Not Just A Running Mate

                 When most Americans go to the polls every fourth November to vote for their President, they usually think of how well he will do and whether he will work for them and whether he is honest and decent. They much less often think of how the man he chose to run with him will do should something happen to our elected leader. Sure, John McCain’s vice presidential selection of Sarah Palin may have been the final nail in his coffin, but most people believe there was no stopping the Obama train anyway. But what would have happened should McCain have won and then passed away?  President Palin? I don’t think anyone would have wanted that! But this is precisely what happened four times in the 20^th Century alone and nine times in our nation’s history. In all of these cases the men who were elected as Vice Presidents took over and became our President. Did we think of how this would affect our country? I think that in 2 of the cases in the 20^th century it greatly affected our country and the course of history. Both Harry S Truman and Lyndon B Johnson assumed office upon the death of our President and both made radical decisions to alter history and decide the lives of perhaps millions.

                After reading about the crooked placement of Truman as the Vice President to FDR in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s book “The Untold History of the United States” and hearing former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara accounts in his movie “The Fog of War” and his book “In Retrospect” it seems that clearly a different course of history would have been taken. The popular man to run with Roosevelt in 1944 was Henry Wallace. While Wallace had an overwhelming majority of the vote from the Democratic National Committee, he was ousted by party bosses, presumably because of his anti-atomic bomb and Soviet sympathies. Had Wallace become president, would we have dropped atomic bombs on Japan and began a cold war against the Soviet Union?  I certainly think not. Wallace, in fact, ended up being fired and defamed by Truman because of his persistence to stop a nuclear arms race and conflict with Stalin and the Soviets.

                Robert McNamara has very telling quotes from President Kennedy in 1963 talking of Kennedy’s plans to withdraw all troops from Vietnam by 1965. It was only after Kennedy was assassinated that full scale war was imminent in Vietnam. McNamara, who was one of the closest to Kennedy during his presidency said this in his book “In Retrospect”; “I think it highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled out of Vietnam.”

                As always, history can be and will always be debated, but there are at times too many reasons to think that the loss of our Presidents while in office have led to disastrous consequences if not poor leadership in its wake. Perhaps next time we go to vote for our President, we take a closer look at who may be running our nation in the case that something horrible should happen to the man or woman we pick to lead us.

Photos courtesy of University of Houston and Wellesley College