Not only all of that, but by the time they reach 35 even identical twins are not longer identical in appearence. If you know them well you can tell which is which. My father was an identical twin and no family member ever mistook one for the other.
And I see I was beaten to it.
Two GWBs???
God forbid
Not even for a quick wank? Man, no wonder these guys end up being wound so tight.
Saddam Hussein, Hitler and Stalin allegedly all had lookalikes as assassination bait. Some even had surgery to improve the resemblance.
No one could rise to the American Presidency without his or her sibling(s) being at least somewhat in the public eye. If the President had a twin, everyone would know about it, and the Secret Service and White House staff would be on guard against any substitution. Not gonna happen.
This is a popular trope in fiction, though. These are old stories, so I won’t spoiler-box them:
Dave, mentioned above, is a good flick. I recommend it.
In the novel The President’s Plane is Missing, the President’s similar-appearing (but not twin) brother flies aboard Air Force One while the President is busy at Camp David with top-secret diplomatic negotiations. The brother is seen boarding the plane, from a distance, by the press corps. Then the plane crashes and everyone thinks the President’s dead, before he dramatically comes out of hiding.
In Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, a stage actor who’s a near-double for a beloved but ill FDR-type planetary leader fills in for him. When the leader dies, the actor gets the gig on an extended basis.
Mark Twain wrote The Prince and the Pauper, about a lookalike for Edward VI, the British boy-king.
Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed is about a Nazi attempt to kidnap or kill Winston Churchill. Turns out he’s got a double for security purposes. Zany hijinks ensue (a pretty gripping story, actually).
I agree. Many years ago I had summer jobs in the Federal government. They fingerprint everybody in the civil service for identification purposes. As Baldwin noted, the President is cleared all the way up to the Double Secret Probation files; I imagine that security clearance paperwork also includes fingerprints for identification.
It also pops up in Dumas’ Musketeer sequel The Vicomte de Bragelonne, the third and final section of which is often titled “The Man in the Iron Mask” in English. Aramis, one of the musketeers, attempts to replace Louis XIV on the throne of France with the titular man in the mask, who is his identical twin.
Right you are. How could I have forgotten that? :smack:
Two of the musketeers, Aramis and Porthos! Porthos never gets no respect.
Everything else notwithstanding, many people in this thread are making a big deal about his fingerprints being on file for one reason or another.
Sure. I bet they are. But on how many occasions do you think his fingerprints have been taken again and compared with previous ones?
Very few, I’d say.
Normally, yes, but if he had an identical twin that few people could tell apart, don’t you think the Secret Service might check every once in awhile?
Actually, though President Jeremy Haines’ older brother, a Senator, does indeed look somewhat like him, and a handful of reporters who are starting to suspect shenanigans hypothesize that the brother was the man on the plane, there’s a dramatic moment where the brother steps forward, having been on some isolated fishing vacation in Vermont or something, leading one journalist to sadly (but of course, incorrectly) conclude that Jeremy Haines is dead.
The impostor, as I recall, turned out to be just some guy who looked enough like Haines to be hired for the occasion, though he needed elevated shoes. It’s entirely possible the 1973 movie adaptation fudged things a bit.
A 1993 episode of SNL, hosted by Charlton Heston, included a sketch presented as a mock movie trailer for the political thriller The President is Illiterate, by the same author as The President’s Wallet is Missing.
If there were two of them, I wonder which would be code named “Dumberer” by the Secret Service…
Nobel laureate Irving Wallace wrote a gripping, entirely plausible book called The Second Lady, in which the KGB replaces the President’s wife with a double.
Akira Kurosawa’s film Kagemusha also makes use of this device, with a thief impersonating a 16th-century Japanese warlord.
[Moderating]
As tomndebb has already requested, please keep your remarks in this thread factual and refrain from cheap political shots.
This goes for everyone else, too.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Apologies offered. Did not see that it had been placed in GQ. :smack:
Respect? Hell, he doesn’t even get cheese!
Most of the literary and movie references cited in this thread have the switch occur on an involuntary basis (at least on the part of the head-of-state).
But the thoroughly charming The Emperor’s New Clothes has an exiled Napoleon (Ian Holm) intentionally switches places with a double so he can be free to travel at will and facilitate a return to power. Problems occur, of course, when the switchee doesn’t want to switch back. Definitely worth checking out.