Vice President Mackenzie Allen becomes the nation's first female president---and its first independent chief executive---when her predecessor dies in office. On his deathbed, incumbent Teddy Roosevelt Barnes says he wants House Speaker Nathan Templeton to succeed him, but Templeton's patronizing attitude so infuriates Allen that she won't resign.

As damaging information concerning her VP choice, Warren Keaton, is rumored to emerge, Mac faces her first foreign crisis: the execution-style slayings of nine DEA agents in Latin America. Meanwhile, her teen twins go back to school---only this time with full Secret Service details. Horace laps up the attention, but Rebecca is terrified of it.