Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. This week we’re talking about a topic that in some ways was born of our discussion recently of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. What we want to talk about today is the vice presidency. It has not necessarily been the same job over the arc of American history, that it has been one or another kind of job and that today as we’ll see, it is a very potentially significant job. Now that said, there’s a longstanding habit of people making fun of the vice presidency in one way or another as an enormously insignificant job. So for example, at the White House Correspondent Dinner, the comedian Roy Wood Jr. said…

Roy Wood Jr. (archival):

But I think the most insulting scandal to fall to the feet of the Biden administration was placed at the feet of our Madam Vice President, the scandal of what does Kamala do, which is a disrespectful question. That’s a disrespectful question because nobody ever asked that question of the vice president until a woman got the job. I’m going to ask… I don’t know what Mike Pence did. The only thing I know about Mike Pence is that he’s really good at playing hide and seek at the Capitol. You got to be crafty to catch Mike Pence in that Capitol baby. He know all the nooks and crannies. At the end of the day as a vice president, the only thing you got to do is just be better than Dick Cheney. That’s the bar, just be better than Dick Cheney.

Joanne Freeman:

Which I think is hilarious and captures some of the other ways in which former vice presidents talked about the job. Actually, two that I stumbled across, and one is especially for you and I, Heather, a former vice president’s commenting on the job was Woodrow Wilson’s former Vice President, Thomas Marshall, who said, “Once there were two brothers, one ran away to see, the other was elected Vice President of the United States and nothing was heard of either of them again.” The other one is for us and that is Theodore Roosevelt. Just before becoming vice president, he said, “I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history than vice president.” We won the lottery…

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, that’s right.

Joanne Freeman:

It’s a big harrumph.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What I love about this topic is that the vice presidency has changed so dramatically over time that it says a lot about our political system and it also is constantly changing still. So a vice president can be many different things and I also kind of love it because if you do political history, these people in a way that most people have never heard of. So it’s kind of our sweet spot here to talk about this. But I also loved that Wood brought up the issues around Vice President Kamala Harris because she is consistently criticized these days primarily on the right, but somewhat on the left as well, more than I recall. And I find this really mind-boggling because she has, in fact, to my definition of what a vice president should do, which is carry out the administration’s policies without overshadowing the president, she has been exemplary.

The fact that she has been working on the ground in the States to shore up reproductive rights and to meet with reproductive rights activists and the fact that she has had some really successful tours of both Latin America and of Africa, which are two crucially important places for our foreign policy, seems to me to have put her head and shoulders above recent vice presidents. Vice President Pence seemed to me to show up for culture wars and theoretically was overseeing the COVID response sometimes, and sometimes somebody else was and all that. I think there’s an awful lot going into the current criticism of Vice President Harris that says a lot about what the vice presidency represents and can represent in our system.

Joanne Freeman:

I think… Also, the position itself didn’t start out being very well-defined, and I would argue that even today, it doesn’t have a big presence in the American political imagination.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So we know about the Vice President needing to balance the ticket both regionally and ideologically within a party. So most people are like, “Oh, the person’s just there to get the president elected.” We know the vice president is supposed to step in if something happens to the president, which is another interesting story. But more recently, the vice president has taken on their own portfolios and what that means for the presidency and for the way we think about the presidency I think is really important. Before we start this, I have to ask, obviously all of this begins with the first vice president and the first vice president is John Adams. The thing that really surprises me when we deal with Adams and the vice presidency is the degree to which he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Joanne Freeman:

Well, an important factor that is no one knew what their job really was at the time when the government was launched. One of the more striking documents I’ve seen about the evolving role of the president, nevermind the vice president, is George Washington’s copy of the Constitution and everywhere he saw something that the president did, he wrote in the margin, president. He was trying to figure out what his job was. So in one sense, yeah, John Adams was very accomplished. He had done all kinds of diplomatic work overseas. He was a leading revolutionary in the fight for independence, all of these things. He was a known public figure in one way or another, but yeah, he didn’t really explicitly know what the vice presidency was. The big position that the constitutional convention was focused on among other things was the presidency because it was giving a lot of power to one person.

