There is a mandated United States presidential line of succession that determines who assumes the role of president in the event that the current officer holder is no longer able to serve, whether due to illness, death, resignation, or other misfortune. Thus far, a vice president has stepped in every time that a president required unexpected replacement. The presidential line of succession even takes into account the possibility that more than one person at the top of the list might suddenly find themselves unavailable1.
In addition to its obvious governmental utility, the line of succession can serve a useful narrative purpose in fiction, which is to indicate to readers precisely how deep in the crap the US finds itself2. If the new president is eight or nine positions down the list, something dramatic must have happened to remove everyone ahead of the new president. Since it’s very unlikely that people well down the list will ever be president, there’s no reason to select them on the basis of suitability for that role. The new president may prove very unpresidential indeed.
Perhaps examples would help.
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959)
Suspecting Soviet perfidy, Colonel Mark Bragg sends his family to stay with brother Randy in Fort Repose, Florida. His precaution pays off. Although Mark is incinerated along with the rest of Omaha, Helen and children Ben Franklin and Peyton survive. Fort Repose is too insignificant to nuke and chance spares Fort Repose the fallout that blankets so much of the US.
Although the American government was as suspicious of the USSR as Mark, the precise timing of the exchange could not be predicted and was a nasty surprise3. Therefore, the most senior member of the administration not in Washington was Mrs. Vanbruuker-Brown, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Author Frank was inspired to underline the serious consequences of nuclear war after a real-life incident. Frank estimated that a nuclear exchange might kill fifty or sixty million Americans. His friend’s response was “Wow! Fifty or sixty million dead! What a depression that would make!”
Among the details selected to drive home what that meant, a very junior official becomes president. President Vanbruuker-Brown does, however, rise to the occasion.
The Gold at the Starbow’s End by Frederik Pohl (1972)
Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen has a simple, obvious solution to the many problems plaguing America and its president. Assemble a small team of America’s brightest, isolate them on a sublight journey to a planet that does not exist, and miraculous breakthroughs are certain to ensue. It’s a scheme so obvious, it is a wonder nobody has ever tried it before.
Knefhausen’s scheme succeeds beyond his wildest nightmares. The crew of the starship Constitution do indeed achieve unparalleled insights… including how to express their displeasure at being sent on what they now see was a suicide mission. Thus, by the end of the novella, the president that approved the mission is long gone and the current president is a forgettable nobody who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to ascend the line of succession to the Oval Office… at least until the rising seas submerge Washington.
The Gold at the Starbow’s End also qualifies for a possible essay on “Five Stories That Are Extremely 1970s, Specifically Mid-Nixon Era.”
Systemic Shock by Dean Ing (1981)
Aware that the world was lucky to have survived World War Three with the loss of only two cities to nuclear doom, the US response to Sino-Indian provocation was to spare governments but target granaries. Thanks in part to a last-minute unrequested assist from the Russian Union of Soviets, the attack was so wildly successful that India had but two options: accept humiliating terms to avoid famine or launch a combined attack with their Chinese allies against the US and its allies. India chose the latter.
Under the circumstances, US defense against the nuclear barrage that followed was surprisingly successful. It was not so successful that the president long survived approving the attack on India. Thus, Speaker of the House Hyatt is elevated to President Hyatt.
Among the many remarkable preparations made by the US for nuclear war in the novel is the means by which a national presidential election could be successfully conducted despite the distraction of the deaths of forty percent of the population. Thanks to the impressive robustness of American elections, even under these circumstances, Hyatt is only president until the 1992 election, at which point he loses to president-elect Yale Collier.
Trinity’s Child by William Prochnau (1983)
The Soviet premier has a bold plan to free the world from the never-ending fear of impending nuclear doom. Step one: launch a surprise attack on the US’s nuclear arsenal. Step two: point out to the president that of the three possible US responses (do nothing and accept the damage, retaliate proportionately, or launch a full-scale retaliation), the first two options limit the deaths to a few million, while the third would kill billions. Since the president can hardly be expected to let someone murder millions of Americans, the president gives an order to respond with option 2.
