Six Crises

by Richard Nixon

  Jim Hagerty returned from Europe and, at the request of the reporters, arranged my first and the only formal White House press conference I was ever to have. In both meetings with the press, my task was to reassure the nation and the world that President Eisenhower was making a rapid recovery, had no intention of resigning, and that the Administration was carrying on business as usual.

  The public reacted quite differently to the stroke from the way it had to the heart attack. A mental illness is somehow more terrifying than a physical one. During the heart attack, the nation worried if the President would live or die but not about his ability to carry on if he recovered. This was not the case during the stroke. The public seemed to say: okay, he may get well, but will he ever be the same again? I received hundreds of letters evoking the mythology of the dark ages on insanity, mental aberrations, and the like.

  A considerable segment of the press, including a cross section of political persuasion, called on the President to resign. Even the New York Post, the most anti-Nixon of all newspapers, said editorially: “The issue is whether the U. S. is to have Richard Nixon as President or no President. We choose Nixon.” The Washington Post, the Providence Journal, and columnist Walter Lippmann said the President should delegate his powers to me temporarily for the period of his convalescence.

  The problem of maintaining public confidence was far greater in November 1957 than it had been back in 1955, probably because now the President was sixty-seven years old, had had three major illnesses, and his second term stretched out for three more years. Few newspapers failed to mention the fact that if the President survived he would be past seventy, the oldest President in history at the end of his term of office. Several newspapers, periodicals, and columnists recalled the President’s own words on resigning, spoken at a press conference back on March 7, 1956: “I have said unless I felt absolutely up to the performance of the duties of the President, the second that I didn’t, I would no longer be there in the job or I wouldn’t be available for the job.”

  But the President’s reaction to the stroke was quite different from his reaction to the heart attack. In 1955 there had been great periods of indecision and despondency when he thought he really wanted to give up, retire, and rest. After the stroke, he fought back. He followed his doctors’ advice and took it easy around his living quarters for three days, but on the fourth day, aware of the public doubts about his ability, he escorted Mrs. Eisenhower to church. It was Thanksgiving Day, and I remember it particularly because when I got home for my Thanksgiving meal after seeing Mohammed V off at the airport, I found that Julie, my younger daughter, who was then nine, had made separate place cards for each one in the family. Written on a page from one of my yellow pads, in red crayon, mine read: BE STRONG—BE WISE—BE THOUGHT—FUL—BE KIND.

  Throughout the next two weeks, the President, rather than resting, pushed himself into ever-increasing activity, attended meetings, conferred with staff and, while many lesser chores were routed to subordinates, reacted belligerently when anyone tried to shield him from an important issue. “Either I run this damn show, or I’ll resign,” he said on more than one occasion. But the emphasis always was on his running the “damn show,” not on resigning. Extremely sensitive to any suggestion that he was not able to do the job, the President brushed aside any expressions of sympathy and struggled to avoid giving any impression of weakness or disability.

  Now he spoke of “dying with my boots on” and insisted on going to the NATO meeting in Paris. He wanted to hold a press conference before leaving to prove to the press that he was able to carry on, but I joined Hagerty and others in convincing him that the trip to NATO alone would reassure the nation of his health.

  Actually the President went through a terribly agonizing period of frustration with his ailment. The problem was that the ideas produced by his ever-active mind were dammed up. He could not think of the words to express them. His cerebral occlusion affected the area of his brain which communicated his thoughts into words. The block scrambled the chain of communication and the words would not match the thoughts. However, the President’s attack was mild. Within twenty-four hours there was a noticeable improvement in his speech, leaving only an occasional mix-up of words. For instance, the President might want to say “tomorrow,” but instead, “yesterday” would come out, or he would become temporarily blocked on a particular word. To a man as high-strung as Eisenhower, this difficulty became at times extremely frustrating and irritating, and he had been warned by his doctors that such frustration might aggravate his injury or cause another stroke. This made it doubly frustrating.1

  Among friends and intimates he could laugh off the occasional blooper, but he was very sensitive about it with others. Normally a fast talker, he was forced now to measure and choose his words.

  During this period, those of us around him did our best to help him keep his spirits up. I recall one conversation we had after he had met with the congressional leaders for the first time since his stroke. The meeting had gone extremely well, but I could see that he had been distressed by minor slips in pronouncing words which others around the table had not even noticed. Consequently I called Ann Whitman and made an appointment to see him that afternoon. I reported to him that the unanimous opinion of the legislative leaders was that he had carried off the meeting with no difficulty. Lev Saltonstall, who sat next to me at the Cabinet table at these meetings, I told him, had arrived late while the President was talking and had leaned over to me and whispered that he was unable to notice any word difficulty whatever.

