WI: Lyndon Johnson Has Heart Attack During Kennedy Assassination

What if rumors were true that during the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson suffered from a fatal or non-fatal heart attack from the stress of the events brought on that day?
 

zookeeper

Banned
Johnson mict resign or stand down at the chanc eoffseeking a fullterm. Hubert Humphrey. Scoop Jackson runs in 1964.
funny you say this i was thinking of writing a tl on this but having Kennedy survive,
 
This occurring before the adoption of the 25th Amendment has the potential to be a real Constitutional crisis if the heart attack is non-fatal but incapacitating. Johnson would be President, with the Speaker of the House next in the line of succession, with no provision at all for an Acting Presidency. This is all occurring, of course, in the middle of the Cold War.

Accordingly, you would have, in the case of a non-fatal but incapacitating LBJ heart attack a very real problem of nobody being able to exercise full Presidential authority or, in other words, a complete cluster****.

The scenario would unfold something like this:

1230 CST Kennedy shot by Oswald

1300 Kennedy pronounced dead

1315 (approx.) LBJ informed of Kennedy's death, suffers heart attack at Parkland

1320 LBJ heart attack diagnosed at Parkland emergency room, LBJ in critical condition and unconscious

1338 Walter Cronkite announces death of JFK and unconfirmed reports of incapacitating heart attack of LBJ

1400 US Government in chaos as word of LBJ's condition spreads; Attorney General Robert Kennedy left to sort out the legal mess. If he's lucky, he'll find some obscure provision of law to enable someone, probably McNamara, to take charge of defense/national security

1500 LBJ's condition revealed to public; it becomes readily apparent that the US has nobody in charge, with a good chunk of the Cabinet, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk still in the air after aborting a trip to Tokyo, adding to the confusion.
 
This occurring before the adoption of the 25th Amendment has the potential to be a real Constitutional crisis if the heart attack is non-fatal but incapacitating. Johnson would be President, with the Speaker of the House next in the line of succession, with no provision at all for an Acting Presidency. This is all occurring, of course, in the middle of the Cold War.

It's probably not as much trouble as you think. Since the President is not capable of signing or vetoing laws, everything Congress passes would become law with a ten-day delay. Therefore, they could revise the Presidential Succession Act and establish a new rule of succession and a new mechanism for removing an incapacitated President from office, and it would automatically pass. They could then take advantage of their newly-established removal mechanism to send Johnson to the hospital and put in place a new President. It would take a few weeks, but it wouldn't be a huge problem, legally speaking.

In the interim, most of the bureaucracy would probably continue to run without any serious issues. The President doesn't deal with most of the day-to-day stuff, after all.
 
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