Unfortunately for the Soviets, in the chaos that follows the attack the current president is thought dead. Washington being in flames, the only successor known to be alive is the Secretary of the Interior. The Secretary of Interior is many things, but coldly rational is not one of them. Civilization seems doomed, unless the surviving military personnel get very creative.
With all due respect for people with nuclear anxiety, the only reason that the premier’s plan isn’t the stupidest idea I’ve ever encountered is because the production of stupid ideas is an extremely competitive field. Among the many obvious issues, it assumes that the US would have the operational flexibility to assess the attack and respond proportionately in the minutes before the missiles arrive.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2018)
President Dewey beat Truman in 1948. Now in 1952, he will be the incumbent fending off a challenger. Or at least, Dewey would have been, had a meteorite not incinerated Dewey, along with anyone unlucky enough to be within hundreds of miles of Washington, DC.
Conveniently for America… or what remained of it… not every member of Dewey’s administration died in the disaster. Secretary of Agriculture Charles F. Brannan survived. But the crisis facing the US, and the Earth itself, may prove more than any one man, no matter how lucky, can manage.
This is another novel in which apocalypse does not prevent a timely US election. I work for Elections Ontario and Elections Canada from time to time. Despite my tremendous enthusiasm for both, I suspect that extinction level events such as global thermonuclear war or giant meteor impact would pose some significant operational challenges for elections.
Note the absence of works in which the calamity winnowing presidents and the line of succession is an epidemic of disease. I was sure one of the classic pandemic books—The Earth Abides, The Stand, Some Will Not Die, The Scarlet Plague—would have offered a sequence of presidents succumbing to the plague to show how serious it was… but every possibility I checked lacked that detail. Surely there must be one?
- The authors of the 25th Amendment (adopted in 1967) might have had in mind the fact that presidential assassin Booth’s co-conspirators tried to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson as well as Secretary of State William H. Seward. The possibility of nuclear war was also likely a consideration for the authors of the amendment, the Cuban Missile Crisis being a recent event. ↩︎
- If the US finds itself in deep shit, the outcome of the disaster could have global consequences, a plus for any author seeking reader interest. You could write a novel about Canadian prime ministerial succession, but not only is the process of replacing a PM now face down in his soup less dramatic, it’s less likely to be globally consequential. No disrespect intended to the late, fatally overworked Prime Minister Sir John Thompson or to the lamentable timing of his sudden demise. ↩︎
- The timing of the apocalypse in Alas, Babylon was accelerated by an accident; a Sidewinder missile hit the wrong target at the worst possible time. ↩︎
I’m going to politely request, at this point, that we stick to fiction and avoid getting into the weeds of current political reality, simply for sanity’s sake. Thanks all!
Note the absence of works in which the calamity winnowing presidents and the line of succession is an epidemic of disease. I was sure one of the classic pandemic books—The Earth Abides, The Stand, Some Will Not Die, The Scarlet Plague—would have offered a sequence of presidents succumbing to the plague to show how serious it was… but every possibility I checked lacked that detail. Surely there must be one?
I think this is what happens to the British royal family in Terry Pratchett’s Nation?
The thing about Nation is that it exemplifies (and satirizes) the (near infinite?) British line of succession. Most recently “The Queen is dead, long live the King” happened instantaneously and their are long lists which could come into play if something happened to London.
There’s some of that in the SM Stirling ‘Dies the Fire ‘ sequence. Elizabeth never makes it out of London, Charles escapes to the Isle of Wight and is propped up by his Icelandic wife.
I thought HM did escape London; it was the then PM Tony Blair who didn’t.
