We the People: Succession of Power

The 25th amendment. A few years before JFK was shot, an idealistic young lawyer set out on a mission to convince people something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for what should happen if a U. S. president was no longer able to serve. On this episode of our ongoing series We the People, the story behind one of the last amendments to the Constitution, and the man who got it done. Correction: In a previous version of this episode we incorrectly said that John F. Kennedy was the youngest president in US history. Kennedy at 43 was the youngest person to be elected president but Theodore Roosevelt, who took office at age 42 after William McKinley was assassinated, was the youngest person to serve as US president. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Is it for mad money? Well, it depends on where they're placed. They can be wherever you want them. Uh huh. Fork, the pockets, so that no snow gets into it.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  On a warm day in November 1963, local Dallas TV station WF A A was broadcasting a show about women's fashion.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Then there's zippers up the sides so that the jacket will fit tightly around the hips, keeping that straight, sleek look that it should have in the arm.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  When suddenly, out of nowhere, the show was stopped.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath, but about 10 or 15 minutes ago, a tragic thing, from all indications at this point, has happened in the city of Dallas. Let me quote to you this.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  When the broadcast came back on air, a man appeared on screen looking pale and in shock. He says...

• 1:12Speaker 03

  President Kennedy and Governor John Colley have been cut down by assassins' bullets in downtown Dallas.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  The American President, John F. Kennedy, along with the Governor of Texas, were shot. Newsrooms were in chaos, trying to figure out what happened.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  Mr. Kennedy was struck in the head. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  President Kennedy is reported to be fighting for his life in a Dallas hospital, but reports conflict...

• 1:40Speaker 00

  For about an hour, there was no official announcement of whether the President or Vice President were dead or alive.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  John Fierich had become obsessed with the possibility of a moment just like this, but he wasn't expecting it so soon.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  My name is John Fierich. I'm a professor at Fordham Law School.

• 2:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today, John is a professor at the law school he graduated from. He's 88 years old.

• 2:18Speaker 05

  I am most likely the oldest professor, full-time, at Fordham Law School.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  But back in 1961, two years before Dallas, John was an idealistic, newly-minted attorney on a mission to convince people that something essential was missing from the Constitution: clear instructions for what should happen if a US president was unable to do his job. He researched it for years.

• 2:45Speaker 07

  One of the most critical and intriguing constitutional questions ever presented for solution is what happens when the President of the United States becomes incapable of discharging the powers and duties of his office?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  This is an excerpt from an article John published in the Fordham Law Review in October 1963.

• 3:05Speaker 07

  Does the Vice President become President for the remainder of the term, or does he merely act as President during the period of inability? The Constitution is not explicit.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  John focuses in on Article 2, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution. It goes like this.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  "In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by law provide for the case of removal, death, resignation, or inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what officer shall then act as President, and such officer shall act accordingly until the disability..."

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Be removed or a president shall be elected.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  OK, now to translate. What that basically means is that if the president dies or resigns or is unable to serve the role of president, then the vice president would serve in his place. And if the vice president can't serve, then Congress has to decide which officer of government should step in as president. But that's about it. No more specifics. Now, at the time, this issue was not exactly top of mind for most Americans because John's article came out in October 1963, a time when President Kennedy seemed vital and healthy. But John had lots of questions. Like, who decides when a president is unable to serve? What happens next? Is the transfer of power to the vice president

• 4:45Speaker 02

  temporary or permanent? What if there is no vice president? To him, the fact that the current president was young and healthy, that the questions didn't seem urgent, made it the ideal time to hash it out.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  I didn't want the article to just go on a library shelf.

• 5:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  So he started mailing out copies.

• 5:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  He sent them everywhere, to current and former politicians. He even sent one to the White House.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  I had a response from an assistant to President Kennedy on November 13.

• 5:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  It went like this.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  President has received your letter and asked me to thank you for sending him the accompanied copy of your article.

• 5:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  An acknowledgement. Not bad. But then the personal responses started coming in. He got one from the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's brother.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  It says as follows. Dear Mr. Ferrick, thank you very much for sending me a copy of your article on the subject of president inability. I appreciate you bringing it to my attention as this is a subject which we have been studying here in the department for some time. Sincerely, Robert F. Kennedy.

