Announcer: Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Morning Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine.
N. Rodgers: I went on an adventure on the interwebs like you do. I ran across a picture of Al Gore and his girlfriend. I know it doesn't matter for this podcast. But anyway, when he got me thinking about was his re-inventing the government documents. Remember when he was Vice President and Bill couldn't put him in charge of reinventing the government, which I think well then what were you doing at the time? But that's neither here nor there. Then it led me down, of course, because that's the Internet. That led me down a rabbit hole to find out that, did you know that before 1978, Vice Presidents didn't exist? There just weren't any. Because until then we didn't care about their records. We didn't have a public law until 1978 where we kept public records of the Vice Presidents. Before Al Gore, no Vice Presidents.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm glad you clarified that your criteria for claiming, that there were no Vice Presidents before 1978, was that we just didn't seem to be interested in any kind of documentation that they did anything important.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: All right, I just wanted to be clear because I was about to say.
N. Rodgers: Oh, I see, you can misread that as they didn't exist at all.
J. Aughenbaugh: They didn't exist at all.
N. Rodgers: That's not true. They did exist but nobody cared.
J. Aughenbaugh: Very few people did. Yes. Very few people did. Okay?
N. Rodgers: That doesn't seem very nice. That's a long time into our history before we started caring about the Vice President. Don't you think that's a little weird?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I get asked by students this all the time, Nia. What do Vice Presidents do? And I usually chuckle before I answer.
N. Rodgers: They are the Prince Harry of our government. They're there in case the heir dies or becomes incapacitated. Prince Harry's perfectly nice guy, but the only reason they had him was to make sure there was a backup for William.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. For most of our country's history, they were basically treated as a backup. You could use sports metaphor. You and I are both fans of plays. They are the stand-in for a play. Hopefully, you never have to see the stand-in when you throw down your couple of $100 to go see a play. But every once in a while the lead actor or actress gets sick, and you might see the stand-in. You throw down serious coin to see a professional basketball game and you're hoping to see LeBron James, and instead, if he is sick you see the backup. But you hope not to see the backup.
N. Rodgers: Because if you see the backup, something else has gone wrong.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: The only time you know about that person theoretically, I mean, for the most part, at least historically is because something has gone tragically terribly wrong with the President.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's correct.
N. Rodgers: First of all, for anybody wondering what documents we're tying things to, there's not very many out of the Vice Presidential office. There are, as I said, a bunch of stuff from Al Gore and since then, other Vice Presidents have published things. But the Senate has a marvelous history online and in print of the history of the Vice Presidents. It goes through all of them. That's because not because there were Vice President. What I've found out with Vice Presidents is, nobody cares they were Vice President. It's because in the Senate, they also are the president of the Senate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: When you find a Vice President's papers at a university, it's because they were either a Senator or representative or a Governor, like they were something else. It wasn't because Vice President so, and so, and it's because of that, that we've put their paper somewhere. Which makes me a little sad. But those are the documents that were basing on today in sort of the history that archive and history from the Senate. Then we're going to take off from there because I have many questions for Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wait a minute. Before we get to that for our listeners, our thought process, when we concluded that we should do an episode about the Vice President arose because this fall, the fall of 2021, various press accounts came out that talked about the role of the current Vice President, Kamala Harris.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Many of these press accounts talked about how her approval in public opinion polls were lower than her boss, President Joe Biden.
N. Rodgers: How unusual is that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. How unusual is that? Why would they even ask a question about the office of Vice President? Because as Nia just mentioned, typically we don't have discussions about Vice Presidents unless something bad happened to the President. It led us to start thinking about the office, and how it evolved, and what formal roles the Office of Vice President has and how, to a certain extent more recent Vice Presidents, Nia, you mentioned Al Gore, but more recent vice presidents have had more active roles in particular presidential administrations.
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: But that's unusual. That's extremely unusual.
