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00:00In the nation's capital during the middle decades of the 20th century, a joke was making
00:22the rounds about a luckless mother who had two grown sons, neither of whom was ever heard
00:28from again. One was lost at sea. The other became vice president.
00:41It's this weird situation with the vice presidency where you're the running mate, you're the
00:45other face on the political campaign button, but unless the president of the United States
00:50wants to give you something to do, you can basically sit around twiddling your thumbs.
00:56It's historically seen as a political death sentence.
01:00Nobody in the history of America, nobody in the history of the world has ever looked at
01:05themselves in the mirror and said, if I do everything right, someday I'll be vice president.
01:14And yet, the vice president has been key to the continuity of government since the early
01:20years of the republic and were a bookie to calculate the odds of a vice president succeeding
01:26to the presidency rather than being elected to it. They would shake out at roughly one
01:33in five.
01:34Eight times in history, a U.S. president has died in office. One time in history, a president
01:39has resigned. There were at least 19 times in history where the president of the United
01:44States was almost assassinated, almost died of illness, and almost died due to accident.
01:50So it's sort of shocking to me that despite that history, we don't pay more attention
01:56to the seriousness of the office.
02:14When the clock started on that infamous Friday, the 22nd of November, 1963, no one could see
02:27what was coming or the way the events of that morning would focus attention on the American
02:33vice presidency. But in the recollection of Lady Bird Johnson, the vice president's wife,
02:41it began with the clouds parting.
02:44After a drizzling morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We're going into Dallas.
02:55The president's train is now touching down, and the president and Mrs. Kennedy have arrived
03:02at Dallas, Longfield. The vice president and Mrs. Johnson are stepping to the foot of the
03:09In the lead car, President and Mrs. Kennedy. And then a Secret Service car full of men.
03:26And then our car.
03:29There are hardly any clouds in the northern skies, and the president will be riding in
03:37the open.
03:38The streets were lined with people, lots and lots of children, all smiling.
03:47We were rounding the curve, going downhill. Suddenly, there was a sharp, loud report.
03:59A shot, and then two more.
04:07I heard over the radio system, let's get out of here.
04:17And our Secret Service man, who was with us, vaulted over the front seat on top of Lyndon,
04:27threw him to the floor, and said, get down.
04:37Pinned down in the back seat, Vice President Lyndon Johnson had no visual of what was happening,
04:45only the sensation of picking up speed.
04:49It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route. Stand by just a moment,
04:56please. There has been a shooting, I repeat, a shooting in the motorcade in the downtown
05:02area. Portland Hospital has been advised to stand by for a severe gunshot wound.
05:07And the first unconfirmed reports say the president was hit in the head.
05:12Police have been ordered, emergency supplies of blood also being rushed to the hospital.
05:20As of that grim morning, Johnson had been Vice President of the United States for two
05:25years, ten months, and two days, and by his own account, he had detested every minute of it.
05:33President Johnson was what he'd had in mind, an ambition first announced at 17 or so,
05:40then doggedly pursued straight into the halls of Congress. He'd been elected Senate Minority
05:45Leader at 46, and Majority Leader the following year, the youngest man ever to hold that post.
05:53By 1960, he wielded so much power in Washington that he'd waited until the very last minute
06:00to declare his candidacy for president, expecting to best the primary favorite John Kennedy
06:07in the back rooms at the Democratic National Convention.
06:11But that had proved a serious miscalculation.
06:14And on the balloting, it's a Kennedy landslide.
06:18Since the chairman, Wyoming's vote will make a majority for Senator Kennedy.
06:26With no shot at the top of the ticket, Johnson had settled for running mate,
06:31persuaded the Democrats could not win the election without him.
06:35The vice presidency was, for Johnson, as for so many who had held the office before him,
06:42a consolation prize without consolation.
06:47Denied an office in the West Wing and a seat on Air Force One,
06:52disdained by Kennedy's urbane inner circle, who snidely referred to the Texas-born VP
06:57and his wife as Uncle Corn Pone and his little lamb chop,
07:02Johnson had become, as one observer put it, a man without a purpose,
07:07a great horse in a very small corral.
07:10Are you familiar with the name Lyndon Johnson?
07:13No.
07:14Pardon me?
07:15No.
07:16No?
07:17No, sir.
07:18No?
07:20He's not president.
07:21John Kennedy knew Johnson was a restless person,
07:25and he assigned him to some, you know, sort of mediocre commissions and different things,
07:32you know, just to kind of keep him busy.
07:35And he also turned Johnson into a roving diplomat,
07:38traveling around the world and meeting with world leaders.
07:42I think Kennedy's attitude was that he didn't really need the vice president nearby.
07:48He didn't need the vice president involved in the day-to-day business of the administration.
07:54If Johnson gamely played his part, he did so knowing it was only a show.
