The Vice Presidency: From Cigar Store Indian to Crown Prince
Graham, Donald
The Vice Presidency: From Cigar Store Indian to Crown Prince by Donald Graham What do you think of Robert Finch’s chances of becoming President? If you say “Not much,” you agree with just...
...Television’s tendency to focus on easily identified spokesmen on particular issues makes the figures it chooses into political celebrities almost overnight...
...An April, 1973, Gallup Poll had Agnew running far ahead of the pack for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination: Agnew Reagan Connally Rockefeller Percy Buckley Baker Brooke Evans No opinion 3 5% 20% 15% 11% 8% 2% 1% 1% 1% 6 Even in an August Gallup survey, conducted before the Vice President resigned, but after word that he was under investigation had leaked out, Agnew still attracted the support of 22 per cent of all Republicans for the 1976 presidential nod...
...This alone seems to be enough to make him a leading contender for his party’s nomination, insofar as polls are reliable measures of such things...
...It was not always so...
...In any case, the voters can evaluate these hazards when the Vice President presents himself, looking for a promotion...
...It is also important that the Vice President be permitted to create his own record, so that if he runs for President, voters will have a basis for judging his qualifications beyond the speeches the President’s writers have given him...
...For the Vice President is the one American politician who is not held responsible for what he says...
...Of all the office’s drawbacks, this is probably the most serious...
...Since World War 11, only four major-party vice presidential nominees had previously been presidential contenders: Earl Warren, Estes Kefauver, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey...
...However, in all four presidential elections since 1960, at least one major party nominated the Vice President or a former Vice President...
...When he left office, to become Ambassador to Italy, his record inspired no one to call on him to run for President...
...With Agnew, there were few such decisions and, but for the vigilance of a U. S. attorney, no such record...
...Finch declined because he didn’t feel he would add much to the ticket...
...I can find no evidence that, in all those years, anyone seriously considered him presidential timber...
...Had he chosen to run, he could have been judged on the record of decisions he had made in office...
...The Vice President can take even greater advantage of the medium, for he and the President are the only figures whose credentials as spokesmen are not confined to any one or two subject areas...
...Nonetheless, the means for selecting Vice Presidents is not notably better than in the 19th century...
...Soon after, the 12th Amendment permitted electors to vote separately for President and Vice President...
...President Nixon’s first Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare is now practicing law in Los Angeles, apparently having decided against a long-odds race for Governor of California...
...And since 1964 the victors have all been former Vice Presidents...
...The result was Vice Presidents who were much more likely to become President...
...He need never take a controversial stand, and even if he is foolish enough to do so, he need not suffer the consequences...
...When Vice President Gerald Ford denounced the “small group of agitators” giving Nixon a hard time over Watergate, blame was again traced to the nefarious White House speechwriters...
...What is needed is a change that will make the Vice Presidency more attractive to men of presidential stature and that will give the parties incentive to nominate such men...
...The ones that are still valid refer to the Vice President’s lack of a useful function...
...But as soon as he went from a responsible, important job as House Minority Leader to one with no responsibility and only conditional importance, a quarter of the Republicans in the country suddenly decided that he was the party’s best hope...
...The original constitutional system ensured that if the President died, his successor would be a man whom many people thought fit to be President...
...The paradox of this system is that the more obscure the man was before his election, the more likely he is to thrive in the Vice Presidency...
...When Vice-president Hubert Humphrey said that he supported the war in Vietnam, many thought President Johnson was making him do it, or that at least he would change his mind when he was his own man...
...Having a responsible job, even a cabinet post, does not of course guarantee that a Vice President will always be a productive contributor to the government...
...Ford is a man of considerable experience and was an effective congressional leader and one widely respected by his colleagues...
...As Secretary of Transportation, Volpe left a record...
...If you say “Not much,” you agree with just about everyone else in the United States...
...Let us think back to 1968: Richard Nixon, sure of his own nomination, commissioned polls to see what vice presidential nominee would help him most in the election...
...Now, Ford was as clean as American, and as ill-housed in October as he was in November...
...He is conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it...
...Political analyst Richard Scammon thereupon declared Ford “the most valuable political property extant...
...Almost overnight, Ford became his party’s leading candidate for President, according to the Louis Harris survey...
...Agnew as Over-Achiever The Vice Presidency has undergone changes since the inauguration of the first Vice President, John Adams...
...Adams was elected under the original Constitution, which gave the job to the candidate who received the second highest total of votes for President...
...The job earned Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew national fame and presidential consideration...
...He’d served for 25 years in the House, and he had held the important job of minority leader for nine years...
...But if Finch were not a man of some principle, he would today be a leading Republican candidate for President...
...It is to say that Agnew had, and Ford has, as good a chance as anyone in their party, and that it is hard to conceive that either would ever have been a serious presidential contender had he not been chosen Vice President...
...If he does say something significant, everyone pokes around for a hidden reason...
...There are, of course, other leading contenders, but the Vice President has an enormous advantage over them: he need never do anything-he has no real job...
