There is a quick way to remove the president from office—and it was seriously considered for Reagan
The vice president and the cabinet can simply take a vote
By March 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s closest advisers were privately discussing whether or not they would have to take charge of the Oval Office for themselves because the president’s mental state had become worrisome — so much so that they hatched a plan to carefully observe him during a meeting. Over the previous year, Reagan, at the age of 76, had become increasingly disinterested and inept.
The new White House Chief of Staff, Howard Baker Jr., was skeptical, but open, to the possibility they would have to remove Reagan from office. There was a way to do it, but it meant invoking a never-before-used part of the Constitution that would install Vice President George H.W. Bush as president.
Reagan’s official biographer, Edmund Morris, who was present for the meeting, described the scene: “The incoming Baker people all decided to have a meeting with him on the Monday morning, their first official meeting with the president, and to cluster around the table in the Cabinet Room and watch him very, very closely to see how he behaved, to see if he was indeed losing his mental grip. They positioned themselves very strategically around the table so they could watch him from various angles, listen to him and check his movements, and listen to his words and look into his eyes.”
Publicly, Americans had begun raising questions after an absentminded Reagan stumbled during a presidential debate against Walter Mondale during the 1984 election cycle. And the Iran-Contra affair was clearly wearing on the second-term president, which necessitated the resignation of his chief of staff, Donald Regan.
Indeed, when Baker took office in March, he found a White House in total chaos. Noting that Reagan “seemed to be despondent but not depressed,” Baker assigned White House aides James Cannon and Thomas Griscom to interview others in the West Wing about the dysfunctional administration.
In their memo reporting their findings to Baker, Cannon and Griscom said that, “There was no order in the place. The staff system had just broken down. It had just evaporated.”
But the root of the system’s ills, according to stories from staffers, Cannon and Griscom wrote, was the president himself.
“They told stories about how inattentive and inept the President was. He was lazy; he wasn’t interested in the job,” Cannon told Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus for their 1988 book Landslide, an account of Reagan’s second term. “They said he wouldn’t read the papers they gave him — even short position papers and documents. They said he wouldn’t come over to work — all he wanted to do was to watch movies and television at the residence.”
The findings were so anxiety-inducing to Cannon, who had previously observed the executive branch as an aide to vice president Nelson Rockefeller and as a domestic policy adviser to President Gerald Ford, that the top recommendation in his memo to Baker stated, “1. Consider the possibility that section four of the 25th Amendment might be applied.”
The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which was drafted following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, took on questions of succession where the Constitution had previously been ambiguous.
The Constitution did not, for example, expressly state whether the vice president becomes president or acting president in the instance of the president’s death, which was first raised in 1841 when President William Henry Harrison became the first president to die in office. While Vice President John Tyler insisted he was the successor, Representative John Williams argued that Tyler acquired only the powers of the presidency and not the office itself.
And the Constitution had no provisions for circumstances in which a president resigns, is removed from office, or is otherwise unable to uphold the duties of the presidency. For example, when Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke, no one officially assumed the presidential powers and duties. First Lady Edith Wilson and White House physician Cary Grayson covered up President Wilson’s condition and Wilson’s wife took over many routine duties and details of the executive branch of the government from then until Wilson left office almost a year and a half later, on March 4, 1921.
But in Reagan’s case, for the first time since the 25th Amendment was adopted in 1967, serious discussion was taking place about invoking Section 4, which allows the president’s removal from the Oval Office if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet declare him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That declaration would then need a two-thirds Congressional vote to pass.
Baker was skeptical, but he did not outright dismiss Cannon’s recommendation. “It doesn’t sound like the Ronald Reagan I just saw, but we’ll see tomorrow,” he told Cannon and Griscom.
So, the next day, Baker proposed observing Reagan’s behavior first hand at that meeting. On March 2, Baker, Cannon, Griscom, and Baker aide A. B. Culvahouse surrounded the president at the Cabinet table so they could watch his every move.
Afterwards, the observers unanimously registered the same conclusion — Reagan was attentive, alert and witty — and Baker considered the matter closed.
“We finish the lunch and Senator Baker says, ‘You know, boys, I think we’ve all seen this president is fully capable of doing the job,’” Griscom later recalled, adding that they never raised the issue again.
Baker, attempting to put closure on Reagan’s state in the mind of the public, went before the press and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, is this president fully in control of his presidency? Is he alert? Is he fully engaged? Is he in contact with the problems? And I’m telling ya, it’s just one day’s experience and maybe that’s not enough, but today he was superb.”
But Reagan’s family continued to worry, even if they didn’t know what conclusion to draw.
“There were moments, occasional moments,” Ron Reagan later recalled in an interview. “I’m his son, so I’m hypersensitive to any kind of change. I certainly never thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, he must have Alzheimer’s.’ But there were private moments where you would just kind of think, ‘Hmm … [there was] just a little hesitation there that I’m not used to.’”
In 1993, four years after his second term came to an end, Reagan was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. White House doctors said that they saw no evidence of the disease during his two terms as president, but researchers at Arizona State University published a study examining transcripts of his news conferences and discovered changes in his speech that are linked to the onset of dementia.
“The disease had taken a toll by that time,” Ron Reagan said of the 1993 diagnosis. “To my knowledge, he didn’t spend a lot of time brooding about it or anything like that. I think he kind of let go after that, after he received his diagnosis.”
On November 5, 1994, the former president released a letter to the public disclosing that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease with the “hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition.” (Indeed, Time magazine noted that it was Reagan’s condition that caused the newsweekly to write about the disease for the first time.)
“When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future,” Reagan wrote. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
