When I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh in the early ‘80s, I had a class taught by a gifted political science professor by the name of Ted Windt. Windt was an accomplished political insider of the time who told us a rather chilling story that took place near the end of the Nixon administration, when the Watergate investigation was bearing down heavily on his presidency and Congress was beginning to prepare articles of impeachment.
Richard Nixon, by the summer of 1974, was starting to act like a cornered rat. His political support had collapsed, his polling numbers were at all time lows, and the courts were ruling against his every move. The end was clearly near and it was evident in his personal behavior. There were plenty of stories at the time of Nixon roaming the halls of the White House late at night talking to the paintings, or to himself. He had always been a well-known paranoid, but that trait was getting worse and was now accompanied by symptoms of delusion, hysteria and other similar illnesses. In a nutshell, the President of the United States was becoming mentally unstable and unhinged.
The Secretary of Defense at this particular time was James Schlesinger, a gifted and wonky cabinet minister known for having a somewhat independent streak, but generally a mainstream conservative team player who was widely respected throughout the government. As the legal and political circle began to close around Nixon in late July and early August of ‘74, Schlesinger became increasingly alarmed about Nixon's state of mind and issued what would amount to be an order of dubious constitutionality. He sent out a directive to all of the field commanders in each of armed services that they were not to obey any orders not coming straight from his office. In effect, Schlesinger had committed a shadow coup against Nixon, who, in whatever state of mind he may have been in, was still the Commander in Chief.
This daring gambit that Schlesinger pulled, depending on whether you feel that it saved the Constitution or abrogated it, led me to thinking about our current situation. We clearly have a Commander in Chief who, by many fair appraisals, is not completely in command of all of his faculties and who will in all likelihood, be making many life and death decisions in the next four years, assuming he lasts that long. Do we have any members of his cabinet or elsewhere in the government that are daring enough to countermand the President, and if so, would that be acceptable under our constitution. It also leads one to question the wisdom of the founding fathers to put so much unquestionable responsibility in the hands of just one person. I don't know the answer to these questions, but I'm curious to know what others think.