The Contemporary Presidency: The Twenty Fifth Amendment: Recommendations and Deliberations of the Working Group on Presidential Disability
The Framers of the Constitution addressed the issues of presidential disability and succession in the document they wrote in Philadelphia in 1787 but they did so in ambiguous and uncertain language. Article II, section 5, states that "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 be removed, or a President shall be elected." Two daunting problems emerged from this wording. First, it is not clear whether the words "the same" refer to the presidential office itself or to the powers and duties of the presidential office, an important distinction (Feerick 1992, 3). If the office passes to the vice president, he/she becomes president of the United States; if the powers and duties of the office are transferred, the vice president becomes acting president while the president continues to hold the office. Although the debates at the constitutional convention suggest strongly that the Framers preferred an acting presidency by the vice president rather than an actual succession to the presidential office (Ferrand 1911, 495), the Constitution itself neglects to make this clear. Further compounding the problem was that in 1841, after President William Henry Harrison became the first U.S. president to die in office, Vice President John Tyler's insistence that he had become president, and not simply acting president, of the United States, was accepted by Congress and the country. This created a powerful precedent supporting vice presidential succession to the office itself (Goldstein 1995, 522). The second problem arising from constitutional ambiguity is that the Framers unwisely placed together in the same sentence of the document three permanent and irreversible reasons for presidential separation from office (death, resignation, and removal) with one that is temporary and possibly even fleeting (inability). Because they failed to define "inability" or indicate how it might be determined, the constitutional configuration they adopted contributed to understandable reluctance by presidents to admit any inability to discharge the powers and duties of their office because they feared that if they did so, the result would be the same as if they permanently vacated it. The vice president would become president and they were uncertain whether they would be able to regain the office when their inability ended. Their reluctance was most unfortunate, because many presidents have suffered debilitating--although often well-concealed--illnesses while serving as the nation's chief executive. John Adams remained away from the capital for more than six months while trying to recover from the effects of probable hyperthyroidism (Ferling and Braverman 1998, 83). Madison suffered from a high fever and was delirious for almost a month, being described by some of his aides as deranged (Brandt 1961, 210). Jackson was afflicted with pulmonary hemorrhages, excruciating headaches, and shortness of breath. William Henry Harrison succumbed 30 days following his inauguration after developing viral pneumonia (Marx 1960, 113-14, 131). Cleveland underwent two concealed surgeries for cancer of the jaw while on board a yacht that traveled slowly up the Hudson River, procedures not disclosed until 1928, more than 30 years after he left the White House (Post and Robins 1992, 7-9). During the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke that paralyzed his left side and made his speech labored and indistinct, but the White House at first described his condition as a digestive upset (Smith 1964, 91). Harding suffered a heart attack while traveling from Vancouver to San Francisco but his White House physician publicly attributed his illness to crabmeat poisoning (Ferrell 1996, 15). …
John Adams's Health Reconsidered
H T ISTORIANS have long believed that John Adams was given at times to irrational behavior that could only be attributed to emotional instability. Several of his contemporaries reached the same conclusion. His secretary of war, James McHenry, once called him "actually insane." Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist senator from Massachusetts, said the president "has his passions" that were derived from a "half frantic mind." Rumors circulated in the capital in 1799 that Adams was mentally unbalanced and prone to lose control and that he was given to "dashing and trampling his wig on the floor."1 The most famous allegations of Adams's instability were made by Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. During the late stages of the War of Independence, Franklin told Congress that Adams "is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things [he is] absolutely out of his senses."2 In i8oo, Hamilton publicly denounced Adams, asserting that his "eccentric" tendencies often destroyed his judgment; Adams "has certain fixed points of character," Hamilton added darkly, that "deprive him of self command and produce very outrageous behaviour."3 Although more kind, several students of Adams have contended that he suffered one or more physical or mental breakdowns. Both Charles Francis Adams, his grandson and first biographer, and Gilbert Chinard, his first important twentieth-century biographer, concluded that he "almost broke down" in 1771 under an arduous workload and the emotional fatigue of his
The Society of Individuals
Norbert Elias (1897-1990) Note on the text Preface Part I: The Society of Individuals (1939) Part II: Problems of self-consciousness and the image of man (1940s-1950s): Wishful and fearful self-images of humans as individuals and of society The thinking statues individualisation in the social process Part III: Changes in the we-I balance (1987) Appendix I: Rainer Maria Rilke, 'The Book of Pilgrimage' Appendix II: Two poems by Goethe Appendix III: Power struggles and the concepts of 'state' and 'society' Appendix IV: Migration and the conflict of generations Bibliography Index.