A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  The Kennedy cabal could barely disguise their contempt for the Democratic Party leaders from the South. They were a different party, a different breed. Remember this is 1960; the Civil Rights Act had not been passed. In 1956, ninety-nine Democrats in Congress signed the ‘Southern manifesto’ – a policy document that expressed unswerving support for segregation– and opposition to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education, the landmark case that ended segregation of black and white children in schools. Today the Democratic Party may be known for its progressive policies; back then in the South – where it still held political sway – it was anything but. It was redneck and socially conservative, working class, blue collar and less well educated. A very different party from the smart, young, preppy, cosmopolitan, polo neck jumper wearing brigade around Kennedy. They regarded those keeping company with Lyndon Johnson as little more than Neanderthals, their white knuckles scraping along the segregated streets of Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. This went way beyond the normal antipathy of rival candidates jostling for power. This was deep-seated and visceral. The two sides really detested each other. And Robert Kennedy’s loathing for LBJ knew no bounds.

  When Kennedy had sewn up the party’s nomination at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in July 1960, both men had suites at the Biltmore Hotel where the gathering was taking place. JFK’s people were wary about their man making any offer to LBJ, and LBJ’s people wanted nothing to do with ‘boy’ Kennedy. But when the victorious Kennedy went via a back staircase from his ninth-floor rooms to LBJ’s suite – away from the prying eyes of the media – he went with an offer that had been framed in a way that he felt certain LBJ would not entertain, and flatly reject. A pro forma offer to the older, far more experienced senator to be Kennedy’s running mate. LBJ said yes without hesitation – which would later cause a total meltdown in both men’s circles. But there was logic to it, if little warmth.

  Kennedy had to deal with the backlash of those closest to him about this unlikely development, and try to convince them of the wisdom of the move. He told his aides, ‘I’m 43 years old, and I’m the healthiest candidate for President in the United States. You’ve travelled with me enough to know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice-presidency doesn’t mean anything.’ An argument that would turn out to be horribly and poignantly inaccurate.

  His other argument was far more compelling. The whole focus of the Kennedy campaign team had been to get enough delegate votes to win the nomination at the Democratic convention. But if you are to be more than a footnote in history, as someone who ran and lost, then you need very quickly to move towards working out how you are going to win enough electoral college votes to win the main prize – the presidency. Having LBJ on the ticket would help guarantee Texas’s 24 electoral college votes, and should ensure that Kennedy would pick up other Southern states, that might otherwise have shunned a Roman Catholic liberal from Boston. In the 1960 election, Kennedy narrowly saw off his Republican rival, Richard Nixon, and shaded the popular vote.

  It’s hard to find exceptions to the rule that the running mate is primarily there to reach parts of the electorate that the principal on the ticket is unable to. Perhaps the only exception to that in modern times was the 1992 election when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate. Another youthful, dynamic and good-looking figure, Gore seemed more of a mirror to Clinton than a counterbalance; this was about a Democratic Party that had been out of power for 12 years wanting to project an image of youth and vitality – at both ends of the ticket.

  But if you go back to the founding of the United States, the President did not get to choose his deputy. The job went to the runner-up in the electoral college. After George Washington stood down as America’s first president, in the 1796 election John Adams was running to succeed him for the Federalists; Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s former Secretary of State, was the favoured candidate of the Congressional Republicans. Adams won the election and became America’s second president; Jefferson, from a rival party, became vice-president by dint of being runner-up. Just imagine that in today’s context. President Trump and Vice-President Hillary Clinton. Okay, agreed, unimaginable.

  The fact is, the position of the vice-president was an afterthought. No consideration had been given to the possibility – as happened with Adams and Jefferson – that you might end up with two men, yoked together, who had sharply differing views on the world. It was an issue that would only be addressed by the 12th Amendment. There were only two constitutional functions ascribed to the number two. They would succeed the president in the event of death; and they would preside over the Senate – the vice-president having a casting vote in the event of a tied vote. As if to underscore how little the VP had to do with the executive branch of government, his salary was paid for by the legislature.

  But gradually presidents increasingly wanted a vice-president who would be a political aide. Andrew Jackson, who became president in 1832, chose his chief political strategist Martin Van Buren as his deputy, and relied heavily on his counsel. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln chose to drop Hannibal Hamlin, his first-term vice-president, who came from Maine, in favour of Andrew Johnson. Lincoln feared that without support from the South he would not be able to see the war through to victory and save the Union. Johnson, who at the time was the military governor in Tennessee, opposed secession, but he had a much more sympathetic attitude to the southern states than many of Lincoln’s supporters. They went on to win the election together, but soon afterwards Lincoln was assassinated, while at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Johnson succeeded him and promptly went about reconstruction in a way that many believe Lincoln would have never supported. President Johnson would go on to carve his own little niche in the history books: he became the first president to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanours.

