The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Seven weeks after Roosevelt’s return, he was dead and Truman was president, only then informed about the greatest military weapon ever developed, now in his hands. He had been chosen for the vice presidency out of purely political considerations by FDR’s closest political operatives, without much thought of what sort of national leader he might be if destiny were to so dictate. One might expect that now the lesson would have been learned that the selection requires greater care and wisdom for the benefit of party and nation. Yet vice presidential choices continued to be made often by political calculation and even in some cases by whim, as the occupants largely remained lightly regarded in terms of substantive governance.

  ALBEN W. BARKLEY

  OF KENTUCKY

  At his party convention in 1948, when President Harry Truman proposed a nominee for his old job of vice president, he first sounded out Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, four years earlier a finalist in President Franklin Roosevelt’s musings on a replacement for the incumbent Henry Wallace on the Democratic ticket. Douglas was said now to have brushed off the idea, rather inelegantly, by saying he had no interest in being “Number Two to a Number Two man.”1 So Truman turned to an old friend in Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, one of the chamber’s most loved and respected leaders, who four years earlier had been dismissed for the job of vice president as too old at age sixty-seven. Now, at seventy-one, Barkley apparently wasn’t too old for Truman, who in hearty health didn’t seem to include possible presidential succession in his reckoning, even after he himself had reached the presidency by way of it.

  Barkley, with his jovial nature, his gift as country storyteller, and his talent for campaign oratory, made a particular contribution to the lore of the second office. He became known and loved throughout America as “the Veep,” a nickname his ten-year-old grandson Stephen preferred to “Mr. Vice President.” Telling reporters where it came from, Barkley said, “I must admit I get a warm feeling when I hear it.”2

  “The Veep” had a storybook beginning, literally born in a log cabin on the farm of his grandfather Alben Graham Barkley in a tiny town called Wheel in Graves County, Kentucky, on November 24, 1877. He bragged that he had traced his ancestry back to Roger de Berchelai, a Norman follower of William the Conqueror. A family member, John Berkelley, had come to America and settled in Virginia around 1618, the father of ten children and, four years after arriving, the victim of a fatal Indian attack. Barkley traced his direct lineage to a Scots-Irish Presbyterian named Henry Barkley, born in 1740 in Rowan County, North Carolina, and his son Robert, who fought in the American Revolution. Named Willie Alben Barkley by his father, John Barkley, and his mother, Electra, Alben hated the name “Willie” so went by his middle name, declaring later that he couldn’t have stomached “going through a Kentucky childhood with the name of ‘Willie’ and later trying to get into politics!”3

  Alben’s earliest relatives in politics were two cousins, a Kentucky congressman named James A. McKenzie and Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson, grandfather of the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956. As a boy, Alben worked as a hand on the wheat and tobacco farms of neighbors and later worked his way through the small Marvin College as its janitor, while also keeping up with his chores on the family farm. He studied Latin and Greek and honed his skills for later campaign stumping as a member of the Periclean Debating Society, inspired by another Kentuckian, Henry Clay, a one-time National Republican who, in 1844, became the Whig nominee for president.

  Young Barkley, however, was an avid Democrat, becoming a proponent of free silver and its brilliant oratorical champion William Jennings Bryan, a man he later met and befriended. He took a job as a traveling salesman of cooking crockery and, after graduation from Marvin, enrolled for a year at Emory College in Oxford, Georgia. Thereafter he taught briefly at Marvin, moved to Paducah, and began reading for a law degree. He became a clerk for the Kentucky congressman Charles K. Wheeler, learning shorthand in the process, and was admitted to the bar in 1901. Two years later, at twenty-five, he married a Paducah girl, Dorothy Brower, and they had a son and two daughters.