It is but traditionally they aren’t in the US Presidential line of succession. At least not in this universe, although maybe they are in Nation’s. And I cannot rule out a Clive Cussler novel in which it is revealed the US and UK signed a secret treaty inserting the British monarch into the PLoS between the Secretary of Transportation and the Secretary of Education, a treaty whose sole signed copy was thought to have been destroyed in the Centre Block fire of 1916, but which in fact was simply misfiled in the only part of the building to survive the conflagration.
I went to high school with someone who claimed that if the right 40-odd people died in the right order she would inherit the British Crown. Whether or not that was true, members of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha/Windsor have been known to marry Americans, and their children would be American citizens who could hold office; given a large enough devastation of both governments it’s not impossible that the legal successor to the US presidency and the British Crown could end up being the same person.
There was a movie in the 90’s with, IIRC, John Goodman where some guy living in Vegas inherits the Crown after some accident involving a photographer. Something like that anyway. I was very stoned when I saw it.
King Ralph, based loosely on the novel Headlong
Trinity’s Child was made into the film By Dawn’s Early Light, which starred the great James Earl Jones and the perhaps not quite as great but absolutely always watchable Darren McGavin. I don’t recall the exact circumstances that lead to the destruction of Washington, DC, and the ascent of McGavin’s Secretary of the Interior to the Presidency, but I think they made somewhat more sense than those proposed in the novel (which I’ve never read). The film is a cracker, totally worth the watching, and the final few minutes are Jones at his finest. What a salute!
James Earl Jones was in another presidential succession film, this time as the (un)lucky successor. The Man (1972) was based on a 1964 Irving Wallace novel, where his character starts the story as the president pro tempore of the Senate.
The President and Speaker have been killed in the collapse of a building while at a summit in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Vice President, suffering from a terminal illness, refuses to assume the office.
There isn’t really an SF connection here other than Rod Serling having written the movie’s screenplay.
You should definitely read the novel, it’s a cracker!
I believe By Dawn’s Early Life replaced the absolutely crackers disarmament plan with an unsanctioned attack carried out by well-placed Soviet extremists.
Well, bother. I guess if I add and delete a reply, I cannot edit the reply I was replying to.
I thought the cast of By Dawn’s Early Light was pretty strong in general.
How nuclear movies was James Earl Jones in, anyway? Strangelove, obs, but where there others?
If you countThe Sum of All Fears, which has Fun Nuclear Stuff in it although no succession, that makes three I can think of.Yeah, well, that was Morgan Freeman, also great, but not James Earl Jones.
Playing the same character, however.No, he wasn’t. I give up.
I thought they recast his role with Morgan Freeman in Sum, or am I confusing my Jack Ryan films?
Freeman plays Jack Ryan’s boss, as did Jones, but it’s not the same character.
Getting both James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman as bosses I want that job!
The revamp of Battlestar Galactica involves a thinly disguised Presidential succession plot.
I’m trying to remember the book (?) involving a manly man crossing a nuclear ruined America in search of the secretary of state for agriculture, the last survivor of the 25th amendment chain.
I have vague recollections of that too, but no details. Maybe something by Dean Ing?
The only story of a post-nuke road trip across the nation I can think of is Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. But IIRC they were transporting a serum.
Technically, Hiero’s Journey could be called a post-apocalyptic road trip across America but Presidential succession does not figure into the plot.
Serendipity- iust started a re-read of that series. There seemed to be a fashion for those after the bomb books at the time: George R Stewart’s Earth Abides, Linda Bushyager’s Master of Hawks & sequel. Also Sheila Sullivan’s Summer Rising (post collapse, but not after the Bomb).
There were several fictional treatments in the mid-1960s, only very vaguely SFF-adjacent, of things going wrong at the highest level of US government (like Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate), but the only succession-related one that I can remember is The Man (Irving Wallace), where the President of the Senate Pro Tempore becomes President after the President and House Speaker both die in an accident while the Vice President’s office is vacant. The drama comes from the successor to the Presidency being a black man—this was written when such a prospect would have been shocking to a large percentage of the public, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. We only had our first popularly elected black Senator, Edward Brooke, a Republican, a couple of years after Wallace’s novel was published.
