How to Get Rid of a President

October 29, 2018
Former CIA officer Priess (The President’s Book of Secrets) capitalizes on today’s keen interest in truncated terms of office in these piquant studies of presidential woe. He covers all the most dramatic ways a presidency can end, including impeachment; resignation before looming impeachment; assassination, which was an easier proposition in the 19th century, when the lack of security details, he notes, made it easy to saunter up to a president with a gun; and death by sudden infection, which felled William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor early in their respective terms. Priess also digs into less spectacular but perhaps more poignant presidential failures: John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and Chester A. Arthur were all not renominated by their parties for a second term; Samuel Tilden was denied the office by a corrupt backroom deal; Woodrow Wilson was secretly replaced by his wife after a stroke incapacitated him; Calvin Coolidge silently wilted from depression. A litany of others were denied reelection by voters. Unlike the many impeachment primers now being published, Priess’s tome doesn’t offer much assessment of prospects for removal; instead he gives readers a collection of colorful, slightly morbid vignettes that connoisseurs of political picaresque will relish.