The vice presidency was not… They didn’t say, “Now let’s talk about this other position.” I mean, there are two things that the vice President is supposed to do from the outset. One of them is preside over the Senate, and one of them is be the step-up president if something happens to the President, and that’s it. That’s what the vice president does. And we now assume for good reason because of the way the office has evolved that the vice presidency is an executive office. But here’s John Adams at the very beginning of the government in 1789, he wrote to someone he knew saying, quote, “The Constitution has instituted two great offices, and the nation at large has created two officers. One who is the first of the two is placed at the head of the executive, the other at the head of the legislative.” That was how he understood his job.

Now you’re right. He assumed early on that he was going to get to take part and he was going to be instructing the Senate and his role and what he thought, his views and his opinions, he would be part of the debate, and he discovers early on that’s not how the senators see his role, that he really is there largely to preside over the Senate and break ties if the case comes across that there is some kind of vote that’s so close, they’re going to need his vote.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Tell me how the voting was initially set up for president and vice president, because you have made the argument that… And I’m just being a power hungry vice president here, but couldn’t you have made the argument that you were supposed to be kind of the co-president?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, they actually debated at the constitutional convention having one president, having an executive council of some kind more than one person. They dispensed with that idea because they liked the idea of holding one man responsible. And again, this shows two things. It shows that there were not organized political parties at the time, and it shows why the vice presidency sort of became significant. What they were mainly concerned about early on in the voting for a president was in the electoral college, they assumed that everyone would vote for a president from their own state. So every elector had two votes and one of them had to be for someone outside of their state. So the main concern with the vice presidency was, “Okay, so we don’t know what the heck is going to make this a national system. This will push people beyond their state.” And so whoever got the most votes would be president.

Whoever got the second most votes would be vice president. So under Washington, he unquestionably is the guy with the most votes. Adams, he comes vice president. Under Adams, the next president, you have him as a Federalist and his vice president is a Jeffersonian Republican. He’s Jefferson, but you have the president and the vice president coming from two different alliances or parties. And then the next election after that in 1800, you have this major crisis when the top two candidates tie. So you can see how the idea made sense at the time and how it didn’t work out really well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But in a way it would make sense to have this system and in fact kick up two people from two different parties or two different factions so that they had to get along. But it’s the legislative thing you’re saying

Joanne Freeman:

Adams himself said, “The second guy is really part of the legislative branch, and the first guy is really part of the executive branch.” He takes the job assuming he’s going to play a role in debate and he’s going to be an active participant as vice president. And he’s dissuaded from that really early on, which is part of why he’s so frustrated. And he has all of these very Adams ish things that he says here you have Adams as early as April of 1789. So that’s right when the government is going into effect the new government under the constitution. And Adams says, “Not wholly without experience in public assemblies,” which is a great understatement, “I have been more accustomed to take a share in their debates than to preside in their deliberation.” So already, he’s expressing some reservations about what it is he’s supposed to do and what he wants to do.

Early on when you read particularly the diary of this wonderful Pennsylvania Senator, William Maclay. Maclay captures Adams trying to figure out what he is in the Senate. So Maclay records Adams at one point saying, “Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act. I am vice president. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.” There’s another comical moment when they’re talking about the inauguration of Washington and when he comes into the Senate, he will be the President in the Senate. And Adams, of course, is the president of the Senate. And Adams becomes very concerned like, “What will I be? When the President is here, what will I be?” And Oliver Ellsworth at the time says… They had a long debate about how the inauguration should proceed. Ellsworth says, “Well, it is evident and clear, sir, that wherever the senator to be there, sir, you must be at the head of them. But further, sir.” And in the diary, Maclay puts a period after every one of these words. I, period, shall, period, not, period, pretend, period, to, period, say, I shall not pretend to say.

