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How to Get Rid of a President
3.8k Plays2 years ago
In the second episode of "How to get on a Watchlist", we sit down with Dr. David Priess to discuss the risks Presidents face from assassinations or impeachments in order to remove them from office, as well as the risks posed by Presidents trying to cling onto power. Dr. Priess is the publisher and chief operating officer at Lawfare. He's a former intelligence officer at the CIA and author of THE PRESIDENT’S BOOK OF SECRETS, about the relationships between presidents and Top Secret intelligence, and HOW TO GET RID OF A PRESIDENT, about how presidents have left office or been pushed toward the door. He currently teaches graduate seminars on intelligence and the presidency at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Content Overview
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. In each episode, we sit down with leading experts to talk about dangerous acts, organisations and people. We examine historical cases, as well as the risks these subjects currently pose. From assassinations and airline shootdowns, through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the dangerous actors behind them and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them.
00:00:38
Speaker
In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
Hosts and Guest Introductions
00:00:44
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
00:01:06
Speaker
I'm Louis H. Passant, the founder and editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm also a doctoral researcher at the University of Loughborough in the field of intelligence and espionage in the private sector. In my day job, I provide intelligence to corporate executives on complex geopolitical and security issues. And I'm Edwin Tran, a private sector intelligence analyst, and I do Middle East affairs at Encyclopedia Geopolitica.
00:01:28
Speaker
We're joined today by Dr. David Priest, the publisher and chief operating officer at Lawfare. He's a former intelligence officer at the CIA, an author of the President's Book of Secrets about the relationship between presidents and top secret intelligence, and how to get rid of a president about how presidents have left office or been pushed towards the door. He currently teaches graduate seminars on intelligence and the presidency at George Mason University's Shah School of Policy and Government. Thank you very much for being here, David.
00:01:55
Speaker
It is a pleasure to be here and talk to you about this. Thanks for inviting me. So you wrote How to Get Rid of a President in 2018.
Dr. Priest's Book and Presidential Assassinations
00:02:03
Speaker
It's an absolutely fascinating book. What prompted you to write it? Well, thank you for that. Two things really. One was I had just finished writing my first book, and it had just come out, and that was the aforementioned The President's Book of Secrets.
00:02:19
Speaker
That book was operating at the intersection of the presidency and intelligence. Where those two crossed over, that's really the heart of that book. And I definitely liked the researching. I liked learning some history that I did not know. And of course, communicating that myself in the book. And I wanted to do it again. And I decided, well, I've already covered the intersection of presidents and intelligence at the highest level with the president's daily brief being the main subject of the book.
00:02:48
Speaker
I want to do something either to learn more about the presidency or about intelligence. What can I write about on intelligence that is better than the president's book of secrets? And I scratched my head and nothing immediately came to mind. At the same time, I realized that the first book is largely about the modern presidents of the United States. I did not have the opportunity to dig back deep into American history because the institution of intelligence to US presidents is a relatively modern one.
00:03:17
Speaker
And I felt that I actually could learn a lot about the American presidents before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which is really where the first book starts.
00:03:26
Speaker
At the same time in the American political discourse, you'll remember this is 2016. And this is a time when it was increasingly looking like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton would be the two major candidates running against each other for the presidency. And even before the election, there were already discussions going on in the political commentary about the fact that one or both of them would certainly be impeached and might need to be kicked out of office somehow because they were perceived as so bad by the other side.
00:03:56
Speaker
So I put that together and thought about it and said we have plenty of books and plenty of commentary in the American media on how presidents get elected. But the real magic of the American democratic experiment is the fact that we found a way to get rid of presidents and keep going as a country. We found a way for presidents to leave the scene and we carry on. And I thought that was worth exploring because I hadn't seen it done quite in that way.
00:04:25
Speaker
So the book focuses on, as you say, kind of all the different ways to remove a president, ranging from being voted out of office or being declared unfit to serve. And we'll be including links to both notes, both books in our show notes for our listeners who do want to read them because they really are fascinating books. But in this episode, we really want to focus on two chapters of the book that are probably the most dangerous ones. And that is the chapter on assassinations, your chapter title taken out by force and impeachment, the chapter entitled Impeached and Removed.
00:04:56
Speaker
So Edwin, I'll hand over to you for the first question. Thank you, Lewis. So I think we really do want to start with your chapter on assassinations, David. Now, I want to preface this by saying I don't want to be on a watch list and we don't need to go into the tactical levels of things. But I was curious about historically what assassinations on presidents were like, if we could get some information on that.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's both remarkably easy and remarkably hard to assassinate a president. We have found through history that there have been many attempts and four of them have been successful. And when you've only had just over 40 presidents, that's a healthy percentage, but many more times that have been close calls. So it's not as hard as it seems. And yet in the modern period,
00:05:45
Speaker
It seems to have become much harder. Yes, technology may make it easier in some ways, but the advances in protection and the expansion of the physical circle that is always around the person of the president has made it more difficult. But the fundamental answer to the question, based on history of how does one go about assassinating a president,
00:06:06
Speaker
is a gun because we've had four assassinations that did kill the president. That was Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John Kennedy. And all four of them were done
00:06:21
Speaker
with a gun three of them at very close range and then one john f kennedy with a rifle uh instead of a handgun and then we've had some near misses and the closest calls where presidents were very close to getting shot and killed of course were all by guns as well andrew jackson gerald ford ronald reagan so unfortunately the answer is with so many guns in america and so much
00:06:45
Speaker
political violence rising. It looks like guns are a real part of the problem here, as in so much else. So, you know, you've mentioned that, you know, the four cases of successful assassinations. Could you just talk to us through those cases about how they happened? And then I'm really also curious about those near misses. How did they happen? How did they play out?
00:07:07
Speaker
Well, let's go chronologically, Lewis. Going back to the very beginning of the Republic, there don't appear to have been any serious assassination attempts against what we would call the founding fathers, right? There was presidents in that first generation who took part in one way or another in the American Revolution and then held the presidency. This is Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, these presidents.
00:07:33
Speaker
We did have a very near miss with Andrew Jackson, who was not of that generation, but in the next era. Back in those days, there was no personal protection of the president. The White House itself was a building where citizens could walk in, and sometimes there would be a policeman on duty, but it was more for the facility than for the person of the president.