  In 1905, Barkley ran for and won his first public office, as McCracken County prosecuting attorney. A rumor grew over later years that he had campaigned on a mule. He subsequently wrote in his autobiography, “This story is a base canard, and here and now I want to spike it for all. It was not a mule—it was a horse … a one-eyed horse.”4 One of his first duties in office, he wrote later, was to send an old friend to jail, “an embezzling county official” who had been elected on the same ticket with him. “Before the sheriff took him away, I made a point of seeing the man I had convicted. I shook his hand and wished him well. He later rehabilitated himself and remained my good friend; he told me my gesture of friendliness had meant a good deal to him when he was down. I have always remembered that incident and have tried not to judge people too harshly.”5

  From prosecuting attorney, Barkley next was elected as a county administrative judge of the sort that gave Harry Truman his political start in Missouri. In 1912, Barkley ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in a four-man race. All four traveled together by horse and buggy or occasionally an automobile, to keep down expenses. Barkley won, going to Congress on the same day that the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as the president. Soon after Barkley sought an interview with Wilson on a patronage matter and became a disciple of his.

  As a newcomer to Washington, Barkley served notice that he did not intend to hang back. Early on he also went to Wilson seeking his support for a constitutional amendment that would end each session of Congress after an election in early January rather than March 4, thus barring defeated legislators from serving so long into the new year. Wilson told Barkley he was sympathetic, but he had too much else on his plate.6 It was an idea that later came to pass, with Barkley’s cosponsorship.

  The Kentuckian had differences with Wilson in politics, though not on substance. During the Great War, Barkley advised the president he thought it was a mistake not to go “barnstorming,” as Wilson put it, for reelection in the 1916 campaign, an election Wilson nearly lost. In 1918, Barkley advised him not to campaign against his critics in Congress but to ask merely for a Congress sympathetic with his war efforts and the peace objectives. The Democrats lost working majorities in both houses that year. Barkley said later this may have been a factor in the Senate failure to ratify the Versailles Treaty and with it the Covenant of the League of Nations.7 In 1919, Barkley also appealed to Wilson to push for giving women the right to vote. In October, he voted for prohibition and upon passage observed the law but later voted for its repeal.

  In 1923 Barkley ran for governor, traveling across Kentucky and building a reputation for tireless campaign stumping, offering a seemingly endless store of country tales delivered with gusto and a bellowing voice from the frame of a lumberjack. He lost the race, but his efforts were a prelude to his election three years later to the U.S. Senate over the incumbent Republican. By the 1930s, he had risen to an assistant to Senate Majority Leader Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas.

  In 1932, Barkley was called on for the first time to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. He triggered a forty-five-minute floor demonstration when he called for repeal of prohibition and as usual talked at great length. Humorist Will Rogers in his newspaper column wrote, “Now comes Senator Barkley with the ‘keynote.’ What do you mean, ‘note’? This was in three volumes. Barkley leaves from here to go to the Olympic Games to run in the marathon. He will win it, too, for that race lasts only three or four hours.”8

  In the campaign that fall, accompanying Franklin D. Roosevelt in Corbin, Kentucky, Barkley told the train-side crowd that he recognized the faces looking up at him from his previous campaign visit to the town four years earlier. “The reason I know you are the same people,” he said, “is that after four years of Hoover, you are all wearing the same clothes that you had on four years ago!” FDR roared his approval.9


  Roosevelt’s election ushering in the era of the New Deal found no stronger supporter than Barkley. He wrote later, “We were a sick nation when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office. I shall never forget the thrill with which the nation responded to his inspiring inaugural declaration that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ After twelve years of numbing laissez faire it was a dynamic experience to serve in the Congress which, in the memorable ‘first hundred days’ of the Roosevelt administration, began to bring the nation back to health.”10

  In 1936, Barkley again delivered the keynote speech at the Democratic convention. He spoke out on his concern about the Supreme Court’s growing resistance to and disagreement with key legislative initiatives by the administration to lift the country out of the Great Depression, questioning the court’s narrow grounds for opposition. While he respected the court as an institution, he said, he insisted that the Democratic Party sought only to treat the Constitution as “a living, moving, vital instrument of government not to be preserved in a museum.”11