N. Rodgers: That's really visible in the documents because before Al Gore, you really don't get documents out of the Vice President's office. But after Al Gore, Dick Cheney had some, Joe Biden had a bunch when he was Vice President. I didn't find a whole lot with Mike Pence, but it may be that they haven't been finished going through the process of publication yet.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: It takes a while.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because as you and I discussed, the United States government archives office, by law has a number of years to process, catalog and in some cases, make determinations about what document should be classified or can be declassified and when they can be declassified. It may be a few years before Vice President Mike Pence's documents get released for the public.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, there are a few out there, but not near the volumes of some of the others.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: But it made me think about where are Dan Quayle's documents? Where are Spiro Agnew's documents? The answer is, some of them they've been given as collections because they've been given to their educational institutions. Some have been given to their state governments. Walter Mondale's are with the Library of Minnesota.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It is Minnesota?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it is Minnesota.
N. Rodgers: Okay. Thank You.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was a long-term senator from Minnesota. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: They have his documents because he's important to their state and for having done these other things, which I think is fascinating. Which leads me to my first question for you about the Office of the Vice President. Originally Vice Presidents were just the person who got the second number of votes. It wasn't tied to the party.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is correct.
N. Rodgers: In fact, it was usually the opposite party.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. The first Vice President was John Adams and he was of the same political party as George Washington. They were both Federalists.
N. Rodgers: Well, that worked out nicely.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, that did work out nicely. But where this became an issue was after Washington retired after two terms, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ran for the office of President. The way the Electoral College was initially set up, the person who achieved the most electoral college votes became President, but the candidate with the second most was Vice President.
N. Rodgers: Can I ask a gossip question about that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Did Washington endorse either one of them?
J. Aughenbaugh: He did endorse John Adams, which was somewhat controversial because Thomas Jefferson had been Washington's Secretary of State.
N. Rodgers: So how do you pick who to endorse?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, so you had this awkward situation. For Adam's one term as President, his Vice President was the leader of the opposition party. Then Adams ran for re-election in 1800. Harvard, and Jefferson ran a customer[LAUGHTER].
N. Rodgers: It wasn't that particularly[NOISE] hard-fought and unpleasant?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Again, I used that particular presidential election in my introduction to US government class by telling students, if you thought 2016-2020[LAUGHTER] was hot.
N. Rodgers: [OVERLAPPING]Was rough.
J. Aughenbaugh: [LAUGHTER] Was rough, nasty. It pales in comparison[LAUGHTER]. John Adams, sexuality was called into question. The Adams campaign engaged in the rumor mill by St. Thomas Jefferson had fathered out of wedlock children with one of his slaves, which as we've come to find out said -
N. Rodgers: Was true.
J. Aughenbaugh: Was historically accurate. But it begs the question, what's that got to do with somebody's ability to be [OVERLAPPING]president, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: But I mean, [OVERLAPPING]we're just really-
N. Rodgers: Was[OVERLAPPING] Adams Jefferson's Vice President?
J. Aughenbaugh: No, because what happened was in that election, the top two vote-getters were Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and Aaron Burr was a member of the same political party as Jefferson.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because neither candidate received a majority of the electoral college votes, that election actually was decided in the House of Representatives. The House picked Jefferson. But Congress did take note of how, because of political parties, perhaps there needed to be a change. That's in part led to the 12th amendment. Because with the 12th amendment, Electoral College voters now pick between candidates for the office of president and candidates for the office of Vice president. Theoretically, the Electoral College could still engage[LAUGHTER] with ticket voting.[OVERLAPPING] But again.
N. Rodgers: I would pay all of Elon Musk's money to see that happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: [LAUGHTER]Okay. But as you and I have discussed in a previous podcast episode about the Electoral College. The Electoral College basically follows, if you will, the will of not only the voters in each state, but also the will.
N. Rodgers: Of the parties.
J. Aughenbaugh: Of the political parties.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. The parties don't want a mixed ticket cause of drama. But okay, so there they're, they are writing the Constitution like you do in the hot summer, Philadelphia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They sat around and said, what would the vice president do? I mean, you can't just write in their vice president hyphen waits for the president to die.