00:07:57
Speaker
And presidents generally walked around the streets of Washington or got into a carriage. And there was no secret service in the first place, but there certainly wasn't anything akin to the secret service for most of the 19th century. So Andrew Jackson was on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. And as he was, I believe, going down the steps, he was accosted by a gentleman who walked towards him and at virtual point blank range shot.
00:08:27
Speaker
And according to all the eyewitnesses and ear witnesses, the gun did have a shot. That is, the gunpowder did explode. But for some reason, it misfired and the bullet did not exit the chamber and hit the president, which it certainly would have within feet from him.
00:08:43
Speaker
The oddity there is not that that happened. Apparently it was a human day that can be a real problem for the type of weapon he had and the type of powder he had. The oddity was that he proceeded to pull out a second weapon and fire that at point blank range before the president and the people around him could react.
00:09:01
Speaker
And that one also misfired. A remarkable coincidence. And they put the odds at this happening at extremely low. But that's how Andrew Jackson survived the first dramatic assassination attempt of a U.S. president.
Historical Presidential Assassination Attempts
00:09:16
Speaker
Abraham Lincoln was the first president who was killed by an assassin, and there had been many attempts to harm Lincoln due to the great tension of the times. But the one that succeeded was the actual first conspiracy to kill a president. John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators were seeking to take out Abraham Lincoln and other senior members of the government.
00:09:37
Speaker
And Lincoln, of course, was fatally shot in the head at Ford's Theater in downtown Washington, D.C. About 20 years after that, a little less than 20 years, President James Garfield was killed. He was killed by he's often called a disgruntled office seeker.
00:09:56
Speaker
But that's that's overstating it a bit. Yes, he was a disgruntled office seeker, but it wasn't clear that he assassinated Garfield because he wanted a job and didn't get it. There were other signs of mental illness and clearly what we would now call stalking behavior of the president.
00:10:15
Speaker
In fact, before the assassination occurred, the same man had been following the president as he walked to the Secretary of State's house and appeared to have followed them at short distance, but for some reason did not.
00:10:28
Speaker
pulled the trigger, even though he had a gun with him at the time. So instead, he waited until the president was going to the train station in Washington, D.C., and he shot him again at close range, just as with Lincoln. In Garfield's case, he took quite a bit of time to die. He held on for a while, but medical practices were quite disappointing in those days, and it is often said that the doctors killed Garfield as much as the assassination itself did.
00:10:56
Speaker
We fast forward again about 20 years to William McKinley, who was president of the United States at the turn of the century. And William McKinley was at an exposition in Buffalo, New York, I believe. And they actually were thinking about security in this case, unlike the other cases where security was not a primary concern. Here they knew that the president would be
00:11:19
Speaker
in a receiving line and he would be entertaining hundreds if not thousands of citizens who would be coming to wish him well and say hello.
00:11:27
Speaker
And they had screeners. They had people who were in the building who were watching people and making sure that nobody was a threat to the president. But in this case, the shooter hit a gun inside what looked like I believe it was almost like a cast. It was he had his hand wrapped to look like something was wrong with his hand. In fact, he had a gun in there, got close to the president and did fire.
00:11:50
Speaker
And then, of course, I already mentioned John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy killed in Dallas, Texas, the first presidential assassination from a distance. He was shot from a window above Dealey Plaza as the president drove through. And with an unobstructed view, it was quite easy, in fact, for Lee Harvey Oswald to get a few shots off that that killed the president. In each of these cases,
00:12:14
Speaker
I think we'll get to the point of countermeasures, so I'm not going to get too much into what we learned from those cases. But each one of those cases were known to the public. That is, they were sensations. They were described. That means that assassins learn from other assassins. And for people seeking to assassinate a president, they could learn, aha, you know, I actually can get close to the president if I really want to, at least back in those days.
00:12:39
Speaker
But they also learn, in a sense, what not to do because they know that security is going to start protecting against the most recent attempt. So they probably don't want to do it the same way as has been done and publicized. So we see a few differences in the efforts after that. I already mentioned that Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were the subject of assassination attempts.
00:13:04
Speaker
in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Gerald Ford, Squeaky Fromm was her name, who attempted to assassinate him, as well as another woman, oddly, within a few weeks in California, two different attempts. But in those cases, they did not try to get up to the person of the president as the assassins of Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley did. They actually tried to shoot from a distance with a handgun, which, of course, reduces the accuracy dramatically.
00:13:33
Speaker
And in Reagan's case, he was exiting the Washington Hilton Hotel when the assassin William Hinckley got close enough to him that he could shoot him. And he again was not within personal reach of the president. He was not standing next to him as if in a greeting line. Instead, he was back just a bit away from the door where the Secret Service had allowed people to be close to the president as he exited the building, close enough that in his case he did get
00:14:00
Speaker
several shots off. He did succeed in killing, but he did not kill the president because Reagan was taken quickly to the hospital and it was close, but he did recover from his injuries and was not the victim of assassination.
00:14:15
Speaker
So just want to revisit something you said there. And like you say, we'll discuss kind of countermeasures in the second half. But I'm really curious, you know, you mentioned a lack of security in the early days of the presidency, at least prior to the attempt on President McKinley. Is this something that made people nervous? Was there an awareness that this was a risk? You know, is this something that other states were also kind of doing at the time or not doing? What was really shocking to me in looking at the history of this is how unconcerned
00:14:45
Speaker
most people were about the assassination of a president, or even the attempted assassination. And it's not that they didn't mourn, they did. When Lincoln was assassinated, when Garfield died, when McKinley died, there was national mourning, and people took that very seriously. But in terms of the government's reaction to it, there certainly wasn't a governmental reaction generally to the Andrew Jackson attempt. It was just shrugged off as a random event.
00:15:15
Speaker
There wasn't any whole-scale changes to protection around the president after Abraham Lincoln was shot. To me, that story of the first 100 years to 150 years of American history, it's absolutely shocking with a modern mindset to look at the cavalier attitude that they had towards attempts on the president's life. In effect,
00:15:37
Speaker
They were gambling with future presidents lives because they were not directly applying the lessons from the previous assassinations with the kind of rigor that you would expect now, which is probably why you had a period from 1865 to 1901, which is less than 40 years when you had three different US presidents assassinated.
