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OTHERS WERE ALSO wrestling with the political and legal implications of Reagan’s incapacitation. Before leaving for the Situation Room, Attorney General William French Smith had summoned his top legal advisor, Theodore Olson, to his office at the Justice Department. As they watched television replays of the shooting and received updates from the White House, Smith told Olson that he “better go find out what procedures are necessary if we have to transfer power to the vice president.”

Olson, the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, had no idea how the process worked. He only vaguely recalled the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which established the procedure for a transfer of power to the vice president. Walking back to his office, Olson pulled his worn paperback copy of the U.S. Constitution from his jacket pocket and began flipping through the dog-eared pages hunting for the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He couldn’t find it, even when he searched the booklet a second time. Then he realized that his copy of the Constitution had apparently been printed before 1967, the year the Twenty-fifth Amendment had been ratified.

Olson summoned his staff to his office. Presidential power had never been transferred from an incapacitated president to a vice president under the amendment. There were no precedents, no legal opinions, no briefing materials. They would have to devise their own directives on the fly.

But at least the amendment gave them a place to start. The framers of the Constitution, by contrast, had provided little guidance about how the government should respond in the event that the president was incapacitated. In the years before the Twenty-fifth Amendment was ratified, there had been several instances when a president was too ill or injured to function. James Garfield, who survived for eighty days after being shot, suffered hallucinations, and his doctors forbade him to work. Even so, his vice president refused to step in. After Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, his wife, his doctor, and his personal secretary essentially ran the country for eight months. And Dwight Eisenhower suffered three major illnesses, including a heart attack and a stroke, during his two terms.

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, lawmakers realized that it was necessary to create a clear procedure, especially in the age of nuclear weapons. The new constitutional amendment, once written and ratified, declared that the president could temporarily transfer powers to the vice president by submitting letters to the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate. The amendment also stated that the vice president and a “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or such other body as Congress may by law provide” could transmit letters to the Speaker and the president pro tempore declaring that the president was unable to discharge the powers of his office. The president could resume office by submitting another letter to the same lawmakers informing them that he was again able to perform his duties.

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AS THE JUSTICE Department lawyers began drafting a memo for Olson, Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, was already several steps ahead of them. Sitting at the conference table in the Situation Room and smoking cigarette after cigarette, he waited for an aide to bring him a sheaf of papers addressing the procedures required for a transfer of power. Intelligent and soft-spoken, the forty-two-year-old Fielding was widely respected for his careful research of complex legal topics and his keen analysis of ethical quandaries. Within days of Reagan’s swearing in, Fielding and his team of lawyers had begun drafting an emergency briefing packet that explained what to do in the event that Reagan was killed or badly injured. Fielding’s objective was to create a binder filled with draft letters, memos, and a checklist; even in the absence of White House lawyers, it could be plucked off a shelf and used as a guide to transfer presidential power to Bush. Fielding and his