08:00The vice presidency is filled with trips around the world,
08:03chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of councils, he once said.
08:10But in the end, it is nothing.
08:12Standing with his wife now, though, in a close, curtained-off room at Dallas' Parkland Hospital,
08:19his office suddenly took on a new cast.
08:24I think it was from Kenny O'Donnell that I first heard the words,
08:32the president is dead.
08:35I think LBJ is contemplating and trying to make sense of a lot of things that are happening very fast.
08:44He's about to get the job that he's always wanted, but this isn't how he wants it.
08:48From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.
08:572 o'clock Eastern Standard Time.
09:002 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.
09:06Vice President, either soon to be or already president of the United States,
09:10Lyndon Johnson was at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas at the time or near the time
09:15of the official announcement of the death of the 35th president of this country, John F. Kennedy.
09:21The Secret Service at this moment, or as of a few moments ago,
09:24was saying that Mr. Johnson's whereabouts would not be revealed for security reasons.
09:29I solemnly swear that I will faithfully...
09:35I knew it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay, Johnson remembered.
09:43The nation was in a state of shock and grief.
09:46The entire world was watching us through a magnifying glass.
09:50I had to prove myself.
09:53I will do my best.
09:56That is all I can do.
10:00I ask for your help and God's.
10:08It was a paradox of the Vice Presidency that the first to hold the office, John Adams, had been quick to grasp.
10:15As he had put it,
10:17I am the Vice President.
10:19In this, I am nothing.
10:21But I may be everything.
10:29Good evening.
10:30History has been trying to tell us something about the Vice Presidency.
10:34The office was added as an afterthought to the Constitution,
10:37which as a document has been called the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man.
10:44But by the time the Founding Fathers got around to the Vice Presidency,
10:48they were weary and impatient, and the flaws of their haste have haunted us ever since.
10:55The U.S. Constitution assigned precisely two responsibilities to the Vice President,
11:01a job description so slight that a member of the first Congress suggested the position be compensated on a per diem basis.
11:10The Vice President really has two roles,
11:13to be there in case something happens to the President, to stand in for him, take his place,
11:19or cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
11:24The Founding Fathers really didn't give the Vice Presidency much thought.
11:30They thought even less about succession.
11:33I think that's fascinating because people didn't live that long back then.
11:39The Constitution said in case of the removal of the President,
11:43or his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the duties of said office,
11:49the same shall devolve on the Vice President.
11:53They left it very vague what devolve meant and what same meant,
11:57what they meant by inability to discharge the duties.
12:01They didn't leave much of a blueprint.
12:04Under the Framers' original scheme of election,
12:07the Vice President was to be the literal runner-up,
12:09the winner of the second most electoral votes for President.
12:14But the rise of political parties,
12:16and the prospect of ideological opponents serving in tandem,
12:20made that approach untenable,
12:22and in 1804 helped to spur the Twelfth Amendment.
12:27What the Twelfth Amendment did is it created a method whereby
12:33electors were to cast separate votes for President and separate votes for Vice President.
12:38Under the original method,
12:40you had a field of candidates who were generally a presidential caliper.
12:46You were taking a shot, and there was a good chance that you could end up President.
12:51After the Twelfth Amendment,
12:54because the Vice Presidency lacked any substantive powers,
12:58there began to be a decline in the number of and the quality of candidates
13:03who would stand for Vice President.
13:07You would be hard-pressed to find very many Americans
13:10who could name Vice Presidents from the 19th century.
13:16Vice Presidents were really chosen by political party organizations.
13:21Many times, the President was chosen because he was part of the winning faction,
13:27and the minority faction was given the Vice Presidency often
13:31as a way of keeping the party together.
13:34That tradition continued even after it became much more
13:40of a presidentially-selected position,
13:42because those presidential candidates themselves had an interest in some kind of balance.
13:49During the first half-century of the new republic,
13:52no President died in office,
13:54and the Succession Clause went untested.
13:57Then, in 1841, the Ninth Commander-in-Chief William Henry Harrison
14:02succumbed to pneumonia barely a month after his inauguration,
14:07and Vice President John Tyler stepped into the breach,
14:10boldly declaring himself President of the United States.
14:15His claim was controversial because many people read the Constitution,
14:20which was ambiguous, to say that if the President died,
14:24the Vice President simply acted as President,
14:28that he simply exercised the powers and duties of the Presidency
14:32while remaining Vice President.
14:35But Tyler insisted that he was President,
14:38refused to be dealt with on any other basis.
14:42He was subsequently referred to as His Excellency, the Great Usurper.
14:47The press had a field day with it.
14:49He would often get mail addressed to
14:51John Tyler, acting President of the United States,
14:54and he had a rule of thumb that he would return those unopened,
14:57regardless of who they came from.