00:15:59
Speaker
So I guess building on to that, I know you mentioned previously individuals like Garfield were killed by individuals. You mentioned a disgruntled office seeker who displayed stalking behavior. So I kind of have two questions here. And the first being, are these generally the work of lone or unstable actors? And then the second question which builds off of that is that
00:16:22
Speaker
Because it seems like back in those days it was so easy to conduct these types of operations, were there attempts linked to, you know, were these attacks linked to wider conspiracies or hostile states? Or did hostile states attempt to do this? Or was it really just these lone wolves and unstable actors?
Motivations and Conspiracies in Assassinations
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really insightful question because it gets to the differences in the way that societies treat political actors. It gets to issues in terms of the perception of leadership, not just in the United States, but elsewhere. There have been assassinations of leaders throughout history, most often across the wide sweep of history.
00:17:00
Speaker
assassinations were done by other potential leaders or people around the leader, family, associates, political rivals. It was not most often a random citizen. You don't hear too many cases. Just look at ancient Rome, where we do have hundreds upon hundreds of years of emperors
00:17:19
Speaker
most but not all of whom we have some good history of. And we don't have a lot of cases of an average Roman citizen or an enslaved person assassinating a Roman emperor, but you have many cases of political rivals, praetorian guards, others around the leader doing it.
00:17:38
Speaker
And that probably is most common across the widest sweep of history. In the modern era, in due, in part due to the weaponry available, but also due to the more popular attitudes of many leaders being close to the people going out to see the people perhaps more often than the average emperor did in days of yore.
00:18:01
Speaker
You do have more opportunity for these things to happen So I think that's part of the reason why we do have more of what we could call lone actors or unstable actors who decide to take a shot at the president in American history that plays out we certainly have the cases of Garfield's assassin we have the case of McKinley's assassin and
00:18:26
Speaker
John Kennedy's assassin, who despite much conspiracy thinking, almost certainly acted alone, that you have people who decide to take it upon themselves to take out the president of the United States. In some cases, it's for notoriety or the belief that you're going to impress people by doing it, whether for political reasons, as the anarchist who assassinated William McKinley did.
00:18:50
Speaker
or for purely personal reasons, as William Hinkley thought he would impress the actress Jodie Foster by killing Ronald Reagan.
00:18:59
Speaker
Very rarely do you have group activities. The one exception in American history, of course, that succeeded was the Lincoln assassination. And that was a conspiracy that John Wilkes Booth certainly led. The co-conspirators were not successful in their attempts to assassinate others, although they did severe damage to William Seward. But the assassin who was supposed to go after the vice president, Andrew Johnson, didn't even have the courage to go through with the attempt. So that conspiracy
00:19:27
Speaker
failed and that is instructive because when you're talking about a conspiracy to do almost anything you always have to deal with the potential of defection. You have to deal with the issue of different skill sets and different levels of courage to go through with the act so it reduces the success rate
00:19:49
Speaker
of any significant action when you make it into a conspiracy. In this case, it was quite, I want to say comical because lives are definitely at stake. But looking at the stories of the others that night, other than John Wilkes Booth, it was very interesting to see how what could have been a devastating blow to the entire top tier of the U.S. executive branch
00:20:11
Speaker
ended up being quite dramatic with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I'm not minimizing that, but it could have been much worse in many ways, constitutionally for the United States. And in terms of its impact, perhaps that's why most assassins don't talk about their plans very
Hostile State Assassination Attempts
00:20:28
Speaker
much. Most of them, as they go forward and try to kill a senior political figure up to and including the president,
00:20:35
Speaker
They tend to keep it to themselves and not try to recruit others to help them do it. You did mention hostile states in there, Edwin, and I do want to quickly touch on that. We don't have any firm evidence that I've seen of a what I would call a state sanctioned assassination effort. That is, you can't find a time when there was a president that a foreign government said,
00:20:57
Speaker
We want to take this person out in an act of violence and we are going to send a hit team to do it. The closest we probably have is a case that would have been an unintended death, I think, but it was during a time of war. And this was when James Madison was president and there was the so-called War of 1812 when Great Britain and the United States were at war.
00:21:23
Speaker
And the British troops had landed in the Chesapeake Bay and were moving towards Washington. And after a battle east of the city of Washington, they were advancing quickly on the Capitol. James Madison had actually been at the battlefront. He was not fighting. He was behind the lines, but he was still there. When he saw what was happening, he returned to Washington, as many onlookers did.
00:21:46
Speaker
And most people in Washington were fleeing because they realized that the ragtag group of American defenders were going to be overrun quickly by the British forces. So James Madison went back to the White House. His wife and staff had already left, famously taking some historical treasures with them from the White House in a rush. But Madison sat down, relaxed a few minutes from his swift horse ride back from the front, had a glass of wine.
00:22:13
Speaker
and then went off to the west. Just minutes or hours, it's unclear in the history, minutes or hours ahead of the advancing British forces who did proceed to burn the White House and other government buildings. Now, it's not clear from anything I've seen that the British commanders knew that James Madison was within reach or close to it. Nor is it clear that if they would have known that they would have sought to
00:22:39
Speaker
take him out by force. At that point during a time of war, is that assassination or not? We can quibble over definitions, but I think killing an American president certainly would fall into the same general category. But it did not happen. Either they did not know he was that close or they weren't that interested in him. They were interested in making the statement about the burning of York in Canada by burning Washington in retaliation.
00:23:03
Speaker
So that was a case of a hostile state getting close to killing a president, but not actually doing it and possibly not even intending to do it at all.
00:23:14
Speaker
And David, I just wanted to say that whole time I've been nodding my head, this has been incredibly insightful. And so just to really emphasize that point that you were making about all this, it really seems like then that more politically motivated attempts, for instance, like when you add more individuals into an assassination attempt, the complexity increases and that leads to more risk for the success of that attempt. Is that accurate?
00:23:39
Speaker
It certainly does, and I think there's a calculation in so many different individual and collective actions.