Like none of us know what you’re doing, but you’re at the head of us. Like so many things. This is not a John Adams slamming portion of the episode. It’s just that everything was undefined at this point and the vice presidency was conceived of more as part of the political process than as a position with an identity in and of itself. Except that every once in a while, he knows that because things are nearly balanced in the Senate between Federalists and Republicans, that his vote might count.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Like, “We’re going to set up this guy who’s got no job basically, or a very small job. And he’s largely unimportant except when he’s the most important person in the country.”

Joanne Freeman:

Right? And the Senate will sit and watch him at the front of the chamber, not quite knowing what to do to busy himself. So in 1794, there’s a potentially important treaty being worked out with England. John Jay is sent off to England to negotiate this treaty, and Adams realizes at that moment and writes to Abigail, who’s up in Massachusetts, he realizes that, “Wow, the people are so balanced in their views regarding this treaty in the Senate, what I’m thinking might matter.” He writes to her saying, “The times are so critical and parties so nearly balanced that I cannot in honor nor consistently with my duty, abandon my post. There are so many wild projects and motions and so many to support them that I am become of more importance than usual. My vote will count.” There’s crazy stuff going on here. So that’s not really fully a complaint. He’s just sort of commenting on the fact that, “Hey, it’s important for me to be here actually, because what I’m thinking and saying and doing might count.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the Jay Treaty, which becomes an incredibly important treaty, he breaks the tie on. Okay, can you walk us through how we change the way we do the election of the vice president? Because that really matters.

Joanne Freeman:

So basically because of the election of 1800 in which the two candidates running for the Republicans, Thomas Jefferson, who was clearly intended to be the presidential candidate, and Aaron Burr, who was clearly intended to be the vice presidential candidate, they tie. They get a tie number of votes because of the way the system is set up. So now who’s going to be president? And it gets thrown into the house as the Constitution states to decide, and every state gets a vote. Burr doesn’t step back and say, “Oh no, I’m just supposed to be vice president.” He says, essentially, “Look, if the people want me to be president, I will be president. So go figure yourselves out. But right now, either one of us could be president.” Which, of course, throws people into an uproar. And you get the 12th amendment after this election, which then says, “Okay, no more of this most votes, second most votes. Now we’ll have two different votes, one for president, one for vice president.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

But then we get the idea of a running mate.

Joanne Freeman:

You get the idea of a running mate. But again, the idea becoming cemented that there’s a ticket, that’s a later development.

Heather Cox Richardson:

After that, the meaning of the vice presidency changes once you get the idea of a ticket later on. And that… I always like to point to Abraham Lincoln’s choice of Hannibal Hamlin in 1860 for that because Hannibal Hamlin was thought of as somewhat of a radical senator, but his real attraction for which would’ve brought more radical people on board Lincoln’s ticket, which was looked at as being moderate. But the real reason that Hamlin ends up on that ticket is because Maine votes before anybody else in the country in that era for municipal offices. And that old saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” was really true because if you could get momentum going in Maine, you could carry it to other states. And Hannibal Hamlin was a very popular and very well-connected lawmaker from Maine. And so putting him on the ticket for a westerner essentially bounced the ticket and made it more likely that Lincoln would make it over the top in that election as he did.

And there was a big to-do when Hannibal Hamlin and Lincoln win in Maine in 1860. And that’s still very current. Of course, the idea that you have to balance your ticket somehow, you could write a whole book on the different compromises people have made to make sure that they balance the ticket.

When we’ve talked about doing a show on the vice presidency, the person I first said was Chet Arthur.

Joanne Freeman:

I just have to say for the moment the fact that you call him Chet Arthur, like that you mentioned that we’re in our sweet spot, and that just is, to me a very sweet example of that. Who else calls him Chet Arthur?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so what I love about Chet Arthur is he is such, to me, a microcosm of the United States in that he becomes the vice president for James A. Garfield in 1880. Not for geographical reasons, although that’s part of it. He’s from New York and Garfield is from Ohio, but because of a split in the Republican Party. And Garfield is running in 1880 after having really sort of reestablished the Republican Party as a party that cares about black rights as a party that cares about… People call it waving the bloody shirt, referring back to the Confederacy and the Civil War. But the reality was that in 1879, the Democrats had taken over the House of Representatives and the Senate and the former Confederates, therefore got the upper hand in Congress and tried to destroy the government. They tried to starve the government of money. And said, “We’re just not going to pay any of the government’s bills until you do what we want.”

