During the nadir of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon hit the bottle hard — to the point that the American security establishment was scared that he might drunkenly cause an international incident. Given that Nixon had control over the American nuclear arsenal, this was, to say the least, a sobering prospect. Yet thankfully for humanity (if not as much for the integrity of American democracy), the military figured out a way to circumvent the elected commander in chief.
"If you go back to the Nixon era, right toward the end during the Watergate period, when Nixon was drinking heavily and had become erratic, the secretary of defense at that time was Jim Schlesinger, an extraordinarily bright man and very principled," David Gergen, a veteran political operative whose career traces back to Nixon's administration, told Salon in 2017. "And he told the joint chiefs, if you get an order from the president to fire a nuclear missile, you do not do that. Don't take an order from the commander in chief until you call me and I give you personal approval, or you get the personal approval of the secretary of state."