J. Aughenbaugh: Die
N. Rodgers: [LAUGHTER]To take office. That nobody is going to take the job if that's all there is to it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Basically, you can narrow down the official duties of the Vice President to the following. They succeed to the office of president upon the death or resignation of a president. By the way, that doesn't get clarified until the 25th Amendment.[LAUGHTER].
N. Rodgers: In the beginning. There was no, for the first several years, then it would have been if the President had died that have gone, ha, guess we have to have an election.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, we actually had situations where you had the Vice-President assume the office of the president when the president died. But members of Congress insisted upon calling them the interim president.[LAUGHTER].
N. Rodgers: But now that makes sense if you don't have a rule. We think of now is that common sense. But if you didn't have a rule, and then they would be the interim president.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which led some Vice Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt in particular. Was just like, no, I'm not the interim president. I am the president. It would ruffle the delicate sensibilities [LAUGHTER] of some of the former Vice Presidents who became president because they're like, well, they say I'm the interim, but there isn't going to be another election for another two or three years. I'm in charge here.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's one constitutional duty. You also mentioned a second constitutional duty, which is they are the president of the Senate. Now, what does that mean? Well, they basically don't get to vote in the Senate unless there's what?
N. Rodgers: A tie.
J. Aughenbaugh: A tie. They don't get to speak unless [LAUGHTER] who the Senate majority leader or the president pro term of the Senate officially acknowledges the vice president. Otherwise, they can't even speak.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, but who's going to not let the vice president speak?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well. But interestingly enough, vice presidents have hardly ever spoken on the floor of the Senate.
N. Rodgers: Oh.
J. Aughenbaugh: The other constitutional duty or responsibility they have is and we actually saw this in January of this of 2021.
N. Rodgers: Yes, bless his heart. Like pens had to count the vote.[OVERLAPPING].
J. Aughenbaugh: Count and ratify the votes of the Electoral College members for the preceding presidential election.[OVERLAPPING]
N. Rodgers: Which is by the way a ceremonial thing. It's not a thing that if you don't do it, it didn't happen?
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: That was never going to be the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: Somebody has to go ahead and do it.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: [OVERLAPPING].
N. Rodgers: But let's have the vice president do it, cause he's not doing anything else.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, the fourth, if you will, constitutional duty basically now revolves around the 25th Amendment. Because the 25th Amendment, again, listeners, we have an entire podcast episode about the 25th Amendment, which was passed in the 1960s. After JFK gets assassinated and LBJ takes the oath of office from a federal district court judge in an airplane that's flying from Dallas, Texas to Washington DC. Congress, can't afford to have all crap moment.
N. Rodgers: [OVERLAPPING]We should probably fix that. We [OVERLAPPING] should not re-plan, if this happens again.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, if this happens again. The 25th Amendment makes it very clear that if the president is incapacitated, not just dies, but incapacitated for any reason, then the president should submit documentation saying that the Vice President is temporarily becoming the president. We saw this for instance, as recently as a month ago from when we're recording this podcast episode. Because President Biden underwent a medical procedure for a couple hours, Vice President Kamala Harris was.
N. Rodgers: The first female president of the United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: President of the United States.[LAUGHTER].
N. Rodgers: Whatever else may be said about her in history. She's too first, she's the first African-American Vice-President.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: She's the first female president of the United States, the first female African-American president of the United States if [OVERLAPPING] only for a couple of hours. But if he had not survived his colonoscopy, which by the way would have been very strange. Because people don't generally die during colonoscopy. If your doctor has asked you to get one, we've encouraged that you do that. You don't generally die during them. But if he had for some reason had a complication, she would have been President of the United States because there's a piece of paper that they sign over that says, you can have this until I feel better, and then you got to give it back. Because otherwise.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's basically a standard [LAUGHTER] form that has been written by the White House legal counsel's office.
N. Rodgers: Please tell me it's in triplicate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, of course, it is. Because normally does the cabinet gets a copy. The White House, Chief of Staff gets a copy. Then the Senate Majority Leader gets a copy, and the Speaker of the House gets a copy. Actually, it's not triple good.