  The President was obviously relieved and pleased to get this report. He had attended this meeting before the doctors’ schedule for recovery from the stroke indicated it would be wise for him to participate in such conferences. But he said he had to prove to himself that he was able to do the job. If he had been unable to come to this meeting, it would have been necessary for him to do some “very hard and tough thinking about the future.”

  I also pointed out that the columnists and editorial writers who were suggesting that he should delegate duties or should resign, and who were criticizing him on the ground that he could no longer be a full-time, vigorous President, were for the most part in the camp of those who never really had been for him. I said they had simply been waiting for some incident which would give them an excuse for expressing their opposition openly.

  He smiled and said that he didn’t pay any attention to the columnists because he didn’t read what they wrote. But I knew that this was one of his stock statements which was not actually based on facts. Jim Hagerty had told me before I went in to see the President that he had been reading a considerable number of columns and editorials and had been disturbed by the tone they were taking.

  I urged the President not to let his critics in the press force him into a course of action which was not in the best interests of his health or of the presidency. I pointed out that he was vitally needed—that the whole country realized how imperative it was for him to make the great decisions affecting our future, and that he owed a duty to keep himself in shape to make those decisions. I suggested that without any public announcement he could talk to his Cabinet and the intimate members of his staff and suggest that they should undertake to process some of the problems before they reached him for final decision. I noted that particularly in the domestic field there was no reason why a Cabinet officer had to come to him every time he had a decision to make.

  He told me that he was going to Gettysburg over the weekend and that in his absence he did not feel it was necessary for me or others on the White House staff to undertake any of the responsibilities of holding meetings. He pointed out that this was in my best interests, too, because of the possible impression otherwise of my stepping in and exerting authority.

  As distinguished from the situation during the heart attack, he now wanted no impression whatever to be left either that he was not running the show or was unable to run it. He told me for the first time that he was conside
ring the advisability of writing a letter to me in which he would state expressly what he wanted the Vice President to do in the event of presidential illness. Finally he indicated that looking to the future he was going to watch carefully how he recovered his health and that if he did not progress beyond the point that he currently had reached, he would have to make a decision to relinquish some or all of his duties. The continued frustration of being unable to express himself would create too great a risk of another injury, which would leave the country in very bad shape. Before I left, I pointed out that in his conversation with me, which lasted almost an hour, he had hardly had any noticeable difficulty with his words. I said that he was a man who was greatly blessed in that—clearly apart from his present difficulty—he always had had a mind that worked much faster than his mouth, and that with most people the situation was reversed. He laughed and said that this reminded him of the joke about the politician who could always be counted on to have his mouth open and his mind closed.

  The question of delegating authority during a President’s temporary disability came up for discussion several times during this period. It had become apparent that the Democratic Congress would not go along with the Administration’s or anyone’s plan to allow the Vice President to become acting President during the President’s disability. Eisenhower had put Herbert Brownell, then Attorney General, to work after the heart attack on a plan of delegating authority, but it got nowhere. After the stroke, Bill Rogers, who had by then succeeded Brownell, went into the problem; legislation was prepared by the Administration and had bipartisan support, but again Congress would do nothing on the subject. The reason was purely political and obvious. The Democratic congressional leaders would not approve any plan which might put Richard Nixon in the White House before the 1960 election. The press had already portrayed me as being on the “threshold” of the presidency; the Democratic politicians wanted no part in carrying me across that threshold.

  The President’s eye was on something far more important than the political implications: he wanted someone there with the authority to act in his behalf in a crisis or national emergency if he should again become incapacitated. The problem of presidential disability is complex, dating back to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when Delaware’s Delegate John Dickinson brought it up and got no answer.

  Authorities and experts have written books on the subject, all dealing with the ambiguity of Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the Constitution, which says:

  In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what officer shall then act as President, and such officer shall act accordingly, until the disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

  Simply stated, this clause does not make clear: who decides when the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office? just what devolves upon the Vice President, the “powers and duties” or the “office” itself? can the President resume office once he has given it up? who decides if the President is well enough to resume his office, if he can at all?