Joanne Freeman:

Huh?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, exactly. I know. I know. But Garfield really leads the fight against that. And he keeps saying, “We fought this war once on the battlefield, and he of course was in the war and we’re not going to fight it again by starving the government.” And some of the people in Congress literally said, “We made a mistake seceding in 1861. We should have stayed here and just done this.” And he’s furious about that. So he says, “We care about black rights, we care about this country, we care about the national government.” He’s really taking the stand. But the Republican Party itself by then was pretty corrupt, or at least pieces of it were. And they were centered in New York, which had way more electoral college votes than anybody else in this era.

And New York was really run by Roscoe Conkling, whom we have talked about before here. And Chet Arthur was sort of his right-hand man. He was the head of the New York’s customs house. And by dint of the fact, he got a cut of all the money going through that very busy port, Arthur was kind of your image of the corrupt politician in those days. He wore the fancy clothes and had the fancy dinners, and he was sort of Mr. Corruption.

Joanne Freeman:

He was proudly corrupt since that was a norm. So for example, in 1872, Arthur’s friend, Silas Burt, who was an officer at the New York City Port, actually challenged Arthur to do something about the glaring corruption of his chief deputy at the customs office. And Arthur responded with this wonderful quote, “You are one of those goody goody fellows who set up a high standard of morality that other people cannot reach. What do you mean cut the corruption?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right, but the rest of us can’t do that.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, you goody goody guy.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So of course, Garfield is one of those goody goody guys. And when it comes time-

Joanne Freeman:

I’m sorry, I’m going to just keep that phrase because it’s just too good.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Garfield can’t win without New York because it has so many electoral votes. And Conkling, Roscoe Conkling, essentially runs New York and Chet Arthur is his right-hand man. So Garfield keeps trying to get Conkling behind his presidency when in fact Conkling had been open that he wanted US Grant to have a third term. There was a big fight about that. And Conkling and his branch of the Republican Party were pushing for Grant. And a lot of people are like, “We don’t think we should have Grant again, because Conkling’s going to run Grant’s Life.” So Garfield gets the nomination because of the big fight that he had taken back to the former Confederates, and then he’s got to figure out some way to get the Conkling branch on board. And Conkling is just going to be a total jerk about this whole thing. So they put Chet Arthur in the vice presidency basically to bring Conkling in New York around, and Arthur had never held an elected position.

So once they get elected by very few votes, Conkling decides, “Okay, this is fine. Now I’m going to run the administration.” And he basically wants to dictate to Garfield, and Garfield is like, “This ain’t happening.” So they get into a huge fight over who he’s going to appoint to take over the New York City custom house because Arthur of course can’t run it any longer because he’s in the vice presidency. And the fight goes on through the first several months of Garfield’s presidency. And it’s actually a really sad time too for Garfield because his wife has malaria. So he is trying to balance all this stuff, and finally in desperation to make their point, Conkling resigns from the Senate. And the other senator from New York known from then on as Me Too Plat, we’ve talked about him before too because he’s like, “Me too, I’m leaving too.”

And the New York legislature does not reappoint them. So essentially Garfield has won, like this is going to go on for months. And in fact, at the end of his life, he learns that the New York legislature has in fact appointed people other than Conkling and Plat. This fight essentially consumes the first part of Garfield’s presidency and he wins it. So there’s this moment when it really looks like there will be this opportunity to revive this old Republican vision of black rights and virtue and all this. And then of course, Charles Guiteau Assassinates Garfield, he’s mentally ill, but the first thing out of his mouth is, “I am a stalwart. I’m one of the people who supports Conkling.” And now Arthur is president.