N. Rodgers: [OVERLAPPING] Quite true, for good.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: That's awesome. But it's basically because until Kennedy, we didn't really have a plan for what would happen if the head of office died in office? Like the plan was you take over until something else happens, but this is a much more formal.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's much more formal and as we saw in the Nixon administration. First, Nixon's Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had to resign because he got indicted for tax evasion and receiving bribes. To fill his term, Nixon appointed, and this again is covered by the 25th amendment, representative Gerald Ford, representative from Michigan as vice president. Well then Nixon resigns after re-wins a second term because of Watergate and because of the 25th Amendment guess who got to become President?
N. Rodgers: Gerald Ford, who had never run on a presidential ticket. He's one of those weird asterisks in history.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's the only person who was vice president and president who did not successfully run for either position. Now he ran for re-election in 1976, but he lost to Jimmy Carter. Interestingly enough, many presidential and vice presidential scholars point to Walter Mondale as breaking the mold of vice presidents, doing very little because Walter Mondale explicitly extracted from candidate Jimmy Carter, that if he agreed to be Carter's vice presidential running mate, that if Carter won, Walter Mondale wanted an active role in the Carter White House and Carter agreed.
N. Rodgers: Well, I'm going to just throw out here. In your notes, you talk about the first vice president that wanted to sit in on cabinet meetings was Coolidge.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. President Warren Harding was president and his vice president was Calvin Coolidge. Harding wanted Coolidge to be an active member of his administration, which was a good thing because in Harding's third year in office, he suffered a heart attack and died and Coolidge, took over as President. Coolidge said, without my experience participating in the Harding's cabinet administration, I wouldn't have been able to do this job.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. See when I saw that in your notes, my first thought was, so the first 130 years of having vice presidents, we didn't actually train them to be presidents. We didn't do anything that would if they had to suddenly take that job over, which by the way, as a side note, the only reason they would ascend to the presidency would be through disaster of some kind. Either death or resignation. That's not a job you want to train on the job. It makes sense with vice presidents, you would want them to at least be sitting in on the cabinet meetings, to at least be following what's happening in world events and where the United States is on those things and policy and that stuff because otherwise that guy comes in and his learning curve is unbelievable.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's off the charts.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, it's me learning Swahili in a day, which by the way, kids is not going to happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: What's really unfortunate is the Harding, if you will, president. Having Vice President Calvin Coolidge sit in did not immediately become the norm.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, that annoys me because it was a really good idea.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was a good idea. But then we get into the 1930s and Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets elected president four times. He basically used the selection of his vice presidential running mate as a patronage position. He would basically say to the leadership of the Democratic Party, who do you guys want to reward for faithful service? Sure, I will have them run because FDR, after he won his first election in 1932, he was basically the star. He didn't need somebody on his candidate ticket to bolster his chances of getting re-elected.
N. Rodgers: If he had been in better health, do you think he would have continued to be reelected over and over?
J. Aughenbaugh: No. I think he would've stepped down after the conclusion of World War II.
N. Rodgers: But speaking of World War II, he didn't tell Harry Truman, his vice president about the Manhattan Project.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: I know it was a secret, but it should not have been a secret from the vice president.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is correct.
N. Rodgers: I don't think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Your position is very similar to most political scientists and for that matter, most foreign policy experts. They're all like and by the way, by law and map, normally do presidents get daily intelligence briefings, but vice presidents get them. That's actually required by law because this is one of the things that became apparent when Truman was made president when FDR died. Truman acknowledged after he served two terms as president, was it two terms? Two terms as president. Truman acknowledged. I was wholly unaware of what was going on with knowing the development of the atomic bomb. But any of the negotiations FDR was having with the other allies.
N. Rodgers: Churchill and all those guys.
J. Aughenbaugh: If the allies win the war, what were the plans post-war?
N. Rodgers: How are we going to carve up Europe and the Middle East?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, well, pretty much. Which led to the criticism that Truman was not as strong with, in particular Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin as FDR had been. Of course in Truman's defense Truman was just like, I didn't know what had or had not been said.
