US vice presidency: From political dead-end to springboard to Oval Office

Over the past several decades the vice presidency has become a more coveted role with more VPs ending up as elected Presidents

“I don't propose to be buried until I'm dead,” Daniel Webster said, declining the offer to be the vice-presidential nominee along with the presidential candidate Zachary Taylor on the ticket of the Whig Party in 1848.

Webster was then a member of the US Senate from Massachusetts. He had by then served as a member of the House of Representatives from New Hampshire and the US Secretary of State. He was then 66 and obviously thought that he still had a long career ahead and a stint in the office of the Vice President would be nothing but a political dead-end for him.

Cut to the US presidential elections 2020. As President Donald Trump is seeking a second term in the White House, Vice-President Mike Pence is not only his running mate again, but is also being seen as a strong contender for the Republican Party’s nomination for the race to the Oval Office in 2024. And, ever since Joe Biden, himself a former Vice President, picked her as his running mate on the Democratic Party’s ticket, speculation is rife about the possibility of Kamala Harris eventually taking over as the “Leader of the Free World”. No wonder Trump not only called her a “monster”, “totally unlikeable” and “communist”, but also went on to say that the Indian-American Senator from California taking over as US President someday would be an “insult” to the US.

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The evolution of the office of the US Vice President from a political dead-end to a springboard to the presidency in fact took place over the past seven decades.

The Vice President is the second-highest officer in the executive branch of the US federal government and ranks first in the presidential line of succession. He is also an officer of the legislative branch of the government being the President of the US Senate, although cannot vote except to break a tie. But the Vice Presidents in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, from John Adams, the first, to Alben W Barkley, the 35th, spent most of their time presiding over the Senate, with little or no role in the executive branch of the government.

The 19th century saw three sitting US vice presidents – Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Van Buren – being elected to be Presidents. Four others – John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson and Chester A Arthur – had to take the top office of the US Government after the death or assassination of the incumbent Presidents – William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln and James Abram Garfield. But none of the four were nominated, let alone won a presidential election later. “From most of the 19th century and through the first half of the 20th century, many Vice Presidents were pretty undistinguished figures,” said Joel K Goldstein, Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law Emeritus at Saint Louis University in Missouri. “The vice presidency was not viewed (those days) as an attractive position for somebody who was politically ambitious.”

The change started coming in early in the 20th century. The four Vice Presidents – Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S Truman, and Lyndon B Johnson – took over the top office after the death or assassination of the Presidents. They all later contested won presidential elections. Gerald Ford was appointed as Vice President after the resignation of Spiro Agnew in 1973 and as President after the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. George H W Bush served briefly as acting President when Ronald Reagan had to undergo a medical procedure. He was the fourth sitting Vice President to be elected as the President in 1989. When his son George W Bush underwent a colonoscopy in June 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney served as acting President for a few hours.

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The role of the Vice President in the executive branch of the US Government started to grow when Dwight D Eisenhower was the President and Richard Nixon was his Vice President between 1953 and 1961. Eisenhower authorized Nixon to chair cabinet meetings in his absence. Nixon was also the first vice president to formally assume temporary control of the executive branch after Eisenhower suffered a heart attack on September 1955, ileitis in June 1956, and a stroke in November 1957.

Eisenhower used Nixon as a foreign emissary and often sent him on international tours.

“Beginning with the Nixon, the vice presidency became the best presidential springboard in American life. Whereas before Nixon, vice presidents typically didn't end up as presidential candidates. Beginning with Nixon, they almost always did,” Goldstein said during a virtual briefing for journalists organized by the Foreign Press Center of the US State Department ahead of the November 3 presidential elections.

But the Vice Presidents still remained “peripheral” in the US government till Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale took over as President and Vice President in 1977. Carter made Mondale a part of his inner circle and gave him an office in the West Wing of the White House, in addition to the ceremonial office in the Old Executive Office Building and Capitol Hill. Mondale functioned as “a general across-the-board advisor” to Carter and took up high-level assignments, including making overseas trips to meet leading allies of the US around the world. He also made a trip to Beijing to help normalize relations between the US and China. With some variations, the Carter-Mondale model has since been followed by all the successive regimes in White House, said Goldstein, an expert on US presidency, the vice-presidency, and constitutional law.

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When Biden served as a vice president in Barack Obama’s administration between 2009 and 2017, the ‘bromance’ between the two was the talk of the town. Biden was placed in charge of implementing the Recovery Act at the beginning of the Obama Administration. He was in charge of disengagement from Iraq. He negotiated a number of the important budget and tax agreements with the Republican Party’s legislative leaders.

Trump and Pence also got along well. Notwithstanding media reports speculating a rift between the two and even about Trump’s plan to drop Pence from the ticket, the President did choose to keep him as his Vice President for four years as his running mate for the forthcoming election – ostensibly to preserve the connection to conservative and evangelical Christians. Trump also put Pence at the helm of the task force he constituted to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

But, if Biden, 78, is elected to the White House, will he let Harris play as important a role in his administration as he, himself, did during Obama’s stint in Oval Office?

“I would expect that if he (Biden) is elected that his Vice President (Harris) would also play a significant role,” says Goldstein. “I think though, it's a mistake to assume that Vice President Harris would be just like a Vice President Biden. I think that may not occur because Vice President Biden is a different person than President Obama. He has different strengths and weaknesses, the things that President Obama didn't like to do that Vice President Biden very much likes to do. For instance, Vice President Biden as vice president did a lot of the legislative deals with the, with the Republican leaders in the Congress, President Obama, didn't like to do that sort of thing.”(sic)

What, however, is more or less certain is that both Pence and Harris have 2024 in mind, even as both of them are busy campaigning for the November 3 polls.