"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is "to be prepared""
--Vice-President Dan Quayle
Least White: Charles Curtis
Despite the seeming irrelevance of the vice-presidency, the office has actually seen less demographic diversity than the presidency in almost every measurable way. This then means that standards are shifted and when (part-Native American) Charles Kurtis became Herbert Hoover’s VP at the age of 69 in 1929. Basically, Kurtis was immediately introduced as Tonto’s older brother. So how close was Kurtis to putting on war paint or scolding Kevin Costner? Well you tell me, because the man was one-eighth Kaw Indian. Mercilessly, Curtis was called “an Injun” and repeatedly kicked out of his office and moved into a smaller one. While the teasing would have all been rather annoying, Curtis never had a chance after casting his lot with Hoover as the duo sealed up their position as the ass part of an electoral ass-kicking several years before the actual 1932 election.
Most Religiously Ambiguous: Henry Wallace
For 8 years, Henry Wallace served as the Secretary of Agriculture under President Franklin “Not the Penguin from Batman” Roosevelt and, frankly, did a pretty good job. Most notably, Wallace ordered the butchering of 6 million little, probably cute, pigs. The pigs became 100 million pounds of pork for starving people, which also raised the price of full-grown hogs (keeping other farmers employed), and also saved 75 million bushels of corn that the little pigs would have eaten. Wallace responded to the unexpected public outcry, saying, “to hear them talk, you’d think that pigs were raised as pets.” (Wallace then cancelled his plans to butcher several million puppies.) He was promoted (or demoted?) to Vice-President in 1940 and spent four years opposing radicalism, supporting Civil Rights, criticizing poll taxes and even predicted a resurgent Red Scare. Moreover, the man didn’t drink, smoke or play poker. Instead, and this is where he gets outrageous, he spent his time studying Judaism, Buddhism, Zorastrianism and other world religions. Now, he didn’t technically “practice” any of the religions, but rather became familiar with them…for fun. This still terrified party leaders, who successfully labeled him “a mystic” and had him kicked off the re-election ticket in 1944 despite FDR’s reluctance. Eventually, FDR conceded that he “could live with” Harry Truman as his new VP…though apparently he really could not, as 3 months later the President was dead.
First White House Attack Dog: Richard Nixon
Truman may have only been VP for some 3 months, but he was agonizingly bored for that time and so made sure his own VP, Alben Barkley, was always traveling and giving speeches somewhere. This precedent of speaking tours was gobbled up and regurgitated when R.M. Nixon became second-in-command and used his office as a form of perpetual campaigning. Using the microphone of the executive branch, Ol’ Tricky Dick (who was actually a young man) went after so-called “lip-service Americans” with a falsified venom that sickened President Eisenhower. In the most private rooms in D.C., Nixon was called the “little man in a big hurry” whose absurd and vindictive tactics were more polarizing than successful. Indeed, two years after getting into the executive office for the first time in twenty years—essentially receiving a Republican mandate--Nixon’s electioneering lost Republican control of Congress. It’s almost an American tradition at this point; that is, that a newly elected President will suffer in their first midterms. Nixon continued to go after his critics and tried to compare himself with former VP Theodore Roosevelt; though the obvious difference was that unlike Nixon, TR had a life outside of politics.
And a great life at that!
(Yes, that's the President riding a real moose across a river.)
The Most Suspiciously Friendly: Lyndon Johnson
Most people were shocked when JFK’s offered LBJ the vice-president slot, and they were simply stunned when the 6’4” Senator from Texas accepted. Johnson assured his supporters, though, that he was not on a road to obscurity but rather felt “power is where power goes.” Commonly, Johnson’s blunt language revealed a blunter politician, such as his Sun Tzu-esque quote, “it’s better to have your enemies in the tent pissing out, then outside the tent pissing in.” But when he flippantly told Bashir Ahmad, a Pakistani camel driver, to come visit America sometime, a curious news spectacle was born (and since forgotten). LBJ used Eisenhower’s People-to-People program to fund the journey of the illiterate foreigner to visit the United States, alongside the Vice-President for a week. They ate chicken fingers and colloquially traveled around (with some press) to NYC, D.C, K.C. and Texas. Eventually Ahmad was tearfully dropped off in Mecca. Friends or not, for Ahmad’s sake, I just really hope he didn’t have to go camping in a tent with Lyndon Johnson.
Quickest Fall from Grace: Spiro Agnew
For five years of the Nixon administration, Agnew was touted as a “law and order” politician who wanted to crack down on crime, extremists, long hair, Frisbees, drugs, pornography, Communism and East Coast intellectuals. Agnew was a spokesman for the hypothetical Silent Majority due to his constant invocation of the “good old days.” You know, the days before crime, extremists, drugs, sex and intellectualism. Regardless, in 1973, Nixon started coming under fire for the Watergate break-in, the resulting cover-up and a series of partially (or completely) unrelated payoffs, tax write-offs, dubious expenditures, blackmail, Cambodia-bombings, wire-tapping and other abuses of executive power. Nixon, displaying the moral clarity of a James Cameron-villain, (likely) threw his Vice-President under the Public Relations bus by having the Justice Department bring up charges of bribery and extortion. The American people were aghast that Spiro “Mr. Clean” Agnew, who was completely disassociated with the Watergate Scandal, had his own legal problems, and that they were actually brought to trial. Agnew fiercely declared, “I will not resign!” about two weeks before resigning. Mere minutes after handing over his resignation, Agnew walked to a court house and pleaded “no contest” to a charge of tax evasion and sentenced to 3 years, unsupervised, probation. Two days after the resignation, Nixon staged an elaborate ceremony to announced that the White House was now free from corruption and could move forward with grace and dignity, for he was nominating his next vice-president: Gerald Ford.
I don’t think anybody would have elected Gerald Ford on his own merit, ever. So why was he so easily approved for the vice-presidency when Nixon was still under storms of impeachable offenses? Did Nixon think all the scandals had been lumped on Agnew and thus forgotten about? Did other people also think that was going to happen? Less than a full administration before then, a Vice-president had (yet again) unexpectedly assumed the office of the presidency. In the 20th century alone, it happened FIVE times. And each time, the VP had been picked to balance the ticket with absolutely no regard to his own executive capabilities (with the possible exception of Truman).
So why are we so quick to forget? I don’t know. I once heard that comedy is just tragedy plus time. I, for one, wouldn’t mind working a little harder in raising the bar of modern politics to give comedy writers a hundred years from now a little less material than we’ve been given.
No comments:
Post a Comment