On the American vice-presidency

And its Iranian and Nepalese counterparts

Now don’t get excited, but I’m about to contrast the president of the United States of America with the president of Iran (and the king of Nepal). Not the individuals concerned, but simply the offices. Please do NOT flame me with comments about personalities.

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You may be aware that, earlier this year (2024), the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a tragic aircraft accident, when his helicopter crashed in poor weather after he had attended an official opening of a cooperative dam project in conjunction with neighbouring Azerbaijan. The Iranian constitution provides that, in such an event, a new president must be elected by the people within 50 days. In the meantime, the vice president, Mr Mohammad Mokhber, fulfilled the duties of president until the election had been held. Mr Masoud Pezeshkian was duly elected president of Iran on 28 July 2024, and is the incumbent in that post.

The American constitution makes no such provisions. Instead, what happens in the US is that there is a successor waiting in the wings, in the form of the vice-president (currently Ms Harris). Now, the fact that Kamala Harris ran for the presidency itself, with Tim Walz as her running mate, is more a product of Mr Biden having stepped down from his own campaign than any form of natural succession, as in a monarchy. Mr Trump himself had a running mate as well, in the form of Mr Vance. Mr Vance was a far more interesting candidate for vice-president than Mr Walz was, at least at the present moment in time.

They say that everyone can remember what they were doing when they heard of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Everyone, that is, except me, as I was only two years old at the time. The moment that Mr Kennedy was declared dead, however, he ceased to be the president of the US and into his position stepped Mr Lyndon B. Johnson. He still needed to swear the oath of office, which he did just after Mr Kennedy’s demise, in an aeroplane, but, even though Johnson was in fact re-elected a few years later and served a term in his own right as president (beating Barry Goldwater in a landslide that saw him lose only six of the 50 states), it was Mr Kennedy’s death that catapulted Mr Johnson into the Oval Office in the first place. In 1964, had he not been killed, Kennedy would likely have stood again for a second term. No one can really know whether, if he hadn’t died, he would have won in 1964, but, in all events, if Johnson wanted the presidency, he would not get a chance until at least 1968, regardless of whether Kennedy had won a second term or not. By the time Johnson got a shot at the presidency in his own right, he would have been 60 years old, a respectable enough age, but would he still have had the momentum to secure a victory against the man Kennedy had beaten in 1960: Richard Milhous Nixon?

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Perhaps here an interjection: on 1 January 2001, a rather remarkable event occurred at the Narayanhiti Palace in Kathmandu, Nepal: Crown Prince Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev turned up to a royal gathering armed with a machine gun, with which he proceeded to murder nine members of his own family, including the king and queen. He thereupon shot himself in the head, dying three days later in hospital. But, for those three days, he was declared to be the King of Nepal. On his death, he was succeeded by his brother.

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Image: Lyndon Baines Johnson, age 7.

One theory about the Kennedy assassination that I have heard, which is entirely unsubstantiated as far as I can tell, and comes from a former Canadian civil servant whom I used to know, suggests that John F. Kennedy, far from being assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed at the behest of Lyndon B. Johnson. He had the means (access to the Secret Service, and the CIA), the opportunity (Dallas, the locus of the crime, is in his home state of Texas) and he had the motive. The motive? Well, to become the president of the United States without having to win a popular or Electoral College vote. The theory goes that, if Johnson wanted the presidency, only one man stood between him and it: John F. Kennedy.

It’s a conspiracy that sounds like it comes out of the pages of the National Enquirer or a John Grisham novel (not unlike that forming the plot of The Pelican Brief): it’s not one which is encountered anywhere else (to my limited knowledge). It’s outrageous and yet it’s conceivable, even if it lays a huge amount of criminal contumacy at Mr Johnson’s door.

An Iranian president-in-waiting would need to calculate very carefully the chances of his victory in a national ballot before devising a plan to assassinate the president in office as part of a wheeze to propel himself (I’ll use the masculine) into office. An American president-in-waiting needs no such calculations: they’ve already been elected.

JD Vance has been identified as a searing critic of Mr Trump according to statements he made back in 2021, and even subsequently. Mr Vance has his own issues in terms of his desire to whip up spurious stories that are deemed helpful to Mr Trump’s cause, but one question that is now starting to be answered by the astute is why Mr Trump selected as his running mate someone who has a record of being so critical of him.

One commentator, Sidney Blumethal of The Guardian, opines, echoing the New York Times, that “[i]f Trump [had] picked a ‘neocon’, a pro-Nato Republican like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, … then the US intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr Trump in order to get their preferred president”. With such an assassination, the new incumbent is plain to see: there need be no election.

One might cynically opine from that, that the Secret Service is protecting Mr Trump from murderers only until they can get him themselves—once he’s been elected. One needs a moment to let that possibility sink in. Because it is, likewise, outrageous; yet, in terms of pulp fiction, conceivable.

The New York Times makes a somewhat bold statement. It is one that makes me wonder how many other people than this Canadian civil servant subscribe to the Johnson theory about the Kennedy murder. Whether the view is correct or not as to what the US intelligence services might want from their president, it does nevertheless leave one question somewhat hanging in the air: what—aside from his patent ineptitude—would prevent JD Vance himself from implementing the self-same policy?