The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In 1980, Ronald Reagan reluctantly turned to George H. W. Bush after flirting with the possibility of choosing former president Gerald Ford. In 1988, Bush kept his decision from his closest advisers before disclosing Dan Quayle as his running mate, to the shock and consternation of his political brain trust. And in 2000, when Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush left it to Richard Cheney to find him a running mate, Cheney in a sense chose himself, becoming the forty-sixth and arguably the most powerful and controversial of all vice presidents.

  Of the nine vice presidents who eventually ascended to the presidency, eight by death of the incumbent and one by the incumbent’s resignation, only two—Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman—were later generally judged to have been superior chief executives. A third, Lyndon Johnson, received high grades for domestic legislative achievements, but they were overshadowed by the historic American military withdrawal from Vietnam.

  Furthermore, until the past half century most elected vice presidents neither carried out significant responsibilities nor were even given the opportunity to carry them out. Accordingly, the office was not seen as a pathway to the presidency; on the contrary, as an otherwise ambitious Daniel Webster, who rejected the Whig Party nomination in 1848, observed, “I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.”2

  Eventually, however, the concept of a de facto assistant president emerged out of occasional suggestions for a more formal designation. In 1956, the former Republican president Herbert Hoover proposed to a Senate subcommittee that an “administrative vice president” be created by Congress to relieve the president of his growing managerial burdens. But the idea was rejected on the grounds that the legislative branch ought not dilute the president’s own responsibilities.

  The rather off-handed attitude toward the vice presidency began to change after 1972, when the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, only belatedly addressed choosing his running mate. When it was learned that his selection, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, had previously undergone shock therapy for mental illness, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket. McGovern, reflecting on the fiasco, proposed that more time be allotted after the presidential roll call for the nominee to weigh his choices and that he submit several names to the convention from which to choose his running mate. More important, he argued that responsibility for the selection should not rest in the hands of a single individual.3

  Four years later, the Democratic presidential nominee, Jimmy Carter, was determined that there be no repetition of the preceding election’s troubles. He personally interviewed finalists vetted by aides before choosing Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, pointedly identifying him as qualified to assume the presidency if required and preparing him accordingly in office. That model has been generally followed thereafter in both major parties, though not all. In 1984, Mondale, as the Democratic presidential nominee, oversaw the vetting process, but his choice of the little-known congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate was obviously politically motivated, based on a bid for women’s votes. Her presidential qualifications escaped the thoughts of most veteran political observers.

  Mondale himself later defended the choice in an interview for this book, saying, “I didn’t see how a campaign against Ronald Reagan could win with just an all-male ticket. I had to shake up the cards some way. If I left a legacy,” he said, “it’s that I was part of opening the political party, the legal process, to women, and choosing Ferraro was a big step forward.”4

  Mondale also said he regretted going through the process of personally vetting his prospective running mates, all of whom he already knew, unlike Carter in 1976. As for Ford, he said that after his flirtation with Reagan to be his running mate in 1980, he thought the vice presidential vetting process was “more show than substance.”5

  In 1988, three months before the senior George Bush, as Reagan’s vice president seeking to succeed him, shockingly chose Dan Quayle as his running mate, the Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Vice Presidency overoptimistically declared, “The public, ever more aware of the need for successor presidents who can fill the office ably and faithfully, has taught politicians that they cannot increase their chances to win the election except by applying governance criteria to the selection of vice-presidential candidates.”6 It also said that a presidential nominee “who pays insufficient attention to governance criteria in choosing the vice-presidential nominee, will suffer for it in the election.… Ultimately, the price of a rash or overly ‘political’ nomination for vice president is paid in the coin of the realm: votes on election day.”7 That was hardly the case in the election of the Bush-Quayle ticket.

  In 2008, the political community was jolted again when the Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, chose the nationally obscure governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. McCain had met her only once, briefly, before she was hurriedly interviewed and presented to the public. Palin proved to be a charismatic candidate but transparently ill-informed on many major issues, again raising questions about the judgment of the man who chose her and that of his key political advisers. The decision continued to fall essentially to the presidential nominee, whether by diligent scrutiny of prospects or personal whim.

  Through all this, one prominent presidential scholar argued whether there ought to be a vice president at all. In a minority view, the late historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., as a member of the 1988 Twentieth Century Fund Task Force, contended, perhaps with Hubert Humphrey in mind, that the office was “as often a maiming as a making experience, a process of emasculation rather than of education,” and should be abolished.8

  But the most recent vice president interviewed for this book, Joe Biden, emphatically defended the office as indispensable today. “The way the world has changed, the breadth and scope of the responsibility an American president has,” he said, “virtually requires a vice president to handle serious assignments, just because the president’s plate is so very full.”9

  Assuming the vice presidency is here to stay, the key question remains: should the choice of a potential “accidental” president be left in the hands of one individual? Several alternatives have been suggested, including conducting vice presidential primaries during the presidential primary period and leaving the choice to the national party convention. But such primaries would necessarily preclude participation of a party’s top prospects seeking the presidency itself, thus characterizing the remaining contenders as second-raters. Also, letting the party convention decide would invite internal division and risk saddling the presidential nominee with an unwanted or disruptive running mate. In 1956, the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, threw the selection to the convention, which chose Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, in a losing cause. No presidential nominee of either major party has repeated that practice since then.