• 5:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Then he hears from Richard Nixon.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  Dear Mr. Furek, I appreciate your sending me a copy of your article on presidents inability. This is a subject in which I am most interested. You aimed high. Well, I didn't know better.

• 6:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it didn't stop with politicians. He wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times. In all of these letters, he emphasized, this problem has come up before in our history, more than once, and Congress has never solved it.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  Presidents are mortal. President Garfield's shooting, President Wilson's stroke, and President Eisenhower's heart attack rendered the respective president temporarily unable to exercise the powers and duties of his office. Despite this, Congress has consistently failed the American people by not acting to eliminate the possibility of a gap in the executive because of the confusion existing over the meaning of the succession provision of the Constitution.

• 7:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the end, John didn't just want a discussion. He wanted more. He wanted a constitutional amendment.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  I think I had an expectation that people who had an interest in the subject would examine the article and with the hope that it would make a case for reform.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Six days later, the president was assassinated.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  It's official now. The president is dead. There's only one word to describe the picture here, and that's grief and much of it. It's official. As of just a few moments ago.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  November 22nd, 1963. John F. Kennedy became the eighth U.S. president to die in office. Suddenly, the alarms John Furek had been raising became very loud, and John believed that then, finally, someone would do something about it.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 8:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Written into the Constitution is a way to change it, but we do that less and less. On this episode of our ongoing series, We the People, the story behind one of the last amendments to the Constitution, the 25th, and the man who got it done.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  Hi, this is Mike from Brno in the Czech Republic. And you're listening to Throughline. A class act, this program.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  This message comes from BetterHelp. Your brain has limited storage, so why is it still holding on to that embarrassing moment from years ago? BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space to talk about what's taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans with mini co-pays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance, you can still get 20% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/NPR. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance. We will learn something on election night, but not everything. There's a lot we will not know, especially when it comes to close races. And we'll know much more the next morning

• 10:24Speaker 04

  and the morning after that. So save yourself a little time scrolling and listen to

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Up first, we'll be there when you wake up each and every morning this week with the latest midterm election news.

• 10:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part one, the question of succession.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Ready?

• 10:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  All right, I'm recording.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  All right.

• 10:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm ready.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  You're always ready, Run, true professional. All right, so you and through line producer extraordinaire Lawrence Wu went to Fordham University to interview our main character in this story, John Fierich. All right, so take me through what happens when you get there.

• 11:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was a cold, cold day.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  The worst.

• 11:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  And I remember I took the subway and I met Lawrence in the lobby.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then, you know, we turned on the recorder.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  As you have to do.

• 11:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then we got on the elevator, rode up to, I don't remember which floor it is, but when we got off the elevator,

• 11:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  I think it was John's assistant, she very nicely like walked us to his office. Hi, you've been here for years? Yes. Hi, good to meet you. I'm from Atlanta. Run. Oh, sweet shit. Yeah, Sarah's been. And like from the moment that we walked into the office, honestly, like, this is gonna sound cheesy, but it was like walking into a time capsule.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hello. Hi. Hi, I'm Run. Have we met before? We have not met before, but. What is your name? Run. Ren, R E N? R U N D, like run with the D. Oh, yeah, nice to see you. Like you look around and it was like all around, I mean, it was interesting. Half of the office was covered with like framed pictures of him and like congresspeople and lawyers and other people that he'd worked with over the years. And then the other half of the office was covered with pictures of like his grandkids and, and then, you know, he had like all these law books, you know, along the wall.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  And, and did it seem like he was eager because people aren't just knocking on his door every day wanting to? Talk about this story?