  For the first half of the twentieth century the ceremonial role of the vice-president and position as president of the Senate was to the fore. Incredibly, Harry Truman who was Vice-President to Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War, was unaware of much of the wartime planning. So isolated was he, in fact, that he knew nothing about the Manhattan Project, the research programme that would lead to the development of the first atomic bomb. He would only learn of it when he was 12 days into his own presidency following FDR’s death in April 1945 – and he would order its use in Japan a few months later to bring the war to an end. Indeed, he knew so little of what was going on that he described the day after Roosevelt’s death in the following terms: ‘I felt like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me.’

  After Truman took over the presidency from FDR – having been so ill prepared for the role – he sought to change the functions and the responsibilities of the vice-president. He brought his number two, Alben Barkley, much more into the centre of decision making. The next step change in the vice-president’s role came at the end of the 1950s when Richard Nixon was VP to Dwight Eisenhower. Nixon had a more formalised set of duties – diplomatic trips – and almost acted as the envoy of the president, chairing executive commissions and being a lobbyist for the administration. He also moved into the building next door to the White House – then known as the Executive Office Building. And that was more than a mere question of geography. Remember that a whole school of academic thought grew up in Soviet times in which who of the party nomenklatura was sitting next to whom at the Red Square parade would be carefully studied for indications of who was on the rise and who was on the wane: Kremlinology. And so it is in Washington, with WhiteHouseology. The closer you are physically, the more face time you have with the president, the more you are brought into decision making, the more powerful you are.

  And so it would develop when John F. Kennedy took over from Eisenhower. Despite the unpromising start to their relationship, the irascible, insecure and egotistical Lyndon B. Johnson formed an important and productive relationship with his charismatic and youthful boss. Kennedy
valued his counsel on questions of legislation, public opinion and political strategy. He also made sure that LBJ was included in all major meetings taking place at the White House. Robert Caro, in his towering series of biographies on LBJ, quotes Jack Kennedy telling a political aide and appointee how important it was to keep the vice-president sweet: ‘He thinks you’re nothing but a clerk. Just keep that right in your mind. You have never been elected to anything by anybody, and you are dealing with a very insecure, sensitive man with a huge ego. I want you literally to kiss his fanny from one end of Washington to the other.’ JFK would tell his chief of protocol to make it her priority to keep an eye on LBJ and Mrs Johnson: ‘I want you to watch over them … and see they’re not ignored. Because I’m going to forget. My staff is going to forget. We’re all going to forget. We’ve got too much to do around here … but I want you to remember.’ Theodore H. White, the great contemporary chronicler of US elections, would write in 1964, ‘The president made of Johnson as much as any President can make of his Vice President, a working participant in national affairs.’

  Of course, this relationship worked because John F Kennedy chose to make it work: he invested the time and effort into managing LBJ – and thus drawing the best out of him. He became an invaluable asset to JFK, and contemporaries noted how remarkably close the two became, given where the relationship had started. But this, in a sense, depended on Kennedy choosing to give LBJ the political space to exert his muscle. There was nothing pre-determined (aside from LBJ’s force of personality) that would require the President to cede power to his number two. It was a choice.

  That next important change would come with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, and the appointment of his Vice-President, Walter Mondale. The two men had a shared vision of, in effect, how to share the presidency; how to allocate roles to each other, and how to integrate the two jobs. And again, don’t ignore physicality. For the first time the vice-president was brought into the White House itself. Mondale would have his own office in the West Wing, but a few steps away from the president. It would mark a serious ‘upgrading’ of the power of the office – and as in any organisational structure where the greatest enemy is stasis and resistance to change, this required institutional imagination, engineering – and determination to push it through. Mondale had talents and experiences that complemented those of the Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter. He would be senior counsel and chief trouble-shooter. There is a fascinating memorandum written by Mondale to Carter on 9 December 1976 – just weeks before the inauguration – setting out how he saw the role of the vice-president in the Carter administration.

  To achieve the role as a general advisor to the president he would need to receive frequent and comprehensive briefings from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. He would receive advance warning of major issues to be discussed at the National Security Council. He would travel the world and deal with major global issues affecting the administration. And if he asked for information/research help, ‘I would hope that I could expect the same or nearly the same level of responsiveness from key administration officials in seeking information that you would receive.’ In other words when the VP asks for something, you’d better sit up and take notice. Not only that, but the staff appointed by the vice-president would also be included in White House meetings.

  It is only in the final paragraph of the 11-page memo that Mondale talks about the role for which the VP position is famed: ‘The role outlined above would, in my judgement, clearly fulfil the most important constitutional obligation of the office – that is, being prepared to take over the presidency should that be required.’ The transformation of the role of VP was nearly complete. It was a model that would be accepted and adopted by all presidential and vice-presidential successors, whether Democrat or Republican.