  In 1974, when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign the vice presidency and Nixon was obliged to nominate his replacement, he chose Gerald Ford essentially because he was advised by congressional leaders in both parties that Ford would be most easily confirmed. Less than nine months later, however, when Ford in turn had to fill the vice presidential vacancy as a result of his own ascendancy, he selected Nelson Rockefeller as a man who distinctly had presidential qualifications. Later, Ford told me, “Some presidents pick a running mate who will not compete with them in public relations, in world recognition, and so forth, and I think that’s unfortunate. A president ought to pick his running mate because he adds strength to the president. Some presidents pick vice presidents who are not at any point going to compete with them.… I never understood why presidents as candidates occasionally select somebody who is really not going to be as popular or as highly regarded as themselves.”10

  In 1976, for the first time the two major parties agreed to add a vice presidential debate to the schedule of the televised presidential debates that had begun in 1960 with the Kennedy-Nixon confrontations. Dole faced the Democratic standby
nominee, Mondale, in a debate marked by a damaging display of anger and resentment by Dole. The incident later was cited as a factor in the defeat of the Ford-Dole ticket, although others mentioned Ford’s pardon of Nixon as a more likely explanation.

  Since 1984, when Vice President Bush faced Congresswoman Ferraro, the vice presidential debate has been a regular feature of the fall election, elevating public awareness of the office if not voters’ decisions on Election Day. In 2012, after President Obama was perceived to have slipped in his first debate with the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, Vice President Joe Biden aggressively debated the Republican running mate, Paul Ryan, and was credited with putting the Democratic ticket back on track to its reelection on Election Day.

  Equally important in raising the visibility of vice presidents in the public eye has been the increasing willingness of presidents to give them conspicuous roles, beyond the ceremonial, in the business of their administrations. Ever since the Eisenhower-authorized globe-trotting of Richard Nixon in the 1950s and the sharply increased utilization of the standbys in the Mondale model of governance in the 1970s, the office has been elevated well beyond the ridicule and near anonymity it endured for so long in years prior to World War II.

  Cheney, probably the most empowered vice president in history, said in an interview for this book, however, that “the president is the president,” and it all depends on what he seeks in his standby. “The only way it will work is if the president wants you to play a role,” he said. Citing the unhappy experience of Lyndon Johnson in the second office, he said with a touch of sarcasm, “Lyndon Johnson would have been a great vice president, but they buried him.”11

  It is clearly imperative now that a presidential nominee retain and exercise the prerogative to choose his running mate and to make constructive use of the experience, talents, wisdom, and energies of his choice if both are elected. Recent governing partnerships have underscored the need and advantages of personal compatibility and policy harmony for effective administration of the public’s business. Biden insisted, “The thing that makes it work here is that the president and I are simpatico, ideologically and politically.” He reported that on a daily basis he spent about four hours with Obama, giving him “unvarnished advice” and a commitment that if ever he disagreed with the president on a major issue, he would resign.12

  This arrangement can only be as productive as the president desires and permits, requiring the vice president’s acceptance of the subordinate role in the governing equation, best illustrated in recent years by the Carter-Mondale, Clinton-Gore, and Obama-Biden relationships. The requisite compatibility also existed between the junior Bush and Cheney, though this vice president’s role appeared to grow so outsized as to raise questions of excessive vice presidential influence, particularly in the conduct of foreign policy. Cheney said compatibility “has to be professional; it doesn’t have to be personal.” But Biden said Cheney in his eight years in the office “kicked the vice presidency up a couple of notches. He took on a different, expanded role.… And I don’t mean it [was] just because of W; it’s also because the world gets increasingly complicated.”13

  After attaining the presidency, Ford, whose personal compatibility was tested in his vice presidency during Nixon’s Watergate downfall, said that while the vice president need not be a subservient yes-man, “he has to be a team player.” He continued, “He can’t go off on a separate tangent on every major issue. When he can’t be a spokesman affirmatively for the president, he ought to be quiet. But it doesn’t enhance the vice president, either,” he added, “to always be echoing what the president says.”14 Ford noted that as Nixon’s vice president he proclaimed the man’s innocence in the Watergate cover-up until he learned otherwise, and then his only recourse was to say nothing.