Joanne Freeman:

But now let me ask you a question related to Arthur first coming in as vice president even before he becomes president. So we started out by talking about the vice presidency in its earliest years where people aren’t really quite sure what it does, and we’re showing it evolving. So now we’re not quite a hundred years later, what did Arthur think the vice presidency was going to be before he does one of the two main things that the vice presidency is supposed to do, which is take over if something happens to the president. Is there evidence as to what he conceived of the position these decades later? I’m assuming by that point it’s changed dramatically.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think Arthur’s vision of the vice presidency was that it was going to let him have patronage to hand out, and he was going to continue to have sort of this man about town rich lifestyle. And he keeps meeting with Conkling. He continues to plot with Conkling to put Conkling in power over Garfield. I mean, he’s really just a thorn in everybody’s side.

Joanne Freeman:

So he’s going to be a Politico who happens to be vice president.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s correct. And he’s not going to do anything because the vice president doesn’t do anything policy-wise. And Garfield had plans, but of course he’s all caught up in this fight with a man who’s essentially his vice president and his vice president’s mentor. And what I love about this is that as Arthur is sort of trying to work with Conkling to continue to run the Republican Party and everything looks like it’s going to hell, and then Garfield is assassinated. And so first Arthur is in shock because of course, the man who killed the president… He’s not going to die for a while, but the man who has put a bullet in the president essentially implicated him in it by saying, “I’m a stalwart now Arthur is president.” And he’s like, “Oh, crap.” And then of course there’s this huge outpouring across the country of love and respect for Garfield as we do for our assassinated presidents.

But then Conkling shows up essentially and says, “Well, this is great. Now you’re going to be the president and we’re going to go ahead and be able to do everything we wanted to do.” And this is why I love CheT Arthur is because he said no. He said, “This was a game…” I mean, and I’m paraphrasing, this is not directly from it. He basically was like, “This was a game and this was about power in New York and the nice life we had with power in New York, but now I’m the president and it’s not a game anymore.” And he turns Conkling away and he actually becomes a decent president.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s interesting, right? Because of what we were just saying, that the vice presidency, which still is this kind of blob of a job, whatever you do, you do it. You preside over the Senate and you take over if something happens to the president. As vice president, he’s going to go on doing whatever the heck he wants. He becomes president. He sees that as a position that really has power. And now he changes his behavior, he changes his politics, he sees it. The word you just used is game, right? It’s no longer a game. He sees himself as someone who really has power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he has the power to use that position to support Conkling, to do everything that Conkling ever wanted, to put the stalwarts back in power, to really run with corruption. And he doesn’t. I mean, everyone forgets about Chet Arthur, but in a way it’s kind of a magical moment of humanity where he says, “No, I’m not going to do that.” And he, of course, destroys his political career because the Garfield people hated him anyway, and the Democrats hated him as well, and now his own people hate him. So he basically has no friends left at all. But then he does in 1883, he signs the Civil Service Act, also known as the Pendleton Act, which reforms the civil service so that people are theoretically no longer going to get positions based on patronage, and they’re going to get them because they’re qualified for them.

It’s a fairly small step to begin with, but it’s going to expand to have the civil service system we have now. But it’s a huge change in our government in terms of the way the entire system operated. But it is there because this guy given power, didn’t say, “Oh, this is great. I’m just going to go on and do what I’ve always done.” He said, “No, it’s not a game anymore and I’m going to try and do what’s right for the country.”

Joanne Freeman:

But in the context of our vice presidency story, it shows that although the job is evolving at this point towards the end of the 19th century, just the difference in how he acts highlights the difference in how the two jobs are perceived, right? The presidency is this position where you have actual power and you can really affect policy. The vice presidency is a national office that will enable him to go about doing what he would like to do. And it’s known, it’s not like that wasn’t something new when Garfield and Arthur come along, but that’s a really important transition to see happen, and he makes it even more important in the way he acts.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, remember he had just watched Andrew Johnson take over for Lincoln and completely change all of Lincoln’s policies. So I think at some level he was like, “I am literally the president’s stand in and I had better do what the President wanted.” And you can see that going forward with people like LBJ after the assassination of JFK in 1963, in a way, outdoing Kennedy sort of saying, “Okay, now I’ve got the mantle of Kennedy. I need to go do what he would’ve done.” And Arthur really is sort of the precursor to that.

