The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Some years earlier, Eagleton had twice undergone electric shock treatments for mental illness, but he never so informed a McGovern aide when asked if there was anything detrimental in his background. The news at the time was considered so potentially damaging to the Democratic chances that McGovern finally convinced Eagleton to step aside, triggering a drawn-out and embarrassing quest for a replacement. After several turndowns, McGovern chose R. Sargent Shriver, head of the Peace Corps in the administration of his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy. As previously noted, that fall the McGovern-Shriver ticket was buried in the landslide reelection of the Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

  Four years later, the whole calamitous McGovern experience gave Carter more reason to undertake the intensive process by which he and his staff personally chose his own running mate. It was particularly appropriate in light of Carter’s intention to make his vice president significantly more than a mere standby figure in his administration. In mid-April 1976, Carter had his staff compile a list of as many as four hundred prominent Democrats, from which he culled about two dozen vice presidential prospects. He also had before him a detailed memorandum from his key Georgia political strategist, Hamilton Jordan. Before Carter interviewed anyone, Jordan advised him, “It is important that you have clear in your mind the role that you would want the Vice President to play in the campaign and in a Carter administration.… Historically, the vice presidency has not been a good job because the President has not allowed it to be.” Jordan also advised Carter to pick someone whose abilities he really respected and intended to use, even bringing him directly into the White House.1

  Jordan designed an elaborate rating system to evaluate the contenders in terms of ability, integrity, and acceptance within the party, from which five senators emerged, one of whom was Mondale, along with a number of governors and other members of Congress. Carter concluded early that his wisest choice would probably be a senator who knew his way around Washington and would counter the complaint against Carter as a total outsider. In the days leading up to the convention, Carter had his senior adviser and close friend Charles Kirbo oversee the inquiries into the personal and professional backgrounds of the most prominent Democrats. Then Carter himself interviewed seven of them, summoning Mondale to his home in Plains, Georgia, for lengthy conversations.

  Carter and Mondale had briefly met only twice before, but in advance of their Plains meeting, Mondale and his Senate chief of staff, Richard Moe, began looking into Carter’s own record and background. Moe drew up a working paper on how Mondale might best function as a working vice president for a president who lacked any experience in Washington, and that preparation made a distinct impression on Carter. “Every question that came up on an issue,” the close Carter aide Greg Schneiders recalled, “Mondale not only could spell out clearly and succinctly his own position, but knew exactly what Carter’s position was, and where the two differed.”2

  When the question of an earlier Mondale withdrawal from presidential consideration came up, Mondale told Carter he had been willing to campaign long and hard if he believed he had a chance of winning but had been realistic in concluding otherwise. Meeting reporters afterward, Carter said he had no doubt that Mondale, if selected, would be an aggressive campaigner, to which Mondale broke in: “What I said at the time was that I did not want to spend most of my life in Holiday Inns. But I’ve checked and found they’ve all been redecorated. They’re marvelous places to stay and I’ve thought it over and that’s where I’d like to be.”3 In the end, personal compatibility proved to be an essential element in the decision. The morning after Carter’s own nomination, he phoned Mondale and got his quick acceptance.

  Walter Frederick “Fritz” Mondale, born on January 5, 1928, in Ceylon, Minnesota, was the son of the Reverend Theodore Mondale—changed from Mundal in the old country. The family had emigrated from Norway in 1856 and settled in southern Minnesota in 1864, where Theodore Mondale was born in 1876. In 1902, he married a local girl, Jessie Larson, and in 1911 he became a minister in the Methodist church.

  After some profitable years in which he was able to buy two farms as investments, a sharp drop in farm prices after World War I plunged him into foreclosure on both of them, and a fatal illness of encephalitis at the same time took his wife from him, leaving him with two young sons, Lester and Clifford. Before her death, Jessie, concerned about the fate of their sons, urged him to start courting an unwed friend, Claribel Cowan, and in 1925 the widower Theodore married her. An internal church row found him and his young family shipped to Ceylon, where Fritz was born and raised in a family of strong progressive inclinations in the Great Depression years.4

  Hardship followed the family as it moved around Minnesota, finally settling in the town of Elmore. The parents conveyed to Lester and Clifford and then to Fritz, Pete, and Mort, the sons born of their own marriage, their strong religious and political convictions about charity and good works, as had also been the case with Jimmy Carter’s upbringing in rural Georgia. Drinking and smoking were firmly prohibited in the Mondale household. Fritz grew up as a somewhat mischievous and athletic boy and became a star football player in Elmore, nicknamed “Crazylegs” for his shifty running style. Family trips in a makeshift trailer, including one to Washington, whetted his interest in politics.

  In the fall of 1946, he enrolled in Macalester College, in St. Paul, and later that year his political science instructor took him to a rally at a union hall in Minneapolis. There he first laid eyes on Hubert Humphrey, who had helped lead the merger of the state’s radical Farmer-Labor Party with its moribund Democratic Party and had become mayor of Minneapolis. Mondale was transfixed by the thirty-five-year-old Humphrey’s rousing call to the party colors. He got to shake Humphrey’s hand and was put to work handing out flyers for Humphrey’s reelection campaign.

