In The Review Queue: Accidental Presidents

Accidental Presidents:

Eight Men Who Changed America

By Jared Cohen

The strength and prestige of the American presidency has waxed and waned since George Washington. Accidental Presidents looks at eight men who came to the office without being elected to it. It demonstrates how the character of the man in that powerful seat affects the nation and world.

Eight men have succeeded to the presidency when the incumbent died in office. In one way or another they vastly changed our history. Only Theodore Roosevelt would have been elected in his own right. Only TR, Truman, Coolidge, and LBJ were re-elected.

John Tyler succeeded William Henry Harrison who died 30 days into his term. He was kicked out of his party and became the first president threatened with impeachment. Millard Fillmore succeeded esteemed General Zachary Taylor. He immediately sacked the entire cabinet and delayed an inevitable Civil War by standing with Henry Clay’s compromise of 1850. Andrew Johnson, who succeeded our greatest president, sided with remnants of the Confederacy in Reconstruction. Chester Arthur, the embodiment of the spoils system, was so reviled as James Garfield’s successor that he had to defend himself against plotting Garfield’s assassination; but he reformed the civil service. Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts. Calvin Coolidge silently cooled down the Harding scandals and preserved the White House for the Republican Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. Truman surprised everybody when he succeeded the great FDR and proved an able and accomplished president. Lyndon B. Johnson was named to deliver Texas electorally. He led the nation forward on Civil Rights but failed on Vietnam.

Accidental Presidents adds immeasurably to our understanding of the power and limits of the American presidency in critical times.

About the Author

Jared Cohen is the founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc. He also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he ran Google Ideas at Google Inc. and served as chief advisor to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010 he served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Accidental Presidents, The New Digital Age, Children of Jihad, and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. He lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

ISBN 978-1501109829, Simon & Schuster, © 2019, Hardcover, 582 pages, Photographs, End Notes, Bibliography & Index. $30.00.  To purchase this book click HERE.

Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes: Saturday, December 21, 1861

A cold, bright winter day. Sent a dispatch home to Lucy. Paymaster here getting ready to pay our men. The James D. (Devereux) Bulloch* was a good friend of mine at Middletown, Connecticut, (Webb's school) in 1837-8 from Savannah, Georgia — a whole-hearted, generous fellow. A model sailor I would conjecture him to be. Rebel though he is, I guess him to be a fine fellow, a brave man, honorable and all that.

It is rumored that Great Britain will declare war on account of the seizure of Slidell and Mason. I think not. It will blow over. First bluster and high words, then correspondence and diplomacy, finally peace. But if not, if war, what then? First, it is to be a trying, a severe and dreadful trial of our stuff. We shall suffer, but we will stand it. All the Democratic element, now grumbling and discontented, must then rouse up to fight their ancient enemies the British. The South, too, will not thousands then be turned towards us by seeing their strange allies? If not, shall we not with one voice arm and emancipate the slaves? A civil, sectional, foreign, and servile war — shall we not have horrors enough? Well, I am ready for my share of it. We are in the right and must prevail.

Six companies paid today. Three months' pay due not paid. A “perfectly splendid” day — the seventeenth!!

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* Pasted in the Diary is the following clipping from the Richmond News of November 30: — “Captain James D. Bulloch, who lately successfully ran the blockade while in command of the steamship Fingal, has arrived in Richmond. He thinks there is a likelihood of Lord Palmerston's proving indifferent to the question involved in the seizure, by Captain Wilkes, on the high seas, from a British vessel, of Messrs. Mason and Slidell.”

Captain James D. Bulloch was the “Naval Representative of the Confederate States in Europe” during the Civil War. It was under his direction and through his energy that the Alabama and other cruisers were built and equipped to prey on American commerce. In 1883 Captain Bulloch published in two volumes a most interesting narrative, entitled “The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, or How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped.” It may also be recalled that Captain Bulloch was a brother of President Roosevelt's mother.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 164-5