00:23:47
Speaker
that the same thing holds. It's not just about assassinating presidents. I think it's about any kind of group project you do in school up into various kinds of engineering and development and certainly having to do with acts of violence like this, which is what is the benefit that comes from the different skills and the different attitudes of the people involved that's a net positive versus the net negative of group dynamics that social psychologists have been studying for many years.
00:24:16
Speaker
And there's always a balance between the two. And depending on the project, depending on the people, you decide what it is. Most of the assassins or would-be assassins in American history that I've looked at who went after presidents didn't appear to have that much of a rational calculation about it. It was more of the idea of
00:24:35
Speaker
I feel the need to take this person out. I'm going to do it. I didn't find a lot of evidence that the assassins of Garfield and McKinley were actually sitting there doing a cost benefit analysis of trying to recruit others to their cause. My guess is it simply didn't occur to them because they were seized with the idea of doing it themselves.
00:24:55
Speaker
So we've spoken a lot here about assassinations, and I'd like to move on now to your chapter on impeachment.
Impeachment and Political Norms
00:25:03
Speaker
But given that the focus of the show is on dangerous activities, let's approach it from the opposite angle. So I suppose my first question on this would be, can a president cling on to power despite an impeachment and removal attempt? Absolutely. In fact, we have seen it in every occasion in American history where impeachment and removal
00:25:23
Speaker
have been attempted. And I think it's important to emphasize that it is an impeachment and removal office that formally gets rid of a president. The word impeachment has come to be used in common conversation to mean getting the president out of office. But impeachment really is like the indictment. It's bringing the charge against the president. And in the United States, the House of Representatives votes whether or not to, in effect, charge the president with a crime.
00:25:52
Speaker
It doesn't have to be in the criminal code of the United States because it is a constitutional offense, but the crime of violating the Constitution in some way is in a sense the impeachment.
00:26:03
Speaker
And we have had impeached presidents. We have had Andrew Johnson impeached in the 1860s. We had Bill Clinton impeached in the 1990s. And we famously had Donald Trump impeached not once, but twice in the most recent presidency. That means we've had four presidents essentially indicted for some crime against the Constitution.
00:26:25
Speaker
That is a method of removing a president, but only with one additional step. And that additional step is the trial in the Senate of the United States, actually voting to take the person out of office.
00:26:39
Speaker
And that famously also has never happened. Andrew Johnson barely avoided it by one vote in the Senate, although there is a lot of historical research suggesting it really wasn't that close, that if every senator actually voted the way that he, and they were all he at the time, if every senator would have voted the way that he actually needed to vote, that Johnson would have won by a wider margin.
00:27:03
Speaker
Bill Clinton was not close to being removed from office, and Donald Trump in both of his impeachments was not exceptionally close to being removed from office. But impeachment is essentially the escape valve that the drafters of the United States Constitution put in
00:27:22
Speaker
to reduce assassination attempts. And for at least one drafter of the Constitution, it was explicit. And this was Benjamin Franklin. He was quite aware of the fact being a student of history and a learned man. He was quite aware of the history that when societies have bad leaders, sometimes there is the resort to assassination. And he thought that was a bad thing in general.
00:27:46
Speaker
So he thought having a process by which a president could be impeached and removed through a political method was far preferable to a solution that had to have violence because there was no violence free option. So they put in the impeachment clause to the constitution to make sure that a president could be removed from office. But as I mentioned, no one has been removed from office. So yes, the bottom line answer to your question is
00:28:14
Speaker
Of course, presidents can avoid being impeached and removed because it is a political process. It often gets wrapped up in being a partisan political process. And in each case, the president's own party members have rallied to the defense of the president, even if they privately agreed that there was great offense against the Constitution, perhaps even something warranting being kicked out of office. The main presidential defense against
00:28:42
Speaker
impeachment and removal is rallying the party flag and getting partisans to agree not to vote to remove the president.
00:28:52
Speaker
So let's talk about what happens after you do get rid of a president. And so how would one make a president stay away? I think, you know, prior to President Trump, there was an unspoken norm that a retired president would stay out of politics and stay out of the limelight. But that's increasingly coming into question now. Is this something that's inherently toxic to a political system, to have former executive leaders hanging around in the wings questioning policy, threatening a return? And how can you counter that?
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah, let me challenge your premise, or at least one of your premises there, which is that former presidents stay out of the limelight. In most recent history, that does tend to be true. But that has not been the case for all of American history. In other cases, we have had presidents who were voted out of office, or in some cases, even presidents who could not even get renominated by their own party because they were so unpopular.
00:29:47
Speaker
who decided, I am not leaving the scene. And they fought on either within the same party or with a new party to run for president. This was not every president who left office, but it was quite a few, especially in the 19th century. So we do have the tradition of most presidents leaving office and stepping out of active politics. This started quite famously with George Washington.
00:30:13
Speaker
who many people have said was a great man, not for battlefield victories and not for acts of his presidency, but he was perhaps greatest because he had the opportunity to stay in power and he chose to step aside and set the precedent for all of American history. He did that after two terms and it became seen as the Washington precedent and most presidents who followed
00:30:37
Speaker
did leave after two terms if they did get reelected to a second term. So you had Washington, you had Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, all of these presidents served two terms.
00:30:50
Speaker
and then did not become president again. Grant is a funny one, though, because he did leave office after eight years. He decided he'd spend most of his time touring around the world. But then he did come back and try to get the nomination again. It's unclear how hard he really pushed to get the nomination, but it doesn't it does appear he did want the presidency again. And certainly he had people around him.
00:31:12
Speaker
who did want it again. So that is a good first case of someone who had the presidency for quite a while and then did what frankly a whole lot of world leaders do, which is decide they don't like not being president. So maybe I should just get the job back.