Joanne Freeman:

We’re segueing now into the 20th century, and if we’re talking about how the vice presidency has changed and what it is and why it’s important and what it does, I think you were the person who suggested this third person we were going to talk about, in part because it represents a dramatic change in the nature of the vice presidency, and that is Walter Mondale.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Walter Frederick Mondale was born in a small town in Minnesota in 1928. His father was a minister, and Mondale worked as an aid to Hubert Humphrey during Humphrey’s first US Senate campaign in 1948, even before he went to law school at the University of Minnesota. And his friends called him Fritz, which was a popular nickname for Frederick, which was his middle name. So he’s more popularly known today as Fritz Mondale.

Joanne Freeman:

So he has a political career before ascending to the vice presidency. He was a respected lawyer in Minneapolis through the 1950s. In 1960, he becomes Minnesota State Attorney General at the young age of 32. He becomes a powerful player in the State’s Democratic Party. In 1964, he’s appointed to the US Senate in Hubert Humphrey’s seat when Humphrey signs on as Lyndon B. Johnson’s running mate for the presidency.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Mondale is a great supporter of Johnson’s Great Society Legislation. And actually as early as 1971 was pushing for national childcare, which actually we talked about in our July, 2021 episode, that human toll of infrastructure. But with this very powerful visibility and stature as part of the Great Society or support of the Great Society, he was a somewhat obvious choice for Jimmy Carter to select as his running mate during his 1976 presidential campaign. The idea there was partly to balance the ticket geographically, Mondale coming from Minnesota and Carter from Plains, Georgia, but also it would really give a state governor a foothold in the National Administration. They had very different skill sets, and that’s really going to matter. Mondale initially wasn’t sure he should take the VP slot, and he went to Humphrey and said, “What do you think?” And Humphrey said, “Fritz, you must do this. You’ll get more done down there in two days than you will up here in two years.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now it’s worth noting that by the time you get to the middle of the 20th century, the vice presidency has become something more significant. It’s continuing to evolve. But after World War II, because you have things like the development of the atomic bomb and other issues of national security that become more and more central, the vice president is seen as a role that’s more important. So Mondale wasn’t sure if he should do it, but the job that he’s deciding whether he should take or not is a job now that has more significance to it. In the mid 1950s, Sam Rayburn, the very powerful speaker of the House, emphasized the importance of the choice of a running mate saying, “In these thermonuclear times, you must select a man, one, that is the best for your country. Two, that you trust so much that he would be the trustee for your wife and children when you die.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet, after World War II and even during World War II, the concentration of power in the President often means that they don’t particularly like or trust their vice presidents. And that’s going to matter going into Mondale’s vice presidency because as he’s trying to figure out whether or not he should do it, he flies down to Georgia to talk to Carter. And he said, “Don’t put me on the back burner and use me only if something happens. I want to have an active role in your administration.” He puts it on the table, says, “We’re going to change the role of the vice president here, and I’m going to have an active role.” And Carter agreed. Later on in Mondale’s memoir, he recalled that Carter said, “I think some presidents in the past were uncomfortable with the presence of their own vice president. They were worried about their mortality, and their vice president only reminded them of it. But that doesn’t bother me. I know I could be comfortable with that.” That’s so Carter.