• 12:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  I think it had been a while.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 12:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, I think it had been a while. He's been at Fordham, you know, like for so much of his, you know, academic life. And obviously, that's where he got his start. That's where he worked on the 25th Amendment. Because it's so special to be here, right? I mean, Fordham is where it all began.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  John Fierich was born in 1936 in New York. His parents had arrived in the US not long before.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  My parents were immigrants and no formal education. I was the first born.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  John experienced a similar upbringing that I and many of you listening experienced.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  I grew in understanding of the importance of getting an education and then using it to make a difference.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Despite that pressure, John wasn't a good student as a kid, no matter how hard he tried. But his parents weren't accepting any excuses.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  It was a slow start for me in grammar school. And my father insisted one summer that I not go out until I understood math much better than my grades indicated.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Whatever his parents did, it worked. In fact, he did well enough to get a scholarship to go to Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, a school just a short subway ride away from where he grew up. He lived between two worlds, one at college and one back in his blue collar neighborhood. He went to classes during the day and worked shifts at a local supermarket in the evenings.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  I felt a real commitment working in the supermarket, be as good as you can be and serving people at the cash register and putting food on shelves.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Even with the job, he found time to be a part of Fordham's student government.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  I was vice president of my class and also the student body. That service experience was very important because I saw that you could make differences.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  And it was in the college student government where John had his first experience with the problem of succession of power in the most nerdy, dramatic kind of way.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  I remember when I was vice president of student body at Fordham College in my last year, I had to deal with the inability of a newly elected president.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Inability, as in the president is unable to serve?

• 15:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  What would that mean? A medical issue?

• 15:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, he had a medical issue. And as soon as he was elected, he resigned.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  The president of the student government stepped down, and suddenly everyone had an opinion about who should succeed him. Some people called for a new election. But remember, John was the student body vice president.

• 15:24Speaker 05

  I said that under the Constitution, the vice president becomes the president, and it's not going to, it should not be a new election.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  A standoff. But Fordham had a student court, I'm not joking here, that would decide these kinds of matters.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  And they sustained the position I had taken, that the student Constitution provided for succession.

• 15:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's dramatic for a student body, like, counts. It kind of, it's almost like a mock trial of what would come later a little bit.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  So John became president of the student government because the student Constitution spelled out that process. President resigns, then vice president becomes president, in this case, John Fehrich. And he found this whole process really motivating.

• 16:16Speaker 05

  It became clear to me, by the time I got into my last year of college, that going to law school would be very supportive of an interest in going into elective politics and making a difference.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  So John applied for law school at Fordham University and got in. He thrived there. He was the editor of the school's law review. But he didn't forget about presidential succession. He couldn't. It was all over the news.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  Eisenhower seemed perfectly healthy in these films made in 1955, just before his sudden heart attack. His illness revealed once again America's unpreparedness to deal adequately with such an emergency.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a major heart attack.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  In the Denver church where Ike worshipped, in churches and synagogues all across a shock nation, America joined in spirit with Vice President Nixon, facing grave burdens in a situation not adequately defined by constitutional law.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  The president was hospitalized, and right away, people started asking, uh, who's gonna run the White House while he's on the mend? Well, first place they might go was the Constitution to figure it out. Okay, Article 2, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution says that if the president is no longer able to discharge his duties because of removal from office, death, resignation, or inability, then the vice president assumes the powers and duties of the president. Okay, so then what happens? People quickly realized that the Constitution didn't say anything beyond what was in Article 2.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  For example, would the vice president just be a caretaker until a new election was held? Or would he be the legitimate president? And so with President Eisenhower's mounting medical troubles, it wasn't clear who was gonna decide if and when the vice president, Richard Nixon, would take over his duties. The two men eventually did work out a deal. Nixon would serve as acting president until Eisenhower returned. Disaster averted, but John F. Fierig wasn't satisfied.

• 18:35Speaker 05

  I saw that there was a problem of inability.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Remember, John had experience with this kind of thing, and he loved it.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  It tied to an interest in the Constitution, so I started to collect information.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  That is an understatement. John began obsessively researching the history of this issue. Even after he graduated and got a job as a lawyer, he kept going.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  I used to go to the Fordham Library at the Rose Hill campus, and if it was a holiday, I worked on it. Whenever I could, I was putting in a lot of hours at the law firm, and I wanted to take a look at the history in terms of the problem itself.

• 19:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  What kinds of historical examples were you coming across as you were digging into the research?