  Discounting the eight vice presidents who rose to the presidency by death of the president and the one by resignation, only five other vice presidents were later elected to the highest office in their own right—Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, Nixon, and Bush—and of these only Jefferson and Nixon were reelected. So the vice presidency as a stepping-stone to the Oval Office has been a rare phenomenon since the earliest days when Adams and Jefferson first achieved it as presidential runners-up. In five of the last nine elections, however, a vice president has been his party’s presidential nominee, and two—Nixon and the senior Bush—were winners.

  What of the vice presidency itself? First of all, with the expansion of the responsibilities of the most recent occupants, should they continue to preside over the Senate, as specified in the Constitution? The arrangement giving them one foot in the executive branch and the other in the legislative seems to be, if not a conflict, then certainly unpropitious. In practice, the vice president long ago gave up regularly taking the chair for Senate sessions, usually occupying it only in anticipation of a tie vote. Yet that specified task can be crucial on a matter of legislative importance to the president. The existing arrangement works no substantial inconvenience on a vice president. Mondale later remembered that the office was no particular burden “and not worthy of efforts to change the Constitution” where it stipulates such service.15

  But Cheney, after leaving office, said of the job, “I considered it an asset.” He said he was welcomed to the Republican Senate Caucus with open arms as an ex officio member of the club. It enabled him to keep up on inside political and legislative information to convey to the president and to push for administration policies.16

  Aside from presiding over the Senate, what role can a vice president best perform? Absent being placed in charge of a cabinet department, some occupants have assumed major responsibilities in areas of their expertise that may overlap with the duties of a cabinet member. Gore, beyond an assigned job to explore government organization, became an influential advocate of energy independence and of various environmental concerns in the Clinton administration. Cheney ran a task force on energy and later was the key Bush administration figure in national security matters, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the treatment of enemy detainees. But he often seemed to crowd Bush’s defense secretary and ranking Justice Department figures in determinations on matters of legality in the reach of presidential powers and in establishing a separate vice presidential office that sometimes appeared to act on its own.

  Mondale later questioned whether Cheney’s tenure posed a threat of an excessively powerful vice president given unusually free rein. “What happens,” he asked, “when, as Cheney did, a vice president uses his office to go into the dark side, and runs a kind of secret, separate government, unaccountable, even less accountable than the president? To manipulate, in this case, a weaker president?”

  Alleging “abuse of vice presidential power,” Mondale cited the role of Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, in the outing of CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson, as part of efforts to intimidate her and her husband, Joseph Wilson, over “what was going on in Iraq,” and the Bush administration’s incorrect insistence that weapons of mass destruction existed there. “Cheney was up to his eyeballs in that,” Mondale said, “because that’s what they did there. They managed news. We have to be worried about that happening again, because it happened once.”17

  With presidential acquiescence, Mondale and Biden have functioned as across-the-board general advisers to the president, at his side or looking over his shoulder as principal kibitzers. All six vice presidents starting with Mondale have served to one degree or another as generalists unencumbered by cabinet-like managerial responsibilities. Years after his tenure, Mondale said, “I often said I don’t want to do anything that somebody else is doing. This should not be a make-work office.” Making the vice president a cabinet member or agency chief, he said, would be a waste of time and would put him “in the middle of chains of command, and a pleader for an agency rather than giving overall advice to the president.” Such a notion, Mondale said, “goes back to the days when they were trying to find something for the vice president to do, an
d that’s no longer a problem.”18

  Biden recalled his response when Obama asked him what he wanted as a portfolio: “I said I don’t want a portfolio.” He noted that Al Gore as vice president had a consequential one in dealing with government reorganization and the environment. “But when you take on a portfolio no matter how consequential, it takes you out of the action in terms of having an impact on the decision process of the president.… Why would you want to have the job unless you could attempt to impact on outcome on all the important decisions?”

  Biden actually turned out functioning as a hybrid when at the start of his first term Obama assigned him to oversee the disbursement of his administration’s economic stimulus and its implementation, through local and state chief executives and federal cabinet members. His role, Biden said, was judged necessary by Obama because the broad task required crossing jurisdictions, federal departments, and agencies. It worked, Biden said, “because everybody knew that when I showed up I was speaking for the president.”19

  Under this approach to the vice presidency, some recent occupants have been free to function as assistant presidents in the fashion envisioned by FDR nearly a century ago when he ran, unsuccessfully, for the office. It’s also been suggested that a modern-era president should have two vice presidents, one to handle ceremonial chores and the other administrative duties. But Mondale said, “The stature of the vice president would be greatly diminished,” adding, “vice presidents don’t have any problem handling both functions.”20 They are also called on increasingly to carry the brunt of political combat and party building, putting on a partisan cloak that often subjects them to being called “hatchet men.” Mondale argued that policy and politics can’t be separated, saying, “I don’t see how a nonpolitical vice president can be of any use to a president.”21 Biden said a vice president risks repudiation if he goes after an opponent on personal grounds but can and must engage in debate on political philosophy.22