NOTES IN THE NEWS
NOTES IN THE NEWS Sixty Dangerous Days An unprecedented Constitutional crisis could confront the nation if the successful candidate for President dies on any one of 60 days later this year or...
...The results showed that 30 per cent thought he would, 32 per cent that he would not, and 39 per cent couldn't say...
...In other words, if the Republican nominee is elected but dies between December 17 and January 6, and if the Democrats control the next Congress as they do this one, they could declare that the Presidential candidate with the second highest number of votes was elected...
...Too Hot to Handle The cause of freedom lost its most highly-placed friend when the Eisenhower Administration refused recently to reappoint Harry P. Cain to the Subversive Activities Control Board...
...Much has been written of the substantial doses of political accommodation that have gone into medical diagnoses of the physicians attending President Eisenhower...
...When the tabulation was broken down along party lines, it was learned that only 14 per cent of the Republicans thought another heart attack could be expected, while 42 per cent of the Democrats and 29 per cent of the Independents felt another attack was in the cards...
...Who in any position of authority will do anything— and how can any private citizen get to the President when it took me, a former Senator and an Administrative official, almost 18 months to do it...
...The haggling over the extent of fall-out damage seems somewhat beside the point when you consider the frightful total damage that a single new H-bomb can inflict...
...NOTES IN THE NEWS Sixty Dangerous Days An unprecedented Constitutional crisis could confront the nation if the successful candidate for President dies on any one of 60 days later this year or early in 1957...
...One day recently, Admiral Strauss, whose habit it is to tsk-tsk talk of widespread destruction from fall-out, came up with the startling intelligence that the recent Pacific hydrogen bomb tests confirm that it "is possible to localize to an extent not heretofore appreciated the fall-out of nuclear explosions...
...Legal experts who have been burrowing into the complications of the Presidential succession have emerged with the conclusion that there is no legal precedent or Constitutional provision to guide the nation if the President-elect dies between November 6, Election Day, and January 6, when Congress counts the electoral votes...
...Cain was not impressed...
...If the successful candidate survives December 17, but dies between that date and January 6, 1957, when Congress officially counts the electoral votes, it is quite possible, in the absence of any precedent or prohibition to the contrary, that Congress could by-pass the Vice Presidential nominee of the successful party and cast its vote for the Presidential nominee of the losing party...
...But they are pole* apart in their estimate of the fall-out damage of nuclear explosions...
...For his efforts to live up to the President's "magnificent words" about individual freedom and justice, Cain got "unshirted hell" from Sherman Adams, top assistant to the President, a sharp reprimand from Mr...
...The newest estimate was published recently by William L. Laurence, the New York Times' celebrated writer on science who saw the first atom bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, saw the atom bombing of Nagasaki, and watched the test of our first airborne hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll May 21 this year...
...Eisenhower himself for not being a "team player," and finally his walking papers at the end of his term...
...Congressional Quarterly, the nonpartisan Congressional news service, took the problem to a number of scholars in the field...
...He said sadly that he thought the President meant well, but that he "hasn't the foggiest idea" of what the security program is or how it works...
...As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Admiral is in charge of the potential export end of H-bombs...
...he asked...
...Who, indeed—now that Harry Cain has paid the price for putting the welfare of his country above the interests of a political team...
...The President's brief comment accepting Cain's resignation thanked him for his "conscientious and devoted service," but Mrs...
...If the President-elect dies during that period, the Vice President-elect assumes the office of President...
...But if the successful candidate died between November 6 and December 17, the day the Presidential electors meet in the various states to cast their formal ballots, the electors of that party would be free to vote for anyone since there is no legal mandate to guide them, and certainly no requirement that they vote for the Vice Presidential nominee for President...
...Cain based this judgment on a talk with the President—a talk that took 18 months to arrange...
...Take Your Choice Topmost among the nation's authorities on the impact of hydrogen bomb warfare are Admiral Lewis Strauss and Governor Val Peterson...
...But within 24 hours, Governor Peterson was solemnly informing the nation that nobody alive is capable of coping with the H-bomb, that if we ever experienced a thermonuclear attack, it would create a virtually impossible situation, so great would be the deadly radioactive fall-out...
...A former McCarthyite Senator from Washington, Cain became a fearless critic of the excesses in the Administration's security program when he had a chance to observe it first-hand as a member of the SACB...
...Who inside the Administration will speak out about the scandal of the security program...
...Now, with the successful testing of our first portable multimegation hydrogen bomb," he wrote recently of his last experience, "we have entered the Megaton Age, in which one plane carrying just one hydrogen bomb, can deliver on a target a cargo of destructive force exceeding by far all the explosives dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy combined through all of World War II...
...Who in Congress...
...as administrator of Civil Defense, the Governor is responsible for the possible import phase of the deadly traffic...
...After Januray 6, but before Inauguration Day, January 20, the road is clearly marked...
...Their conclusions add up to the following: • If a candidate for President of Vice President dies before Election Day, his successor would be chosen by the National Committee of the party concerned...
...Medicine and Politics Laymen, incidentally, are as prone to let their politics influence their medical judgment as are members of the medical profession...
...In the case of the Republicans, the National Committee could in its judgment call another convention to fill the vacancy if there were time...
...Cain went down swinging...
...Now it's too hot to handle...
...In fact, one 10-megaton bomb, about the size I saw explode over Bikini, would equal about five times the total load of explosives dropped in the whole of World War II by the air forces of all the combatants...
...The Administration, she said, had "tossed Harry a bone by appointing him to the Board, and he turned it into a bomb...
...Now a Gallup Poll shows the same trend among the nonprofessionals...
...Interviewers went about asking if voters thought the President might have another heart attack in the next four years...
Vol. 20 • September 1956 • No. 9