Joanne Freeman:

When he wins the election, he follows through on that promise to make Mondale a kind of partner. He gives Mondale an office in the west wing of the White House, which is a first for a vice president. He announces that Mondale will have full access to intelligence briefings, a weekly lunch with Carter, and a staff that is integrated with Carter’s team.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Mondale is going to reshape the vice presidency, and Carter’s going to be right along with that, not least because Mondale has such a different skillset than Carter does. He’s run a New South campaign in the state of Georgia as a governor. He will not have the connections in Washington that Mondale has. So Carter is no fool. He’s going to take advantage of Mondale’s connections in the city and also the things he’s learned in all of his time as a prominent Senator.

Joanne Freeman:

Mondale puts it really clearly as to what he thinks is the logic behind his assertion that the job needs to be different. In his memoir, he says, “The President needs an independent source of advice, a separate set of ears that are not connected with any federal agency so he can get a government-wide objective council. If you are Secretary of State, you’re going to look at administration policy from the perspective of diplomats. If you are director of legislative affairs, you will always be thinking about how a particular decision will play on Capitol Hill. The vice President isn’t tied down to any one of these constituencies when it comes time to balance priorities across the government and advise the president.” This is structural reasoning in addition to the fact that his skillset and who he is as a person is changing the nature of the vice presidency.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it also reflects Mondale’s time in national government at a time when those roles are changing too. I mean, he’s structurally very important as well. So one of the first tests of Mondale’s influence came in the Supreme Courts of Regents of the University of California versus Bakke. The case was about whether or not it was constitutional to consider race in college admissions. And Mondale shaped the response of the Carter administration. He was instrumental in overseeing the government’s brief in that case, and ultimately, the administration argued against formal racial quotas, but for the concept that race could be a factor considered in admissions. And the Supreme Court ultimately agreed with that definition. He also helped to smooth over tensions between Carter and the Democratic leadership in Congress, which to some degree saw Carter as an upstart, including trying to make peace between Carter, who’s a very specific kind of politician, and Tip O’Neill, the house speaker from Massachusetts, who was a very different kind of politician.

Joanne Freeman:

Specific kind of-

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s tight, and were laughing, but the events in the American South that led up to the election of Carter were about race and about constructing a new kind of economy and constructing a new vision of racial matters in America. Tip O’Neill was an old-fashioned Boston machine politician, and that’s a different skillset. He was very good at creating constituencies and of really muscling things through Congress, both really important approaches to politics, but really different. And Mondale could bridge between the two. Mondale ended up in 1977 being crucial to pushing through a stimulus package that Carter wanted. And in his memoir, he actually said to Carter he needed to become more friendly with Congress. He said, “Before this is over, you’re going to find that people like Tip O’Neill are your best friends. They might seem alien to you right now, creatures of Washington of the party, but they want you to succeed. They can deliver with this constituency if they want to in ways others can’t.”

Joanne Freeman:

Mondale also took a hands-on role in foreign policy, again talking about his skillset and his experience in a way that Carter didn’t necessarily have. Mondale tried to pressure South Africa’s apartheid government to end their racist policies and travel to test the waters between Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, setting the groundwork for what would become the historic Camp David Accords. During the talks, immediately proceeding the Accords, Mondale was central to convincing Begin to give up the Sinai Peninsula, which was a major component in the ultimate peace agreement. Mondale told Begin, “We are not talking about Judea and Samaria. I know your feelings on that. We are talking about places that have no significance to Israel. They are not essential to your defense, to your security, to your economy, to your history. It’s just a pile of sand.” Well, that’s a quote of a moment in time. Wow. But there he is playing a very strong role in foreign affairs.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And perhaps making a shift that certainly came from Carter, but articulating a shift toward foreign policy based on principles of human rights. And in 1979, Mondale gave an iconic speech at the UN Conference on Indo-Chinese refugees, which was hosted in Geneva. He made a really forceful case to the 60 assembled nations to allow refugees from the Vietnam War into their countries citing the failure of western nations on the eve of World War II to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied European nations. “Let us renounce that legacy of shame,” he said, “Let us honor the moral principles we inherit. Let us do something meaningful, something profound to stem this misery. We face a world problem. Let us fashion a world solution. History will not forgive us if we fail. History will not forget us if we succeed.” And that shift there in foreign policy toward one focusing on human rights and moral principles as opposed to power and benefits to the United States necessarily, is a really important shift that we’re still seeing playing out today.

