Jared Cohen is the founder and CEO of Jigsaw at Alphabet Inc. He also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he ran Google Ideas at Google Inc. and served as chief advisor to Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010 he served as a member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.Cohen's newest book is Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America. From the transcript of his interview with Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: You -- you talk about, you know, in some ways the most famous succession certainly of the 19th Century, Lincoln's assassination and Andrew Johnson becomes president, generally regarded as the worst president in American history.--Marshal Zeringue
So the puzzle that you try to answer is how could the person who many people regard as the best president in American history have picked a vice president who ended up being the worst president in American history?
COHEN: Well, that's precisely right, Fareed. So, you know, when you look how we basically win presidential succession throughout the course of our history, it's easy to want to say we got lucky and we navigated it and we ended up more or less OK. But that neglects the reality that we were supposed to get Abraham Lincoln's vision for Reconstruction and instead the bullet of John Wilkes Booth's gun gave us Andrew Johnson, a man who was born a racist, died a racist, the last president to own slaves, ends up resurrecting almost all elements of the old Confederacy, which gives us the black codes, which is the precursor to Jim Crow, which gives us segregation.
So when I set out to write this book, what I wanted to do was vindicate the choice of Andrew Johnson in 1864. And back then the president didn't choose the running mate, but Lincoln, knowing that he had a slim shot at winning the election in 1864, had this whole masterful intrigue to get a war Democrat from a border state on the ticket.
And in 1864 Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator who had stayed loyal to the Union. He was actually revered in the North. And because he wanted to put the Union back together, his rhetoric at the time was more forward-leaning on civil rights and punishment for traitors than even -- than even Abraham Lincoln.
But when he becomes president, which by the way is after an embarrassing drunken display where he takes the oath of office as vice president and ends up slobbering all over the Bible, when he becomes president shortly after the Civil War ends and then tactically he goes back to his old ways and the real Andrew Johnson makes...[read on]