• 19:23Speaker 05

  Wilder Wilson, James Garfield.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Okay, here we're gonna stop, and I'm gonna take you on a fun journey into the past cases where a president died, and there was some lack of clarity about who would take on their role. Let's start with President William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States. His inauguration was on a cold rainy day in 1841. Standing outside in the rain, he gave the longest inaugural speech in American history. He spoke for nearly two hours. Anyway, he came down with pneumonia and died a month later. His vice president, John Tyler, quickly assumed his office. He was the first vice president to become president after the president died. It set up a new precedent,

• 20:13Speaker 02

  because up to that point, no president had died in office. And again, there was no explicit instructions in the Constitution about what to do. But interestingly, President Tyler never appointed a vice president and himself nearly died in a sailing accident three years later. And then there was President James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States. He was shot at a train station in Washington DC in July 1881. He survived but was severely injured and bedridden for weeks. He wasn't dead, and people tried everything to keep him alive. Even Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, tried his newly created metal detector

• 20:55Speaker 02

  to help doctors try to find where the bullet was lodged in the president's body. But it didn't work. And Garfield couldn't really function as president as an infection slowly destroyed his body. Garfield ultimately lived for 80 days. And the entire time, many people in the country wondered, who should serve as president? There was basically no acting president until Garfield died and the vice president took his place. And finally, there was another famous case, this time from the 20th century. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States, had a massive stroke, which incapacitated him for the remainder of his presidency. Many historians believe his wife, Edith Wilson,

• 21:40Speaker 02

  was effectively acting as president in his absence for nearly a year and a half, until the end of his term. Through his research, John F. Rix saw all these cases and realized that even though this problem had come up repeatedly in US history, no one had ever crafted a permanent solution.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  I was shocked by that.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  And so he decided he was going to channel that shock into writing an article about it.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  And of course, being a former editor of the Law Review, I had a pathway to writing about the problem of president's inability, and that became my most important writing.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  His October 1963 article in Fordham Law Review.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  It was called "The Problem of President's Inability: Will Congress Ever Solve It?"

• 22:28Speaker 02

  "The Problem of Presidential Inability: Will Congress Ever Solve It?"

• 22:33Speaker 05

  Question mark.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Question mark.

• 22:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Well, I guess this is the thing, right? Because, you know, you were writing it at a time when John F. Kennedy is in office, a young, you know, strapping president. And I guess I wonder, why did you think this was so important? Like, you, it's because it sounds like, I mean, you were spending your weekends, your holidays, working on this question. Why did you feel like the average person should even care? Why did you think that that was an important problem to solve?

• 23:11Speaker 05

  The articles I read and, and the learning that I developed indicated that there was a, really a major problem here, and, and they just couldn't get their hands around how to solve it.

• 23:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  And what, what in the most simple terms was the problem for the average person? And what, what could the potential consequences be of not solving it, I guess?

• 23:31Speaker 05

  Well, I guess, one way to look at it, I go back to the Constitutional Convention.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  The Constitutional Convention was the big meeting that lasted the entire summer of 1787, where a group of delegates from the American states met in Philadelphia and wrote the US Constitution. And they saw this coming. This problem of presidential succession that John was tackling almost 200 years later, the delegates actually disgusted.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  At some point in the convention, John Dickinson of Delaware, as I recall, says, what is an inability?

• 24:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  He says that who determines what is an inability?

• 24:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  And he's asking this in like 1787.

• 24:17Speaker 05

  1787.

• 24:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  And so what is an inability? What happens in the case of an inability, so to speak? And who determines it? And nobody answered him.

• 24:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  What is the threat to the country potentially? Or what is the threat hanging over the country in the event of, you know, an inability of the president?

• 24:40Speaker 05

  I wrote the article in a time of potential nuclear war. And if something happened to a president who was still alive.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  After an assassination attempt or illness, for example.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  The consequences for the country would have been enormous. It would have been a crisis.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Coming up, a president is shot and John goes to Washington.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  This is Rachel from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR.

