Vice Presidents
Jay Bryant
July 12, 2004
Dick Cheney is the best Vice President in the history of the United States.
I know what some of you are thinking, and the words, "damning with faint praise" are in there, aren't they? Shame on you.
Others of you are having a knee-jerk negative reaction either because: a) given the long history of the nation, such a sweeping claim seems preposterous, or b) you really and truly hate this administration, and think Cheney is in fact the worst Vice- President in history.
But I ask you: who's your candidate for the title?
Mind you, I'm not saying Cheney is the greatest man ever to serve as Vice President. That list includes two Mt. Rushmorians, Messrs Jefferson and T. Roosevelt, and much as I admire Cheney, I'm not putting him in that class just yet.
But neither of them did anything particularly notable during the time they spent as Vice President. Both had great accomplishments before and after their tenures in that office, but if their historical reputation depended on what they did as Veeps, they might not rise above the level of, say, William Almon Wheeler of Malone, New York who served as Rutherford B. Hayes' second-in-command, not that anyone noticed.
Another Vice President, Richard M. Johnson, who served under President Martin Van Buren also had notable achievements both before and after his term. Before, he killed the great Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh in the Battle of the Thames. After, he was a Kentucky State Legislator. In those days, Democrats were tough s.o.b.'s. The most notable achievement of tough s.o.b. Aaron Burr’s Vice Presidency was shooting and killing Alexander Hamilton 100 years ago this week.
All in all, there have been 46 Vice Presidents, and that's a real number, too, unlike the common delusion that there have been 43 Presidents, which is only true if you count Grover Cleveland twice. Nonetheless, the "Two Clevelands" counting system is part of the American myth, and I have given up trying to change it, especially now that it has become a common way of distinguishing between the two Presidents Bush. You know, Bush-41 and Bush-43, which should, of course, be Bush-40 and 42, but nobody seems to care. To make matters worse, President Bush-41 actually was Vice President Bush-43!
From 1928 (Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas) to 1960 (Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas) every single Democratic candidate for Vice President came from the south or border except for the communist useful idiot Henry Wallace of Iowa, who ran with FDR in 1940. Wallace was such a dodo that he was once given a tour of one of the largest and most notorious sites in the Gulag without ever realizing he was in a prison camp. I think it's pretty doubtful Roosevelt thought he was qualified to be President, and Roosevelt was a sick old man at the time he picked Wallace as his running mate.
(It is one of the scariest thoughts of all time that if Roosevelt had died just a year before he did, Wallace would have become President. If you think FDR screwed up at Yalta, you're right, but imagine the concessions Stalin could have wrangled out of Wallace!)
Since 1976, the Democrats have run southerners for Vice President unless they had a southerner as a presidential candidate (in the Clinton-Gore case, both were southerners), with the exception of 1984, when the celebrated all-Yankee Mondale- Ferraro ticket carried precisely one state.
For good or ill, Americans have never thought much of their Vice Presidents, and the Presidents they served probably thought even less of them. FDR didn't even bother to tell Truman about the atomic bomb, Eisenhower said he'd have to think a while when asked what contributions Richard Nixon had made to his administration, the freeze-out of Johnson during the Kennedy presidency was much commented on, and then there were Agnew, Mondale, Quayle…and Gore, who, having previously invented the Internet, spent his vice-presidential years attempting to "re-invent" government, a big part of which consisted of searching for a controlling legal authority that would allow him to fleece Bhuddist monks for campaign cash.
I haven't yet mentioned Vice Presidents Adams, Tyler, Fillmore, A. Johnson, Arthur, Coolidge and Ford, all of whom became President but none of whom did anything noteworthy as Vice President, although Coolidge did attend cabinet meetings, the first V.P. to do so on a regular basis.
You like any of those names as the best Veep ever? I haven't skipped very many people you've ever heard of on my list, except perhaps John C. Calhoun and Elbridge Gerry, whom you've heard of but probably didn't know were ever Vice President.
If you're a Democrat, you may well choose Hubert Humphrey as the best Vice President ever. He attended Lyndon Johnson's cabinet meetings and, as one history of the vice presidency puts it, "helped unify the Johnson Administration's antipoverty and civil rights programs." He was also one of the most personally likeable men who ever lived, putting him in a very different league than Gore or Mondale. He's a good liberal nominee for the title of Top VP Ever.
Among Republicans, the only real challenger to Cheney is Bush the Elder, who is the only Vice President who ever served as acting President (for eight hours in 1985 while Reagan underwent cancer surgery). He had some very real foreign affairs responsibilities, too, but even so, when I asked one GOP bigwig to recall Bush's VP days, I was told, "he mainly went to funerals." That may be uncharitable, but the point is that no one will ever say that about Cheney's service.
Cheney is the only Vice President ever accused of being too influential. The paranoid caricatures paint him as a Svengali, manipulating President and nation in the interests of – what, Halliburton? I have observed Dick Cheney since his days in Congress; he is one of the most responsible and capable leaders I can think of. He was in government decades before he went to work for Halliburton and any suggestion that he would put that or any other private interest ahead of his country is a canard both absurd and malicious.
Dick Cheney has elevated the Vice Presidency to an unprecedented level of importance and influence. Because of this, his enemies have attacked him with unprecedented vituperation, his very competence grist for their mills of hatred.
But ideology aside, the Executive Branch of government needs, institutionally needs, Vice Presidents like Dick Cheney in modern times. We can no longer afford to waste the second office in the land on someone who is not going to earn his salary, and whether or not you agree with the policies he has helped design and administer, Cheney has worked tirelessly for the nation.
John Edwards may have the face and hairdo of a model, but the comment once made about VP Schuyler Colfax, that he was "all wind and no weight," may also apply. Cheney, on the other hand, is, to paraphrase a tune from the decade in which Colfax served, the very model of a modern Vice President.
Veteran GOP media consultant Jay Bryant's regular columns are available at www.theoptimate.com, and his commentaries may be heard on NPR's 'All Things Considered.'
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