N. Rodgers: I never met the guy. Come on. I'm going to see if I can add an intelligence briefing to the documents because that'll be an interesting thing to see. But you have in here what I think is one of the most funny/awesome quotes from Eisenhower. I love it. It's such a slam. I shouldn't love it. Part of the reason I love it is because I am so not a Richard Nixon fan. I know Richard Nixon did some good things during his presidency. I'm willing to concede that, but I'm not a fan of him as an individual. But some reporter asked, can you think of a major contribution that Nixon has made to your administration? Eisenhower replied.
J. Aughenbaugh: None that I can think of.
N. Rodgers: Well, if you give me a week, I might be able to think of one, what a slam. What a terrible way to not support your vice president. Part of me wonders if some of this comes from this idea of jealousy. This idea of, I want to be the banana and you just get to be the peel. You're not here to draw any attention whatsoever. It's part of what I've been thinking a lot about with Kamala Harris and President Biden is how much attention. I think that Kennedy probably had some real jealousy with the attention that Johnson got.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and in particular, when John Kennedy ran for president and won the Democratic Party nomination. He was comparatively very young, a relatively untested US senator and the Democratic Party elites were like, you're going to be running against Richard Nixon. Nixon who was Vice President for two Eisenhower terms. Before that had been a member of Congress.
N. Rodgers: He [inaudible] recognition.
J. Aughenbaugh: This guy campaigns dirty. I mean he got his nickname as-
N. Rodgers: Tricky Dick.
J. Aughenbaugh: Tricky Dick Nixon not because of Watergate. That was his nickname because as a member of the House of Representatives, he was part of the house on American committee that went after communists.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say didn't he worked with Jim McCarthy.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Democratic Party elites basically forced Kennedy to take LBJ on as his VP. Because they said Johnson is tough no BS and by the way, he's a Southern Democrat, and we're going to need Southern Democrats to win this presidential election.
N. Rodgers: I'm not trying to cast dispersions, but Johnson also fought dirty sometimes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, sure.
N. Rodgers: Like bringing him in against Nixon was a brilliant thing to do because the Kennedy machine wasn't I don't think ready for that fight.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Kennedy machine was well established in Massachusetts-
N. Rodgers: Up North.
J. Aughenbaugh: -in the Northeast. But LBJ was the Senate Majority Leader. LBJ had a reputation as the Senate Majority Leader of basically getting what he wanted by any means possible. That would allow Kennedy to look presidential because who was doing the negative dirty work of the campaign.
N. Rodgers: Every day.
J. Aughenbaugh: Johnson never let Kennedy forget that one of the reasons why he was president was because he was his vice-president on the ticket.
N. Rodgers: Well, and one of the reasons that a lot of things happened for him in Congress was because Johnson made them happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Kennedy becomes president and then basically shuts Johnson out.
N. Rodgers: Because he and Bobby brothers. They were tight.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, you want to talk about a knowledge deficit. JFK gets assassinated, and LBJ to a large extent was not part of the planning for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which was a huge fiasco, was hardly ever in the room during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Was hardly ever consulted in regards to forcing the South to desegregate.
N. Rodgers: The huge amount of both domestic and foreign Cold War issues that he was not a part of really handicapped him in his first year as president where he's trying. Even though he said he was trying to maintain Kennedy's Camelot, how do you do that when you don't know all the relationships that had been built. It didn't help that he and Bobby Kennedy hated each other.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yeah.
N. Rodgers: They very breathy each other through.
J. Aughenbaugh: When LBJ won the 64 election, he cleaned house. He got rid of a lot of the Kennedy administration holdovers. There was no question that Bobby Kennedy would resign as Attorney General because as you pointed out, Nia, Bobby Kennedy thought Lyndon Baines Johnson was the worst kind of Southern Democrat.
N. Rodgers: Well, he thought he was class. He thought he was a redneck.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again Kennedy was from the Northeast. For listeners, again understand how much the political parties in the United States have changed. Because Southern Democrats, well into the 1960s were in most instances, segregationist, a very traditionalistic. They were all boys. Southern Democrats in the United States Congress frequently served for 25, 30, 40 years.