15:01The Tyler precedent took care of what happens when the President dies in office,
15:05albeit not formalized by the Constitution.
15:09Seven subsequent Presidents became President of the United States
15:12because of that precedent.
15:15Hilliard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur,
15:18Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge,
15:21Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson.
15:26The Vice Presidency, meanwhile,
15:28would remain vacant in each case for the duration of the term,
15:32there being no constitutional mechanism for filling such a vacancy.
15:37Twice between 1842 and 1963,
15:41Congress revised constitutional provisions
15:44that extended the line of succession beyond the Vice Presidency.
15:48But the man first in that line, the Vice President,
15:51remained a kind of appendage,
15:53his prerogative shrouded in mystery,
15:56so long as the President was alive.
16:00In 1881, after President James Garfield
16:03was struck by a would-be assassin's bullet,
16:06he clung to life for an agonizing 88 days.
16:10While Vice President Chester A. Arthur hovered on the sidelines,
16:14unsure of his authority to step in.
16:18There was a concern that if anyone acted
16:21to transfer power to Vice President Arthur,
16:24that it would displace Garfield from the Presidency
16:28because Arthur, like Tyler, would become President.
16:32And since the Constitution only envisions one President,
16:36that would mean that Garfield would be ousted.
16:41So this became sort of a cloud
16:44that hung over the country, really,
16:47whenever there was a presidential inability.
16:51When Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919,
16:54his VP, Thomas Marshall,
16:56likewise refused to appear the usurper
17:00and stood aside as Wilson's wife and his secretary
17:03kept the President's condition a secret for more than six months.
17:08And then there was Richard Nixon,
17:11Vice President to Dwight D. Eisenhower,
17:14who spent much of his presidency in and out of the hospital.
17:18So in 1955, General Eisenhower is very, very popular as a president,
17:22but he has a massive heart attack,
17:24which requires a very long convalescence.
17:27Then in 1956, as he is standing for re-election,
17:30he has emergency surgery,
17:32which also requires a very long convalescence.
17:35And it opens up discussion around this black box,
17:38which was who was running the presidency
17:40while Ike was convalescing
17:42after his multiple serious health problems.
17:46There was no provision in the Constitution
17:48for dealing with a situation where the president is disabled.
17:53There's actually no formal mechanism
17:55for discharging the duties of the president
17:58to an acting president, even the vice president.
18:01There was no clarity around who's in charge.
18:06People increasingly looked to the president
18:09to address both domestic and international problems
18:13and to handle an increasingly complicated global situation
18:17in a nuclear age.
18:19I expect to be back at my custom duties,
18:22although they say I must ease my way into them
18:25and not bulldoze my way in.
18:27It made the president more powerful, more significant,
18:31and that meant that the vice president
18:33became more significant.
18:35And so ultimately, the vice presidency
18:37gets pulled from Capitol Hill,
18:40where the vice presidency presided over the Senate,
18:43and then really little else,
18:45down Pennsylvania Avenue to the executive branch.
18:50President Eisenhower was cognizant
18:53and very transparent, really, that he had health issues.
18:58He had concerns about the lack of clarity
19:01in the Constitution in terms of inability
19:04or presidents being incapacitated for some period of time.
19:08And so he gave himself the authority
19:11to decide when an inability existed.
19:16And even more important than that,
19:18this same directive, he gave that authority
19:21to Vice President Nixon to decide
19:24if the president was incapacitated
19:26or unable to fulfill the duties of the office.
19:30But it didn't have the force of law.
19:32And it was polite and unstressful,
19:34apparently, between them,
19:35but it was really precarious for the country.
19:38What if there had been a dispute
19:40as to whether or not the president was disabled
19:44and the vice president thereby enabled?
19:47What if the president and the vice president
19:50disagreed about that?
19:53It did put the issue of when and how
19:56and whether the vice president is running the country
19:59front of mind.
20:05The gentlemen's agreement made between Eisenhower and Nixon
20:09had been replicated by John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
20:12But there was little reason to think
20:14they would need to invoke it.
20:16As Kennedy had put it to an aide during the campaign,
20:20I'm 43 years old,
20:22I'm the healthiest candidate for president,
20:25and I'm not going to die in office.
20:31In 1963, I was a young lawyer.
20:35I had spent the previous two years
20:38writing an article for the Fordham Law Review.
20:41It started when I saw newspaper articles
20:44about disability during the Eisenhower administration.
20:48And I took that on as my topic,
20:51and it was published a month before
20:53President Kennedy's assassination.
20:56And I figured, well, it's probably going to go
20:59on a library shelf somewhere, but it's an important subject.
21:05When President Kennedy was assassinated,
21:08all of a sudden I got all kinds of calls.
21:12Can we get your article?
21:14Would you be on a program?