00:31:28
Speaker
There were others who served for shorter periods of time who also didn't think that they should have to go. But in those cases, they were not as popular as Ulysses Grant. They did not have as legitimate of a shot as Ulysses Grant. The beauty of the American system is that it is up to the people mediated by an institution like the Electoral College to decide. So you could have a president like the president in the 19th century, Martin Van Buren,
00:31:56
Speaker
who could run for president and get elected as Andrew Jackson's successor, run again four years later and lose,
00:32:04
Speaker
and then decide four years after that, I want to run again, and I want to see if the people will elect me. In our system, that hasn't happened very often, but it has happened where people were in some cases humiliated, losing an election, but then decided they wanted to run the chance of being humiliated again, and so they kept trying. It has worked, but it has only worked once, and that was with Grover
00:32:26
Speaker
Cleveland. The president's so nice, you know, we elected him twice. So Grover Cleveland was president. He won the popular vote and the electoral vote, and he became president for four years. He went up for reelection. He won the popular vote, but he lost the electoral vote. And so Benjamin Harrison took over as president. Four years later,
00:32:46
Speaker
Grover Cleveland runs again, he wins the popular vote for the third straight election, and then he is president for a second non-consecutive term. That is the oddity. Other presidents, like I said, had tried that, but no one had actually been out of the White House and then gone back in as president. The other historical oddity I'll note on this front is not about a president losing and coming back.
00:33:11
Speaker
but about a president who just refuses to leave. And that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He formally broke the Washington precedent that Grant was essentially trying to break.
00:33:22
Speaker
when in 1940 he ran for a third term and won. And then in the midst of the Second World War, he ran again in 1944 and won. He died during the fourth term very early in the fourth term. So it's very unclear whether he would have run for a fifth term had he been alive. He died of natural causes. I suspect not. His reasoning for staying in office both in 1940 and 1944 was
00:33:49
Speaker
the world's in crisis, and my steady hand is useful here. But that's a case where the political opposition really found no way of getting him out of office, and they merely had to wait for natural causes to do the job. So we'll discuss that more after the break. We'll look at how you protect presidents from assassins, but also how to protect American democracy from a president who does, like you say, refuse to leave.
00:34:25
Speaker
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00:34:49
Speaker
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Modern Presidential Security Measures
00:35:14
Speaker
Alright David, we're going to change angles now and look at things from the blue team side and we're going to go back to the topic of security. And as you previously mentioned, you know, presidents have a more public facing nature and that puts them a lot more risk. How then do you protect presidents when there are so many actors that want to target them?
00:35:34
Speaker
Yeah, if you ask the Secret Service about it, their answer would probably be, how do we do it? We do it very carefully because there are so many threats. There are myriad ways in which bad actors can get at the president. The key to learn is that it's not like it was
00:35:52
Speaker
150 years ago, the stories that I told earlier, since the Secret Service took on protection of the president in the 20th century to any significant level. And then certainly with the advance in security that took place first in the Second World War around Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and then even more significantly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Secret Service has expanded dramatically in terms of personnel,
00:36:21
Speaker
in terms of resources, in terms of technology, in terms of training, such that it is now a...
00:36:29
Speaker
very, very careful service with its own problems. The Secret Service seems to have a scandal every few years involving some aspect of its protection or its management. But in part, that's because they have expanded their protection duties so much. There is both an investigative side and a protective side to protecting the person of the president and other high level dignitaries.
00:36:54
Speaker
One way that you actually go about to protect a president when there are so many various actors that might wish to target them is by looking very carefully at past cases. And I recently had a long conversation for my podcast Chatter with Jonathan Wackrow, a former secret service, special agent, and detail leader who had done presidential protection.
00:37:18
Speaker
And we talked at some length about the training that they go through and the fact that the history that we just walked through, most Secret Service agents know as well, because they've studied the actual movements, what was known about the assassins and potential assassins, what was known about the circles of protection around the president and their weak points. And each study is done with a mind towards reducing those weak points in the future and finding countermeasures.
00:37:46
Speaker
So, yes, they actually looked at things like the Lincoln assassination, which seems like ancient history when it comes to modern technology. But for the Secret Service, it's a very real threat given that somebody could try to do the same thing to a president today.
00:38:01
Speaker
So definitely true that they look at history and try to avoid the same mistakes twice. They also take advantage of great technology and some of these means are secret, but there's a whole bunch of things ranging from video surveillance to motion detectors that allow the Secret Service to have increasingly protected circles around the president.
00:38:24
Speaker
And depending on how far out you want to expand those, those can go out for quite a physical distance when it comes to things like patrols or random checks, things of that sort. I think one of the biggest advances, however, has been only in recent years, relatively, I'm talking decades, not centuries, which is making sure that people who have close access to the president
00:38:48
Speaker
are not carrying weapons. And that's something that was not done early in the republic's history, and such that somebody could walk right up to Andrew Jackson and put a gun to to his chest. That could not happen now, because there are searches done of people approaching the president magnetometers often present any event where the president is going to be, you can't just walk in with a weapon. It's not going to happen. This came up
00:39:13
Speaker
recently with some testimony to the January 6th committee when it was found that, yes, they were putting people through magnetometers to get close to the president on January 6th when he was speaking. And the president was aware of it and basically was saying, no, I want the crowd to be bigger. So let's just let them through the magnetometers, which it appears the Secret Service did not do. They were more concerned with protecting the president.
00:39:37
Speaker
So there are many means of protecting a president. I've talked a lot about the protection side. The investigation side, however, is probably where the biggest growth has been.
00:39:45
Speaker
Secret Service will investigate any serious threat made to the president. They will do a number of interviews. When the president is traveling, they will know who in that area has previously threatened the president and they will keep tabs on them to see what's going on. That's really evolved in a way that I'm guessing 100 years ago, people around the president could not have even envisioned. It's a very robust effort.
00:40:11
Speaker
to investigate people who could harm the president, but also to investigate the means, the methods by which someone could attack the president and to mitigate against those, even if they don't know of a person trying to use those means.
00:40:26
Speaker
So I'm really interested by this idea of the days of a president wandering unaccompanied through Washington being over. One of the increases of technology, thinking about it as armed vehicles, the ability for the president's movements around Washington to be protected. But how does the Secret Service draw lines with this agents over the roles of having to say no to a president over security concerns? You mentioned Trump allowing people through the magnetometers. Is there a hard and fast rule around this process or is it individual agent discretion?
00:40:55
Speaker
I think it's somewhere between the two, honestly. Is there a hard and fast rule? No, because every situation is going to be different and they want the protective detail to have some flexibility to protect the president and not be bound to a rule that's either too lenient or too strict.
