Designated Survivor

Discovery of the week: an entertaining Netflix series Designated Survivor, in which Kiefer Sutherland does his tight-lipped, ultra aggressive Jack Bauer characterisation as a US Housing Secretary who becomes President as the Designated Survivor when the Capitol is bombed and destroyed during the State of the Union address. It's a mixture of The West Wing - daily travails of a President and his team; Homeland - a Congressman comes back from the dead as an unexpected survivor whom a female agent suspects of being a traitor - and 24, with its throbbing dramatic soundtrack.

I thought this idea of a Cabinet member designated by the President as being the one person not to attend the State of the Union and to take over if a catastrophe happens, to be a neat but implausible plot line. But it turns out to be real!

Apparently the idea of someone not attending the State of the Union or a Presidential Inauguration, and being sequestered in a safe and a secure location, began in the Cold War amid the threat of nuclear war in the 1960s. It's not just any old person, it has to be a person in the formal line of succession to the President, which effectively means a member of the Cabinet. In recent years Secretaries of Interior, Agriculture and Commerce have been designated. On 20 September 2001, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney sat out President  George W. Bush's speech to a joint session of Congress. The designated survivor is chosen by the President and has to qualify as President, i.e. be at least 35, US natural-born and a US resident for at least 14 years.

I'm not sure but I think that, at the time, the designated survivor's name is not publicised but subsequent perusal of the list of attendees at events such as the Presidential inauguration can reveal a realistic guess. So who was not at President Biden's inauguration? Well, that would be none other than Donald J. Trump, of whom you may have heard. Was that the plan all along?

So it sounds like a sensible idea and I wonder whether other nations have similar protocols.

I could find no instances of that. For instance in the UK, what if the State Opening of Parliament was occurring when the Houses of Parliament were bombed into oblivion? The Queen is Head of State and there is a long  line of succession, so that seems OK, although I don't know whether a senior member of the Royal Family is sequestered in a secure location just in case. The monarch invites someone to form a government, i.e. become Prime Minister, so that seems OK too. No problem, we Brits have it sorted.

Anyway, it's a pretty good TV series. Enjoy!