21:17Now, therefore, I, Lyndon B. Johnson,
21:20president of the United States of America,
21:23do appoint Monday next, November 25,
21:27the day of the funeral service of President Kennedy
21:31to be a national day of mourning throughout the United States.
21:36The assassination of John F. Kennedy
21:38and the subsequent elevation of Lyndon Johnson
21:41was different than any of the seven deaths in office
21:45in part because it was so dramatic.
21:47The president of the United States was shot on live TV,
21:50and then the alleged assassin was shot just a couple days later,
21:54also on live television.
21:58It traumatized an entire generation.
22:02President Kennedy was shot in the head.
22:05Had he survived but been disabled,
22:09was the country comfortable leaving it up to one man say so,
22:13to his vice president Johnson say so,
22:16as to whether or not President Kennedy
22:18was able to continue in the office of the presidency?
22:27Back in the late 1700s and early 1800s,
22:31perhaps the question of succession
22:33didn't matter as much as it does in the age of nuclear weapons,
22:37but we're in the height of the Cold War.
22:39The Cuban Missile Crisis has happened.
22:42You just can't live in a world with ambiguity around succession.
22:47Vietnam was moving forward.
22:49There were civil rights protests.
22:51You had civil rights leaders being assassinated.
22:55And so there was a growing awareness, like,
22:58this is a dangerous world,
23:00and mortality is a major factor here for presidents.
23:04This is real. This happens.
23:06And it happens pretty frequently.
23:08All I have, I would have given gladly
23:13not to be standing here today.
23:17When President Johnson delivered his special message to Congress
23:21on November 27, 1963,
23:24five days after the assassination,
23:27there was more than usual interest
23:29in the politicians seated behind him on the dais.
23:32To the left, the Speaker of the House,
23:35a 72-year-old with very little international experience,
23:39and the 86-year-old President pro tem of the Senate on the right.
23:44Should something untoward happen to the president now,
23:48these men were the next in line.
23:51The constitutional flaw that had gone unmended
23:55for nearly two centuries
23:57was suddenly now at the top of the national agenda.
24:02CBS reports, the crisis of presidential succession.
24:05I think that now is a time for all of us to study it very intensively.
24:11We just had this great tragedy.
24:13We came out of our state possibly of shock and disbelief.
24:19But now it is time to do something that common sense determines
24:23is the best way to keep our government functioning
24:26without the possibility of great confusion
24:29right in the point of crisis.
24:32It was while taxiing toward the terminal at Chicago's O'Hare
24:37that Birch Bayh, the freshman senator from Indiana,
24:41first heard that Kennedy had been shot.
24:45The pilot had come over the intercom.
24:48Later, Bayh would recall that as his taxi
24:51crawled through the city's streets that evening,
24:54bleak with rain and sorrow, he said,
24:57his thoughts had gone to Lyndon Johnson,
25:00to the counsel he'd been so well-suited to provide as vice president,
25:04and the counsel he surely would need from his VP in turn.
25:09But there I sat up sharply by remembered.
25:13There was no vice president now.
25:17In fact, as of that moment,
25:20the nation had been without a vice president
25:23for a cumulative total of more than 36 years.
25:28The fact that we had so many moments in history
25:31where there was a vacancy in the vice presidency
25:34tells you how little we thought about the importance of the vice presidency.
25:39But to not have a provision to replace the vice president
25:42creates a significant break in the line of succession.
25:48As it happened, Senator Bayh recently had been made
25:51chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments,
25:54an appointment now ripe with purpose.
25:58Just 20 days after Kennedy's assassination,
26:01Bayh announced that his subcommittee would hold hearings
26:04on the twinned problems of presidential succession and inability
26:09and proposed a constitutional amendment,
26:12Senate Joint Resolution 139, meant to address both.
26:17The American Bar Association played a very important role
26:20in the creation of the amendment,
26:22and I was given an opportunity to participate in that.
26:26The issue boiled down to,
26:28how do we deal with an involuntary inability?
26:32If the president does something wrong, we have to address it.
26:36And what should those provisions be?
26:40Presidential inability had been a preoccupation on Capitol Hill
26:44at least since the Eisenhower administration.
26:48A raft of remedies had been proposed and hearings held,
26:52but consensus proved elusive.
26:55As the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee,
26:57Emanuel Seller, put it,
26:59when you had three congressmen discussing inability,
27:02you had 17 different opinions.
27:06When they were debating the circumstances
27:08in which a vice president would take over
27:10and become effectively acting president,
27:13it was like an imagination debate.
27:17Imagine all of the crazy things that might befall a president.
27:22And once you start talking about things in those terms,
27:26you're unlikely at any point for everybody to arrive at an idea
27:30that seems like something to handle all contingencies.
