Accidental Presidents

Eight American presidents took office because the man elected to it died. Jared Cohen examines each succession — Tyler, Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, 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.