00:41:11
Speaker
On the other hand, it is not just left to each person on the detail to decide what they're going to do in each moment. They're carefully choreographed movements. They know exactly what the other members of the team are doing, where they're supposed to be, literally which way they're facing and where their feet are going to be so that they can move at a moment's notice. That is all due to their standard operating procedures that are born of blood, as John Wackrow put it.
00:41:36
Speaker
Telling a president no is a hard thing to do for anybody. Politically, that's often difficult, but when it comes to the protective detail,
00:41:44
Speaker
It's often very difficult because the president is saying, I want to go to this place to campaign, to take my children somewhere. I just want to go for a walk around the White House, as Harry Truman used to do, and even Bill Clinton used to go out jogging. And the Secret Service wants to find a way to say yes. They want to find a way that the president can both do what the president wants to do.
00:42:07
Speaker
and remain safe. If it comes down to an actual crisis situation, there is no legal requirement for the Secret Service to do what the president says to do. They are not sworn to obey every whim of the president. They are sworn to protect and defend the US Constitution, and their particular role in that is to serve as protection for the president. While if they're trying to protect the presidency, and they're trying to protect the role of the presidency within the constitutional order,
00:42:37
Speaker
and they have a president who is deliberately putting themselves in harm's way, their duty is to the former, not to the latter. Again, the January 6th committee received evidence that the president insisted on his detail driving him to the Capitol building on January 6th as the crowd was nearing the Capitol and presumably attacking the Capitol.
00:42:58
Speaker
and the Secret Service detail declined to do so. So that's a case of telling the president, no, we're not going to do that. Maybe they used the words, no, we're not going to do that. Or maybe they just drove back to the White House and ignored the request. Either way, the president knew he wasn't going to the Capitol and reportedly got upset at them. But that's one of the occupational hazards of being a Secret Service agent, is you have to run the risk of the president being mad at you.
00:43:25
Speaker
That might be mad because you're on the advanced team and when they're going to travel somewhere they want to have a movement that is unsafe and you have to talk them out of it and they get angry because they really do want to visit this location. It can be a case where it's I want to go to the Capitol building while there's a riot going on and they say no we're not.
00:43:45
Speaker
Or it could be a case on the other extreme, where it's Ronald Reagan in 1981, who doesn't even know he's been hit by a bullet, and suddenly he has a Secret Service agent who physically picks him up, throws him on the floor of the limo, and jumps on top of him, putting his entire body weight on the president. If you had to ask Ronald Reagan if he wanted his agent to do that, when in Reagan's mind he hadn't been shot, he would probably say no. That's very physically uncomfortable.
00:44:13
Speaker
In fact, it saved the president's life. And it was that agent who was able to detect that something was wrong and he needed to go to the hospital instead of back to the White House. So that's a case where if they would have asked Reagan at that exact moment, do you want me to physically hurl you into this car and jump on top of you? He may have said no, but the Secret Service agent not only didn't wait for a no, he didn't ask. He just did his job. And I think that's what it comes down to. The agents are trained to do their job. And if that means pissing off the president, they'll do it.
00:44:44
Speaker
So you mentioned that there's a, it seems there's a major secret service controversy every few years. The example that comes to mind for me is the alleged drinking and partying that supposedly led to coverage gaps during the Kennedy assassination. Do you think there are structural or systemic issues with how the secret services are organized and run that make it susceptible to these failures? Or is it, like you say, they're in the spotlight so much, there's so much attention on them, there's so much risk. Where are these controversies coming from?
00:45:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's really both. On the one hand, you've got an organization that famously says that they are a zero-fail organization. And that's tough for an organization that does have in its history, if not in its own organization's history,
00:45:26
Speaker
for assassinations of US presidents, but they have a zero-fail mission. That's actually the title of a wonderful book by Carol Lenig that I'll get you the information for, which describes the history of the Secret Service, its protection of presidents, its failures along the way, and what the institution has learned or has not learned
00:45:47
Speaker
from them. So yeah, that definitely is a part of it. Now I would venture to say that if you took a similarly sized part of the Department of Agriculture in the United States, or the Department of Interior, or the Department of Energy,
00:46:04
Speaker
and you did a random sampling and found out how many people had been partying or drinking on the job or had some other personnel scandal, that there probably would be similar cases in other institutions of like numbers. But there are a couple of things about the Secret Service that are of course different. One of them is unlike most of those I just named,
00:46:24
Speaker
the government officials who work for the Secret Service, if they're traveling, often it's either with the president or another protectee, or it's to do advanced work. And that work really can't have any mistakes because that affords an opportunity for a potential assassin to do his or her work. So the threshold for slacking on the job at a minimum or actually being inebriated on the job, there's a different level there.
00:46:52
Speaker
The second part of it is that these are people who presumably are selected and trained for their exceptional nature when it comes to both integrity, but also their personal discipline because they have to be trained to move at a moment's notice if the situation demands it to put themselves between the attacker and the target. And that is something that is contrary to human instinct.
00:47:18
Speaker
For somebody to be trained that way, to have such personal discipline that they are able to overcome their homo sapiens instinct and do something that puts themselves in mortal danger.
00:47:28
Speaker
You don't want that to be a person who has no control over himself or herself as soon as they have a drop of alcohol. And some of these cases, some of the stories that have come out in recent decades do raise some serious questions there. And is there something about the institution that it's a work hard, party hard kind of place where the tension is so great that it does encourage people to take personal risk as a way, if you will, of venting? Is there a certain type of personality drawn to this work?
00:47:57
Speaker
that is also drawn to that kind of behavior. This is why we have investigations of the Secret Service periodically. I expect there will be another serious soul searching going on now due to the events of January 6th and some of the related matters that have come to light. It's not an easy answer to your question, but I think it is a multifaceted
00:48:16
Speaker
answer because there are many variables at play here and the Secret Service of all organizations probably needs to make sure that it exceeds all of those standards rather than just barely meet them.
00:48:29
Speaker
David, coming back now to your chapter on impeachment, I actually wanted to bring up that I was listening to a discussion you had at George Mason University a couple of years ago. And I remember you brought up this really interesting example of how Woodrow Wilson had this medical condition and his wife kind of played an active role in keeping him in power. And one of the questions we were wondering is how can the U.S. government limit the ability of a president to resist things like impeachment and other removal attempts?
