What It's Really Like to Be 'First in Line'

‘I only saw Eisenhower alone,” Richard Nixon lamented in 1969, “about six times in the whole deal.” This dismal recollection exemplifies the tendency of former vice presidents to remember their tenures with frustration, not elation. Kate Andersen Brower probes this institutional disharmony in “First in Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents, and the Pursuit of Power,” an intimate, compulsively readable account of the dynamics that have shaped—and sometimes destroyed—relations at the top of the American political hierarchy since World War II.

A former White House correspondent and now a CNN analyst, Ms. Brower knows the terrain and has secured interviews with all six living former VPs, though not the incumbent. Their insights, along with Ms. Brower's instinct for the telling anecdote, make “First in Line” a valuable addition to the literature of the modern presidency.