The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Mondale concluded early in his new job, “Many of the lawmakers I called the old whales, the powerful veteran committee chairmen [of his own party], had little interest in seeing us succeed. They were profoundly skeptical of this Democratic outsider, and they were scheming right from the start to find ways of testing and diminishing him. They were almost as happy with a Republican president as a Democratic president because the big point was getting their own way.”19

  Carter had hoped to kick off his administration with an economic stimulus bill composed of a jobs program, public works spending, and an individual tax rebate of fifty dollars as symbolic evidence that the Democrats felt the public’s pain. But as the economy began to show an uptick, Carter scrapped the rebate to the severe distress of many congressional leaders. The actions disturbed Mondale as well while he sought to run interference for the Georgian newcomer.

  Mondale used his weekly private lunches with Carter to alert him to the political elements of some of his plans that may have eluded him. “I had hoped I might help Carter navigate these shoals, or at least avoid collisions with our friends,” he wrote later. “I spent a lot of time up on the Hill with senators and members of the House picking up information that I would bring to the president.” He said of their private lunches: “[They] proved to be one of our most valuable ideas—just the two of us, no staff, no fixed agenda, totally honest. I often used those lunches for politics because Carter didn’t like to bring politics into our meetings with cabinet officials and agency staff. This was my chance to tell him what I was hearing and how I interpreted it.”20

  Mondale, however, found himself in the administration of a man who led with more head and less heart than Mondale did. Carter’s agenda was the captive of his justifiable concern over the restraints imposed by federal debt and inflation, at the cost of diminished social programs that Mondale favored. Speaking as a traditional liberal, Mondale said of his personal challenge dealing with Carter: “I tried to keep our constituency together by forcing [the liberals] to confront the inflation issue, and I fought within the administration to prevent unnecessary budget cuts. It was a tough job for an old progressive like me.”21

  Reviewing their administration in a memo to Carter after their first seven months, Mondale wrote, “I think it is important that I devote more time to strengthening our relationship with those constituencies [of the old Democratic coalition] and persuading them that our interests and theirs are inextricably tied together.”22 The matter came to a head in mid-1978 at a party conference in Memphis at which Mondale’s good friend Ted Kennedy called on the Democrats to “sail against the wind” of economic restraints in support of their old social agenda. Mondale defended Carter’s anti-inflation worries, in a prelude to the inevitable clash to come in Kennedy’s decision to challenge Carter’s bid for reelection in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries.

  Before then, however, Carter orchestrated the one foreign-policy achievement that would crown his otherwise troubled presidency—the 1978 personal peace negotiations refereed by him between Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin at Camp David, Maryland, which ended in their historic peace treaty. Mondale played an unobtrusive role as an ice-breaker in separate private talks with Sadat and Begin in advance of their meeting at Camp David and as an encourager to each of them once there. Carter wrote of the vice president later in his memoir: “Mondale handled everything possible for me in Washington, and took a helicopter up to Camp David whenever he could get away at night or on weekends.”23

  Carter included Mondale in most major meetings and often used his vice president as an intermediary with each of the visiting principals. Carter meanwhile tenaciously urged them not to waste the opportunity he had afforded them, and he eventually succeeded.24 The next year, Mondale also played a key role with the State Department specialist Richard Holbrooke in getting Carter to agree to take a leading part in a multination rescue of Southeast Asian boat people—refugees fleeing the war-torn region by sea.25

  Overshadowing both these foreign-affairs achievements, however, were two episodes that most seriously damaged the Carter presidency. The first came in the late summer of 1978, when Carter made the domestic decision that caused the worst breach in his relationship with Mondale. With Middle East oil prices soaring and a severe energy crisis plaguing the country, the president planned a major speech on it, then abruptly canceled it and summoned a host of outside kibitzers to Camp David to counsel him on what do to. For twelve days, the energy experts and various political leaders trooped to the Maryland hideaway for seminars that seemed only to underscore Carter’s indecision. The president’s pollster, Patrick Caddell, weighed in with data suggesting that the American people had lost confidence in their president, and Carter decided he had to make a speech addressing that conclusion.

  Mondale wrote later of Caddell’s notion: “He argued that the public was having a sort of psychological breakdown after several bad years in American politics. He thought Americans simply couldn’t grapple with the gravity of a challenge as severe as an international energy crisis. Caddell proposed that Carter speak to the public about this failure of will and urge them to buckle up and deal with it.” But, Mondale wrote, “I thought that was a dead end.” Referring to psychological texts Caddell had brought with him, Mondale told him, “Pat, I’ve read all those books and they don’t have a damn thing to do with the price of energy or the next election.”26

  Of the internal staff debate that ensued with the president, Mondale wrote later, “By late afternoon I was pretty upset, and probably for the only time, I broke with Carter.… I said I don’t believe this problem is in people’s heads.… These are real problems. People can’t get gas. Their paychecks are getting smaller. They’re worrying about their heating bills.” Further, Mondale told Carter, “You can’t blame the American people for the problems they face. We were elected to be a government as good as the people, yet now we’re proposing to say that we need a people as good as the government. You can’t sell that.” Mondale wrote later, “I probably got a little angry as I finished my case, something I can’t remember ever happening with Carter and me, and I probably made an ass of myself. But I was afraid that this would be the end of our administration.”27

  Carter took Mondale for a walk to cool him down, but in the end the president delivered a crisis-in-confidence address that immediately was dubbed his “malaise speech,” although he never used that word. It left an impression of incompetence and confusion that hung over Carter and his administration long afterward.

