The Russian Affair

by Adrian D'hage

  ‘You’ve all read the relevant areas of the Constitution,’ the vice-president began, once the members of the cabinet were seated at the suite’s dining room table. ‘And I don’t have to emphasise that this is, without a doubt, the most serious decision we will ever have to make on behalf of our fellow citizens. We are talking about the removal of a president on the grounds he is mentally unfit.’ McCarthy paused to give his words added emphasis. ‘Let me be clear,’ he continued, ‘this is not about me having any designs on the Oval Office. If you feel that my resignation should be a necessary part of this process, I will gladly provide it.’

  ‘Well, that might well be necessary, Mr Vice-President!’ Samuel F. Dewberry, the Secretary of Education, was bordering on obese. A big donor to the Travers campaign, he had only been confirmed as Secretary of Education after one of the most divisive hearings in living memory. ‘And that’s if we go ahead with this – and that’s a very big if. I, for one, am not going to sit here and watch a democratically elected president be turfed out by a bunch of untouchables who think they are above the law!’

  ‘This is the law, Samuel,’ the vice-president responded icily. ‘Section 4 of the 25th Amendment.’

  ‘Well, someone explain it to me. And whatever it is, what’s it got to do with President Travers? I’ve just flown in from addressing a conference in California, where there’s more than a few west coast left-wing loonies that wouldn’t be out of place in this room.’ Dewberry’s pudgy jowls were red and he was almost shouting. ‘I step off the plane at Ronald Reagan and I’m given a file I haven’t had time to read, and I find there’s a coup d’état underway in my own country. What the hell is going on?’

  The vice-president took a deep breath. Dewberry, he knew, was very fond of Jack Daniels, and the five-hour flight from Los Angeles had given him time to consume more than a little.

  ‘While you’ve been away, Samuel, the president has decided to start a nuclear war.’ The room went quiet as the vice-president explained his last meeting with the president and the latter’s desire to hit the Pankisi Gorge with a battlefield nuclear warhead.

  ‘Now to answer your question, Samuel, and for the benefit of anyone else who may not have had the time to become acquainted with the detail, the 25th Amendment came into being as a result of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1967. The original text of our Constitution was quite vague as to whether or not a vice-president should take over if a sitting president died, and on at least three occasions prior to Kennedy, there was some confusion. When President Harrison died in 1841 after only a month in office, there was considerable opposition to Vice-President Bedford taking over. James Garfield lingered on for months after he was shot in Washington in 1881, and so did Woodrow Wilson after he suffered a stroke in 1919, but when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One after the Kennedy assassination, the Congress decided to enact the 25th Amendment. That amendment is part of your briefing papers,’ said McCarthy, looking pointedly at Dewberry.

  ‘But prior to being sworn in 1963, Johnson had already suffered one heart attack, and back then, when his vice-presidency became vacant, you couldn’t replace him. The next in line was the Speaker of the House, John McCormack, and he was 71. After that, it would have fallen to the Senate President pro tempore, Carl Hayden, and he was 86, so Congress set about clarifying what would happen if a president became incapacitated, and that led to Article 4 of the 25th Amendment, which is the subject of this emergency meeting today.’

  McCarthy paused to allow the cabinet to read it again.

  ‘How many times has this amendment been invoked?’ asked the Secretary of the Interior. Mathias Cobb was on the vice-president’s ‘against or doubtful’ list. Cobb, the vice-president knew, was another who had gained his post courtesy of large donations to the Travers campaign.

  ‘Just six times,’ said McCarthy. ‘Section One was used to install President Ford when Nixon resigned before he could be impeached. Section Two, which deals with a resignation or incapacity of a vice-president, has been used twice: once in 1973, when Spiro Agnew was charged with taking bribes of one hundred thousand dollars, which is over half a million in today’s terms. He resigned and Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to be confirmed as Agnew’s replacement; and again when Ford took over from Nixon, Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to fill the vacant vice-presidency. But in terms of a president’s incapacity, which is covered by Section Three, it’s been invoked just three times, and each time that was because of a medical as distinct from mental incapacity. In 1985, Ronald Reagan went in for colon cancer surgery and the vice-president, George H. W. Bush acted as president for eight hours. And in 2002, and again in 2007, George W. Bush had a colonoscopy, and in both cases, Vice-President Richard Cheney acted as president for a little over two hours. But that’s very different to a mental incapacity, which is what we are discussing today.’

  ‘Well, I support Samuel,’ said Seaborn Davis, the Secretary of Agriculture. ‘We’ve no right to just ditch a sitting president. This is not Italy or some tin pot South African republic. It’s the United States of America. If I’m reading this correctly, the cabinet has to be convinced that the president, and I quote “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”. And the vice-president shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as the acting president. We may not like the way Travers goes about it from time to time, and he can be irascible – name me a president who hasn’t been – but that’s no reason to throw him out onto Pennsylvania Avenue.’