  Anyone, I think, can imagine two dozen troublesome contingencies which might become involved in passing the powers of a President to a Vice President, and constitutional lawyers, who have studied the question for more than a hundred years, can think of two hundred more. President Eisenhower, after studying the problem closely, was intent on solving the practical problem of giving his Vice President the authority to act immediately in a crisis, if necessary. He mentioned several alternatives, but kept coming back to the idea of writing a letter which would give the Vice President alone the authority to decide when the President was unable to carry on—that is, when the President himself was unable to make the decision.

  In early February, the President called Rogers and me into his office, commented that he thought he had licked the problem, and handed each of us a copy of a letter. Then he leaned back in his chair and, while we followed on our copies, he read a four-page letter to us, beginning, “Dear Dick.” We made some minor suggestions and he incorporated them into the letter and then sent it on to his secretary, Ann Whitman, for final typing. Marked PERSONAL AND SECRET, one copy went to me, one to Bill Rogers as Attorney General, and one to John Foster Dulles, as Secretary of State and ranking member of the Cabinet.

  With the exception of our very minor suggestions, the letter was wholly Eisenhower’s in concept and drafting, and it was a masterpiece. Leaving the White House, Bill Rogers remarked that Eisenhower would have made an outstanding lawyer, for the letter handled the contingencies of a very complex problem from every angle and was as good a drafting job as any constitutional expert could have done.

  The President made public the following key paragraphs:

  The President and the Vice President have agreed that the following procedures are in accord with the purposes and provisions of Article 2, Section 1, of the Constitution, dealing with Presidential inability. They believe that these procedures, which are intended to apply to themselves only, are in no sense outside or contrary to the Constitution but are consistent with its present provisions and implement its clear intent.

  (1) In the event of inability the President would—if possible—so inform the Vice President, and the Vice President would serve as Acting President, exercising the powers and duties of the office until the inability had ended.

  (2) In the event of an inability which would prevent the President from so communicating with the Vice President, the Vice President, after such consultation as seems to him appropriate under the circumstances, would decide upon the devolution of the powers and duties of the Office and would serve as Acting President until the inability had ended.

  (3) The President, in either event, would determine when the inability had ended and at that time would resume the full exercise of the powers and duties of the Office.

  This letter established historical precedent. Eisenhower was the first President in American history to take cognizance of and act upon a serious gap in our Constitution. President Kennedy, even before his inauguration, drew up an identical list of procedures for his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, to follow in exercising the rights and duties of the President in the event of Kennedy’s incapacity. The new Administration adopted in its entirety the section of the Eisenhower letter which was made public, and it would be fair to assume that President Kennedy’s successor will follow the precedent.

  But what must be clearly understood is that the agreement President Eisenhower set forth in his letter to me, and the one President Kennedy has entered into with Vice President Johnson, are only as good as the will of the parties to keep them. Presidents and Vice Presidents have not always had the mutual trust and the cordial relations President Eisenhower had with me or that President Kennedy has had with Vice President Johnson up to this time. Jealousies and rivalries can develop within an Administration which could completely destroy such an agreement.

  Only a constitutional amendment can solve the problem on a permanent basis. President Eisenhower’s agreement with me was personal and had the force of his authority only during his term of office. President Kennedy’s agreement is similarly limited. These agreements, which are mere expressions of a President’s desires, do not have the force of law. Even a law passed by Congress might be subject to constitutional challenge. However, such a law would express the will of Congress and should be passed while the incumbent President is in good health and before a presidential election year drags politics into an already complex problem. The experiences of Garfield, Wilson, and Eisenhower should have taught us a lesson. Surely the time has come for a truly bipartisan program to draw up a constitutional amendment which would define the rights and duties of a Vice President during any period when the President of the United States is
incapacitated.

  The urgent need for such an amendment becomes crystal clear when a President is disabled, but that is precisely the time when politics bar any reasonable agreement on the wording of such an amendment. The time to begin solving this problem is now, when the incumbent President is in good health and at a safe distance from the politics of a presidential election year. It is hardly necessary to point out that these perilous times in which we live will continue, and more than ever before our nation will need an able and healthy Chief Executive or acting Chief Executive at all times.

  Action on this problem will have important side effects as well. It will assure the continued useful employment of the Vice President as a deputy of the President rather than as a fifth wheel in the government, another precedent established by Eisenhower. The Vice President will thus become an integrated member of the incumbent Administration, able and ready to take over the rights and duties of the President if it becomes necessary. This being true, it also will bolster the new political trend of selecting capable men as vice presidential nominees, men to whom the presidential nominee would be willing to turn over his duties during a period of disability, rather than the selection of men solely on geographical, factional, or party appeasement considerations.