From Cabinet secretary to doomsday president: What being a designated survivor is like

President Donald Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025. (Pool via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — They start the day often as low-profile Cabinet secretaries. They end it that way, too, God willing.

But, when the rest of the government is gathered together for a big event, like U.S. President Donald Trump ‘s joint congressional address Tuesday night, a designated survivor is kept away to ensure someone in the line of presidential succession stays alive.

Picking a failsafe in case of a cataclysmic event that wipes out everyone else dates back to the Cold War. It’s been dramatized in novels and an ABC series starring Kiefer Sutherland that aired from 2016 to 2019.

Being the actual designated survivor brings extra adrenaline jolts and humbling thoughts about being unwittingly catapulted into the presidency and unthinkable tragedy — though the minute-to-minute details usually don’t feature the high drama of fictional portrayals, those who have filled the role say.

“It focuses your mind. It also enhances your prayer that it doesn’t happen to you,” James Nicholson, who was President George W. Bush’s veterans affairs secretary and designated survivor during the 2006 State of the Union, said of possibly becoming president after a cataclysmic event.

Trump’s White House hasn’t said who will be the designated survivor choice Tuesday. Historian and journalist Garrett M. Graff said the concept of designated survivor has long captivated people because it combines the public’s inherent fascination with danger and the romance of an “everyman” being thrust into the presidency.

“The idea of, you’re just a random Cabinet official, and then something terrible happens and, all of a sudden, you’re president of the United States,” said Graff, author of “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die.”

Until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, designated survivors had more control over where they went outside Washington. President Bill Clinton’s energy secretary, the late Bill Richardson, was picked in 2000 and simply moved up a planned weekend trip with his wife to Oxford, Maryland, a waterfront town about 80 miles away, so he’d be there during the State of the Union.

When Dan Glickman, Clinton’s agriculture secretary, was tapped during the 1997 State of the Union, his hometown of Wichita, Kansas, was too far away, so he chose New York, where his daughter lived.

“I thought it was kind of exciting. But I wasn’t hyped up from a dangerous perspective,” Glickman said. “I don’t even think anybody told me to be careful.”

Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s attorney general, was the designated survivor during the 2007 State of the Union. He said White House chief of staff Josh Bolten called a few days before and gave a couple of options for where he could hunker down.

Gonzales chose to be in flight, and he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to find “members of every major department and agency” there to ride with him. They carried thick binders stuffed with memos and protocol instructions, just in case.

He said there were a series of briefings that may have stretched right into Bush’s speech, which he watched from the air.

“It was during that time that it sort of suddenly hit me, if something happened in the Capitol and everyone’s killed, that I’d be president,” Gonzales said. “It’s sort of sobering. And you wonder, would I be up to governing a wounded nation?”

In “Raven Rock,” Graff details how the designated survivor concept was formalized by the Carter and Reagan administrations amid fears that Soviet subs just off the Atlantic Coast could fire nuclear missiles and wipe out Washington with barely 10 minutes’ warning.

Beginning in April 1980, the White House Military Office tasked the Federal Emergency Management Agency with ensuring succession. An aide was directed to recommend to the president who should skip events when all possible successors were together outside the White House.

Officials still prepare for a massive attack or disaster. The military helicopter that collided with a regional jet outside Reagan National Airport in January was on a continuity of government mission — training to keep the federal government functioning in case of catastrophe.

The first time that a Cabinet member being kept away from a presidential speech to Congress was publicly divulged was President Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary Terrel Bell in 1981. But Bell wasn’t identified until afterward.

Today, TV images from the House chamber allow political junkies to spot the missing Cabinet member within minutes.

Nicholson said Bush’s then-chief of staff, Andy Card, had asked him a few weeks before the State of the Union to take on the role. He was a natural fit given that his agency played an important role in continuity of government exercises due to its numerous hospitals and clinics nationwide.

Nicholson flew by helicopter to a destination only divulged once he was in the air, and later sat in a command center, where he underwent briefings before watching Bush’s speech.

He was served a “wonderful” dinner, prepared onsite by personnel from the White House mess, though he can’t recall if it was T-bone steak or prime rib or something similar. “It made you think that, at least, if this awful thing happened, you’d be well fed,” he said.

“The enormity of that job. You think about, remote as it is, this is something you might have to do,” he said of becoming president. Nicholson’s wife was attending the State of the Union, meaning that if something happened, she could be among the victims, which only added to the pressure.

When it was over, Nicholson wasn’t asked to fill in his predecessor in the role, Gonzales, or future designated survivors.

“We don’t have a club,” he laughed. “We should.”

Glickman recalls boarding an Air Force G-3 from Andrews along with Secret Service agents, a military official and a series of advisers not on his usual staff. A three-car motorcade later carried him from LaGuardia Airport to his daughter’s apartment near Union Square in Manhattan.

She wanted to invite others to watch the speech with them, but Glickman nixed that. “This was not a party,” he said.

It wasn’t all serious, though. Glickman said he was told he didn’t need to dress up, so he didn’t wear a suit. Instructions not to study up spared him from reading briefing books or memorizing security protocols.

After the speech, the Secret Service asked if Glickman wanted a ride to the airport. He declined, saying he planned to have dinner with his daughter. It was sleeting when the motorcade left without him, making taxis scarce and the sudden return to real life especially abrupt.

“I was the most powerful man on the face of the earth, theoretically,” Glickman remembered joking to his daughter. ”And then I can’t even get a cab.”

Will Weissert, The Associated Press