It’s not just a meal
Inside the nation’s most secretive and exclusive power lunch
WASHINGTON — Al Gore came armed with policy memos, George H.W. Bush with jokes and Dan Quayle with requests from Cabinet secretaries. Mike Pence brought plenty of patience.
Though they differed in their tactics, the vice presidents had the same goal — maximizing their office’s most valuable hour, a weekly lunch with the president.
For nearly 40 years, these regular lunches were a bedrock ritual of the vice presidency, a precious and lowkey 60 minutes for the commander in chief and his No. 2 to catch up, swap gossip and mull strategy. The lunches were among Washington’s most tightly guarded meetings, shrouded in mystery that has frustrated chiefs of staff and bedeviled historians. That’s because no one else is usually in the room.
Snippets have emerged about how Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden do lunch. As they nibble on soup or salad and discuss politics and policy, the nation’s most powerful pair are entertained on a nearby monitor by a running slideshow of their public events, according to advisers.
A recent book, “This Will Not Pass,” portrays the lunches as flat — lacking “a real depth of personal and political intimacy” — and data show the lunches are occurring less frequently. While Biden and Harris dined together about every other week during their first year in office, they have lunched only twice since January, a Los Angeles Times review of Harris’ schedule shows.
That’s strange considering that as vice president, Biden considered his weekly lunch with President Barack Obama to be inviolable. He pledged to extend the same courtesy to Harris. All of which raises a serious question: Is Harris missing an opportunity to press her issues with the boss and convey to the nation — and political rivals — that she has unparalleled exclusive access to the leader of the
free world?
A look at how other vice presidents took advantage of the nation’s most exclusive power lunch suggests the answer is yes.
The lunches are “part of sending a signal on a regular basis that the two are working together and the vice president is important — so the perception as well as the reality of access,” said Joel Goldstein, who has written extensively about vice presidential relationships. “There are other ways of access, but knowing you’re going to have an hour that you can raise things is important.”
The vice presidency was famously described by a former occupant as an office unworthy of a bucket of warm urine. The lunches were conceived to address that problem by giving vice presidents more private access to their boss. They started in 1977 when Walter Mondale sought to transform the vice presidency from political hospice into a power center. A month before his swearing in, he laid out demands in an 11-page memo that called for a weekly meeting, in addition to the right to walk into the Oval Office whenever he wanted. The meeting soon morphed into a weekly lunch that has been adopted by every White House since.
“This was the most valuable time that Mondale had with Carter,” said Goldstein. “These lunches were sacrosanct. It wasn’t something they would just blow off casually on either side.”
The contents of the lunches — at least the parts divined by historians and aides — provide revealing insights into how presidents and their vice presidents meshed.
Mondale had more Washington experience than President Jimmy Carter, a former governor and peanut farmer, making him a valuable counselor on foreign policy and legislative affairs.
George H.W. Bush, once a congressman and head of the CIA, had a similar advantage over President Ronald Reagan, an actor and California governor. But he had to approach his boss carefully. The two had been bitter rivals for the 1980 presidential nomination. Over tacos or enchiladas on Thursdays, when the White House chef often prepared its version of Mexican food, Bush sought to build trust. The best way to do that was through humor — Reagan famously started off most meetings with a joke.
Bush, a New England patrician, was hardly a comedian. So, he sought help from friends and associates, including professionals. He frequently called Ray Siller, who wrote for Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” for tips, according to Chase Untermeyer, an aide to the then-vice president. Untermeyer can still recall Bush trying out a joke he got from his brother about a guy named McGee, a bar and a British spy.
“I don’t remember hearing any readout of how the joke went over but I can easily picture old Ronald Reagan, an appreciator of Irish humor, chuckling,” Untermeyer said. The jokes, Untermeyer said, helped “embellish a friendship that you could say was a surprise to them both.”
When Bush became president in 1993, he kept the lunches, an act Vice President Quayle very much appreciated. The weekly meetings immediately made him more relevant in the administration because officials would see them on the public schedule, Quayle said in a 2002 oral history for the Miller Center. “Invariably, I’d get some calls. ‘Would you mention this?’ And either they had mentioned it and failed, didn’t want to mention it, or didn’t have access to the president,” he said.
Quayle said he was transparent about being a conduit.
“I said, ‘I just want to tell you that Secretary Brady stopped by this morning,’ ” Quayle recounted, offering an example that involved Staff Secretary Phillip Brady. “’He’s really concerned with the turf battle that is going on between State and Treasury on various issues’ — which happened all the time.”
Gore, known for wonky fastidiousness, ordered his staff to craft a weekly memo he could bring with him. The memo — listing bullet points on technology, the environment and other initiatives — was regarded as a priority by his aides, a chance to shape which of Gore’s priorities made it in front of the president.
Gore would use the document to get Clinton’s signoff, and jot brief notes from the president, said Elaine Kamarck, a former adviser to Gore. Having that approval allowed Gore and his staff to make sure “we didn’t have someone from the West Wing say ‘You can’t do that,’” she said.
Kamarck said the lunches were a weekly fixture until the relationship frayed over Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. (The pair had lunch the day Clinton’s impeachment trial opened in the Senate.)