My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

In answering a question about JFK's health and its role in Lyndon Johnson's decision to accept the Vice Presidency, Bruce takes a look at the people and factors surrounding Johnson's decision, Kennedy's motivations, Eisenhower's indirect role, and the confusing hours in a Los Angeles hotel that changed history.
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Why talk about LBJ? There's a few reasons.
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On the surface, the 25th Amendment is a perfect mechanism for providing a stable transition of Presidential power. But that's not what early state ratification critics thought. And it's not how Hollywood writers oft envision it.

When debating the 25th amendment to the US Constitution, one state legislator called it rushing "pell-mell into madness." Another said it did not complete the very purpose it intended and should go back to Congress for fixing. And still another said it has a huge hole around the vice presidency.

These state quibbles were enough for a scare, but the states ratified anyway, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a bipartisan push. But were the arguments valid?

Although the 25th is designed to potentially remove a President, it is also designed to avoid doing that if at all possible. It was written by politicians to avoid politics, and as several TV and movie writers have found, it could create lots of politics.

If you find it confusing, you aren't alone. Some opponents during its ratification took a look at what came out of the hard work of Sen. Kefauver and Bayh and said - why was it written this way? And not all their criticisms were answered.

In this episode we look at the 25th and objections raised in Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Colorado that might have sunk the amendment.

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From a town in California named for Zachary Taylor, to a famous letter sent by Frederick Douglass, we tell a few stories that didn't make it in to the series.



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It comes down to milk and cherries? Plans change when a nation's hero falls, and historians go to work, reinterpreting the events of 1850.
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