Joanne Freeman:

After Mondale’s death, Carter highlighted what you and I, Heather, have been emphasizing here about the very different role that Mondale played as vice president in the way in which he really changed the job. He said in April of 2021, “Fritz used his political skill and personal integrity to transform the vice presidency into a dynamic policy driving force that had never been seen before.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And he recognized that the vice presidency could be a place where you’d, you’d change the country. And that showed, I think when he ran for president in 1984 and chose as his vice president, Geraldine Ferraro of New York, making her the first female vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket. That was not necessarily a daring move in the sense that it certainly appealed to certain constituencies. It balanced the ticket to some degree. She was from New York, he was from Minnesota. But it was bold. It was a bold thing to do.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s interesting. One of the things that occurs to me in the narrative that we’ve constructed about the vice presidency is first off, as we sort of suggested at the beginning, it’s not as though Americans have a very strong sort of politically imaginative hold on what the vice presidency is on what vice presidents do, and various points in time, Americans have been focused either on Congress or on the presidency, really not so much the vice presidency. So part of what we’re doing is showing, highlighting a job that I think in many ways Americans don’t necessarily think about and is immensely important. But I think equally, if not more important is the fact that you can see how dramatically this job changed from how it was very briefly described, if that, in the Constitution to where it is today. And I think that’s important because certainly Originalists would point to the Constitution and say, “Well, that created the system. There it is. That’s what it is.”

We’re showing a really dramatic change in the nature of a really important job. I think right now, that’s a really important thing to bear in mind because we’re looking at presidential and congressional and actually just generally political contests right now where people have some rather undemocratic ideas about how politics should proceed.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I love the way Mondale talked about how the president needs to have a sounding board outside of the bubble and also the degree to which he balanced Carter out. Because one of the things that fascinates me about this position as we look at it now, I think in a way it’s the hardest job in the country because you can’t overshadow the president. So there’s a lot of complaints about why isn’t the vice president out there every day making speeches? And it’s like because that’s literally not her job description. The idea is she needs to keep her mouth shut basically, so she doesn’t overshadow the president, but at the same time, they’re supposed to move the President’s policies forward, especially in areas where the president doesn’t have the expertise, like Mondale had it in foreign affairs in a way that Carter didn’t.

Joanne Freeman:

Or in which the skills and persona of the Vice President are going to be politically more useful and more powerful than the President’s.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The fact that she has been in the States talking about reproductive rights and the fact that she has ran down to see The Tennessee Three immediately, and the fact that she could represent the United States in Africa, a continent where we have a long history of people not thinking we’re doing very much good to be able to have a female representative of our government who is a woman of color, was so freaking huge that Africa trip was like this giant symbol of this major change in our foreign policy was just been tons of speeches about both before and after, and she just made it all come to life in pictures. And that reality that a vice president uses that role to fill in the holes that a president can’t necessarily is, I think, really the definition of it in the 21st century.

And it’s interesting when you look at the people whose names are being talked about for the vice presidential nomination on the Republican side, and you think… I don’t think they’re thinking of it that way. I think they’re thinking of it as, “Let’s get the guy elected and then eat a sandwich.”

Joanne Freeman:

Well, and also thinking in a very one-dimensional way, like, “Oh, well, if the president’s from this part of the country, we need someone from that part of the country. Oh, wouldn’t it be handy if the vice presidential candidate is a woman?” Sort of balancing in the most superficial kind of ways. Factor of the matter is, 150 years in the future, if you and I were doing this episode, Harris would be one of the vice presidents we would want to talk about, right? So I think for reasons both constructive and defensive, it’s important to think about who is running for vice president, who is being debated about who is being appointed to be the running mate, and what that means about possible outcomes because in ways that I think we often don’t focus on, the person who is vice president can have an enormous impact.