Vice presidents, always an enigma

Mike Pence: toady or tactician? Or just another VP with the always unenviable job?

Thomas Marshall, whom you very likely never heard of, served as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president and is known, if at all, for his declaration that what America needed was a good five-cent cigar. But he also is the man who used to tell the story of two brothers, one who went to sea and was drowned and the other who became vice president of the United States. Neither was ever heard from again.

There are two things about the current vice president upon which almost everyone can agree. Mike Pence is not at sea. And he is determined to be heard from again.

Thus the remarkable few days that the onetime Republican governor of Indiana has experienced in the public prints. First was an astonishing column by the conservative commentator George F. Will, who characterized Mr. Pence as “oozing unctuousness from every pore” and who painted him as a hopeless, total toady. Then came a New York Times report suggesting the White House increasingly considers the vice president a scheming opportunist blinded by ambition, perhaps reaching for the main prize himself.

In the last half-century, only one other figure from Republican lore — Rose Mary Woods, the Nixon secretary who contorted herself for a photographer to show how she might have erased more than 18 minutes of taped presidential conversations — could accomplish a stretch like that.

White House palace protectors almost certainly would dismiss both critiques as bleats from a dying mainstream media commentariat. There is no denying that both accounts appeared in the accursed pages of the MSM, initials that used to be a shorthand for what once was known as a miracle cure (methylsulfonylmethane) but which now is the most fiendish three-letter appellation in Washington, with the possible exceptions of course of HRC and BHO.

One way or another, this is a season for fresh attention on the vice president, which itself is a statement of some moment. Vice presidents often have been so obscure, and their activities so obscured, that no one paid any attention to them at all.

Inconspicuous perhaps, but not always inconsequential.

Lyndon Johnson had strode the Capitol like a colossus when he was Senate majority leader but he chafed at being John F. Kennedy’s vice president. Johnson was a brooder even in better days, but he was a caged animal as secondin-command, eventually falling into a visible depression. One day his personal secretary, Juanita Roberts, pushed Johnson — descendant of Confederate soldiers — to consider a Memorial Day speech at Gettysburg. He resisted, she pushed. And then, 55 years ago this month, he delivered a speech that was an uplifting bookend to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and that has been credited for nudging Kennedy to give his landmark civil-rights speech less than a month later.

Johnson didn’t treat his vice president, the liberal warrior Hubert Humphrey, much better, but in recent times, vice presidents — the last six, three from each party — have had bigger roles.

“It is a tough and unique job, taking someone at the top of his or her profession and making that person totally subservient,” says Joel Goldstein, the Saint Louis University law professor whose “The White House Vice Presidency” examines the recent growth of the position. “The position takes leaders and make them followers. The vice president is always advancing someone else’s agenda.”

And yet for a powerless position, the vice presidency often is a magnet for controversy. Richard Nixon was targeted with tomatoes in Caracas. Spiro Agnew was Nixon’s point man for his press attacks and resigned in disgrace. Dick Cheney took criticism for his aggressive nationalsecurity views. Now Mr. Pence is under seige.

Trump loyalists are alarmed he has taken such a forward role in this fall’s midterm elections, grousing that Mr. Pence is establishing a power center parallel to that of the White House and the Republican National Committee. Much of the criticism is aimed at the presence of Nick Ayers, a wunderkind strategist steeped more in campaigning than in governing, in Mr. Pence’s circle.

Then, the day the United States opened its new Jerusalem embassy, Mr. Pence marked the occasion by reciting the Shehecheyanu — “Our praise to You, Eternal our God… [for] enabling us to reach this season.” Some rabbis cringed, viewing this blessing as a legal formula not to be employed simply because someone is moved by the moment.

Mr. Pence, almost alone among Trump insiders, is a veteran politician, chosen as running mate either — depending on your viewpoint — because no one else would take it, or because he possessed the political experience (member of the House, governor of a state) that complemented Mr. Trump’s status as outsider and disrupter. Either way — as a Trump team player or as a guide to the political arts — Mr. Pence built unusual stature in the White House.

The conservative Mr. Will is not conservative with his criticism of vice presidents. Some 32 years ago he assailed George H.W. Bush, who in 1986 did not have the exalted reputation he now possesses, writing, “The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny ‘arf’ — the sound of a lapdog.” His Pence attack is even more arch.

“Pence has sort of a unique challenge because President Trump is such an idiosyncratic character,” says Mr. Goldstein. “Pence has been a lapdog in a way no other recent vice president has been — but he has also done more, such as being more assertive politically, than his predecessors.”

The elephant in the Republican room — if that is not a redundant statement — is that the emphasis here is not on the midterms but the 2020 or even 2024 presidential election. Mr. Pence would likely run if the 45th president does not seek a second term.

But the question that must haunt Mr. Trump is this: If Donald Trump seeks a second term, would Mr. Pence be his running mate?

Woodrow Wilson kept his vice president on his ticket for his second term, perhaps because Marshall lived up to his own definition of the job: “a man in a cataleptic fit; he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; he is perfectly conscious of all that goes on, but has no part in it.” And one other thing. Vice President Marshall behaved as if he were lost at sea.