SECOND CHOICE

When the former governor of Ohio takes the time to produce a book about vice presidents who succeeded, upon the death of their Chiefs, to the highest office, the reason must be good. DiSalle's seems to be. He is plumping for the passage of the proposed Twenty-fifth Amendment now at the legislatures of the States which would codify succession and allow for medical and mental review of a disabled President's health. The historical section of his review of Veeps-to-Chief, from John Tyler who took the reins of government when William Henry Harrison died of the flu to our Long-Range Bomber Johnson's ascension to a vacated higher sphere, seems, in the early periods, to have been prefabricated for the authors scholarly fashion or lifted from innocuous texts. But if this material overlaps other books such as They Also Ran by Irving Stone, there is a certain value to the later sections. DiSalle was, in his own words, intimately involved in the choice of Truman as a candidate and his picture of the convention's backstage is one not seen before. This holds true for his account of the Kennedy round. But if we might guess that he is doing more than producing evidence for passage of the Amendment it would be that this long, in large part, rehash of a minor phenomenon of American history is DiSalle's way of declaring himself willing to be Veep. This proves his thesis that the job has evolved from one described as living death to that position, ironically enough, men would die to be in.