In all these novels, the President is portrayed as a mostly sympathetic protagonist. The last half century has shown that such a portrayal would be wildly inaccurate. Philip K. Dick was probably closer to recent reality with his robotic Presidents whose speeches are programmed by a cadre of high status insider advertising experts, as in The Penultimate Truth and The Simulacra. The latter novel has a succession crisis in the sense of a conflict about changing the contract for building the next President from the huge incumbent firm to a smaller company, a decision that leads to civil war by the point that the story stops.
I think I first read that novel when it was printed in paperback, probably in connection with the movie based on it coming out (I think the cover illustration featured a still from the film). It starred the late great James Earl Jones, and I’ve just learned that the screenplay was written by Rod Serling.
Yes, I fondly remember reading The Man — I went on a bit of a Wallace kick as a teen in the 1980s.
Closest that comes to mind is Irving Wallace’s 1964 (so, written before the 25th Amendment) bestseller THE MAN, though only a single illness is involved, rather than a pandemic. The Vice President dies of disease. (Don’t remember if it was a specific illness.) Then the President and Speaker of the House die in an accident. (Plane crash, I think?) the Presidency falls to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Douglas Dilman, a Black man appointed as tokenism. I vaguely remember the book as long and rather turgid.
are in a German castle preparing for a summit when the ceiling collapses and kills them both. President is only known as the Chief or TC, (clearly JFK). Then the President pro tempore becomes POTUS
In The Man, the Vice President has died of a heart attack (obviously based on LBJ). The President and the Speaker of the H
I was surprised to see the otherwise meticulously researched Gravity Falls took the poorly supported view that a President expelled from office remained President as long as he didn’t acknowledge the expulsion, even long after his term had ended.
Fred Pohl’s Black Star Rising featured aliens looking for an American President, and not being eager to accept “There isn’t one” for an answer – resulting in the plot that propells the plot
It would not have helped with the scenario in Black Star Rising but I bet there’s a study of how to manage succession when all the standard candidates have died, buried somewhere in a Hudson Institute filing cabinet.
One might observe that anything that destroyed Washington DC thoroughly enough to create a succession crisis would inevitably also destroy the Hudson Institute, filing cabinets and all.
In a room marked “Beware of Leopard”?
One SF-adjacent novel is Interface, co-written with his uncle by Neal Stephenson (hence SF-adjacent). A presidential candidate becomes president with the aid of biochip (which repairs brain function that he’d lost following a major stroke). It features his black female vice-president (not that likely in 1994, when the novel was published) and an interesting approach to presidential succession.
Joe Steele, by Harry Turtledove.
Alternate history in which Stalin was born in California instead of Russia.
The scenario happens near the end. Steele dies in office, his VP fires most of the cabinet, the remaining few are assassinated, and the VP is impeached and removed, leaving no legitimate successor.
Alistair Beaton’s “A Planet for the President” does have a plague, but there’s a vaccine. America has it.
Wasn’t there a Heinlein
polemicstory about the President dying and the Veep, a black woman, refuses to step aside. (She may have been an actress or model) Luckily, she has a Professor Bernardo de la Paz equivalent handy to help her restructure things the right (Heinlein-ish) way.Yes, this is somewhere in Expanded Universe.
“The Happy Days Ahead” perhaps – she was a thinly disguised Nichelle Nichols.
In A Specter is Haunting Texas, the JFK assassination begins a trend that all successions occur due to assassination. LBJ also rings Texas with all US’s missile defense system, so that nuclear war leads to it (and Siberia) being the surviving world powers. And they are fighting over possession of Yellowknife (Canada).
It’s not SF as such, but in mainstream bestsellers, Tom Clancy used this in Debt of Honor (to turn Jack Ryan into President Ryan).