00:48:57
Speaker
It's really hard. The way that the system is set up, the presidency has a great deal of power under the U.S. Constitution. And that's not a mistake. The drafters of the Constitution knew that they were creating a position and they consciously chose to make it a single person and not a collective presidency for decision making reasons.
00:49:21
Speaker
But they realized that this could be a road towards despotism if they weren't careful. So they did put in some checks and balances. Some of them had to do with the act of governing itself, like things like vetoing legislation, but being overridden on the veto. That's the governing stuff I'm not going to focus on. They put in some checks and balances regarding a president who wants to remain in power when they should not.
00:49:47
Speaker
primarily is what we discussed, impeachment and removal, a legislative branch remedy to overreach by the executive branch. But they also realized over time, due to cases like the one you mentioned with Woodrow
Constitutional and Political Challenges in Governance
00:50:00
Speaker
Wilson, that there could be a time where the president has literally done nothing wrong, that the president is actually following the Constitution and upholding his or her oath to the Constitution.
00:50:13
Speaker
but just isn't doing the job. Most likely they envisioned it would be due to a health reason. And that was the problem with Woodrow Wilson. He had a massive stroke and was unable to perform the powers and duties of the office. For a while, people didn't know that. And even when they did know that, most people were unwilling to push the issue. Here's a sick man who's trying to recover. And do you want to take away his ability to recover by taking away the thing that is motivating him to recover in the first place?
00:50:41
Speaker
And in that case, it does look very likely that his wife, among others, stepped in to, in fact, do some of the duties of the presidency in his name, even though they were not constitutionally selected to that office. So they wanted to have a means to address that. So in addition to impeachment and removal, one of the means that is now in the U.S. Constitution due to the addition of an amendment is the ability of the vice president, along with a majority of the cabinet,
00:51:09
Speaker
to declare the president unable to perform the duties of the office. Now, this does not formally remove the president. It simply takes the powers and duties of the president away until the disability is removed.
00:51:22
Speaker
And then those powers return to the president. This is a tough one too, because what makes a president disabled? They chose not to define it more finely than that because they did not want to limit people's interpretation of it for situations that they could not anticipate. But we have had cases where it probably should have been used. We already mentioned the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt in April, 1981. He was definitely out of commission.
00:51:47
Speaker
He was in surgery for hours and he was clearly unable of performing the duties of the office for at least days afterwards. And yet the 25th Amendment was not invoked and the president never had powers and duties taken away from him. That was a clear fail. Even people who were there at the time, in retrospect, have said that they probably should have looked to formally give the vice president the powers and duties
00:52:14
Speaker
of the office. But we do have that as another escape valve for a president who is not willing to step aside temporarily because there's a provision there by which the vice president and the majority of the cabinet can decide for him. Ideally, the president decides himself, but an unconscious president has a hard time invoking the 25th Amendment by himself. We have had presidents who have done it, however, when conscious. So you have had Vice President Dick Cheney
00:52:42
Speaker
who was temporarily holding the powers and duties of the presidency twice when George W. Bush as president was undergoing surgery and passed over those powers for a few hours at a time. I believe we also had a vice president
00:52:56
Speaker
George H.W. Bush, who was acting president for a short period of time when Ronald Reagan had colonoscopy. So you have had those cases for hours at a time, but not a case that it was originally envisaged for, which is Woodrow Wilson having a stroke and being incapacitated for months. And then the horror story that the actual drafters of the 25th Amendment were thinking about, which is what if John F. Kennedy had been shot
00:53:21
Speaker
But the bullet had been a few inches removed from where it hit. What if he were in a coma instead of killed? There was not a natural provision to determine whether Lyndon Johnson could take over as an effect acting president or not. So we do have that one.
00:53:38
Speaker
That actually helps. Now, of course, like we've been talking about, what if a president doesn't want to leave office? If a president has been declared unable and they learn about it, they can actually fight. And there is a mechanism in the 25th Amendment to negotiate exactly how much is the president disabled and ultimately a vote in Congress decides whether the president is truly disabled for the purposes of the 25th Amendment. But that gets a little bit far afield of the core here.
00:54:07
Speaker
So I think my main takeaway, listening to you speak and from reading how to get rid of a president, is that the issues we're discussing here aren't particularly new, that there's a lot of precedent here, but politics is becoming increasingly polarised, especially around the idea of stolen elections. Violence is increasingly becoming a part of the political discourse in the US.
00:54:28
Speaker
It isn't unthinkable that both politically motivated impeachments, removals, and even assassinations could increase in frequency. So I suppose my question that I'd like to leave you with is, what can the US do to build better resilience against this challenge? You raise a very tough question. Many people are asking this from different perspectives because we notice a couple of trends in American politics, particularly around the president in recent years.
00:54:57
Speaker
One trend is the use of impeachment and attempted removal independent of the causes of it. That is, let's pretend we don't know why Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were impeached. But the fact is you had the presidency effectively taking place in the late 18th century and you only had one impeachment of a president between George Washington and Bill Clinton. So you went,
00:55:26
Speaker
about 200 years with one impeachment of a president. And there were some other minor attempts to bring up impeachment charges, but none of them ever reached a vote in the full House of Representatives. The closest was Richard Nixon, who was moving towards an impeachment vote, but he resigned before the impeachment
00:55:45
Speaker
could take place. I actually consider that a successful use of the impeachment power because I think he would have been impeached and probably removed had that gone forward. So the impeachment process did work. It didn't actually come to a final vote, but it did compel the president to leave office. But for the actual formal impeachment process and a trial in the Senate, it happened once in 200 years of the American presidency.
00:56:13
Speaker
And then you go from the late 1990s to today in a period of about 25 years, and you've had three impeachments and three Senate trials of the president. That starts to look like a trend. That starts to look like this is something that is being used more often. Now, one can come up with many reasons for that. One reason for that is that presidents are behaving
00:56:36
Speaker
more poorly than they had before and they're actually violating their oaths of office more and they're committing crimes against the constitution more and they need to be held to account more. That is a possibility. That's why the actual charges do matter. It's also possible that the legislative branch simply sees this as a more palatable remedy than they did in the past. George Washington.
