So that'd be something interesting. Another one that is interesting for similar reasons, though, is FDR's first vice president, John Nance Garner. So Franklin Roosevelt has three vice presidents during his 12 years in office. For his first two terms, it's John Nance Garner, who's a Southern Democrat from Texas. Then after that, Henry Wallace, who actually is also interesting. So your listeners might want to look at him too. And then finally, Harry Truman, who gets in just before FDR dies. So the other, the others served 12 years as FDR's vice president. And it's Truman, who only serves for a month, who becomes the president, which is kind of talk about historical timing again. But John Nance Garner had been Speaker of the House. So he's one of, he may be the only figure, I think, who is presiding over both the House of Representatives and the Senate as Speaker of the House and vice president. So he's got quite a career in and of himself, too. But Garner, he's on board with Roosevelt for most of the first term. But then in the second term, when FDR starts pushing court packing in 1937, when he wants to reorganize the executive branch and do these various things, Garner splits from him. So similar to Calhoun, Garner becomes one of these figures who starts opposing his own president, organizing the opposition, really becomes leader of what's called the conservative coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats and Southern Democrats. Garner becomes a leader, which is ultimately why FDR goes with somebody else in 1940. Also because Garner runs against FDR in 1940, saying the two-term tradition is important. FDR has hit his two terms. We should not allow a third. Of course, FDR defeats him, picks a different vice president, but he's another figure who has this fascinating relationship with his president, who is a loyal Democrat. He wants to be a loyal soldier, but ultimately he splits and becomes one of Roosevelt's probably most prominent opponents during those first two terms.

SPEAKER_00 38:55

That is so interesting. Now I have these names and I am definitely going to be digging in. I will say that, you know, you had brought up Nixon before as a vice president. Nixon's political career always intrigued me after visiting the Nixon library in Yorbalinda, California. Of it is very interesting that somebody who was vice president, you know, became president, but not until later. So Dr. Cash, thank you so much. I just I think that, you know, when we think of vice presidents, I'm gonna be honest, a lot of the people you named, I'm like never heard of them, right? Because they're not supposed to be these important figures, but then there are some that aren't point important. You mentioned your book, and I know that you have a couple of books. So we readers and listeners, we will be putting those in our show notes. So you talked about the isolated presidency, and then you have another one about adding the lone star, John Tyler, Sam Houston, and the annexation of Texas, which, as a Southwesterner here in Arizona, I find that fascinating. So we will make sure to put all of those in the show notes. Dr. Cash, thank you so much for again talking about the vice presidency, the 25th Amendment, and just all of the really intriguing stuff that goes with it.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.