Dream Tickets
Nollson, John
"Dream Tickets" John Nollson Life was simpler in the early days of the Republic when presidential candidates did not have running mates. Everybody just ran for president. If you came in first,...
...This, of course, also provides the background to the real unreported story at the GOP convention of July, 1980, in Detroit...
...Or maybe we need to open up the political process and begin to think in terms of co-tickets, as for example, Nixon-Carter for president running with Ford-Mondale for vice president, or maybe the other way around...
...Democratic nominee Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to persuade former president Dwight D. Eisenhower to be his running mate...
...Unhappily, not even Dr...
...Naturally, his first choice was the former, or soon to be former, president, George Washington himself...
...presidency be completely restructured so as to become a totally powerless and meaningless office, the occupant of which had absolutely no functions to perform...
...Clearly, we have to look ahead to 1984, when former president Carter will be able to run again with former president Nixon as his running mate...
...Washington thought about it for a while but decided to return to land speculation...
...Moreover, this system produced presidents of one party and vice presidents of another, a very unstable arrangement...
...Nobody wanted to be vice president at all, especially after the first vice president, John Adams, called the job the most insignificant office ever devised by the mind of man...
...The Texan, ever the cagy politician, offered all manner of inducements to the General, but negotiations collapsed over Eisenhower's insistence that the vice...
...Not only did T.R...
...Though it was widely believed that former secretary Kissinger was representing former presiden-t Ford in discussions with former governor Ronald Reagan, he was in fact an emissary from former president Nixon...
...Ulysses S. Grant tried to get former president Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, to come out of retirement and accept second place on a GOP ticket headed by old Unconditional Surrender himself...
...If the polls are accurate, there will soon be another living former president, namely Jame.s E. Carter, and yet another living former vice president, namely Waiter F. Mondale...
...y o review, then, this is the situation we now face...
...C } n e interesting sidelight on the 1936 Republican convention was Alf Landon's effort to get former president Herbert Hoover to run with him for vice president...
...John Nollson DREAM TICKETS L i f e was simpler in the early days of the Republic when presidential candidates did not have running mates...
...Landon's closest advisers had to talk the Kansan out of it...
...Hoover, so newly discovered documents reveal, was more than willing...
...Nixon was willing to accept second spot on a ticket headed by either Reagan o r Ford...
...There are, first of all, two living former presidents, namely Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford...
...Complex negotiations ensued, but the deal could not be made...
...Kissinger's patient explanations could disabuse him of this notion...
...He retired to Quincy in a huff, and did not speak to .Jefferson again for about 20 years...
...When it was Thomas jefferson's turn to run for president, he tried to unify the country by persuading former president Adams, a Fecleralist, to accept the second spot on the Anti-Federalist ticket...
...If you came in first, you became the chief magistrate...
...The Georgian, represented in the secret negotiations by his younger brother, insisted that Nixon agree to change his party registration before joining the ticket...
...Nixon was interested in heingJimmy Carter's running mate...
...The convention adjourned in total exasperation...
...The advisers thought that Hoover was so unpopular that he would cost votes...
...I t is now known that he became a real pest, trying to foist himself on Thomas Dewey at the GOP convention of I948...
...Adams thought that having a former president on the ticket as his vice-presidential running mate would aid his chances...
...John Adams had the Federalist nomination sewn up long before the convention, but he needed a running mate...
...Jefferson was quick to point out that he had been elected president, even though Adams had refused to be his running mate...
...Adams thought about it, and then became very angry, thinking that he had somehow been insuhed...
...designation on the GOP ticket headed by William Howard Taft--who weighed more than 300 pounds...
...Landon, ever a realist, believed that he wouldn't do any worse even if he had the Great Engineer by his side and, truth to tell, he was not far off the mark...
...Dewey's secret diary brims with unflattering references to Hoover's effort to get himself on the ticket...
...There are, for the record, four living former secretaries of state, but who cares about them...
...Grant was so upset that he spent most of his time as president working on his famous memoirs...
...On the other hand, there was Calvin Coolidge, who did not choose to run for president in 1924, nor did he choose to be Warren Harding's running mate either...
...Instead, he picked Hubert H. Humphrey...
...Then they began to write letters to one another...
...Naturally, all candidates wished to finish either first or third...
...refuse, but he was so incensed at having been asked to perform this demeaning chore that he ran for the presidency himself...
...Both of them are also former vice presidents...
...The fault, so it seems, lies with former president Theodore Roosevelt, who refused to accept the V.P...
...In 1976, former president Richard Nixon dispatched Henry Kissinger on a delicate mission to New York City...
...if you came in second, you became the vice president...
...Somehow, Ford got it into his head that he was being asked .by Reagan to run for vice president...
...When Humphrey ran on his own account in 1968, he too tried to get Eisenhower to run with him, but the General had, by then, lost all interest...
...That was the source of all the confusion...
...When George Washington decided not to run for a third term, the political process was thrown into confusion...
...Hoover, incidentally, continued to declare his availability for the second slot well into the 1950s...
...Historians have long wondered how Woodrow Wilson, whom everyone knew to be a pompous bore, managed to win the presidency in 1912...
...Readers who are old enough to remember the 1964 Democratic convention will recall the tale that almost won Theodore H. White a Pulitzer Prize...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1980 25...
...Nixon refused...
...After all, these are difficult times, and we have to be imaginative and forthcoming, willing to run risks, take chances, and, most of all, forge ahead...
...Johnson thought this demand demeaned the office which he himself had once filled...
Vol. 13 • September 1980 • No. 9
