Jack Garner, one of the vice presidents serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt once said to the 1960 incoming vice president, Lyndon Johnson, that the vice presidential office was “not worth a pitcher of warm spit.”
The truth is that the role vice presidents have played in American politics and presidential administrations has changed dramatically over time.
America’s first vice president, John Adams, remarked to his wife Abigail, “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.”
John Adams played little to no role in Washington’s administration, but later vice presidents would play a critical role in American politics while both occupying the office and in their occasional ascendancy to the presidential office.
John Tyler, sometimes derisively called by political opponents, “His Accidency” was the first vice president to become president after the death of the chief executive, and set the precedent for the vice president assuming all the powers of the presidency if the president dies or leaves office. Thomas R. Marshall, who served under President Woodrow Wilson and once made the analogy of the vice presidency that there were once two brothers, “one went out to sea and the other became vice president, neither was heard from again,” was the first vice president to attend cabinet meetings. And Dick Cheney played a vital role in the George W. Bush presidency, helping to craft policy at the highest level.
Clearly the office of vice president is often worth nothing, but occasionally ends up being everything.
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