Speaker Of The House

There was a time when I would have said there was no way the governor of New York was paying money to have sex with a prostitute. I would have said there was no way John Edwards had a girlfriend and an illegitimate daughter. I would have said there was no way the junior senator from Nevada was having an affair with the wife of one of his closest friends and I would have said there way no way the governor of South Carolina had a girlfriend in Argentina.

Way. I would have been wrong in all four cases. That's a long way of saying that at this point I was pretty sure that nothing a politician does could surprise me. Even so, I probably would have said that there was no way former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, of Illinois, of course, was not only hiding a deep, dark sex secret but had agreed to pay $3.5 million to keep it secret. Yikes.

We're now in the middle of the media feeding frenzy I call Sex Scandal 101 and the Hastert thing will play out over the coming days and weeks, with all the tawdry details trickling out as they always do. I'll be keeping an eye on, and possibly blogging about, the scandal but for right now, I find that I'm most intrigued by thinking about the position of Speaker of the House. It's the top leadership role in the House of Representatives, but as most of the media stories about Hastert have pointed out, the Speaker is also second in the line of succession to the presidency, right behind the Vice President.

(Brief rant about details: I've seen a couple of articles saying that the Speaker is third in line. No. Just no. The President isn't in line. He's the President. The VP is first in line and the Speaker is second. Who's third? The Senate President pro tempore. Current titleholder: Senator Orrin Hatch.)

Anyway, no big deal, right? Second in line, how important can that be? We've always got a Vice President, right? Actually no. On three occasions in the last 50 years or so the country has been without a VP, twice for a few weeks and once for over a year, putting the Speaker of the House one heartbeat away from becoming President.



In the 1970s it happened twice, both times connected to Richard Nixon. On October 10, 1973, VP Spiro Agnew resigned after being charged with accepting bribes. From that day until December 6, 1973, when Representative Gerald Ford was confirmed and sworn in as Vice President, there was no VP.

Eight months later President Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal and on August 9, 1974, Vice President Ford succeeded to the presidency. Nelson Rockefeller was selected to be the VP and was sworn in on December 19; until then the country was once again without a VP. Who would have become president if anything had happened to Nixon in 1973 or to Ford in 1974? Speaker of the House Carl Albert, a Democrat from Oklahoma.



The country was also without a VP for over a year from November 22, 1963, when Lyndon Johnson succeeded President Kennedy, until January 20, 1965, when Hubert Humphrey was inaugurated as VP after having been elected along with Johnson in November 1964. According to William Manchester in The Death of a President, there was some drama surrounding Speaker of the House John McCormack, who refused Secret Service protection, saying it was an intrusion:

When Johnson reached Washington [flying home from Dallas after the assassination] McCormack insisted that the Secret Service must discontinue all interest in him at once. Because of the Speaker's political power his extraordinary demand was honored that Friday. Thus the man next in line was without security protection for fourteen months. It was one of the best-kept secrets in the government. Those who knew of it did not even mention it to one another until Hubert Humphrey had been sworn in.  

I know. I'm a geek and it'll probably never happen, at least in real life. It did happen in the alternate universe of The West Wing, thanks to the imagination of Aaron Sorkin. At the end of season four, Vice President Hoynes is found to be having an affair and resigns; shortly thereafter President Bartlet's daughter is kidnapped. Feeling that he is too distraught to lead the country, the president temporarily steps aside and with no VP, Speaker of the House Glen Allen Walken, played by John Goodman, takes the oath as president. Watch it here:



Sunday morning update: I've written about presidential succession, and posted this video, before. (Here and here, for example.) I want to again point out that the typo in the title isn't from me. That's how it's labeled on YouTube.)