N. Rodgers: Kennedy died in office.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. He started out by the way folks as a Southern Democrat.
N. Rodgers: But that's a whole different episode and whole different issue.
J. Aughenbaugh: Back to vice president. Eisenhower's comment about Nixon in part portrayed personal animus that Eisenhower had with Nixon because Eisenhower was much more moderate of Republican than Nixon. By the way, Nixon was on Eisenhower's ticket in 1952, in part because of Republican Party establishment thought that Eisenhower needed a well-known staunch Republican to bolster his support among the Republican Party base.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. Even though it kills me to say this, even though it was funny, the other thing that it reflects is how little the Vice President gets to do. If somebody says, "What is your vice president done for you lately? The president answer up until then was nothing, because aside from Coolidge, they did not get invited to meetings. What is it that the Jack Nance Garner.
J. Aughenbaugh: The vice-president for the first two terms of FDR.
N. Rodgers: What did he say that the vice presidency was worth?
J. Aughenbaugh: I've seen the quote two different ways. A warm bucket of spit or warm bucket of piss.
N. Rodgers: Either way it's gross.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's gross. He so disliked it that he actually challenged FDR for the Democratic Party nomination in 1940. Because he was just like, "I hated it and I hated his politics, and Roosevelt didn't like me, and I didn't like him."
N. Rodgers: Just as a side note with that, just even if you do like your vice president, there's only so much power as we've noted earlier constitutionally, there's only so much power that the the vice president has. But when you don't agree, that also gets complicated. You have a whole, algor. He didn't really like the way that Bill Clinton brought Hillary Clinton into a huge number of decisions. I know that caused tension between them and it cause tension later when Al Gore ran for president because he also didn't like the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He wanted to stay out of his, like don't help me run, but it actually hurt him in the end to do that, probably.
J. Aughenbaugh: According to some scholars, Al Gore had so much distaste for how the Clinton administration responded to the Kenneth Starr independent counsel report. That when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he explicitly asked Bill Clinton to not campaign for him, particularly in the South.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Al Gore just got dragged in the South in 2000.
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because because if he had picked up one state-.
N. Rodgers: Florida would not have mattered.
J. Aughenbaugh: Florida would not have mattered because Al Gore basically cleaned up in the Northeast, the Rust Belt, California. All he had to do was just pick up either a home state of Tennessee or former President Clinton's home state of Arkansas, and he would have won. But those disagreements are not all that unusual because again, listeners, if you think about presidents and this is not necessarily a criticism of presidents. But presidents get judged based on what their administration did. Why are you going to share the spotlight to the person who possibly wants your job.
N. Rodgers: Who's waiting for you to die. That's a little volt. Standing behind me like, please don't cast a shadow on me today. But also, the other thing is, vice presidents are often chosen at least modernly, to fill some perceived gap that the presidential candidate has. Kennedy with the South. Carter with experience. Mondale had been around forever. Reagan was-.
J. Aughenbaugh: Bush 41.
N. Rodgers: Was Bush 41.
J. Aughenbaugh: But foreign policy experience.
N. Rodgers: He brought his Reagan out of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because Reagan was a governor of California.
N. Rodgers: Then Bush choose Quayle because Quayle was young and Bush was old. He brought a younger vibe to it. You get these, they're chosen for very political reasons, strength.
J. Aughenbaugh: Strategic electoral reasons.
N. Rodgers: It's not surprising that these two people often don't agree. They are often previously competitors until one of them drops out of the race for president, and then the other person says, "Hey, wanted to be on my ticket." I love the current president and vice president, Biden and Kamala Harris. She ran briefly until she realized she was not building enough of a war chest, because money is how politics run.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, even in 2008. If you think about, for instance, Barack Obama picking Joe Biden.
N. Rodgers: He picked older, experienced, knowledgeable of the Congress.
J. Aughenbaugh: What a lot of people forget was, it wasn't just Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. At one point Joe Biden was part of that mix. He wasn't announced candidate, but he was there.
N. Rodgers: He infamously said, "He's very well spoken."
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Wow, easy they're cheetah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: I love Joe Biden gaps?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because when he's unfiltered.