  ‘It’s quite a bit more than irascible, Seaborn,’ McCarthy opined. ‘With respect, the members of the National Security Council see him a little more often than the cabinet. I accept there is no weightier decision than the one you’re being asked to consider, so I’ve asked Professor Isaac Moseley, who is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, to brief you.’ The vice-president leaned back and whispered to his secretary to fetch the professor from the adjoining room. ‘Warn him that Dewberry’s had a few.’

  ‘More than a few,’ Mary Jo whispered back.

  ‘Professor Moseley, thank you for coming,’ McCarthy began. ‘I’ve given Professor Moseley a summary of the concerns many of us have been voicing in private,’ he continued, addressing the rest of the participants. ‘Professor Moseley’s agreed, on the condition of complete confidentiality, to brief you on the clinical findings he’s arrived at with regard to President Travers.’

  ‘Have you actually examined President Travers?’ Samuel Dewberry rasped. ‘Have you spoken with him?’

  ‘No, Secretary, I —’

  ‘Well, how the hell do you provide —’

  ‘Secretary Dewberry! President Travers is about to launch a nuclear attack. You will get an opportunity to voice an opinion after Professor Moseley has given us the benefit of his!’ The vice-president’s voice cut through the air like a scimitar.

  ‘Thank you.’ The vice-president turned back to the professor and nodded.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Vice-President. To answer Secretary Dewberry’s query very briefly, to provide a psychological assessment of a public figure, without examining them in person, breaks the American Psychiatry Association’s code of ethics. The President of the United States holds the power to launch a nuclear attack on the world and if he is thought to be mentally unfit, then despite the code that should apply to other public figures, POTUS is in a unique category. Mental illness, by its very nature, makes it highly unlikely that a president will subject himself to a psychiatric examination, and in that case, we have a duty to speak out, perhaps not publicly in the first instance, but certainly to you, his cabinet.’

  Secretary Dewberry maintained a sullen silence.

  ‘We can only make a judgement based on Travers’s public utterances, which of late, have been increasingly threatening and belligerent. The attack on New York might ordinarily excuse that, but Travers was in that mode even before he was elected.’

  The members of the cabinet, some with growing a
larm, listened as Professor Moseley outlined the medical diagnosis for President Travers. ‘There is evidence,’ Moseley said, ‘of histrionic personality disorder, the symptoms for which include looking and feeling uncomfortable if he’s not the centre of attention, and conversely, feeling much more relaxed when a favourable focus is on him. People with histrionic personality disorder are often dramatic and overemotional and they seek the approval of others. This latter trait can be exploited by those around him, and in Travers’s case, by leaders like Petrov. But there is also evidence of a narcissistic personality disorder. People who suffer from this mental illness exhibit a variety of traits – resenting other people’s successes, taking advantage of people, believing they are better and more deserving than others, and requiring excessive admiration. It may seem out of place,’ Moseley said, ‘but people with narcissism disorder actually have a very low self-esteem and they exaggerate their achievements and their talents to the point that many of them live in a fantasy world – one where they refuse to recognise any reality that does not accord with their view of themselves and the real world around them.’

  The vice-president looked around the table. Some cabinet members, mainly those also on the National Security Committee, were nodding in agreement. Others looked doubtful and three, including Dewberry and Cobb, who owed their cabinet positions to large campaign donations, looked scathingly opposed. It would, McCarthy knew, be a close-run thing. Of the 15 members comprising the cabinet, eight of them would have to sign the letter to Congress.

  ‘Paranoia is often common to both conditions,’ Moseley concluded, ‘wherein a person often imagines they’re being persecuted by individuals or organisations. There is abundant evidence for this trait embodied in Travers’s paranoia with the intelligence community and with the media. In both cases, Travers sees them as a threat and the perpetrators of an evil conspiracy against him. People suffering from this mental condition can often become delusional, where totally irrational thoughts become so fixed in their mind that their view of events, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, becomes reality and nothing will convince them otherwise.’

  This, the vice-president thought, was Travers to a tee.

  ‘Without a clinical examination session, it’s difficult for my colleagues and I to give you a precise diagnosis, and indeed there is some overlap between narcissism, paranoia, and histrionic personality disorder, but when it comes to an overall diagnosis, we are all in furious agreement. President Travers is mentally ill and is unfit to hold the high office of President of the United States of America.’

  For Vice-President McCarthy, only too well aware that Travers would likely carry out his threat to attack the Pankisi Gorge, time was of the essence, but he allowed a short question and answer period. He could not afford for those who were wavering to feel they were being railroaded.

  ‘We need to put this to a vote,’ McCarthy said finally, feeling a lot less confident than he sounded. ‘If a majority of you – eight – agree the president is unfit for office, then you will have to sign a letter to that effect, to both the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate.’ The latter was a reference to a person who acted in place of someone else. In the case of the Senate, the President pro tempore acted in place of the vice-president, who was also President of the Senate. ‘Once that letter is signed, the vice-president becomes acting president with immediate effect – and I stress the word “acting”,’ McCarthy said. ‘He doesn’t become president; he just assumes the powers of the presidency. Travers does not immediately lose office, so we’re not turfing him out onto Pennsylvania Avenue.’ McCarthy looked pointedly at the Secretary of Agriculture. ‘He will lose his authority, and especially his authority to order a nuclear attack and we and the rest of the world will avoid a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.’