27:33It took by 18 months to push his resolution
27:37through both houses of Congress,
27:39and another 16 for it to be ratified by the states,
27:44before it was finally and formally proclaimed,
27:47the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
27:50I think it's a happy announcement that today,
27:54on the 10th day of February, 1967,
27:57we can announce the consummation of efforts
28:00to find a solution to a constitutional gap
28:04which has existed for the best part of two centuries.
28:09A joint consensus at last had emerged on one crucial point.
28:14The nation needed a vice president at all times.
28:18Today, in this crisis-ridden era,
28:21there is no margin for delay,
28:24no possible justification for ever permitting
28:27a vacuum in our national leadership.
28:30And now at last, through the 25th Amendment,
28:34we have the means of responding to these crises of responsibility.
28:40The 25th Amendment created a means
28:43of filling a vice presidential vacancy during a presidential term.
28:51Also, to transfer power to the vice president on a temporary basis
28:56if the president was unable to exercise presidential power.
29:02It really reflected a new vision of the vice presidency
29:06as an important officer in the executive branch,
29:10a close and compatible colleague of the president,
29:15someone who was familiar with the policy
29:19and committed to the policies of the administration
29:22so that a transfer of power would go smoothly.
29:27Even if a president had to have a one-hour operation,
29:32as Senator Biden would say,
29:34if missiles were flying at America at that point,
29:37you want to be sure that there's no gap
29:40in terms of where the executive power is
29:43and the person that we have to look to
29:46in that situation is the vice president.
29:50Few observers thought the amendment perfect,
29:53but most agreed it was flexible enough
29:56to cover all manner of contingencies.
29:59What no one could have guessed was just how,
30:02and how often, it soon would be called into play.
30:07They were trying to imagine everything,
30:09but truth is always stranger than fiction, right?
30:12The real circumstances of how things come to pass
30:15are always wilder than the hypotheticals that you imagine.
30:19And so it was with the vice presidency,
30:21and so it was with the 25th Amendment.
30:25When it was first reported in the late summer of 1972,
30:29the Watergate story might easily have escaped notice.
30:33An odd break-in at the headquarters
30:36of the Democratic National Committee
30:38involving five men,
30:40a bag full of sophisticated surveillance devices,
30:43and 230 crisp hundred-dollar bills.
30:48Then it became clear that one of the Watergate burglars
30:52had ties to the re-election campaign
30:54of President Richard M. Nixon,
30:56and the nation's attention was riveted
30:59as month by month evidence mounted
31:01of a White House conspiracy and cover-up.
31:05By the middle of July 1973,
31:08investigators were focused on tape recordings
31:11of conversations had in Nixon's offices,
31:14recordings that Nixon patently refused to release
31:17on the grounds of executive privilege.
31:21The Senate Watergate Committee met and unanimously voted
31:24to subpoena the tapes.
31:27So in 1973,
31:29the Watergate political crisis is in full flower.
31:33The Attorney General, Elliot Richardson,
31:35is worried not only that the president
31:38might have committed crimes,
31:39that the president might be removed from office,
31:41he's worried that the president might die.
31:43He's under so much stress.
31:45And at the same time, in the summer of 1973,
31:48this U.S. Attorney's Office in Maryland
31:50keeps calling and asking for a meeting.
31:53And they finally get the news through to him
31:56that this little public corruption investigation
31:58that they've been working on in Maryland
32:00has produced very good evidence
32:02that Vice President Agnew has been committing extortion
32:06and taking cash bribes in the White House.
32:09Washington was stunned today by the disclosure
32:11that Vice President Agnew is under criminal investigation
32:14by federal authorities in his home state of Maryland.
32:19Imagine you're Richard Nixon in this moment.
32:21Watergate is spiraling and spiraling
32:24and getting worse and worse
32:25and threatening you more and more with each passing day.
32:29Now here's your vice president taking bribes,
32:32taking envelopes stuffed with $100 bills
32:34during the time he was vice president.
32:38I will fight to prove my innocence
32:40and that I intend to remain in the high office
32:43to which I have been twice elected.
32:49Spiro Agnew was chosen by Richard Nixon
32:52as his running mate in 1968.
32:54And it was a bewildering choice to most observers.
32:58Spiro Agnew was the governor of Maryland
33:00and he was not a high-profile member
33:03of the Republican establishment in any way.
33:05That said, during his vice presidency,
33:08he really established himself as a political force,
33:11as a divisive, rabble-rousing figure
33:15who antagonized the press,
33:16who excited the right-wing base of the Republican Party.
33:22When Nixon and Agnew ran for re-election in 1972,
33:25that proved to be a really winning combination.
33:27It was a landslide when they won in 72.
33:31But Agnew had never been invited into Nixon's inner circle.
33:36Though he'd been given an office in the West Wing,
33:39the first vice president to be so situated,
33:42he'd been made to understand
33:44that his proximity to the Oval was purely symbolic.
