Hail (1972)

Richard B. Schull portrays the Secretary of Health whose teenage daughter is a protester against the war in Vietnam. The Secretary and the President are old war buddies and the Secretary lost his leg in the war. It is brought to the attention of the Secretary that the President is acting erratically. He is systematically drowning mouse, selecting a new uniform for White House security based on German uniforms, and is obsessing about unfaithful people around him. A union head is murdered when TV is dropped into his bubble bath on orders from the President. A group of hippies raid a National Guard armory looking for weapons. Said group is murdered in their sleep with poison gas including the Secretary's daughter. Her boyfriend turns out to be an US Army Captain acting under orders from the president to set the group up as a false flag. The Secretary agrees to a coup against the President by the cabinet officers. The position of each is decided by a gum ball machine with numbers on each gum ball, number one going to the Oval Office. The Secretary gets number two and the oldest man in the room gets number one. As each person is celebrating the old man seizes up and dies leaving the number one spot to the Secretary. All he has to do now is bring a bomb into the presidential bunker. The day he arrives at the bunker he is very nervous and meets his former friend and President in a bathroom stall. He arrives at the meeting only to find it was all a ploy. The old man is still alive and everyone is in on the joke. The President needed something to convince the American people that he needed real power to save the country. An old friend who tries to get revenge for the death of his radical daughter would be just the ticket. They put his briefcase into a barrel of water only to find... nothing. Just some paper, Rolaids, pencils, Kleenex, and other junk. The Secretary tells off the president and everyone else. As a last gesture he pulls off his artificial leg and slams it upright on the table. As he hops off he tells the assembled conspirators to damn themselves. The secret service assists him to a helicopter outside as the president and cabinet lean forward to look inside the leg. We see the bunker explode with a huge fireball. The pilot asks the secretary where he wants to go. The Secretary says "The White House".