  A fight for control of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party was underway among Farmer-Labor radicals, including local communists and Democratic regulars led by Humphrey. Humphrey ran for the U.S. Senate in 1948, and Mondale became a foot soldier in the effort, heading the Humphrey campaign in a key congressional district that was carried in a landslide.5

  At Macalester, Mondale affiliated with Students for Democratic Action, the campus offshoot of Americans for Democratic Action, later dropping out of college and moving to Washington as the SDA national secretary. In 1951, Mondale finished his degree at the University of Minnesota, then enlisted in the army during the Korean War and was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Upon his discharge a year later, he entered the university’s law school, marrying Joan Adams in 1955, graduating in 1956, and practicing law in Minneapolis until 1960. In 1958 he ran the successful campaign of Orval Freeman for the governorship and was rewarded with an appointment as the state attorney general, at thirty-two the youngest in the country.

  Under Mondale’s leadership, his staff won convictions in a massive case of fraud and corruption involving executives of the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation, a huge Minneapolis-based charitable institution for the benefit of children crippled by polio and other debilitating diseases. Some of the officials, including the former mayor Marvin Kline, were found guilty. In 1963, Mondale led the state attorneys general in the famous U.S. Supreme Court case in behalf of Clarence Earl Gideon, an indigent prisoner convicted after denial of free counsel. And in 1964, at the behest of Humphrey, Mondale shaped a compromise at the Democratic National Convention in the fight over seating the Mississippi delegation. Finally, in 1965, another gubernatorial appointment put Mondale in the U.S. Senate, replacing Humphrey after his 1964 election to the vice presidency.

  In 1968, Mondale and Senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma managed Humphrey’s successful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination after LBJ dropped out. In 1969, Mondale finally broke with Johnson on the war in a speech at Macalester College, and in 1971 he voted to halt American military involvement in Cambodia. Two years later he cosponsored the War Powers Resolution, stipulating that the pre
sident inform Congress of any U.S. military action taken and report periodically on its progress, subject to congressional termination. The resolution was subsequently and routinely ignored by the executive branch.

  In 1973, during the Watergate scandal, which eventually drove Nixon from office, Mondale undertook to explore a presidential bid of his own for the 1976 presidential nomination. “After more than a year of constant travel, constant fund-raising and constant speaking,” he wrote later, “I had pulled about even with ‘None of the Above’ in national opinion surveys, and I dropped that bid—to widespread applause.” It was then that he made the comment that he didn’t want to spend his life in Holiday Inns. But what he also said in late November 1974 was: “Basically I found I did not have the overwhelming desire to be President which is essential for the kind of campaign that is required,” adding, “I don’t think anyone should be President who is not willing to go through fire.”6

  By the time the 1976 party convention rolled around, however, Mondale had second thoughts, at least about running for the vice presidency. When he became one of Jimmy Carter’s finalists for the job, he was both willing and prepared. “When Fritz came down to Plains,” Carter wrote later, “he had really done his homework about me and the campaign. More important, he had excellent ideas about how to make the vice presidency a fulltime and productive job. He was from a small town as I was, a preacher’s son, and shared a lot of my concerns about our nation [and] we were personally compatible.”7

  Carter himself received high marks in the news media for the care and deliberation he demonstrated in making the choice of an esteemed legislator to help him navigate the shoals of political Washington, in the event they got there together the next January. When the fall campaign heated up in earnest, Mondale plunged in. But by far his greatest contribution was in the nationally televised debate with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the sharp and acerbic World War II combat hero.

  In any presidential campaign, the prime role for running mates is that of the medical Hippocratic oath—first, do no harm. But Dole had a reputation as a political attack dog, and he also harbored a deep hostility toward the Democratic Party. He was also bitter over the severe wounds he had suffered as a World War II officer in Italy. At first in the debate, Dole displayed his playfully jibing side, observing, “I think tonight may be sort of a fun evening. I’ve known my counterpart for some time. We’ve been friends and we’ll be friends when this debate is over. And we’ll be friends when this election is over—and he’ll still be in the Senate.”8

  But Dole’s personal rancor came boiling out in his biting answer to a question from the debate panel. The veteran Associated Press reporter Walter Mears asked why in 1974 he had said that Ford’s pardon of Nixon for the Watergate crimes had been “prematurely granted and mistaken.” Dole snapped back that Watergate wasn’t a very good campaign issue, “any more than the Vietnam war would be, or World War I or World War II or the Korean War—all Democrat wars in this century.” Then he added, “I figured up the other day if we added up all the killed and wounded in Democratic wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.” An incredulous but calm Mondale pounced: “I think Senator Dole has richly deserved his reputation as a hatchet man tonight. Does he really mean that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the fight against Nazi Germany?”9

  The Carter campaign strategists concluded that Mondale had done so well and Dole so poorly that they quickly produced a television ad showing both men with a voice-over that said, “What kind of men are they? When you know that four of the last six vice presidents have wound up as presidents, who would you like to see a heartbeat away from the presidency?” Actually, it was four out of seven at that time, but the point was the same.10 In the extremely close election, which Carter and Mondale won by only 2.2 percent, many fingers pointed primarily to Ford’s pardon of Nixon for his loss. But Dole’s reference to “Democrat wars” got its share of mentions as well.

