What it’s like when you’re a heartbeat from presidency
Inside every vice president is someone who wanted something else. “Do I regret not being president? Yes,” said Joe Biden, who occupied the vice presidency before Mike Pence.
These misgivings are common. Few men — and they have so far all been men — enter public life shooting for the vice presidency, as Kate Andersen Brower shows in “First in Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents and the Pursuit of Power” (Harper), her crisp, engrossing new book. They either had the office foisted on them or took the second spot on a presidential ticket as part of a larger plan.
If that includes catapulting themselves into the top job, they need to devise a different strategy. Only George H.W. Bush was elected president on his own after serving as vice president during the 20th century, and before that, Martin Van Buren in 1836 was the last vice president to make the move.
Nine vice presidents have become president after the president either died, was assassinated or resigned. Some of them, such as Andrew Johnson and John Tyler, were among the most lackluster occupants of the White House, while others, primarily Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, became some of the nation’s most con- sequential presidents.
All too often, how- ever, their time as No. 2 was filled with loneliness and humiliation. Johnson, previously the Senate majority leader, was kept in the dark and often ridiculed by the staff of President John F. Kennedy, whom Johnson succeeded after he was assassinated in 1963.
“The vice presidency was torture for a man who had run the Senate and was used to commanding attention when he entered a room,” Brower writes of Johnson.
Richard Nixon yearned to be taken seriously by President Dwight Eisenhower, who once told a reporter in 1960 that he could not think of “a specific accomplishment of his vice president,” Brower writes. Nixon repaid the favor to his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who had to resort to begging Nixon for more to do.
Agnew’s eventual resignation in October 1973 led to the appointment of Gerald Ford as vice president, who called his time in the job the worst eight months of his life before assuming the presidency when Nixon resigned.
Brower dutifully touches the bases of the most recent vice presidents — primarily Truman, Nixon, Bush, Dick Cheney, Biden and Pence. She is particularly sharp on her reporting on how first lady Melania Trump argued for Pence as then-candidate Donald Trump was deliberating over whom to pick as his running mate.
“Melania’s shrewd instincts proved correct; Mike Pence was by far the least controversial on Trump’s list of vice presidential candidates,” Brower writes.
“First in Line” is not a deep historical treatise that examines the lives and times of our recent presidents. It does not need to be.
Instead, Brower delivers what she did in her previous books (“The Residence” and “First Women”), a readable, insightful account of how the vice presidency has evolved and the men (and women) could end up in the Oval Office some day.
Ray Locker is an editor in USA TODAY’s Washington bureau and author of “Nixon’s Gamble: How a President’s Own Secret Government Destroyed His Administration” and the upcoming “Haig’s Coup.”