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Nearly three hundred tons of aircraft and fuel struck the east face of the building at a speed of
three hundred knots. The aircraft disintegrated on impact. No less fragile than a bird, its speed
and mass had already fragmented the columns outside the walls. Next came the building itself.
As soon as the wings broke up, the engines … shot forward, one of them actually smashing into
and beyond the House Chamber… The entire east face of the building’s southern half was
smashed to gravel, which shot westward – but the real damage took a second or two more,
barely time for the roof to start falling down on the nine hundred people in the chamber …
The passage quoted above does not come from a government report speculating on the
target of the fourth hijacked airliner on 9-11, nor is it a post-9-11 analysis of terrorist nightmare
scenarios. It comes from a Tom Clancy techno-thriller, Debt of Honor, published in 1994 (762).
In it, a commandeered jet slams into the Capitol while the president addresses a joint session of
Congress, propelling its hero, just-confirmed Vice President Jack Ryan, into the presidency.
Ryan himself barely escapes death in the attack. The resulting devastation sets the stage for
Clancy’s next volume, Executive Orders, in which the new President Ryan has to reconstitute the
government and lead a nation under attack.
Article II of the Constitution provides for Congress to determine “what officer shall act as
President” should both the president and vice president be killed or incapacitated at the same
time. This situation is known as a “double vacancy.” Concern about the continuity and stability
of government in such a crisis goes all the way back to the founding era. The first law providing
Convention