Portraits paint picture of an office both mocked and coveted

AMERICA: A National Portrait Gallery exhibition gives some colourful insights into US vice-presidents

FROM THE earliest days of American democracy, the office of vice-president has been both mocked and coveted; it’s a dull job with great potential for advancement.

Fourteen of America’s 44 presidents first served as vice-presidents, and were then either elected or moved to the executive office when a president died. Apart from the role of understudy, the vice-president’s only prescribed duty is breaking tie votes as President of the Senate.

The vice-presidency is “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived”, America’s first vice-president, John Adams, wrote to his beloved Abigail 216 years ago.

Adams and Thomas Jefferson, another early vice-president who later became president, look prim in their powdered wigs and ruffled jabots, in an exhibition on Presidents in Waiting at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. But even then, politics was a cut-throat business. As diplomats in Europe, Adams and Jefferson were such fast friends that they exchanged portraits.

Then, when Adams became George Washington’s vice-president and Jefferson his secretary of state, the friends quarrelled.

Relations deteriorated further because the rules of the day made Jefferson, the runner-up in the 1796 election, Adams’s vice-president.

In George Washington’s cabinet, Jefferson also fought with Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury.

Jefferson distrusted big government and believed in the common man, rural America and the friendship of France. Hamilton was the hero of urban elites, had faith in federal power and looked to Britain.

Over two centuries, Jeffersonian populism has sometimes been claimed by Democrats, sometimes by Republicans. Its influence on today’s disgruntled and resentful American right is obvious.

It’s common practice for presidents to neutralise potential rivals by offering them the vice-president’s job.

In 1900, William McKinley feared the popularity of Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider hero of the Spanish-American War, so he made Roosevelt his running mate.

McKinley was assassinated the following year and Roosevelt, then age 42, became the youngest US president ever.

On hearing of the president’s death, one of McKinley’s advisers quipped, “That damned cowboy is president now.”

Roosevelt’s fifth cousin Franklin would later choose a political rival, the speaker of the house John “Cactus Jack” Nance Garner, as his running mate.

Texas politicians are known for raw language, and Garner described the vice-president’s office as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”.

The quote was often edulcorated to “a bucket of warm spit”. Garner upbraided a writer who misquoted him thus as a “pantywaist”.

Garner’s successor bar one as FDR’s vice-president, Harry Truman, was shocked by the “feeble condition” of the ailing leader. “In pouring cream in his tea, Roosevelt got more cream in the saucer than he did in the cup,” Truman recalled of a meeting in 1945.

On leaving the White House, Truman nonetheless told reporters that Roosevelt was fine.

Lyndon Johnson said he “always felt sorry for Harry Truman and the way he got the presidency (on Roosevelt’s death), but at least his man wasn’t murdered”.

Johnson desperately wanted to be president, but his horror at John F Kennedy’s assassination shows in a photograph of Johnson a few hours after Kennedy’s death, taking the oath of office, standing beside Jacqueline in her bloodstained Chanel suit.

“The vice-presidency is filled with trips around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chairmanships of councils, but in the end, it is nothing,” Johnson said later. “I detested every minute of it.”

Johnson would be succeeded by another former vice-president, Richard Nixon. Dwight D Eisenhower retained his general’s stature by using Nixon as a political hit man in the 1950s. Asked what were Nixon’s contributions to his administration, “Ike” replied cuttingly: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”

Bill Clinton valued Al Gore’s advice, but it was only after leaving office that Gore blossomed into a crusader against climate change and Nobel laureate.

Dick Cheney was George W Bush's éminence grisein the "war on terror", possibly the most powerful vice-president ever.

The criticism one hears most often of the former candidate John McCain is that he put his running mate, the hare-brained Sarah Palin “within a heartbeat of the presidency”.

An erstwhile rival to President Barack Obama, vice-president Joe Biden now plays the role of loyal and self-effacing adviser.

Biden's son Beau fought in Iraq, and Biden tried unsuccessfully to dissuade Obama from sending more troops to Afghanistan, earning him the moniker of "Obama's sceptic in chief" in the Washington Post. EJ Dionne, of the Post, describes the former senator from Delaware as "a garrulous Irish guy" whose candour makes him valuable.

Soon after taking office, Obama appointed Biden to head a taskforce to help the middle class, about which one hears nothing.

I’ve kept an eye on the vice president’s schedule over the past ten days: one memorial service, four official dinners, a reception and a lunch.

And Biden telephoned the mercurial president of Georgia, whom Obama doubtless wants to keep at arms length.