33:47A little over a week ago,
33:49I took a rather unusual step for a vice president,
33:53Agnew complained in his memoir.
33:55I said something.
33:57Before very long,
33:58his West Wing perch had been repossessed.
34:01Then came the glare of simultaneous scandals
34:05in the executive branch.
34:07Time magazine today quotes officials
34:09in the Department of Justice as saying
34:11that the case against Vice President Agnew
34:13is growing steadily stronger
34:15and that an indictment appears inevitable.
34:19Nixon refused to support Agnew or defend Agnew in any way.
34:23He knew it was likely that he himself
34:26would be impeached or forced to resign.
34:30Nixon knew that it would be a disaster
34:33if Agnew were to succeed to the presidency.
34:36So Nixon's Justice Department
34:39was actively pursuing forcing Agnew from office.
34:45I will not resign if indicted.
34:47I will not resign if indicted.
34:52I intend to stay and fight.
34:56What Attorney General Elliot Richardson decided to do
34:59was allow these federal prosecutors to go ahead
35:02with a plan to bring federal criminal charges,
35:05dozens of felony charges
35:07against the sitting vice president of the United States.
35:10And when Vice President Agnew was informed
35:14that that was what was going to happen to him,
35:16he entered into a plea deal discussion.
35:19Very unusually, it was supervised by the judge himself.
35:23Even more unusually, the judge supervised
35:25the plea deal discussions at a motel.
35:28I don't know. That's what they did.
35:30They met at a motel.
35:31The two sides sat on opposite twin beds
35:33in a motel room with the judge.
35:35They worked it out.
35:36And what they worked out was that
35:39Vice President Agnew would not go to prison.
35:42He would be assured that he would not go to prison.
35:45He would have to plead essentially no contest
35:48to at least one charge.
35:50But as part of the agreement,
35:52he would resign the vice presidency.
35:54Vice President Agnew, burying himself as a tax cheat,
35:57resigned the day under an agreement
35:59which protects him from prosecution
36:01on charges of grafting.
36:03The big question tonight,
36:05who will succeed Spiro Agnew as vice president?
36:08We're talking about the 25th Amendment,
36:11the Constitution providing that a vacancy in office
36:14is to be filled by a nominee opposed by the president,
36:17ratified by the Congress.
36:19How is this thing going to work?
36:21There are some questions to be answered,
36:23but I think we are extremely fortunate
36:25that there is the 25th Amendment to work with.
36:28The existence of the 25th Amendment
36:32and the clarity around how a vacancy
36:36in the vice presidency is filled
36:38was, I think, part of the reason
36:41that Agnew's resignation
36:44was sort of an okay resolution to this crisis.
36:47With the Watergate tapes still hostage
36:50to the president's claim of executive privilege,
36:53some in Congress now balked at the 25th Amendment
36:56and the prospect of having to confirm
36:59a vice president of Nixon's choice.
37:02So long as the president himself
37:05is so clearly under the cloud
37:07of possible disclosures on the tapes,
37:09insisted Senator Edward Kennedy,
37:11grave questions exist as to the propriety
37:15of the president's choosing his own successor.
37:19Richard Nixon was an embattled president,
37:22and yet the authority given to him in the 25th Amendment
37:26allowed him to exercise considerable influence
37:30on the political landscape.
37:33And so he immediately started looking
37:36for someone to fill the vacancy.
37:38In the end, his selection was a calculated one.
37:42The less overtly presidential
37:44the nominee Nixon reasoned,
37:46the less controversial,
37:48the more likely a speedy confirmation by Congress.
37:52I proudly present to you
37:55the man whose name I will submit
37:58to the Congress of the United States
38:01for confirmation as the vice president
38:04of the United States,
38:06Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan.
38:10He picks Gerald Ford,
38:13this ex-football player,
38:15very affable, very likable,
38:17but not somebody who was going to run for president.
38:21He was actually thinking of retiring.
38:23He was going to run one more time,
38:25he told his wife, and then hang it up.
38:28Gerald Ford was an obscure congressman from Michigan.
38:31Richard Nixon offered him an opportunity
38:34to have the second most powerful job in the country.
38:38There's not a lot of instances
38:40where somebody might view the vice presidency as an upgrade,
38:43but from Michigan's 5th District, I'd say it's an upgrade.
38:47I know many of you are on deadline,
38:51so I have a brief statement to give you at this time
38:55relating to action which President Nixon has taken tonight.
39:00President Nixon has denied...
39:03On October 20, 1973,
39:06ten days after Agnew's resignation
39:09and two weeks before Ford's confirmation hearings
39:12were set to begin,
39:14President Nixon managed to hasten his own political demise.
