Who Was Vice President?

February 7, 2019

Corona, California

     There's a game I like to play, mostly in my mind, but also among groups of people, especially those of different ages, if they'll put up with it.  It's called "Who was Vice President on the day you were born?"  Many people know who the President was when they were born, but fewer know the identity of the Vice President at that moment.  That's because, as John Nance Garner (himself the Vice President for eight years under FDR) is supposed to have said, the Vice Presidency "is not worth a bucket of warm piss."  Unless they get lucky and the President croaks or resigns from office, most Vice Presidents go into utter obscurity after their terms have ended.  A few, like Bush Sr. and Nixon, get elected to the Presidency in their own right without having first succeeded to the office through the misfortune of their predecessor, but the great majority do not.

     Knowing who was Vice President on the day you were born requires a bit of knowledge of U.S. history, as well as an understanding of when Presidential and Vice Presidential terms of office begin and end, and also maybe a thing or two about when a President may have left office prematurely.  The answer to the question for some people might be that no one was Vice President on the day they were born.  That can never be said about Presidents.  For someone born on November 22, 1963, for instance, there were two Presidents, or if you want to get really technical, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.  There's always a President, automatically, even if he takes his time getting sworn in.  It's like being the monarch of England--the king is dead, long live the king, and all that.  But the answer to who was Vice President on November 22, 1963 could be Lyndon Johnson, or it could as easily be no one, since after about noon central time on that day there wasn't a Vice President, and wouldn't be another one until Hubert Humphrey took the office in 1965.  For a person who was born on January 20 of certain years, the answer might that there were two Vice Presidents on that day as well as two Presidents.  For instance, if you were born on January 20, 1993, the Vice President was Dan Quayle until noon eastern time, and after that it was Al Gore.  But just to complicate things, if you were born before inauguration day was changed to its present earlier date--to  January 20, starting in 1937--the old inauguration day was March 4.  Then, too, some guys had more than one Vice President.  Franklin Roosevelt had three, and the last of them, Harry Truman, took office on the day FDR died, April 12, 1945, and served without a Vice President all the way until he was elected to a full term that started on January 20, 1949.  Nixon had two Vice Presidents as well.

     The 25th amendment to the constitution, which was adopted in 1967, established that when the office of Vice President becomes vacant due to the death, resignation, or removal from office of the President or Vice President, the new President may himself nominate a Vice President to fill that office.  But that nomination process takes a bit of time, since both the House of Representatives and the Senate must approve the nomination.  Thus after Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President on October 10, 1963, Nixon selected Gerald Ford to be his new Vice President, but the Congress didn't approve his nomination, and he didn't start serving, until December 6, 1973.  Similarly, after Ford became President on August 9, 1974, he nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his Vice President, but Rockefeller wasn't given the green light until December 19, 1974.  Remember that, if you were born in 1973 or 1974.

   With all that in mind, do you know who, if anyone, was Vice President on the day you were born?  I confess that for many years I had no clue who was v.p. on the day I was born, and like some of you, I didn't really care.  When I was growing up, the grandfatherly bald head of Dwight D. Eisenhower adorned the walls of post offices and other public buildings, and as a young child I came to think of him as the only President I had ever had.  Not so.  In fact, on August 3, 1949, the day I was born, Harry Truman was barely into his second term as President (the only one to which he was so elected), and the Vice President was none other than Alben Barkley, a person who has since slid into that obscurity to which I alluded at the beginning of this post, joining such luminaries as the aforementioned John Nance Garner and Dan Quayle, as well as Henry Wallace, Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes, and the slightly more notorious Dick Cheney.  And those are only the ones who might have been around if you play the game with someone who is less than about a hundred years old.  Should you ask a centenarian who was Vice President on the day he or she was born, the correct answer would be Woodrow Wilson's running mate Thomas R. Marshall, pictured above, a man whose main claim to fame was his opinion that "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  Thomas Marshall was a fairly witty guy.  He was governor of Indiana, and is supposed to have said, upon hearing of his nomination for the Vice Presidency, "Indiana is the mother of Vice Presidents; home of more second-class men than any other state."  Up to that point there had been three previous Vice Presidents from Indiana, and in the ensuing years we have added two more Hoosiers to the office--Dan Quayle and our beloved current veep, Mike Pence.

     The very existence of the sitting Vice President is often only brought to our attention when he does something exceptional, like tripping on the steps of an airplane.  He is, by virtue of his constitutionally-granted powers, also the president of the Senate, but only in the most technical sense.  He might choose to preside over the Senate from time to time, if he's not busy looking for a five-cent cigar, but he can't cast a vote unless the Senate is tied.  Almost all the time the person who presides over the Senate is a senior elected member of the majority party, known as the president pro tempore.  These days it's Charles Grassley of Iowa.  But just as often the president pro tem delegates the job of presiding over the Senate to a lesser hack.  It's just a matter of banging the gavel.  In all cases the person currently presiding over the Senate is addressed, ex cathedra, as "Mr. President" or "Madam President."  This might confuse the casual watcher of CSPAN into thinking that this country has more than one President.  Unfortunately, we don't.

     One final thought about the Vice President:  because he has been popularly elected to the office, he cannot be removed from office except by death, disability, resignation, or impeachment for "high crimes and misdemeanors."  (Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first Vice President, came close to getting the boot.  He was federally indicted for bribes and kickbacks he had taken before and during the time when he was governor of Maryland, and, looking up and seeing the sword of Damocles, copped a plea and resigned from office.)  This means, significantly, that the Vice President can't be fired by the President no matter what he does, and he really doesn't have to do anything at all.  He doesn't even have to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate if he is disinclined to do so.  In theory, the Vice President could refuse to have anything to do with the President at all, or tell him to go fuck himself, and there's nothing the President could do about it except maybe to refuse to let him attend any boring meetings of the cabinet, of which he's not a member anyway.  To my way of thinking this would be like throwing Br'er Rabbit into the brier patch.  This knowledge gives me an even lower opinion of our current Vice President, Mike Pence, than I am already inclined to have.  Because in spite of the fact that he's constitutionally completely independent of the President, he chooses to stand behind him almost all the time, with a half smile on his face, as if he's expecting to get brownie points for being there.  Another second-class man, without at doubt.