  Even before the winners were sworn into office, Carter was true to his word about making Mondale a real partner. Carter summoned him to Plains again for further discussions. Mondale had Richard Moe draft a memo laying out the key elements in their thinking. Mondale had talked at length with Humphrey about his friend’s own experiences as vice president under Johnson. “I knew that if I didn’t see everything Carter saw, even the classified material,” Mondale wrote in his memoir, “I could not be an effective adviser.”11

  On Mondale’s arrival in Atlanta, Hamilton Jordan met him, and Mondale asked him how Carter had reacted to the memo, a copy of which he had sent to Jordan. “Oh, the memo,” Carter’s right-hand man said. “Just double-space it and he’ll agree to everything.” And so it was. Mondale remembered that Carter told him, “I want you to be in the chain of command—a vice president with the power to act in the president’s place,” and gave Mondale his own office in the White House, a break in precedent.12 A major difference between Humphrey’s experience with LBJ and Mondale’s with Carter was Carter himself, who was above delivering the sort of deep personal humiliations that Johnson had routinely dealt to subordinates.

  In anticipation of assuming the presidential powers of war and peace, Carter included Mondale in all preinauguration briefings. “It was obvious to me that in a nuclear exchange, the President might well be incapacitated, and the Vice President, as the new Commander in Chief, had to be fully qualified to assume his duties,” Carter wrote later.13 Mondale also was the first vice president to be sent the highly classified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB), including the latest foreign-policy intelligence.

  During the transition, he was assigned to prepare an action agenda for the first months of the Carter administration, and about three weeks before its inauguration, each member of Carter’s new cabinet was given a twenty-nine-page memo of Carter’s weekly schedule through the approaching March, prepared by Mondale.14 Unlike most past cases, Mondale’s staff was totally integrated with Carter’s, an indication of the shared agenda they had, rather than Mondale being given specific side assignments like those that had often been shunted to past vice presidents.

  Mondale himself was placed entirely in the loop for receiving all policy papers going to the president, and he usually saw Carter on a daily basis. A regularly scheduled lunch meeting between the two was a staple of their weekly calendars. Mondale also functioned as a sort of long-range traffic cop for issues to be taken up by the president in an orderly fashion, including foreign travel for each of them.

  At the outset, Mondale insisted that he not be given the direction of any agency, such as the Domestic Council, which had bogged down Rockefeller, or any major area of responsibility beyond the agenda setting. When Carter proposed that he serve as his White House chief of staff or take on dealing with Africa as his special task, Mondale begged off, successfully making the case that he could better serve as a generalist and senior adviser without portfolio.15 Nor did he want to be caught in bureaucratic wrangling with cabinet heads working the same side of the issues street. With Carter new to Washington and many Georgians with little experience there given key White House positions, Mondale’s direct general counsel was much needed, as seen almost at once.

  One matter not included in the early cabinet meeting, and hence not subject to comment by the cabinet, was a sudden decision by Carter less than a month in office to veto federal funding for some eighteen water projects, mostly in the western states. They were pet projects of senior members of the House and Senate and often tagged as pork-barrel handouts. Carter added insult to injury by failing to consult with or notify the affected legislators in advance, to Mondale’s chagrin. But Carter was determined to tackle inflation and balance the federal budget by the conclusion of his term.

  Mondale finally alerted Carter to the political as well as the budgetary aspects of the issue, advising that he veto the most egregious pork-barrel items and yield on the others
in the interest of party peace. But newcomer Carter dug in his heels. “Eventually we rounded up enough votes to sustain a veto,” Mondale wrote later, “but House Speaker Tip O’Neill called the president and proposed a compromise—to suspend the projects rather than cancel them. Carter agreed, but that only infuriated several members of Congress who, at some risk to their congressional friendships, had promised to support us. In the end, a year later, Carter finally did sign a bill cancelling several of the projects on his list. So we won a little on the merits, but we lost a lot on the politics.”16

  Mondale’s influence had its first major test in helping shape a major affirmative action case before the Supreme Court. A young white student from Minnesota named Allan Bakke alleged he had been denied admission to the University of California medical school in deference to less-qualified black students. Carter’s attorney general and old Georgia friend, Griffin Bell, had his staff produce a draft in support of Bakke that would run contrary to Carter’s own general support of affirmative action. Mondale weighed in with Carter, asking him, “Why do we need this fight now? The administration is already battling with its liberal allies. Why provoke them more and turn away from our campaign promise to promote affirmative action?”17 Mondale’s intercession eventually helped bring the brief into line with Carter’s commitment to this critical civil rights principle.18