...Johnson and Humphrey came to the Vice Presidency with known views and national followings...
...A simple change that would accomplish these ends would be to abolish by constitutional amendment the Vice President’s job of presiding over the Senate and make him eligible to serve in any position in the executive branch (he is now an officer of the legislative branch and as such not eligible for jobs with real executive responsibility...
...Senators Fulbright (on foreign policy), Baker and Ervin (on Watergate), and Jackson (on energy) illustrate this effect...
...What has changed about the Vice Presidency is not the kind of men who are chosen to run for the office, but the attention they receive once elected...
...As soon as he was chosen to succeed Agnew, Jerry Ford began the most meteoric rise in the history of American politics...
...An October Gallup poll without Ford’s name included had found Ronald Reagan the most popular choice among Republicans for President: Reagan 29% Rockefeller 19 Connally 16 Percy 14 Baker 8 James Buckley 3 William Brock 2 Edward Brooke 1 No opinion 8 A month later, Harris’ survey found a totally new picture: Ford Reagan Percy Rockefeller Connally Baker Richardson Taft Buckley No opinion 25 20 10 9 8 8 3 3 1 13 Another Harris poll showed that Ford won trial heats against Democratic Senators Edward M. Kennedy ,or Henry M. Jackson...
...Once there were two brothers,” Marshall said...
...Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, compared the holder of the office to a man in a cataleptic fit...
...It is worth noting that the original provisions gave the country its two most distinguished Vice Presidents, Adams and Thomas Jefferson...
...If the office is going to school our future Presidents, we ought to ask whether we and they are well served by it...
...But elevation to the Vice Presidency appears to be able to turn anyone, competent or incompetent, experienced or not, into a political powerhouse overnight...
...It is possible, but not likely, that either would have come by it in any other way...
...When Vice President Spiro Agnew began his attack on the press and television newscasters, the analysts noted that a White House aide wrote the speech and concluded that it was part of the President’s grand political strategy...
...lowed a rule which has been in force since the emergence of the television era: once you become Vice President, you will win your party’s nomination for President unless you plead nolo contendere to charges of income tax evasion...
...Clean, he doesn’t have a fancy home in Kenwood,” Scammon said...
...There is a formidable set of political advantages to being Vice President...
...At last, he narrowed his choices to John Volpe and Spiro Agnew...
...This attention from the press, heightened by television’s need for the identifiable spokesman, brought the name recognition that makes front-runners in the presidential polls...
...In the election of 1800, the same provisions gave the country a disaster: a deadlock between Jefferson, who was nominally his party’s presidential candidate, and Aaron Burr, supposedly Jefferson’s running mate...
...He’s Mr...
...One ran away to sea, and the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either of them again...
...This is not to say that Ford will be nominated, nor that Vice President Agnew would have been his party’s candidate had he not been the subject of the investigation that led him to resign...
...Fighting Unemployment In short, the modern Vice Presidency encourages the parties to select little-known men and, if they are elected, turns them into presidential contenders regardless of their competence...
...The Vice Presidency: From Cigar Store Indian to Crown Prince by Donald Graham What do you think of Robert Finch’s chances of becoming President...
...He found that he ran best on his own, that more people would vote for Nixon without a vice presidential nominee than would vote for NixonReagan, Nixon-Lindsay, or NixonRockefeller...
...Some of Humphrey’s former allies were bitter at him because, loyal to the man who had made him Vice President, he no longer adopted the outspoken liberal tone he had been known for...
...The high point came in 1968 when Vice President Humphrey opposed former Vice President Nixon...
...Those who had feared Johnson when he was an enormously powerful Senate Majority Leader laughed at his impotence as Vice President...
...If he had run and been elected, Finch would most likely have folDonald Graham is a writer now based in New York...
...The out-dated ones derive their humor from the Vice President’s obscurity...
...It is possible to be the secretary of a large department and be allowed to do nothing...
...In the 100 years before 1960, only three incumbent or former Vice Presidents were elected President...
...This solved one problem but created another...
...There is the possibility that a President, out of jealousy, might circumscribe his Vice President’s authority, whatever his official job...
...So he set about doing his best to duplicate the condition of running without a vice presidential candidate...
...Most of the others were selected to balance a ticket...
...According to Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1968, Richard Nixon twice asked Finch to be his vice-presidential running mate...
...A Ford In Our Future A year ago certainly no one was comparing Spiro Agnew to a man who ran away to sea...
...The combination of Franklin Roosevelt’s death, which elevated a virtual unknown to the Presidency, and Dwight Eisenhower’s serious illnesses in 195 5 and 1956 impressed on a whole generation of reporters the importance of the man “a heartbeat away from the Presidency...
...But the 12th amendment meant that by the mid-19th century, vice presidential candidates were less likely to be respected national figures and more likely to be obscure politicians chosen to balance a ticket...
...This transformation of the vice presidency has rendered half the famous put-downs of the office obsolete...
...America, he’s Mr...
Vol. 6 • April 1974 • No. 2
