The Strange Destiny Of a Vice President

By LANCE MORROW |

A procession trudges along the service road of American history, looking distinguished and wistful: George Clinton, Daniel D. Tompkins, George M. Dallas, William King, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, William A. Wheeler, Levi P. Morton, Garret A. Hobart, Charles W. Fairbanks, Charles Dawes, John Nance Garner, Henry Wallace, Alben Barkley . . .

These men, Vice Presidents of the U.S., share a strange fate -- a shelved career, high office without power, a political glory all but lost in nonentity, and a galling kind of subservience. Good news: You are the second highest-ranking official in the land. Bad news: You are also the butler. Or the handyman. All you have is a faintly unclean hope of things to come.

The vice presidency calls up its rueful folklore. "Cactus Jack" Garner of Texas, F.D.R.'s Vice President from 1933 to 1941, did not say the office was "not worth a pitcher of warm spit." He said it was "not worth a pitcher of warm piss." The line is almost always cleaned up for the civics class. No one has improved on Mr. Dooley's formulation: "Th' Prisidincy is th' highest office in th' gift iv th' people. Th' Vice-Prisidincy is th' next highest an' th' lowest. It isn't a crime exactly. Ye can't be sint to jail f'r it, but it's a kind iv a disgrace. It's like writin' anonymous letters."

Sometimes, of course, the nonentity is summoned up from the servants' quarters and invested with the master's power. When a President dies in office, there is the initial shock of the news and then, a moment later, a sort of secondary explosion. The hand slaps the forehead in a star burst of realization: "My God! You know what this means?!"

Such moments -- April 15, 1865; April 12, 1945; Nov. 22, 1963, for example -- are lessons in the psychology of power. The trauma of a President's death, especially by assassination, becomes the drama of a mediocrity, a sort of imposter, presuming to take over. Or so it always seems. The vice presidency almost by definition enforces an expectation of the second rate: the man is inherently a loser (he was not the President, after all) or at best a Sancho Panza. In the case of Andrew Johnson following Abraham Lincoln, the fear of mediocrity was fulfilled. When Franklin Roosevelt died, a god of the era gave place, it seemed, to democracy's least common denominator, a barking, weightless little haberdasher from Independence, Mo.

The presidential nominee always says the person he has selected to be his running mate is the American "best qualified to take over in the White House in the event of my death." That is a ceremonial lie. The choice of a vice- presidential running mate is a purely political calculation aimed at winning the November election. A presidential candidate looks for a complementary running mate, someone to shore up a weak side -- to lend geographical or ideological balance, for example. Conservative Californian Ronald Reagan picked Connecticut-Texas moderate George Bush. It may be a matter of ages, aesthetics, chemistry and coloring, as well as political alliances. Elder, moderate, military statesman Dwight Eisenhower chose younger, nastier, darker, feistier conservative Richard Nixon. At some time down the line, national tickets will be balanced by sex and race as well.

The vice-presidential ritual demonstrates a phenomenon of political optics: few men -- or women -- look qualified to be President before they get into office, either by winning it or taking the place of a fallen predecessor. Or, conversely, those who look abundantly qualified beforehand may prove to be disappointing. Presidential politics is inventive, bizarre and addicted to surprise.

Consider: Harry Truman, who seemed hopelessly unqualified when Roosevelt died, is now regarded as one of the better Presidents, a strong leader of substance, intelligence and personal force.

John Kennedy in 1960 had glamour, money and his father's ambitions for him. And no record of any real achievement anywhere. Many regarded him as a rich, graceful pretty-boy and little else. Some still do. J.F.K. may have a larger place in American memory than he did in the actuality of his time.

History discloses character in unpredictable ways. Much of America's elite in 1860 regarded Lincoln as a wilderness buffoon. There is the counterpattern: Ulysses Grant, the soldier who saved the Union, looked like a much greater man at his Inauguration than he did when he left the White House. So, too, some candidates (Michigan Governor George Romney in 1968, for example, or Texas' John Connally in 1980) had an air of silver-haired inevitability about them until the political process almost mysteriously rejected them. Ex-Vice President Lyndon Johnson came to the White House by a strange, fatal route. He was splendidly qualified to be President, it seemed. But his Administration % ended like the fifth act of King Lear.

Before George Bush arrived at the White House, a certain amount of ambient wisdom had written him down as a wimp, an opportunist who, at almost every step of his career, would be overtaken by the Peter Principle (in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence). Bush has not yet completed his transformation to Lincoln. Dan Quayle does not yet look Trumanesque either. But there is time. Hope lies always in the evolving surprise.