  Mondale was also distressed by a Carter decision at Camp David to shake up his cabinet, calling for the resignations of all members and accepting five, apparently in an effort to show toughness and strength. Mondale wrote later, “I think our administration never recovered from that week. Congress was caught by surprise. Wall Street was rattled. The general public seemed flummoxed. The Republicans said Americans weren’t depressed about America, they were frustrated with us.”28

  Even more damaging in public opinion was the storming by Iranian student radicals of the American Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, and the taking of 101 American diplomats and other personnel as hostages. The attack came shortly after Carter had reluctantly agreed to admit the ailing and exiled shah of Iran to the United States for medical treatment, a decision in which Mondale had concurred. For the next 444 days, the hostages were held under the most humiliating circumstances, an episode made infinitely worse for Carter when a helicopter rescue mission ordered by him was badly botched in the Arabian desert, leaving eight dead among the American forces.

  On top of all this woe came Ted Kennedy’s decision to challenge Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination. The development was particularly trying for Mondale because he and Kennedy were good friends, and they shared most of their party’s liberal positions and aspirations. In Carter’s diary on June 29, 1979, he wrote, “I had lunch with Fritz. He thought my comment concerning ‘whipping Kennedy’s ass’ was
ill-advised. His is kind of a lonely voice. Some of my staff members say it was the best thing for morale around the White House since the Willie Nelson concert.”29

  Mondale was particularly chagrined at Carter’s decision early in the election year to stay off the campaign trail and conduct what was called a “Rose Garden strategy” of focusing on the national and international crises, leaving to Mondale the role of chief campaign surrogate. Carter did, however, agree to join Kennedy and a third candidate, Governor Jerry Brown of California, in a debate sponsored by the Des Moines Register, scheduled for the first week of the election year.

  On Christmas Day of 1979, however, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in support of an internal coup there, leading Carter to impose an embargo on grain sales, in spite of a previous pledge in Iowa, the nation’s corn capital, never to do so. Kennedy immediately attacked the embargo, saying it would hurt Iowa farmers without punishing the Russians, who could get the grain they needed elsewhere. Three days later, with the Iran hostage crisis also still unresolved, Carter pulled out of the debate, saying he was hoping soon “to bring the Iranian matter to a head” and hence there was no way he could leave Washington.30 The newspaper offered to shift the site there, but Carter declined.

  In Des Moines, Mondale seized on Kennedy’s criticism of the embargo, accusing him of trying to capitalize on “the politics of the moment.” Although Mondale himself had advised Carter not to order the embargo, he said supporting it was “the patriotic route to take.” When a reporter asked the vice president if he was accusing Kennedy of being “unpatriotic,” Mondale said only, “I’ve said what I’ve said.” Kennedy, learning of the remark, shot back, “I don’t think I or the members of my family need a lecture from Mr. Mondale or anyone else about patriotism.”31

  Years later, in his memoir, Mondale wrote, “This was hard for me. Kennedy’s position was my position; I didn’t think the grain embargo would hurt the Soviets much, but I knew it would hurt American farmers and turn the farm states against us.” He wrote he “regretted immediately” saying, “Kennedy should support the president at a time like this,” adding, “I was tired and I shouldn’t have said it. Ted took offense, and I took it back right away, and by the next morning he had accepted that. But it was bruising.”32

  Worse from the viewpoint of the Carter campaign, Kennedy’s challenge dragged on through June and left the Democratic Party badly split. With the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan, overcoming doubts about the competence of a former movie star to be president, he and his running mate, the former UN ambassador George Bush, won a clear-cut victory on Election Night in both the popular vote and the electoral college.

  Despite failing to win a second term, Mondale could claim some significant victories in his four years as vice president. He was instrumental in the creation of the Department of Education; he also was a key figure in the enactment of the Panama Canal treaties transferring the canal to Panamanian control, in the rescue of the Vietnamese boat people, and particularly in his assistance to Carter in bringing a successful conclusion to the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks at Camp David. He was credited also with moderating some of Carter’s deeper budget cuts affecting the poor and the middle class while retaining enough political capital to achieve his party’s presidential nomination four years later.

  In 1984, Mondale made a political comeback by winning the Democratic nomination over Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who ran as an insurgent against the party establishment candidate. Mondale won strong labor backing and turned the tables on the charismatic Hart, the 1972 campaign manager of George McGovern, by questioning his substance. The Mondale campaign dusted off a television advertising slogan of the day, asking of Hart in his own ad, “Where’s the beef?” It halted Hart’s early surge, but Mondale did not clinch the nomination until the final day of the last 1984 primaries.

