THE TRUMP MUTINY?
Bogart’s paranoid Lt.-Cmdr. Queeg influenced debate over the U.S. 25th Amendment
The USS Caine is on the verge of foundering, nearly drowning in the waves of a typhoon in the middle of the Pacific, and Lt.-Cmdr. Queeg looks scared.
The neurotic naval officer, played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1954 Oscar-nominated movie The Caine Mutiny, clings to the ship like it was going under while his crew yells out to him for orders. It seems Queeg is testing their last nerve.
The crew had come to believe the captain is out of his mind. He had recently ordered a sweeping investigation into who ate a missing quart of strawberries from the galley, believing apprehending this strawberry thief is of singular importance. In a second fit of paranoia, Queeg orders the sailors to search for a nonexistent secret key to the icebox, believing it would lead to the thief. Now the captain is frozen in fear — while believing he has everything under control.
“Captain, I’m sorry, but you’re a sick man,” executive officer Steve Maryk ( Van Johnson) tells him at the climax of the movie, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk. “I’m relieving you as captain of this ship under Article 184.”
And with that, the captain loses his power.
The scene is unforgettable for Bogart’s bug-eyed portrayal of a man wielding power who has gone mad.
But a certain group of lawyers and lawmakers in the 1950s and ’60s would remember this scene as they sat down to draft the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides an alternative to impeachment for removing an incapacitated president. They didn’t want a similar situation — an “Article 184” in the amendment — where a vice-president or others could simply usurp the commander-in-chief’s power at the mere utterance of the word “disabled,” says John D. Feerick, professor and former dean of Fordham School of Law, who assisted in drafting the amendment in the 1960s.
The film is a “live depiction,” Feerick says, of the type of crisis that could arise if a president ever faced questions about physical or mental inabilities but disagreed completely with the judgment — a scenario unaccounted for in the Constitution’s impeachment clause, which allows for removal of the president only after conviction by the Senate for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours.”
The 25th Amendment, which Congress ratified on Feb. 10, 1967 in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, describes the procedures for replacing the president in the event that the president dies, resigns, is temporarily unconscious or is found to be “unable” to carry out the powers and duties of the office. That last part, section 4 of the amendment, describes who makes the decision in the event the president won’t willingly step aside: the cabinet and the vicepresident. Should the president disagree with them, Congress must vote to strip the president of powers by two-thirds majority, protecting against internal political coups, Feerick says.
But what the amendment doesn’t provide is any clear definition of what it means to be a “disabled” president or one “unable to discharge” duties. The ambiguity has fuelled debates for decades — perhaps no more so than now.
Since President Donald Trump has taken office, section 4 of the 25th Amendment has emerged as a favourite hypothetical among his political adversaries. Most recently, the anonymous “senior administration official” who wrote an op-ed in The New York Times professing “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” suggests there had been “whispers” within the cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment against Trump, painting the president as incompetent and impetuous. On Sept. 9, just days after the New York Times published the op-ed, Vice-President Mike Pence went on CBS’s Face the Nation hoping to end the speculation and denying he had ever been apart of any 25th Amendment talk. Pence has also denied he wrote the op-ed, and has said he would — “in a heartbeat” — take a lie-detector test as proof.
“There’s never been as much discussion about the amendment in the disability context than in the last two years,” Feerick says. “The one thing that I see in that is that this important part of the Constitution” has received more attention. “It’s a serious part of the Constitution. It protects the office of the president, and it makes it very difficult to remove a president.”
So how would a president be declared “disabled” — and importantly, by whom?
The impact of The Caine Mutiny, though small in the grand scheme, is felt the most here.
The meaning of “incapacity ” and “disability” and who’s to judge it was first posed in 1787 during the Constitutional Convention that drafted the document. But the words, while raised, never made it into the text. And for more than 175 years nobody cared or dared to answer it. Deliberations began in earnest in the 1950s, as president Dwight D. Eisenhower fell ill three separate times. During a 1956 hearing on the “problem of presidential inability” before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Arthur E. Sutherland, a Harvard law professor, described how The Caine Mutiny shaped his understanding of that problem, particularly as it relates to mental inability.
He had stayed up reading the “bully novel” until 2 a.m., he told the committee.
“I do not in anywise say this lightly, nor intend to depreciate the solemnity of the problems that face this committee, but as a matter of fact your committee’s deliberations have the same theme as the one in The Caine Mutiny,” Sutherland said.
“It is an excellent analogy,” said committee chairman Rep. Emanuel Celler, D -N.Y., who along with Sen. Birch Bayh, D -Ind., would be main drafter the 25th Amendment in the years to come.
Feerick would have a similar conversation about The Caine Mutiny with the American Bar Association during a 1964 Washington conference intended to assist Congress in drafting the 25th Amendment.
As he wrote in his 1965 book, From Failing Hands: The Story of Presidential Succession, the lawyers reached a consensus that the vice-president shouldn’t be allowed to decide for himself whether his boss was disabled in part because of what happened in The Caine Mutiny. After executive officer Maryk told Queeg he was a “sick man” and took over the ship, both Queeg and Maryk attempted to shout orders, causing confusion in a crisis.
Maryk went on trial for mutiny and was acquitted — thanks to Lt.-Cmdr. Queeg ’s own rambling testimony, which included a tangent about strawberries, which bolstered Maryk’s judgment.
“It will be recalled how much difficulty (Maryk) had in telling (Queeg) that he was disabled and that (Maryk) was taking over pursuant to certain Naval Regulations,” Feerick says in the 1965 book.
“The point of this argument was that a vice-president would be on precarious ground in a case where a president had become insane, refused to declare himself disabled, or disagreed with the decision of the vice-president. In such a case, it was said, the vice-president would be too reluctant to act or, if he did act, he might be labelled a usurper.”