That Clancy is also useful to cite when people claim the idea of using hijacked airplanes as weapons, by flying them into buildings, was completely unheard of before 2001. (It’s not really useful for much else.)
Stephen King’s The Running Man ends with the protagonist crashing a plane into the TV company’s HQ to kill the producer of the program. Published 1982.
An idea also used by the time travel series Seven Days in 1998 – the pilot episode had terrorists crash a light aircraft loaded with nerve gas into the White House, and the agency controlling the time machine decides that preventing this is more worthwhile than defending the universe from any unforeseen time paradox consequences etc. They have to do this twice if I recall correctly, because the terrorists had a backup plan…
My memory of this was thinking that Clancy got the idea from the series, but his novel actually came first by several years.
I think Dean Ing’s 1979 Soft Targets features in passing an extremely unsuccessful attempt to fly an explosive-laden Cessna into the Statue of Liberty.
Robert Frezza’s 1996 Fire in a Faraway place resolves the conflict by having the good guys carry out what is essentially a note-for-note remake of 9/11 with a space ship. Except as the book came first, the parallels are inadvertent.
Another non-SF scenario from The Bulwark (a Never Trump online mag) where the Senate Majority Leader becomes President (at least temporarily) in January 2025. Subscription required to read all of it.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-cataclysmic-post-election-scenario
The gist is, the House needs a Speaker before it can count the Electoral College votes, the House has recently had trouble selecting a Speaker, and if January 21 comes without a Speaker then the election can’t be certified. Which means no President or Vice-President and since there’s no Speaker of the House the next in line is the President Pro-Tem of the Senate and since that’s usually the Majority Leader, that person becomes the President!
No apocalypse required!
One nitpick about this scenario. The President Pro Tempore usually is NOT the Majority Leader. In practice, the President Pro Tempore is generally the most senior member of the majority party in the Senate. This is generally someone different from the Majority Leader, although I’m not sure what is done when the Majority Leader is the most senior member.
Note that this is a Senatorial convention to select the most senior member of the majority party as President Pro Tempore. I don’t think it’s an actual Senate rule.
‘Trinity’s Child’ is a book that’s begging to be filmed again (‘By Dawn’s Early Light’ was good, true…), with modern CGI.
There’s John Barnes Daybreak series (Directive 51, Daybreak Zero, The Last President)
Re: the disease, a TV show at least does it well. “Last Man on Earth” has a montage featuring coverages from funerals covering the VP, AG, and others down to the Secretary of Education.
Nobody is going to mention Designated Survivor?
The first two seasons were very good.
Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent” series got more and more SFish as it went on, and featured a wide variety of succession issues – Presidential death due to illness, death of a President/candidate due to accident after the convention, assassination of the next candidate, etc.
See also “The Texas-Israeli War: 1999” by Howard Waldrop and Jake Sanders. In the aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange and devastating germ warfare, Texas secedes from the Union, and sends a squad to kidnap the US President, who’s in Oklahoma to try and negotiate a return to the Union. The decimated US military hires Israeli mercenaries to retrieve the President, in what turns out to be an “unauthorized” mission, since the Vice-President is secretly colluding with the Texans so he can stay in power.
In John Barnes
Orbital
resonance, the first- possibly the only in that universe- President Bush dies of mutAids. I don’t remember if the deaths went down the line.
So here’s the weird thing. I thought the MutAids plague got spread in part because so many people are a couple of handshakes from the President and I planned to mention the book in this article because of that. When I flipped though my copy, I could not find the passage I thought I remembered.
That bit (about the handshakes) is in Kaleidoscope Century
Ahhhhh. I didn’t think to look there.
I think that in ‘The Trade of Queens’ the nuke set of in Washington ended with a President Rumsfeld with consequences about what you’d expect for the Clan.
If I recall correctly the Prez was in DC and the veep had a heart attack shorty after.