39:18In a fit of pique,
39:20he demanded that Archibald Cox,
39:22the special prosecutor investigating Watergate,
39:25be dismissed, his office abolished,
39:28and his files sealed,
39:30an action that led, in turn,
39:32to the immediate resignation
39:34of Attorney General Richardson, then his deputy.
39:38The newspapers dubbed it the Saturday Night Massacre,
39:41and cries for Nixon's ouster rose across the land.
39:45Nothing like this has ever happened before,
39:48and what it means is that the worst dreams
39:50of everyone who was worried about the president's secret tapes
39:53have now become true, become reality.
39:56Western Union reported that in the following three days,
40:00more than 150,000 telegrams flooded Washington,
40:04the heaviest concentrated volume on record.
40:08As one columnist noted,
40:10even Congress, which so often rolls on its back like a spaniel,
40:14is beginning to face the necessity of impeachment.
40:19In the Capitol Hill office of the Speaker of the House,
40:22the usually remote possibility
40:24of a double vacancy in the executive branch
40:27suddenly loomed large.
40:30Here's Carl Albert, Democratic Speaker of the House,
40:33and two things land in his lap at the same time.
40:36First of all, the vice president has resigned,
40:40which means Carl Albert has responsibility in the House
40:43for confirming a new vice president.
40:45Simultaneously, Richard Nixon, the president,
40:48is going to be impeached,
40:50and Carl Albert has responsibility
40:53for dealing with the House side of the impeachment process.
40:56And if there is no president and there is no vice president,
40:59who becomes president?
41:01Carl Albert, Speaker of the House.
41:04So if he wanted to, if he was of that kind of a mindset,
41:09Carl Albert in that moment could have engineered
41:12the ousting of the president of the United States,
41:15not filling the vice presidency of the United States,
41:18and thus installing himself as president,
41:20which would have put the presidency
41:22in the hands of the Democratic Party
41:25just months after the entire country
41:28had chosen the Republican Party to lead by a landslide.
41:32It would have been a partisan coup.
41:34It would have been legal.
41:36It would have been procedurally sound,
41:38and it would have been a revolution.
41:41These are not ordinary times,
41:43nor, I suppose, will the times ever be ordinary,
41:47when the 25th Amendment must be invoked.
41:51By the time Ford's confirmation hearings got underway,
41:54the likelihood that the vice presidential nominee
41:57ultimately would succeed to the presidency
42:00was on everyone's mind.
42:02Never before was a candidate for national office
42:05subjected to such close scrutiny.
42:08Some 350 FBI agents were dispatched
42:12from 33 different field offices
42:14to look into every aspect of Ford's life,
42:17while Ford himself patiently endured
42:20hours upon hours of questioning
42:22by members of both houses of Congress.
42:25Today, having confirmed the nomination of Gerald R. Ford,
42:29the proceedings required by Section 2
42:32of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution
42:36have been complied with.
42:38Raise your right hands, Ford.
42:41Confirmed swiftly and by overwhelming majority,
42:44Ford was sworn in on December 6, 1973,
42:48the 40th vice president of the United States.
42:52He would spend fewer than eight months in the job
42:55before the U.S. Supreme Court
42:57ordered the long-disputed White House tapes released,
43:01among them three conversations
43:03that proved Nixon had been party to the Watergate cover-up.
43:10A day or two later, Ford went with his wife, Betty,
43:13to visit what was to be their new home,
43:16a dwelling authorized by an act of Congress
43:19shortly after the passage of the 25th Amendment,
43:22the first official residence ever provided
43:25to the vice president of the United States.
43:27The Fords are the first family
43:29with the opportunity to live there,
43:31and they get this tour,
43:33and Betty Ford gets to pick out the china
43:36for the vice president,
43:38and Gerald Ford turns to her and says,
43:40Betty, we're not going to ever live here.
43:43He saw the writing on the wall.
43:46They were going to be moving into the White House.
43:49I have never been a quitter.
43:53To leave office before my term is completed
43:56is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.
44:00But as president,
44:02I must put the interests of America first.
44:07President of the United States leaves office,
44:11the first in our 189-year history
44:13to do so by the route of resignation.
44:17The transition went remarkably well.
44:20It was essentially seamless.
44:22I think in part that is because the 25th Amendment
44:26had allowed there to be a procedure
44:28for filling vacancies in the vice presidency.
44:31Mr. Vice President, are you prepared to take the oath of office
44:34as president of the United States?
44:36I am, sir.
44:37The president was able to choose someone
44:39from his own political party,
44:41so there was no conflict that way.
44:43Ladies and gentlemen,
44:45the president of the United States.
44:52And at the end of the day, Ford was in fact prepared.
44:57He was in fact qualified.
44:59My fellow Americans,
45:01our long national nightmare is over.
45:06Our Constitution works.
45:09Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.
45:13Ford had never been on a presidential ticket.
