TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052091/0520103.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 120 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 23

COVER STORIES

The Strange Destiny Of a Vice President


He is the second highest-ranking official in the land, and he
is also the butler -- or the handyman

By LANCE MORROW


    A procession trudges along the service road of American
history, looking distinguished and wistful: George Clinton,
Daniel D. Tompkins, George M. Dallas, William King, Hannibal
Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, William A. Wheeler, Levi P. Morton,
Garret A. Hobart, Charles W. Fairbanks, Charles Dawes, John
Nance Garner, Henry Wallace, Alben Barkley . . .

    These men, Vice Presidents of the U.S., share a strange
fate -- a shelved career, high office without power, a
political glory all but lost in nonentity, and a galling kind
of subservience. Good news: You are the second highest-ranking
official in the land. Bad news: You are also the butler. Or the
handyman. All you have is a faintly unclean hope of things to
come.

    The vice presidency calls up its rueful folklore. "Cactus
Jack" Garner of Texas, F.D.R.'s Vice President from 1933 to
1941, did not say the office was "not worth a pitcher of warm
spit." He said it was "not worth a pitcher of warm piss." The
line is almost always cleaned up for the civics class. No one
has improved on Mr. Dooley's formulation: "Th' Prisidincy is
th' highest office in th' gift iv th' people. Th'
Vice-Prisidincy is th' next highest an' th' lowest. It isn't a
crime exactly. Ye can't be sint to jail f'r it, but it's a kind
iv a disgrace. It's like writin' anonymous letters."

    Sometimes, of course, the nonentity is summoned up from
the servants' quarters and invested with the master's power.
When a President dies in office, there is the initial shock of
the news and then, a moment later, a sort of secondary
explosion. The hand slaps the forehead in a star burst of
realization: "My God! You know what this means?!"

    Such moments -- April 15, 1865; April 12, 1945; Nov. 22,
1963, for example -- are lessons in the psychology of power. The
trauma of a President's death, especially by assassination,
becomes the drama of a mediocrity, a sort of imposter, presuming
to take over. Or so it always seems. The vice presidency almost
by definition enforces an expectation of the second rate: the
man is inherently a loser (he was not the President, after all)
or at best a Sancho Panza. In the case of Andrew Johnson
following Abraham Lincoln, the fear of mediocrity was fulfilled.
When Franklin Roosevelt died, a god of the era gave place, it
seemed, to democracy's least common denominator, a barking,
weightless little haberdasher from Independence, Mo.

    The presidential nominee always says the person he has
selected to be his running mate is the American "best qualified
to take over in the White House in the event of my death." That
is a ceremonial lie. The choice of a vice-presidential running
mate is a purely political calculation aimed at winning the
November election. A presidential candidate looks for a
complementary running mate, someone to shore up a weak side --
to lend geographical or ideological balance, for example.
Conservative Californian Ronald Reagan picked Connecticut-Texas
moderate George Bush. It may be a matter of ages, aesthetics,
chemistry and coloring, as well as political alliances. Elder,
moderate, military statesman Dwight Eisenhower chose younger,
nastier, darker, feistier conservative Richard Nixon. At some
time down the line, national tickets will be balanced by sex and
race as well.

    The vice-presidential ritual demonstrates a phenomenon of
political optics: few men -- or women -- look qualified to be
President before they get into office, either by winning it or
taking the place of a fallen predecessor. Or, conversely, those
who look abundantly qualified beforehand may prove to be
disappointing. Presidential politics is inventive, bizarre and
addicted to surprise.

    Consider: Harry Truman, who seemed hopelessly unqualified
when Roosevelt died, is now regarded as one of the better
Presidents, a strong leader of substance, intelligence and
personal force.

    John Kennedy in 1960 had glamour, money and his father's
ambitions for him. And no record of any real achievement
anywhere. Many regarded him as a rich, graceful pretty-boy and
little else. Some still do. J.F.K. may have a larger place in
American memory than he did in the actuality of his time.

    History discloses character in unpredictable ways. Much of
America's elite in 1860 regarded Lincoln as a wilderness
buffoon. There is the counterpattern: Ulysses Grant, the soldier
who saved the Union, looked like a much greater man at his
Inauguration than he did when he left the White House. So, too,
some candidates (Michigan Governor George Romney in 1968, for
example, or Texas' John Connally in 1980) had an air of
silver-haired inevitability about them until the political
process almost mysteriously rejected them. Ex-Vice President
Lyndon Johnson came to the White House by a strange, fatal
route. He was splendidly qualified to be President, it seemed.
But his Administration ended like the fifth act of King Lear.

    Before George Bush arrived at the White House, a certain
amount of ambient wisdom had written him down as a wimp, an
opportunist who, at almost every step of his career, would be
overtaken by the Peter Principle (in a hierarchy, every employee
tends to rise to his level of incompetence). Bush has not yet
completed his transformation to Lincoln. Dan Quayle does not yet
look Trumanesque either. But there is time. Hope lies always in
the evolving surprise.