From FDR to Kamala Harris, modern VP picks have changed our history a lot, and many of them were bad ideas.
From FDR to Kamala Harris, modern VP picks have changed our history a lot, and many of them were bad ideas.
A s we await former vice president Joe Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, to pick her own running mate, it’s worth looking back at the vice-presidential choices of the past: the ones that changed history and the ones that fell flat. In part one, I covered the biggest and worst VP picks from Aaron Burr in 1800 to Teddy Roosevelt in 1900. Now, let’s turn to the past century.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (James Cox, Democrat, 1920): American politics was transformed by three successive shocks in a little over a decade: the beginning of popular elections of senators in 1914, the doubling of the electorate when women began to vote in 1920, and the introduction of radio in the 1920s, which allowed candidates to speak directly to the people at an unprecedented scale. The latter two would prove crucial to the rise of FDR.
In the 1920 election, both parties were obsessed with the idea that the path to winning the women’s vote was to choose the handsomest ticket possible. The 38-year-old FDR, who had only ever been elected to a single term as a state senator, brought three other advantages: He was from New York, he was associated as assistant secretary of the Navy with the prosecution of the First World War (which remained popular, even if America’s entry in the war was controversial), and he had the Roosevelt name in an election held the year after Teddy’s death in which TR had been widely considered the leading Republican candidate.
To this day, FDR remains the only vice-presidential candidate on a losing ticket to later become president. He had a winding path back after the Democrats in 1920 suffered the worst popular-vote defeat in American history. Struck down by polio in 1921, he spoke at the 1924 and 1928 Democratic conventions and returned to narrowly win the governorship of New York in 1928, only to encounter the Great Depression — which elevated FDR while it destroyed the Republican national coalition that had dominated American politics since 1920.
FDR’s status as a former vice-presidential nominee was far from a direct ticket to his later rise to the most transformative American president since the Civil War, but it did raise his profile — and our history might have been quite different if someone else had filled his role.
Calvin Coolidge (Warren Harding, Republican, 1920): Another dapper gent picked to balance the other 1920 ticket, Coolidge shot to national prominence as governor of Massachusetts for breaking the Boston police strike in 1919. Despite ranking high in the pantheon of conservative presidents, one could argue that Coolidge should not rank high on the list of important vice-presidential choices because he effectively continued the policies of the Harding administration after Harding’s death in August 1923. But it might not have been that way. The vice presidency was first offered to Hiram Johnson, the California progressive who had been Teddy Roosevelt’s running mate in 1912. The lingering rift between Johnson and the party when he ran for the Senate in 1916 helped Republicans narrowly lose the state in that year’s presidential election, and California delivered reelection to Woodrow Wilson. So, mending fences with Johnson seemed worth the cost, but he turned it down. Harding and the party bosses then moved to pick another square-jawed progressive, Wisconsin senator Irvine Lenroot, an ally of Herbert Hoover. Only a rebellion among the rank-and-file delegates in favor of Coolidge derailed the nomination of Lenroot and ensured conservative control of the White House through 1928. With his great popularity, Coolidge could have tried for a second full term, but still mourning the death of his son, he stepped aside, leaving the party in the hands of the more moderate, technocratic Hoover.
Charles McNary (Wendell Willkie, Republican, 1940): James Sherman in 1912 was the last vice president to die in office. But when the nation allowed FDR an unprecedented third term in 1940, it unknowingly averted a major constitutional crisis in the midst of the Second World War. FDR’s opponent, Wendell Willkie, a heavy smoker, suffered a serious heart attack in August 1944 and died in October at age 52, just weeks before the Battle of Leyte Gulf and a month before he would have faced reelection. His 1940 running mate, Senate minority leader Charles McNary of Oregon, had been an easy choice, popular within the party. He, too, died in February 1944 of a brain tumor diagnosed the previous year.
Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, had Willkie and McNary been elected, their secretary of state would have become president in the midst of a world war and thrown the presidential election of 1944 on its ear. Congress in 1947 changed the rules to make the speaker of the House next in line, rather than a cabinet secretary — a view that eased the bill’s passage through a Republican Congress under Harry Truman.