00:56:57
Speaker
had some debates with the legislature, but nobody really considered impeaching George Washington. They just didn't think it appropriate at the time. Now it may just be generally considered more appropriate third and related to that.
00:57:11
Speaker
is it may be seen now as a tit-for-tat. It may be seen as, well, you impeached a Democratic president on what some people found to be spurious charges. That was Bill Clinton, and you impeached him. And now, okay, so now a Republican, Donald Trump, has been impeached, and this time you did it twice.
00:57:32
Speaker
So we need to find a way to bring impeachment charges against a democratic president. And then the next time a Republican president comes, it becomes something where if the House of Representatives is in the other party's hands, is there almost a knee-jerk reaction to find something you disagree with the president about and try to impeach them? The historical reticence of the Senate to actually remove an impeached president is in effect the safety valve on this. Even if every president from now until the end of the constitutional republic is impeached,
00:58:02
Speaker
The fact is the Senate, unless there is a dramatically overwhelming partisan balance against the president, is unlikely to automatically remove the president just because he has been impeached. So that's one. The other side of this is what you raised about what appears to be an increase in political violence.
00:58:22
Speaker
This is the one that's more upsetting. And there are parallels in history, again, going back to the ancient Roman Republic, of when norms are broken and when political violence is allowed and not punished, that it basically ratchets in a new level of acceptability, that that becomes okay. Even if people don't say it that way, it actually does become something that is accepted because it inherently is not punished.
00:58:49
Speaker
That is the danger here is the political violence, most notably the attack on the Capitol building on January 6th. If that is normalized for more than a fringe of the American public, then the next attack on a government building or a constitutional procedure is not as shocking and becomes more accepted as just part of what happens in our political society. And that is the real danger because America has been remarkably resilient against that form of political violence for quite some time.
00:59:19
Speaker
If that is not just one data point, but actually is the start of a trend, then that does intersect with the dynamics I just spoke about regarding impeachment. And it can lead to a much more volatile experience for US presidents going forward. I mean, I think that brings me up really nicely to our two final questions. So I'll ask the first one of these, which is what keeps someone like you up at night when it comes to thinking about these challenges? Yeah, I think I think you're right to tie it into that last point, Lewis, because
00:59:48
Speaker
The political violence and the importance of precedent, which many of us probably don't realize at the time, but only in hindsight, that really worries me. Whether or not you agree with some of the grievances that the crowd had on January 6th as they stormed the Capitol,
01:00:07
Speaker
The very fact of storming the Capitol should be offensive to anyone in a representative democracy. And to the point that that does become accepted, we have some real issues at drawing a new line of unacceptability. So that's probably one that keeps me up at night. I'm honestly not too worried about the other side of it, the kind of back and forth impeachments that are a possibility. If in fact impeaching a president becomes more common,
01:00:35
Speaker
Okay, so what? It's in the Constitution. It's there to be used. The fact is it wasn't used probably often enough in the first 200 years of American history when presidents
01:00:47
Speaker
did things and the presidency became much more powerful than the legislature as a result. I'm not as worried about it simply because of the dynamic of the removal from office, which is the real censure beyond the impeachment. I do think it loses something. The impeachment should have a sting to it. And if it happens to every president just because of being elected president, it does lose that stigma that comes with it. But I think the power then is back to the Senate to decide whether to actually
01:01:16
Speaker
remove a president. But to answer the question, what keeps me up at night is more the political violence side than the removing the president side. And then David, on kind of an opposite end, what questions should we be asking you, or actually what single question should we be asking you about this topic?
01:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. I know the questions you shouldn't be asking and you haven't, which is, should we assassinate presidents? The answer there is so clearly no. I hate to even feel like I have to say it, but given the rise in political violence, I think it is necessary to put on the record that we have constitutional means for removing
01:01:58
Speaker
the president to avoid that. And once we get to a place where even thinking about presidential assassinations as
01:02:08
Speaker
maybe not a preferred method, but even a possible method that we want to entertain, we've gone to a very dark place and we're best off avoiding it. It's actually a disservice to all the people who have served and fought for the country's constitution and ideals. So I'm glad the question isn't, should we remove presidents by force more often? The answer is no, we have plenty of ways to remove them, including some we've talked about here today, like impeachment. We have plenty of means to
01:02:36
Speaker
at least politically remove someone from the levers of power, if not actually remove them from office. I think one of the more interesting questions around this whole idea is, is the tension about removing a president due to the fact that we really do need to recalibrate how much power the presidency has?
01:02:57
Speaker
is the importance of knowing how to remove a president affected by the fact that for many decades now we've had what has been called an imperial presidency. That is a dangerous adjective in a representative democracy, imperial. And that's certainly not the way that the presidency was first established. And I think the founders would be astounded at the
01:03:23
Speaker
absolute power that the president appears to have in some areas having to do with policymaking and governance.
01:03:31
Speaker
So, yeah, maybe all of this reflection on ways of removing presidents and the fact that some people want to do so by force, which is always wrong, and some people want to do so by constitutional methods, which is always right in terms of the preferred method to do it, even if the reason for it is not valid. Maybe that is the wrong question. Maybe the question is,
01:03:53
Speaker
should there actually be a recalibration of the power between the branches of government in the United States such that we don't have to worry about an overpowered president who is able to do so much harm so quickly
01:04:07
Speaker
It would require a whole lot of re-envisioning the role of Congress, not delegating as much to administrative bureaucracies in the executive branch, but taking more of a hands-on role with much greater staff and resources devoted to Congress itself. So that's a huge question that even most political scientists do not dare to raise, but that is really the fundamental question behind all of this if you're talking about the importance of the presidency in the system itself.
01:04:33
Speaker
David, you've certainly given us a lot to think about here, so all that's left to say is thank you very much for joining us. I'm glad it was worth your time. Thank you for the opportunity. And for our listeners, please don't forget to check out the show notes on howtogeteronawatchlist.com, where we'll include links to David's books and others discussed on the show. Our production team for this episode was Edwin Tran and Colin Reed, and thank you very much for joining us.
01:05:00
Speaker
You're welcome.