N. Rodgers: Oh man. He sounds like an angry grandpa sometimes you're like, "Okay maybe you should just relax and not talk in front of cameras."
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, but even think about Bush 43. One of the criticisms of the second Bush when he was running for president was. What have you done other than to burn governor of Texas. The governor of Texas doesn't have as much power as governors of other states. What have you really done? Well, if he wins the party nomination and then shocks everybody by picking one of the most seasoned, experienced Republicans, Dick Cheney. That says, if I'm inexperienced, that's not going to be a problem because in my White House, I have a guy who has worked in the Federal government as far back as the Nixon and Ford administration's, they couldn't support. It was Ford.
N. Rodgers: Almost all the Bush's life, Cheney had worked in government.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He had enormous experience with Barack Obama choosing Biden, which is why it's a bit mysterious why Biden choose Kamala Harris, unless you want to look at that in terms of race and the immediacy of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was motivating. Again, most election if you were scholars. It wasn't surprising that Biden picked Harris because the criticism of Biden within the Democratic Party was he was the Clinton era. How do you motivate the Democratic Party base in the third decade of the 21st century. You go ahead and pick a young woman of color who made it very clear when she was in the primaries and caucuses. She was critical of Biden. You bring her onto the ticket to make sure the Democratic Party base gets out the vote. Because if you knew anything about the 2020 Republican Party base, Trump was going to have them motivated. How do you make sure you offset that?
N. Rodgers: In the ideal world, she would have been one of those, what is it that Lincoln had a cabinet of rivals? She would have been somebody who reminded him of the things that he doesn't have experience in. He doesn't have experience being female, he doesn't have experience being a person of color in this country, and remind him of those things with policy. I think that may have been the ideal going in, but I'm not entirely sure that's what happened. I don't know if that is in part pandemic related. There's been bigger things to worry about. I would love to be a fly on the wall and it would be interesting in four or five years when people start writing their books. For us to hear about conversations that were happening in the White House at this time. But before we go, I do want to ask you about something else.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: Is it true that the vice president didn't have any place to live?
J. Aughenbaugh: That is correct.
N. Rodgers: Okay, that seems like an oversight of the founders, like we're going to have a vice president, but we're not going to give them a place to live. Wait, we long established that the White House would be working office, part residents. That's what they call it. They call it the residents, and that's a different part of the White House. Then the White House staff works, they don't work in the
J. Aughenbaugh: Office is the office part of the White House. Then you have the residence. But until the 1970s
N. Rodgers: 1970s not 1870s.
J. Aughenbaugh: 1970s. Specifically it was 1974. Congress designated the US Naval Observatory. For any of you who are from Northern Virginia or DC, that's in the Northwest part of Washington DC. That is now the official residence of the Vice-President. The first vice president to live there was Walter Mondale.
N. Rodgers: Sorry, there's a house on the ground. The Naval Observatory is not part of the vice presidential office. They were like, "Oh, we found this house. You could move into if you want.".
J. Aughenbaugh: But remember Nia, we've talked about this. The US federal government is the biggest landlord in the United States.
N. Rodgers: Well, yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: It owns the most property and the most office buildings. I've seen some scholarships, say in the entire world.
N. Rodgers: I'm not surprised by that. I would imagine that unless it's a monarchy where they own the entire country. You really couldn't rival that so it's got to be of anything that's a non monarchy. We've got to be the biggest.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this reflects how little.
N. Rodgers: Exactly I want you to come to Washington, find a place to live. I'm not talking about way back in the day with people whose names you don't remember because there were all those 1800s presidents, so you don't remember so of course you don't remember their vice presidents. I'm not talking about those guys. I'm talking about Johnson, I'm talking about Nixon. I'm talking about Agnew and Ford, until you get to Mondale. Those are, by the way, people who are more or less in my lifetime, Johnston.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, Nia, they didn't do it because they were necessarily a new-found appreciation, they did it because providing security for vice presidents and their families in their personal residences, was getting too expensive.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Their thought process was.