Henry Wallace and Harry S. Truman (Franklin Roosevelt, Democrat, 1940 and 1944): Hardly any vice presidential choice looks more providential than FDR’s substitution of Truman for Wallace in 1944. Democratic Party leaders privately recognized what they publicly denied: that FDR was dying of congestive heart failure. They understood that the nation’s security could not be trusted to the Soviet-sympathizing Wallace, and, in a historic irony, the swap of Truman was accomplished at the convention while Wallace was on a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union. The whole subsequent history of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and Korea might have been different.
Crediting the virtue of Democrats’ choosing Truman should not cause us to overlook the nearly catastrophic misjudgment shown by FDR in picking Wallace in 1940 as the second in line in a world already at war. Ironically, the choice of Wallace was criticized by Democrats not for the fact that he was a socialist but for the fact that he was a former Republican. One delegate complained, comparing him to Willkie, “Just because the Republicans have nominated an apostate Democrat, let us not, for God’s sake, nominate an apostate Republican.” Some biographers have speculated that FDR purposely chose a running mate who was unpopular within the party to give him a freer hand in replacing him later or choosing his own successor — while maintaining his own control of the party.
Richard Nixon (Dwight Eisenhower, Republican, 1952) and Earl Warren (Thomas Dewey, Republican, 1948): A vice-presidential nomination was just one stop along the way of Warren’s rise in American politics. Following his election as California governor in 1942, the liberal Warren was a long-shot presidential contender in 1944, 1948, and 1952, and he turned down Tom Dewey’s offer to join the 1944 ticket before accepting the same offer from Dewey in 1948, creating a blockbuster ticket of the governors of New York and California. They still lost California by 0.44 points.
In 1952, Warren threw his support behind Eisenhower, helping Ike secure the nomination over conservative stalwart Robert Taft. But this time, his price wasn’t a spot on the national ticket — he instead ended up as chief justice, a choice Eisenhower was said to have called “the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”
Ike’s vice-presidential choice was just as consequential in shaping American politics over the next three decades as his appointment of Warren. If Warren was forced on him as an IOU, Nixon was a choice that Eisenhower largely handed off to the party bosses, reflecting the general’s lack of experience in Republican politics. Nixon, like J. D. Vance today, was 39 years old and a year and a half into his tenure in the Senate when selected for the ticket, although unlike Vance, he had previously served two terms in the House and had won his Senate race by a surprising 19 points. It was thought that he could help deliver California where Warren had failed to do so, and that his youth, hardscrabble upbringing, and Navy service would appeal to fellow veterans of the Second World War who had served in positions less elevated than supreme Allied commander.
The Nixon rollout was a disaster, with a campaign-fund scandal that almost ended his career — the first of several political near-death experiences — until he gave the pugilistic, populist “Checkers” speech on national television in September 1952. The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket survived and went on to a pair of national landslides.
Nixon came to define the center of a Republican Party torn between its conservative and liberal wings, losing a narrow presidential race in 1960 before winning two terms in 1968 and 1972 and self-destructing in 1974 in the Watergate scandal. Brilliant, crafty, resentful, manipulative, ideologically protean and awkward but compelling, Nixon learned the art of making himself the center of cultural conflict. He remains one of our most polarizing presidents. He arguably did more than anyone else to define American foreign policy between 1953 and 1980.
Lyndon B. Johnson (John F. Kennedy, Democrat, 1960): Our youngest elected president and the last one to die in office chose his running mate out of political calculation, and it was a choice as fateful as that of Nixon. JFK had beaten back a late challenge from LBJ for the nomination, which included a televised debate between the two. As Senate majority leader, LBJ was already the most powerful man in Washington, and the ticket was arranged through delicate negotiations. At 52, with thinning hair and a deep voice, he projected a maturity and gravitas that balanced Kennedy’s youth and “vigah.” As a Texan of humble origins who was raised Baptist and converted to the Disciples of Christ at a revival meeting, he balanced Kennedy’s patrician Boston Catholicism.
Liberals were less than thrilled; if Kennedy was a moderate Democrat with sometimes uneasy relations with his party’s liberals, LBJ was seen as a retrograde southerner who backed anti-civil-rights filibusters. In fact, after he ascended to the presidency in November 1963, it would be Johnson who championed sweeping civil- and voting-rights laws and pushed the Democrats much further to the left on many issues of domestic and welfare policy than the tax-cutting JFK had ever attempted. And, of course, it was LBJ who played the pivotal role in making the Vietnam War an American land war.