• 25:56Speaker 07

  The countdown to the 2026 midterm elections is here. Voters will determine who controls the Senate, the House, and countless local offices. All the election coverage you need can be found on the NPR app, from big-picture political headlines to local stories that are curated just for you. Plus, live coverage as results come in on election night. Download the NPR app at npr.org/2026election.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  This week on Short Wave, truth and fraud. That is the beating heart of the movie You Can See Everything. But can you spot a liar in action?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Lying doesn't come with emotional and behavioral stereotypes that we think.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  How to detect deception for real on Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 26:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part two, the road to an amendment.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Well, the president was shot in Texas. What is your reaction to that? Well, I tell you, it upsets me very much to hear that because that's the only man

• 27:00Speaker 02

  that I got my trust in for president.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  On November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead, John F. F. Kennedy was only two years out of law school.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  I remember being at a meeting as a young lawyer and receiving a call telling me the president had just been shot. We were all just in a state of shock hearing that.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Even before that day, John was already laser focused on the question of what would happen if a president suddenly couldn't serve. For about an hour, there was no official word if JFK was alive or dead. In that uncertainty, John gamed out the options.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  It clearly would have been disabled, and we would have had a crisis on our hands with the ambiguity about the status of a vice president in a case of inability. Does he take the office for the rest of the term of that president, even if the president recovers? Or does he be just an acting president for the duration of the inability? And Arthur Kroc-

• 28:08Speaker 02

  A New York Times journalist who'd read John's article about this issue.

• 28:12Speaker 05

  publishes an article and makes reference to my article.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  What is inability? Who raises the question of when it has occurred and when it has ended? And who resolves these questions when they have been raised? Suppose a disabled president refuses to certify it, or if he asserts it, proclaims the end of his disability when it still exists. How is the government crisis to be met?

• 28:39Speaker 05

  I'm totally shocked when somebody told me that I was quoted in the New York Times, that they ought to crack. And then I started getting quills.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  One of the best studies of the subject was published by John D. Fierich in the October 1963 issue of the Fordham Law Review. His solution is a constitutional amendment.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  Because suddenly, it looked like you almost predicted. Yeah, my life changed. Because somehow I started getting requests for the article.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Things started moving fast. And it became clear that John's writing and ideas could play a role in whatever came next.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  I realized that elective politics was not for me, but law reform and communicating through writings, through talks, would be who I am.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Just a few weeks after President Kennedy's assassination, the American Bar Association, the ABA, announced a meeting called Special Conference on Presidential Inability. The lawyers were ready to dive in. It was scheduled for January 1964, and John was invited to be a part of it.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  The staff of the ABA, they had seen the reference to the article, and they recommended this young lawyer in New York, who wrote this article that was quoted in the Times, should be invited to be a member of the group.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  All of the lawyers invited to the conference were given background materials in preparation.

• 30:16Speaker 05

  And the first document to read is my article.

• 30:20Speaker 07

  Our strength and survival depend on our having an able leader at the head of the executive branch at all times. The continuity of the executive should never be in doubt. At present, it is.

• 30:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  You had done all the work already, basically. Yeah.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. It was complete. The article was out there.

• 30:38Speaker 07

  A constitutional crisis exists. It is time that Congress act to resolve it once and for all.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  So John goes to the ABA meeting in January. He's sitting around with all these lawyers. One of them was even an elected politician, Democratic Senator Birch Bay from Indiana. And they've all read his article. And obviously, they have some questions for John.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  Why an amendment? Is there any issue about whether the president should be able to declare his own inability?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  So basically, can the president decide himself when he's not able to do the job anymore? Or should someone else make that call? Should the vice president? This was tricky territory.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  If you gave the authority only to the vice president, the American public are going to see a battle between the president and the vice president. It could look like a coup. It's like a coup.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  In other words, if it's just up to the VP to decide if the president is fit to serve, then what's stopping them from using that power to basically take over the presidency?

• 31:46Speaker 05

  So all of that, we sort of worked through. And at the end of the day, put out the recommendations.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  The biggest one being, we need a constitutional amendment. The ABA lawyers, including John, sketched out what this could look like. First, they said that if the president is unable to serve, then power goes to the vice president, who will serve either to the end of the term or until the president is able again. Who decides if the president is unable to serve? Well, the president himself can do that, or the vice president, as long as he has enough votes from the cabinet or some other body approved by Congress. Okay, so the ABA took these recommendations to Congress.