  In his convention acceptance speech, aware that he was trailing Reagan in the polls, Mondale rolled the dice, boldly declaring, “Let’s tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” It caused Reagan’s deputy campaign manager, Lee Atwater, to remark that Mondale deserved “an A-plus for boldness” but predicted that Mondale would “get an F-minus in the end.”33 He was right. Mondale explained much later, “I thought one way of dealing with Reagan was to show more confidence, solid experience in dealing with the budget. It didn’t get me anywhere.”34

  In a long-shot effort to pull out the general election, Mondale nominated the New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as the first female in American history to be on a major national ticket. The ticket won an impressive vote among women, but in vain. Mondale himself could not match the Reagan appeal, and a hope in his camp that a rambling performance by the aging president in their first debate would benefit the challenger was dashed in the second. Reagan won the audience by jokingly observing, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”35 Mondale acknowledged later that he knew he was beaten after that.

  Reagan’s reassurance of his competence in that second debate brought an even greater landslide victory in November for him and Vice President Bush, who captured all but 13 of the 538 electoral votes, losing only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Mondale went back to law practice in Minneapolis.

  Mondale’s defeat did not end his public service, though. In 1992, upon the presidential election of his fellow Democrat Bill Clinton, Mondale was offered the ambassadorship to Moscow, which he accepted but later thought better of it as a poor fit for him and ultimately declined it. Clinton came back and offered him Japan, which he accepted and served happily and effectively for four years, returning in late 1996 to Minnesota, where he engaged in DFL Party affairs with no intention to ever run for public office again.

  But in 2002, the Democratic senator Paul Wellstone, campaigning for a third term less than two weeks before the election, perished in a small plane crash that also claimed his wife and a daughter. Wellstone’s campaign manager pleaded with Mondale to run in Wellstone’s place as the only Democrat who could hold the seat and assure Democratic control of the Senate. Reluctantly, he agreed. But a large and emotional memorial service for Wellstone, attended by leading figures of both political parties, turned into a political rally in the hands of unthinking partisan Democratic speakers. The tone was deeply resented by attending Republicans and many other grieving Minnesotans. On Election Night, Mondale, then age seventy-four and hindered by the poisoned circumstances, lost by three percentage points to the Republican mayor of St. Paul, Norm Coleman, and returned again to the practice of law in Minneapolis.

  Mondale, because of his intimate service with Carter in the White House, was arguably the most well-prepared man for the presidency who ran for but never attained it. Still, his service in the vice presidency, shaped largely by his own hand in collaboration with his president, became the model for future presidents in making constructive use of the office, if they chose to follow it.

  GEORGE H. W. BUSH

  OF TEXAS

  The cliché endures that the vice presidency is the prime stepping-stone to the presidency. But after John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first two vice presidents, were elected to the presidency in their own right, only two others have since made it—Martin Van Buren in 1836 and, more than a century and a half later, George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988. The nine others who rose to the presidency achieved it as a result of eight presidential deaths and one resignation.

  In most of the early years after Adams and Jefferson, the elected vice presidents lacked the distinction required for the presidency or served in such subordinate and near-invisible roles in their administrations that they did not warrant consideration for the highest office. Van Buren was an exception as the chief political strategist and adviser to President Andrew Jackson, and his presidential candidacy was seen as a means to continue the Jackson policies. Likewise, 152 yea
rs later, Bush’s presidential candidacy was cast by many Republicans as the closest thing to a third term of President Ronald Reagan, whose agenda Bush loyally embraced for eight years. Although he succeeded in being elected, he proved to be no Reagan, either in charisma or in policy, and in the end was denied reelection in 1992.

  Coloring within the lines was a trademark of the senior George Bush. His ancestors on the English and Scottish sides of his family could boast of distant ties to royalty, and his grandparents and parents raised him with a proper respect for courtesy, piety, and self-reliance. His paternal grandfather, Samuel Prescott Bush, after graduation from Stevens Tech, took various railroad jobs in the Midwest before settling in Columbus, Ohio. There he became the president of a company manufacturing railway car equipment and the first president of the National Association of Manufacturers.1

  Samuel Bush’s son, Prescott, George’s father, attended Yale, served briefly as a field artillery captain in France in World War I, on return moved to St. Louis, and went into business. There he met and married Dorothy Walker, daughter of the wealthy investment banker George Herbert Walker. Soon after, he went to work for the U.S. Rubber Company in Tennessee and then in Milton, Massachusetts, where young George, the second of five children, was born on June 12, 1924, and named for his maternal grandfather.2 A by-product of the name eventually was another tag hung on him that later led to derision, especially from political foes. Grandfather Walker had come to be called “Pop” by his sons, so as young George was growing up they called him “Little Pop” or “Poppy,” and it stuck to him with a gentle vengeance outside the family long afterward.3

  The family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and Prescott Bush soon joined the New York banking and investment firm of W. Averell Harriman, of which his father-in-law was president. At Yale, he had become a member of the secret elite Skull and Bones Society, where a fellow Bonesman was Roland Harriman, brother of W. Averell. When the firm merged with another Wall Street powerhouse, Brown Brothers, Prescott became one of twelve partners and, not surprisingly, a Republican, though not yet interested in political office.4