Spiro Agnew (Richard Nixon, Republican, 1968 and 1972): After the failure of Barry Goldwater’s conservative campaign, Republicans returned to the center of their party with Nixon. While Agnew’s pugnacity as an attack dog and a culture warrior as vice president might suggest that he was chosen in 1968 as a sop to conservatives, his record as Baltimore County executive and governor of Maryland had marked him as more of a law-and-order moderate. Agnew was more an asset than a liability in Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns, as the malaprops that made him a target for comic barbs mattered far less to Nixon’s “Silent Majority” voting base (itself a phrase originally coined for supporters of Coolidge) than Agnew’s scorn for the counterculture. But he became the only vice president to resign because of scandal (Calhoun having been the only other VP to quit) when a 1973 investigation of kickbacks during his time in Baltimore politics led to him pleading guilty to tax evasion. That scandal meant that Nixon’s resignation the following year would elevate Gerald Ford — not Agnew — to the presidency as our only entirely unelected chief executive.
Thomas Eagleton (George McGovern, Democrat, 1972): No other vice-presidential choice has blown up on the launchpad quite like Eagleton. He wasn’t McGovern’s first choice: He wanted Ted Kennedy, who not only turned down the job but then scuttled McGovern’s effort to recruit another Massachusetts Democrat, Boston mayor Kevin White.
The selection process reflected the chaotic nature of the Democratic Party’s processes after McGovern became the first presidential nominee selected solely by primary voters. McGovern’s selection of Eagleton, a handsome, moderate, but little-known 42-year-old first-term Missouri senator, was made in haste at the convention with no vetting. It was also made in ignorance of the fact — revealed only after Eagleton’s death — that the pro-life Missourian had been the anonymous Democratic source for a quote in a Bob Novak column that led to McGovern being branded the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.”
When it came out two weeks after the convention that Eagleton had undergone electroshock treatments for chronic clinical depression, the resulting media feeding frenzy forced him to drop off the ticket, accentuating the sense that McGovern was presiding over an incompetent and disorganized campaign. McGovern did, however, finally get his Kennedy, replacing Eagleton with Sargent Shriver, a former Peace Corps director married to a sister of the Kennedy brothers. As for Eagleton, his brief status as a national punch line didn’t prevent him from serving another 14 years in the Senate.
George H. W. Bush (Ronald Reagan, Republican, 1980): The path to becoming Reagan’s heir was a winding one. In 1976, dealing from a weak hand in a contested convention against Ford, Reagan pre-announced as his running mate Richard Schweiker, a liberal Republican senator from Pennsylvania. In 1980, having vanquished Bush as well as Bob Dole (Ford’s 1976 running mate) in the primaries, Reagan was in a much stronger position. But with an eye on uncertain polling, continuing divisions in the party, and a third-party bid by liberal Republican congressman John Anderson, Reagan gave serious consideration to an unprecedented step: picking Ford as his running mate. No former president had ever accepted the second-banana role on a ticket before.
Tense negotiations at the convention followed, with Ford demanding “meaningful participation” in “major decision areas” and overstepping by largely endorsing Walter Cronkite’s suggestion in an interview that Reagan-Ford would be “something like a co-presidency.” It all fell apart after that: An aghast Reagan pushed for an immediate answer without offering more concessions and was relieved when Ford finally said no.
Some conservatives wanted Reagan to choose an ideological heir such as Jack Kemp or (Reagan’s preference) Paul Laxalt. Instead, he went back to the second-place primary finisher, Bush, who had to walk back his description of Reagan’s Kemp-inspired tax-cutting platform as “voodoo economics.” Eight years at Reagan’s side in two landslide victories set up Bush as it had done for Nixon, and he dispatched both Dole and Kemp in the 1988 primaries.