• 32:35Speaker 05

  Several of us on the conference also were invited to testify in subsequent days.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Do you have some concern that it would be difficult for the vice president and also the cabinet members to act with the necessary degree of impartiality? Would they be torn between loyalty to the president and the vice president? I think all of these are legitimate questions for us to discuss before making a final decision.

• 33:01Speaker 07

  I feel this way, Mr. Chairman. First of all, I feel that nobody outside of the cabinet would have the confidence of the people of the country. Certainly, the cabinet is a body that is recognized as consisting of people close to the president.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  This is from John F. Rix's testimony in Congress. It wasn't recorded, so it's being reenacted here. Senator Birch Bay is asking the questions.

• 33:25Speaker 07

  In other words, you don't think removal of a disabled president is something to be taken lightly? Not at all, Senator. I feel very strongly that any provision which we adopt should be weighed as heavily in favor of the president as possible, because it seems to me that this is the single greatest institution we have, and I would be very reluctant to see us set up a commission consisting of people who were neither appointed or elected.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Eventually, a draft of a constitutional amendment worked its way through Congress, with Senator Birch Bay leading the way.

• 34:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is top priority at this point.

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Top priority. It was magnificent.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  It didn't immediately succeed. Congress adjourned without the House voting on it. But Senator Birch Bay didn't give up. In 1965, he introduced it again.

• 34:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  How directly were you involved in terms of the deliberations on, you know, the Senate and House floors? Were you like, you know, running papers to people, taking notes? Like, how directly were you involved in that whole process?

• 34:33Speaker 05

  Well, in many ways, I had several roles.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  First, as an organizer, he became a part of the ABA's Young Lawyers Committee on Presidential Inability and Vice Presidential Vacancy.

• 34:46Speaker 05

  I did the best I could to energize the young lawyers of America, and we were very active, talking to the members of Congress from our state, both the House and the Senate.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Second, educating lawyers and the public about the amendments.

• 35:02Speaker 05

  I wrote articles on it in the ABA Journal. So in the A B A Journal at the time, today we got social media, we got so many publications. But at that time, that was an important publication. So the lawyers are getting educated all over America.

• 35:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  You're educating them. So you were, you were educating. Yeah, yeah. You were really like shepherding it, it sounds like.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  People were carrying the material and the literature and passing it on.

• 35:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  I mean, that's the part of all of this, you know, that I think it's easy to forget. Like, you're still in your, you're, you're in your twenties. You're pretty fresh out of law school when all this is happening. Like, it must have been a whirlwind to just be literally on the front lines of shaping the Constitution.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  Well, I, I was so busy, I don't think I, I focused on what was really happening. You know, I was working as a practicing lawyer. I was putting in a lot of time.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  So after months of organizing and educating and Senator Birch Bay working his colleagues trying to get their votes, the bill was reintroduced.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  And when that was introduced in January sixty-five, it had seventy sponsors in the Senate. They all wanted to get their name on it.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  The bill passed both houses of Congress. But in order for the bill to become an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, three fourths of state legislatures had to ratify it. It's very time consuming and difficult to achieve. But in nineteen sixty-seven, two years after the bill was introduced, the twenty-fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. John Fehrick's dream had become a reality.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  At the White House, a vital piece of legislation reaches President Johnson's desk. It's the twenty-fifth constitutional amendment, providing for the replacement of any disabled president or the filling of any vice presidential vacancy.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  The 25th Amendment has four sections. The first three are straightforward. Basically collectively, they say that when a president is removed from office, or dies, or resigns, the vice president automatically becomes president. If a vice president dies or resigns, then the president nominates a replacement, and that person has to be approved by votes from both houses of Congress. If a president sends a letter to Congress saying they can't continue their duties because they're unable physically or mentally, then the vice president takes on the president's duties until the president can do it again, or there's another election.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  Availing myself of the constitutional option offered to this office by Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which permits through a written declaration to temporarily transfer all powers of the presidency to the next in the constitutional line of succession.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Anyone else who watches the show, The West Wing, like me, might remember when President Bartlet invoked the 25th Amendment after his daughter was kidnapped. There was no vice president, so he handed power to the Speaker of the House.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  I want it as clear as can be that this administration stands squarely behind and shoulder to shoulder with the acting president.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Then there's Section 4, the longest section, the most controversial one. It basically says that the vice president and the cabinet, or some other body designated by Congress, can determine if the president is unable to serve. If they get together and vote that the president is mentally or physically incapacitated, then the vice president will assume the powers and duties of the president.