  If we are being unkind, the one vice-president who stands out a bit from the line of successors to Walter Mondale is Dan Quayle, who was Vice-President under George H.W. Bush. He was one of those vice-presidents who failed to impress. In fact Quayle turned out to be a bit of a turkey. Famously during the 1988 campaign when he was George H.W. Bush’s running mate he went to a school where there was a Spelling Bee competition being run. Spelling Bee commands enormous attention in the US, as children compete against each other in what leads to a grand televised final for who has the best spelling. Mind-bogglingly clever children end up spelling out words that you’ve never heard of with meanings you don’t know. Dan Quayle’s intervention was not in a grand final, but at a school he was visiting in New Jersey during the campaign. The 12-year-old child had been asked to spell ‘potato’. He went up the blackboard, wrote it out, and stood back to admire his work. It was then that Quayle intervened and told the boy that it was incorrect, and added an ‘e’ so that it was spelled ‘potatoe’. His place on the ticket had been designed to bring some youth and good looks to the long-in-the-tooth Bush senior’s campaign. It brought unintended comedy as well.

  It was his appearance in the vice-presidential TV debate that brought one of the great put-downs of all time. Quayle, then aged 41, repeatedly tried to compare himself in his stump speeches to John F. Kennedy for his vitality and vigour. In the debate against the Democrat vice-presidential hopeful, Lloyd Bentsen, Quayle when questioned about his comparative inexperience insisted he had more congressional experience than JFK. His older and wilier Democrat opponent was lying in wait, ready to pounce. Lloyd Bentsen moved in, slowly, for the kill. ‘Senator,’ he said to Quayle. ‘I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. (Pause) Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy (crowd erupts into shouts and applause).’

  There was also a whole series of gaffes and malapropisms from Quayle that brought a vice-presidential running mate rare attention. For example, ‘One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is “to be prepared”.’ Or: ‘Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.’ And then there’s this: ‘The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.’ The list goes on and on, and it just becomes an exercise in cruelty to keeping adding to them. What? You’d like a couple more? Oh, alright then, but against my better judgement. Looking ahead he once said: ‘I believe we are on an irreversible trend towards more freedom and democracy – but that could change.’ And again, with rare prescience: ‘We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.’ He spent four years as vice-president. For the past twenty years he has been working at a private equity firm, his head rarely appearing above the parapet.

  The vice-presidency that aroused the most controversy was that of Dick Cheney, the number two to George W. Bush. Or was it the other way round? Was Bush the subordinate to Cheney? George W. Bush was the oldest son of George H.W. Bush – and in his youth a rather wayward son. He was the classic privileged child who had slightly gone off the rails. He drank a lot. In 1976 he was prosecuted for drink/driving. During his presidential bid he would recount that after waking up with a hangover following his fortieth birthday celebrations, he resolved never to drink again. He became Governor of Texas in 1995. That would be his launchpad for the presidency. But his surname was the most impressive thing about his résumé. It would unlock untold millions, the essential lubricant for all presidential campaigns.

  The same was not true of Dick Cheney. He was steeped and marinated in government, politics and the Republican Party. Only a few years older than Bush, he seemed to belong to a different generation. He had worked in a junior capacity for Richard Nixon – his boss at the time was Donald Rumsfeld, who would go on to be Defense Secretary in the Bush administration. He had been chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. He’d served in Congress for a decade, had become the Chair of the House Republican Conference, the House Minority Whip, then Defense Secretary to W’s father. You name it, he’d done it. He knew how Washington worked, how Capitol
Hill functioned, what kept the wheels of the White House turning. He knew where the bodies were buried, and who had buried them – and who might need to be buried if they stepped out of line. He was a bad enemy to have.

  He matched that with great organisational skill, and intricate knowledge of the mechanisms of government. Building on the changes that Walter Mondale had brought, in his suite of offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building he constructed, in effect, a shadow White House. Whatever President Bush had staff for; he would have a team doing the same. There would be no issue on which he would be blindsided. And then there was the presence of the man himself – Cheney was an all-seeing, all-knowing force within the White House.

  But his power wasn’t confined to the Executive branch of government. He made sure his tentacles reached everywhere. In addition to the West Wing, he maintained his expansive suite next door in the Eisenhower Building; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives made sure Cheney had offices near the House floor, while maintaining two offices in the Senate. In all aspects of policy making, Cheney’s reach was long. It was a similar story when it came to appointments at the highest level of the administration.

  The presidency of George W. Bush was defined by one event – 9/11. It was the most traumatic event for America since Pearl Harbor, which brought the US into the Second World War, and truly shook the kaleidoscope. It was also a catalyst for a ‘war on terror’ whose repercussions are still felt to this day. At the centre of all decision making was Dick Cheney: the talk of an ‘axis of evil’, the war in Afghanistan and, more controversially, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with ‘shock and awe’. Cheney repeatedly sought to justify the latter on the grounds that the Al Qaeda bombers of 9/11 had links with the regime in Baghdad. In 2004 the 9/11 Commission concluded there were no such links. He would continue for a decade afterwards to repeat the same discredited claims. Where Cheney was vindicated was in his prediction that on the battlefield victory would be swift and overwhelming; what he and the rest of the Administration never anticipated was the quagmire into which the United States would become sunk. One policy blunder would follow another: the naïve de-Ba’athification of the Iraqi army, which left thousands of unemployed, highly trained soldiers to wage a war against the occupying forces; the under-estimation of the civil war that would erupt between Shias, Sunnis and Kurds; the total lack of thought that would go into nation building. It was textbook how to win the war, and lose the peace.