  Accordingly, after reelection, when Roosevelt suddenly proposed in 1937 that the membership of the Supreme Court be enlarged by the addition of up to six justices, Barkley was generally in sympathy. He was prepared to support FDR, knowing the size of the court had been altered in the past. But FDR dropped the bombshell on Congress, and on his own leaders, without warning or a concerted plan to get his proposal enacted. Both Majority Leader Robinson and Barkley, as his assistant, were caught flat-footed when a rebellion in the Senate’s Democratic ranks erupted. The day before the issue was to come up for debate, Robinson called a meeting in his office and concluded after a nose count that the votes for passage were unlikely.

  The next morning, Barkley got a phone call telling him Robinson had died of a heart attack in his apartment, alone, with his wife visiting family in Arkansas. The floor fight on the measure was postponed. In the midst of all this chaos, Roosevelt chose to write to Barkley as the acting majority leader of the Senate. But it so happened that Barkley’s leadership was not going unchallenged. A Mississippi conservative also was seeking the post, and FDR’s “My Dear Alben” salutation was seized upon as evidence that the president was taking Barkley’s side in a major Senate matter. In a secret ballot of Democratic senators, Barkley won by a single vote. Afterward, according to Barkley, the president told him, “Although I took no hand in the contest, I’m glad you were elected.”12

  Barkley’s leadership of the Senate was in sharp contrast to that of the tough and decisive Robinson. The new leader was more inclined to persuade and compromise with fellow senators while entertaining them with his yarns. He was not as effective in the face of Democratic divisions. As a result, in his first year as leader, some critics nicknamed him “Bumbling Barkley.”13

  But with the advent of World War II, the party became more cohesive in the Senate behind his determined and clear leadership in support of national defense and wartime needs. He facilitated aid to the European Allies through changes in neutrality laws, particularly the enactment of the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, which threw a lifeline to the struggling British.

  Later, in 1942, Barkley himself was under consideration for a Supreme Court vacancy, in which he had not expressed an interest. When Roosevelt chose another man in January 1943, he wrote Barkley a note: “Dear Alben: I do not know whether you will be disappointed or not in this Supreme Court matter. Personally, I would not be.” Roosevelt went on to describe Barkley as “a sort of balance wheel [in the Senate] that has kept things moving all these years,” explaining further, “I had to come to the conclusion that there are nine Justices but only one Majority Leader in the Senate—and I can’t part with him in that capacity.”14

  In 1944, Barkley entertained thoughts of being Roosevelt’s running mate, having been extremely engaged in promoting the New Deal agenda as the Senate majority leader. There was, however, one notable exception to Barkley’s support. He had just worked exhaustively in getting a $2.3 billion tax bill through the Senate to continue financing the war against Germany and Japan. FDR, having sought a whopping $10.5 billion for that purpose, threatened to veto the bill as woefully inadequate. Barkley told FDR if he sent over a veto he, Barkley, would “be compelled to say something about it in the Senate.” Roosevelt replied, “Of course, you have that right.”15

  Barkley’s solid support of FDR had been unquestioned up to now, but when the president went ahead with his threatened veto, the majority leader became particularly incensed at the incendiary language Roosevelt used in rejecting the bill. He called it “a tax-relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy,” saying he had asked Congress for “a loaf of bread” and was handed instead “a small piece of crust” of “many extraneous and inedible matters.” Barkley wrote, “To me, $2.3 billion is no crust.”16

  The next day Barkley took the Senate floor, angrily charging that the president’s message was “a calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every member of Congress,” adding, “I do not propose to take this unjustifiable assault lying down.” He charged that in reading the tax bill, Roosevelt “had gone forth with a searchlight and magnifying glass to find inconsequential faults.”17 He called a Democratic caucus and resigned his leadership, saying that if Congress had “any self-respect yet left it [would] override the veto.”18 His declaration was greeted on the Senate floor and in the galleries with wild applause, enhancing his esteem in the Senate.