45:16He had never run for any office
45:18higher than this one little district in Michigan.
45:22Suddenly, here he was,
45:25the most powerful person in the world.
45:32It had all happened so quickly,
45:35the Nixons hadn't yet had the chance
45:38to move their belongings out of the White House.
45:42The Fords had this very sweet, middle-class,
45:45colonial house in Alexandria, Virginia.
45:49Being the affable people they were,
45:52they gave the Nixons time to get their things out
45:55and make the transition and move.
45:57And so there was a period of time
45:59there where the Fords were actually
46:01the president and first lady
46:03living in their house in Virginia.
46:06This was just a mere decade after JFK had been assassinated.
46:11So you have this president living
46:13in a quiet, suburban community outside of D.C.
46:17So they had to put bulletproof glass in the master bedroom.
46:21They had to reinforce the driveway
46:24with steel rods underneath
46:26for the president's motorcade cars to be parked.
46:29They had secret service in the garage setting up their post.
46:34Ford said, our poor neighbors went through hell.
46:38Once again, for the second time in just over a year,
46:42the vice presidency stood vacant,
46:45and the reality of the procedures
46:47outlined by the 25th Amendment had begun to sink in.
46:51As one senator had foreseen,
46:53even before Nixon resigned,
46:55the nation will no longer be democratically governed.
46:59Gerald Ford was the first president in U.S. history,
47:03and so far is the only president in U.S. history
47:06to assume the office without ever having been elected
47:10president or vice president.
47:12He had never faced a national electorate before,
47:15and yet he became president of the United States.
47:19Adding even more to the story,
47:21adding even more to the whole oddness of the situation,
47:25if you will, was that the first task
47:28Gerald Ford had as president
47:30was to choose a new vice president.
47:33He comes through the door now with his choice.
47:37And the choice, it is Nelson Rockefeller,
47:40the former governor of New York,
47:42who was leading the list of speculation among many people.
47:46Nelson Rockefeller had been a leader
47:49of what was then a very strong liberal to moderate faction
47:54in the Republican Party.
47:55He had made serious bids for the presidency,
47:58although he had not won a Republican nomination.
48:01And he was somebody who, as governor of New York,
48:05was a widely respected figure nationally.
48:08President, the vice president designated of the United States.
48:13By the end of that year, we have two national offices.
48:17First and only time in the history of the country
48:20who were appointed, so to speak, under the 25th Amendment.
48:26But it worked.
48:28I pledge myself to the fullest limit of my capacity
48:32to work with you, Mr. President, and the Congress
48:36in the great task of building the strength of America.
48:42When Rockefeller took office on December 19, 1974,
48:48he assumed a position newly imbued
48:51with stature and significance.
48:53For if the 25th Amendment had sidestepped democratic ideals
48:58in laying a path to the office,
49:00it also had established, constitutionally
49:03and once and for all, the importance
49:06of the second in command.
49:08When Nelson Rockefeller assumed the vice presidency,
49:12it was a much-changed institution,
49:14even from a few years prior, let alone historically.
49:19When Richard Nixon was vice president,
49:22he had a staff, a small staff,
49:24and a budget of under $48,000 a year.
49:27When Rockefeller became vice president,
49:29he had a staff of over 70 and a budget of $2 million.
49:34The office of the vice president
49:36began to mirror the office of the president.
49:39The vice president had special assistance
49:42on domestic and foreign policy,
49:44had a press secretary, had a chief of staff.
49:48Those things may seem just symbolic, but they're not.
49:53They imply power and they imply authority.
49:57Whether the vice president then actually exercises power
50:01is a whole different story.
50:04Having that new constitutional amendment
50:07focused on the vice presidency,
50:09both implicitly acknowledging the importance
50:12of the vice presidency
50:14and also systematizing the nature of the office,
50:18I think did underscore for the country
50:22that the vice presidency is a thing,
50:25that it's not only a contingency,
50:27that it is an office that must be filled
50:30and that has an important role in the country.
50:33Vice president has been a principal part
50:36of presidential decision-making
50:38in virtually every administration over the last 50 years.
50:42Being vice president gives you opportunities
50:45to operate as a governmental official
50:48in ways that most high executive officials never experience.
50:54To take an office that, for most of our history,
50:57has been lampooned
50:59and to turn it into a consequential position
51:04is really one of the great modern successes
51:08of our system of government.
51:11The office that Vice President John Adams occupied
51:15at the dawn of American democracy
51:17would be largely unrecognizable to him now.
51:20More than two centuries on,
51:23it can no longer credibly be described as nothing.
51:27But the vice president is still, and always,
51:31a heartbeat away from being everything.
51:54American Experience, the American Vice President,
51:57is available on DVD.
51:59To order, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
52:04American Experience is also available
52:06with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.
52:24American Experience
52:28www.americanexperience.org