This had enormous ripples. Bush presided brilliantly over the Cold War’s endgame and set the tone for what would follow in the next quarter century of U.S. foreign policy with the international coalition that won the Gulf War. But he also failed badly to advance conservative policy at home, leading to electoral ruin in 1992. He plucked Ford’s former chief of staff, Dick Cheney, out of the line of succession for House GOP leadership (where he was replaced by Newt Gingrich). And, of course, the Bush presidency was crucial to making his sons George W. and Jeb the governors who turned Texas and Florida red and to making George W. a two-term president and Jeb the party establishment’s favorite in 2016.
Dan Quayle (George H. W. Bush, Republican, 1988): I dissent from the tendency to see Quayle as a terrible vice-presidential choice, although he obviously was no help to Bush in the 1988 or 1992 elections. He was relentlessly lampooned as shallow, dim, and gaffe-prone, and Lloyd Bentsen’s patronizing “you’re no Jack Kennedy” rejoinder to him in their 1988 debate was the closest that the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket ever got to a highlight.
Bush had other choices, including both Dole and Kemp. John McCain, 52 years old at the time, was considered a serious vice-presidential prospect until derailed by the Keating Five scandal that led to McCain’s reinvention as a campaign-finance crusader. A lot of political history would have been different had McCain become vice president then. TV coverage during the convention even buzzed about Donald Trump as a possible running mate, although characteristically, it was Trump who generated that (Bush never seriously considered Trump, and it would have been out of character to do so). Trump is only a year older than Quayle. Had Bush not picked Quayle, he might well still be in the Senate — and just to pick one example, had Republicans held that Senate seat all along, Obamacare would never have been enacted. Quayle would play a key role in the conservative-media landscape by elevating the career of his vice-presidential chief of staff, Bill Kristol, and would return in a key cameo during the 2020 election drama when his advice helped convince Mike Pence to stand up to Trump on January 6, 2021.
James Stockdale (Ross Perot, Reform Party, 1992): Maybe the best-worst running mate in memory was the 69-year-old Stockdale, a genuine American war hero (as a POW in Vietnam, he was an inspirational figure to McCain and others in resisting their captors under torture) who unfortunately came off as old and confused during a vice-presidential debate with Quayle and Al Gore in which he opened with an ill-chosen rhetorical icebreaker (“Who am I? Why am I here?”) and at one point failed to turn on a hearing aid that he needed because of his beatings by the North Vietnamese. The overwhelming conventional wisdom after the fact was that the national press and the late-night comics had been terribly unfair to one of the most admirable men ever to enter American politics.
Dick Cheney (George W. Bush, Republican, 2000): Cheney, selected to bring gravitas and reassurance to the ticket with his background as wartime secretary of defense, White House chief of staff, and in House leadership, proved to be one of the most powerful of vice presidents, for good and for ill. He brought with him his old boss, Don Rumsfeld, and his vice presidency laid the groundwork for the career of his daughter, Liz. But Cheney also left Bush without an obvious heir, which probably contributed to the Bush second term’s loss of its political touch.
Sarah Palin (John McCain, Republican, 2008): Palin made about as spectacular a debut as any vice-presidential choice, taking the national media completely by surprise and delivering a fantastic convention speech that brought new populist energy to a campaign fighting a multifront war against a bad political climate, a historic opponent, and a candidate mistrusted by the party base. It all went poorly for Palin after that, and she ended up leaving office as governor of Alaska before her term was up. In 2022, she couldn’t even get elected to Congress.
The what-ifs are fascinating, because if Palin had waited four more years to hit the national stage, she might have swept to the nomination in 2012. Perhaps that, too, would have played out poorly, but the death of the Tea Party movement without ever getting to run a presidential campaign, and the contribution of that shortfall to deranging the nation’s politics, might have been avoided had a populist Palin been the Republican standard-bearer, win or lose, in 2012.
Joe Biden (Barack Obama, Democrat, 2008 and 2012) and Kamala Harris (Joe Biden, Democrat, 2020): The consequences are yet to fully unspool, but would Biden have been the Democrats’ nominee in 2020 if he hadn’t been plucked out of the Senate after two disastrous presidential bids to be Obama’s wingman? Would Harris, who flopped badly in 2020, be their nominee today? In either case, the answer rather obviously is no.
Choose carefully and wisely when picking a running mate. The consequences can be beyond what anyone envisions.