  On leaving the Senate Democratic caucus, Barkley was besieged by awaiting reporters seeking his comment. “Boys,” he told them in classic Barkley style, “I’m afraid I’m like the Swede who proposed to his girl while driving. She said yes, and then they drove along for five miles in silence. Finally she asked him, ‘Why don’t you say something?’ The Swede replied, “Ay tank Ay say too much already!’ ”19

  Surprised at the resignation, Roosevelt wrote Barkley another “Dear Alben” letter, urging him to reconsider and urging his fellow senators not to accept the resignation or to “immediately and unanimously” reelect him. Barkley was indeed reelected, and the House and Senate overwhelmingly overrode and killed the FDR veto. In his conciliatory letter, Roosevelt concluded, “Your differing with me does not affect my confidence in our leadership nor in any degree lessen my respect and affection for you personally.”20 But Barkley wrote later, “I am in no position to state with certainty that the episode revolving around Mr. Roosevelt and me over this tax bill affected my future political career. Nevertheless it is legitimate to reflect on what might have happened if this episode had not transpired.”21

  Roosevelt’s selection of Truman over Barkley did not seem to sour the Senate leader’s relations with his old Senate colleague when Truman became president. They became an effective team in pushing further New Deal legislation, now labeled the Fair Deal under Truman. But when tough economic times returned and the Republicans took over control of the House and Senate for the first time since the Great Depression, Barkley was reduced to the Senate minority leadership. In the approach to the 1948 presidential election, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Truman would lose a bid for reelection to the Republican Tom Dewey, nominated a second time after his defeat by FDR in 1944. Therefore, it seemed also that the Democratic vice presidential nomination would be worth even less.

  Prior to the convention, Truman’s aide Clark Clifford passed the word to insiders that the president had telephoned Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, bypassed by FDR in 1944 for Truman as his running mate, and sounded him out about taking the nomination this time around. Douglas wanted time to consider, but he finally said he wasn’t interested. An insulted Truman, mixing his metaphors, told a friend, “I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas and he cut the limb out from under me.”22

  At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Barkley again was chosen to deliver the keynote address, this time to a glum and dispirited party anticipating the worst outcome. He rose to the occasi
on, firing up the delegates with a classic Barkley assault on the Republicans. Chiding the Republicans for attacking the New Deal, he asked, “What is this cankering, corroding, fungus growth which every Republican orator … denounced with unaccustomed rancor, then in their adopted platform hugged to their political bosom as if it were a child of their own loins? It was recovery. The new Roosevelt administration breathed into the nostrils of every worthy American enterprise a breath of new life, new hope and new determination.”23

  The demonstration that followed Barkley’s stirring battle cry lasted so long that many said later he had talked himself into the vice presidential nomination. Farley said, “The convention made up the President’s mind for him” on his running mate.24 In any event, in light of the convention’s reaction, Truman phoned Barkley the next day, congratulating him on the speech and offering him the nomination. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to be Vice President?” he asked. “I didn’t know you wanted the nomination.” Later, Barkley wrote of his reply, which sounded a bit haughty: “Mr. President, you do not know it yet.” Truman responded, “Well, if I had known you wanted it, I certainly would have been agreeable”—hardly a ringing endorsement. Barkley replied that if it was the will of the convention he would accept but added that the nomination would have to come quickly. He explained rather petulantly, “I am not interested in any biscuits that have been passed around hot to other people and come to me cold.”25 According to his wishes, he was nominated unanimously.

  In a fighting speech given at two in the morning, arousing the slumping delegates, Truman assured them, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget it!” He assaulted “the worst Eightieth Congress” ever and announced he would be calling it back into a special session to act on an array of liberal bills, saying about the legislators, “They can do this job in fifteen days if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office” afterward.26