  ‘What if he won’t comply?’ asked Elias Bowden, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Bowden, an ex-submarine commander, was level headed and intelligent, but the vice-president still had him in the ‘doubtful’ column. Bowden, McCarthy knew, would have to be convinced there was no other choice.

  ‘Travers would have to write to the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate, asking for his powers back, stating that he was not unable to perform his duties.’

  ‘Which he will undoubtedly do,’ Dewberry grumbled, ‘which begs the question as to why we’re wasting our time on a wild goose chase.’

  The Jack Daniels was still well and truly in play, thought McCarthy. ‘Yes, Secretary Dewberry, but if you will let me finish,’ the vice-president replied, fixing the Secretary of Education with a steely look, ‘Travers would not get his powers back for four days, by which stage, he may not be of a mood to launch an extreme response to New York. And even then, if the majority of this cabinet is still of a mind that Travers is mentally unfit, we can write back, and it’s then up to Congress to decide, while the vice-president remains in charge. The Constitution requires two thirds of the House and two thirds of the Senate to vote on the president’s incapacity, so the safeguards are there. The safeguard that’s missing at the moment is one against Travers pushing the nuclear button.’

  The vice-president looked around the table. Members of the cabinet who were also members of the National Security Council, like the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense – those who had seen Travers in full flight – would be firmly in favour of removing him. But McCarthy knew it would still be close. He had seven in the ‘probable or affirmative’ column, seven in the ‘doubtful or against’ column with one, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, that he couldn’t quite read.

  ‘There’s only 15 of you, so we’ll do it by a show of hands. Those against this action, and leaving the president to act in whatever way he sees fit, please raise your right hand.’ Dewberry’s hand was the first to shoot up, followed by Davis and Cobb, and the Secretaries of the Interior, Commerce, Labor and Health and Human Services.

  The Secretary of Veterans Affairs’ hand was half in the air. ‘Mr Vice-President, in voting to leave President Travers in place, I’m very torn here. I’m as concerned as you are at the state of the President’s health, but I just can’t believe he would launch even battlefield nuclear warheads. I cannot bring myself to a point where I think he would actually drop nuclear bombs or missiles, no matter how small.’

  ‘Mr Vice-President, excuse me for interrupting.’ The Chairman of the Joint Chief’s voice was grave. ‘But I’ve just received a secure text from the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president has ordered DEFCON One for all our forces, worldwide. In addition, he’s ordered a test firing of a Minuteman III from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, to be fired at the Kwajalein Atoll which is in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific some 4700 miles to the east. And that’s not all,’ said General Reid reading off his secure phone. ‘The White House Military Office has reported that the president has asked for an update on the nuclear codes and the procedures for launching a nuclear attack.’

  McCarthy felt a chill run down his spine. ‘General . . . would you explain, for those on the cabinet who might not be entirely familiar with military terminology, what DEFCON One means.’

  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs got to his feet, emphasising the gravity of the message he’d just received. ‘DEFCON stands for Defense Readiness Condition and is set on a scale of one to five, wherein DEFCON Five is the least severe, and DEFCON One is the most severe. To give you an idea of what the president has just done, we have never, since this system came into being in the late 1950s, been at DEFCON One. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviet president, Secretary Khruschev, agreed to Fidel Castro’s request for nuclear missiles to be stationed in Cuba, we went to DEFCON 3, with Strategic Air Command at DEFCON 2, which is the penultimate step to nuclear war. We were at DEFCON 3 for the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel and DEFCON 3 was ordered again during 9/11. We have never been at DEFCON One, the defin
ition of which means nuclear war is imminent.’ The Defense Chief went on to describe what was happening in the United States and around the world as he spoke.

  ‘Right now, the 90th Missile Wing at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, the 91st Missile Wing at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and the 341st Missile Wing at the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana are readying for a strike in case Petrov retaliates for any attack on the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia. The missiles are fuelled and the silo covers on the underground launch sites will have now been retracted. The launch crews are at their stations, waiting for the president’s command. The crews on board our nuclear submarines, wherever they’re stationed, will be on high alert. We currently have ten of our nuclear submarines deployed, and each is carrying 24 Trident nuclear missiles. The message to launch them will provide the Captain and the Executive Officer with the combination to an onboard safe that contains the fire control key which is needed to deploy the missiles.’

  McCarthy looked at the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

  ‘I agree to sign,’ was all he said.

  McCarthy nodded to his secretary to distribute the letters to the Senate and the House of Representatives for signature.

  ‘Explain to me again how these nuclear codes work?’ President Travers demanded of his military aide, Marine Corps Major Jesse Hardin.