• 38:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm wondering if you can explain what the thinking was in terms of making it pretty, you know, like a really high bar, essentially, to get to the point where a president is being declared, you know, as having an inability.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  We start with the principle that...

• 39:17Speaker 05

  People choose a president, as we recently did, for a term of four years. And that's a major part of the Constitution. So it made it an amendment, makes it clear, but goes to Congress. The vote is in two houses, and it takes 2/3 of each house. And it was felt that that was really protective of the four-year term. And nobody wanted to process an inability where we've got to make an instant decision. And it could be a crisis if you don't make it. President's plane went down, you can't find the president, whatever it might be.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Coming up, the 25th Amendment gets its first test.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Alistair Hething, and I am a professor of history at Muskingham

• 40:20Speaker 00

  University in New Concord, Ohio. I often use your show in my classes. You are listening to Throughline from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. Want to look and feel your best this fall? ProLon's five-day fasting-mimicking diet is a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com/NPR.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  This midterm election season, the NPR app is your single stop for clear, independent coverage. Stay on top of national and local storylines with news, stories, podcasts, and political analysis on demand. Download the NPR app and check out the Elections 2026 tab today.

• 41:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  On a new episode of Your Turn with Alison Aubrey, two dream analysts explain the power of dreams as a guide for self-exploration.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Sometimes dreams really contain the secret that we need to overcome difficulties, get unstuck, see a different way, and move forward.

• 41:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  All this and more on Your Turn, available on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Part Three, The Twenty-Fifth.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Before Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, following the Watergate scandal, there was his vice president, Spiro Agnew.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  The American people deserve to have a vice president who commands their unimpaired confidence and implicit trust. For more than two months now, you have not had such a vice president.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  During the Watergate investigation, which implicated Nixon in a major political scandal that was rocking the country, a separate investigation was happening involving Agnew. There were allegations that he had been involved in bribery while serving in Maryland politics, including his role as governor. Agnew called these allegations damned lies. And at least to the public, Nixon backed him. The charges that have been made against him, and which he has denied publicly, he has denied to me privately on three occasions. But the pressure for Agnew to resign was growing. He told Nixon first in October 1973. Then he told the country on national television.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  In this technological age, image becomes dominant. Appearance supersedes reality. An appearance of wrongdoing, whether true or false, in fact, is damaging to any man. But more important, it is fatal to a man who must be ready at any moment to step into the presidency.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Spiro Agnew's resignation left Richard Nixon without a vice president, which meant that six years after the 25th Amendment was ratified, it got its first test. The amendment has four parts. The one that concerns the vice presidency is Section 2.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  Section 2.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  John Fehrick, who helped draft the 25th Amendment, reads it for us.

• 43:54Speaker 05

  Whenever there's a vacancy in the office of the vice president, the president shall nominate a vice president who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. And it was used for the first and only time

• 44:12Speaker 05

  during the period of 1973 and 74, when the vice president resigned from office, the President Nixon was able to nominate Gerald Ford, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, to be the new vice president, who was confirmed within two months after the nomination.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  On today, having confirmed the nomination of Gerald R. Ford of the state of Michigan to be Vice President of the United States, the proceedings required by Section 2 of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution have been complied with.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  So Gerald Ford became the vice president. Then the following year, President Richard Nixon resigned, which meant that, under the 25th Amendment's Section 1, newly confirmed Vice President Ford would now become President Ford. He then nominated his new vice president, again, under Section 2, Nelson Rockefeller. So within a year, the 25th Amendment was invoked three separate times.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  We never speculated about that scenario, that's for sure. I mean, we never had anything like that in our history.