N. Rodgers: Let's save some money by sticking them over here in this building.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which we already provide security for.
N. Rodgers: I see, there was a money saving effort.
J. Aughenbaugh: This was a cost effective way to go ahead and provide security. It wasn't about well the Office of Vice President is really important.
N. Rodgers: Yeah. That Walter Mondale, he's really awesome and we should give him a house. Oh, no. Sir. We're getting really tired of driving out to Maryland to your house, so we'd like for you to just move here to the Naval Observatory.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because I've often wondered I was aware of it wasn't until the 1970s that the Naval Observatory is where vice presidents officially live. But I wanted to know why all of a sudden there was the change. It was because of the increasing costs of providing security for vice presidents and their families in their profit private businesses I was just like, Oh my goodness. If you want an official demonstration, of how little we think about the Office of Vice President.
N. Rodgers: That's it. That it took us 200 years to getting around to giving them a place to live. You may be waiting for something disastrous to happen, but you're going to need to do that on your own dime somewhere in the Northern Virginia, Hinterlands or whatever. I'm sure that there was some sort of and we can look into this for the next episode. Sorry, folks, I should have mentioned at the beginning, this is a two parter because we have a whole bunch of other stuff, cool, weird things about the Vice President's office that you should know so we're going to be back in the next step to talk about those. Because some quit and some didn't have, there's been all kinds of interesting things with vice president.
J. Aughenbaugh: There's some really strange stuff that's gone on in the Office of Vice President.
N. Rodgers: We're ending here on the house thing, but we maybe could delve a little bit more into this next time about the Vice Presidential budgets for redoing the homes because they have one, they get some money, but it's not like the money for the White House and you're not supposed to make these huge, humongous changes. But it's interesting to see how the different Vice Presidential wives put their stamp on what is now the home. But that's only been in the last 30, 40 years, whatever it is. You can't count. Sorry, is it 50 years? No, so it's quite 50 years? Forty years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. It's about 35 years, 35-40 years.
N. Rodgers: Can we come back and talk about the more fun quirky?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because there's some really interesting stuff that's gone on with the position. Which again, is even more fascinating to me. Because officially, and in terms of practice, the office of the Vice President, hasn't been considered all that important.
N. Rodgers: Has no real job. Can't talk in front of the Senate unless they ask you to, don't vote unless you need to. Basically you stand around and confirm re-elections or confirm elections. Honestly, you probably do a whole lot of praying that the President doesn't die?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because you're not prepared for the job. I don't know. We could talk about next time about the hubris of vice president's too, because some of them have had amazing levels of hubris. Some of them have been real jerks. They've said and done things that you think really, and they kept him as vice president.
J. Aughenbaugh: We'll even talk about, the infamous Vice Presidential James. Very few of them have actually gone on to become president.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, I have a theory about that, which we will talk about next time.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sounds good.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughen this has been fun.
J. Aughenbaugh: I've enjoyed it, yes.
N. Rodgers: We will be around for you listeners for next time. Thank you.
J. Aughenbaugh: You will get to hear us again to talk about Part 2, the Office of Vice President? I say that in my best serious voice.
N. Rodgers: Part 2. No, you should do it like what is his name? In Part 1 they've discovered, the vice presidency, in Part 2, the vice president fights back. I can't remember what's his name, Don Pardo?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, Don Pardo. Well, how about the announcement for the monster truck race? [inaudible]
N. Rodgers: Were you have to yell. You know you have a microphone, you don't have to scream. It turns out they do anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or the announcers at boxing matches.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, they get very excitable. Or soccer, or what the rest of the world calls football.
J. Aughenbaugh: Football, yes.
N. Rodgers: When they do their goal and they see how long they can yell goal. Gooaal and it just goes on forever and ever you're like, "Dude that guy's got some serious lungs."
J. Aughenbaugh: In this corner we have Vice President Kamala Harris.
N. Rodgers: My goodness. We're really looking forward to that. Thanks Aughen.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you Nia.
Announcer: You've been listening to civil discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the Workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaak Hopson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.