Accidental Presidents

Eight American presidents took office because the man elected to it died. Jared Cohen examines each succession, those of Tyler, Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and Lyndon Johnson, and asks what it meant for a country to be handed to someone nobody chose for the job. Eric Schmidt, Cohen’s longtime collaborator and co-author on The New Digital Age, praised it as a timely book highly relevant to today’s politics.