• 45:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  As someone who had helped to, you know, build this amendment that was becoming very, very critical in this chaotic moment around the Watergate scandal, what did that look like for you, realizing this was having a very, very direct impact on the country's future?

• 45:43Speaker 05

  I was distraught, obviously, like so many of us, because Watergate was terrible.

• 45:50Speaker 05

  But keep in mind, process involved both houses of Congress,

• 45:56Speaker 05

  filling a vacancy in the vice presidency. And every district in the country had a representative in Congress. They wanted to get as close to the people as possible without a popular election, because you'd have an electoral college election.

• 46:11Speaker 05

  And the House had to be included, every district in the country.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  This wouldn't be the only time the 25th Amendment would be invoked. Section 3, which allows the president to initiate a power transfer, that was used once by Ronald Reagan, twice by President George W. Bush, and once by President Joe Biden, all for being under anesthesia for medical procedures. The only part of the amendment that has never been used is Section 4. That's the one where power is taken from the president. It basically says that the vice president and the cabinet can determine if the president is unable to serve. If they get together and vote that the president is physically or mentally incapacitated, then the vice president will assume the powers and duties of the president as acting president.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Section 4 almost had to be invoked when President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. A bullet was about an inch from Reagan's heart, and he had to undergo surgery. But it wasn't invoked. People also mentioned Section 4 more recently when talking about former President Joe Biden's age, and when President Trump's opponents questioned his capacity to lead at the end of his first term. But so far, all that discussion has only been hypothetical.

• 47:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Obviously impossible to predict the future, but I am curious, given your lifetime of work on all sorts of issues relating to the Constitution, and we have been working on a series about amendments. And this is one of the last amendments to have ever been passed. What do you think is the future of the 25th Amendment specifically and the amendment process generally?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  I do think at the end of the day, we've been through a lot of issues in our country's history. We had, you know... The Confederacy and a long time before women could vote, participate, and African-American women, even when other women could vote. And we've gotten, we've been able to move beyond that. The way I see the world, I respect our Constitution. I hear presidents of both parties say, talk about the Constitution as part of their advocacy. It's a written Constitution. It's been the longest written Constitution in the history of the world. And it makes clear from the start the sovereignty of the people, we the people.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  And if you want to change the Constitution, it's not easy. But I don't rule out another constitutional amendment, even though it's very hard. And I have the confidence that the American people, whether you understand the Constitution or not, you do understand there's something out there called the Constitution.

• 49:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's rare to hear someone speak, hopefully, about any of this, frankly, today. It feels like the popular sentiment is despair, is pessimism. What fuels your hope?

• 49:25Speaker 05

  Well, I've said to students the other day, we all have an obligation as lawyers to keep hope alive because of the rule of law and our Constitution. And it's not easy. But that doesn't mean it can't be done.

• 49:48Speaker 05

  And that's somebody who gives up hope. And that was just that young lawyer that thought that Congress should do something about the 25th Amendment.

• 49:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  I feel like it's especially, you know, I don't know, powerful, kind of having this conversation with you, sitting here in Fordham, where all this began. And I think it's kind of beautiful that you're here. Like, it's sort of a...

• 50:16Speaker 05

  It's so nice to see you. I mean, I just, it's...

• 50:22Speaker 05

  You know, when I, when I read the pages in there last night, I, you know, I, I wouldn't be able to do that today. And it brought, brought back a lot of, a lot of memories of people who are all gone, you know, and, and, and yet, like myself, had a belief in America.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 50:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randa Abdel Fattah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by me.

• 51:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  And me, and. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kay. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Christina Kim. Devin Kadyama. Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi. And a special thank you to Sarah Wyman, who did most of the reporting and writing for this episode. You are amazing, and we miss you here at Throughline.

• 51:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Voiceover work in this episode was done by Neil Rausch and Zach Forrest.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Thank you to Jeanette Oakes, Keondre Starling, Johannes Durkey, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 51:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes. Navid Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Anya Mizanyi.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you've heard on the show, write us at [email protected].

• 51:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 52:19Speaker 04

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.