by Torres Leyba, Chair Ward J and DPVC Secretary
Over the 235-year history of the American Presidency, many books, articles, and scholarly works have opined on the curious history of the one political office that, on first glance, would seem like an obvious springboard to attaining the top elected political office in America—the Vice-Presidency.
Since its inclusion in the Constitution, however, those who have occupied the office have historically bemoaned their time as America’s “spare” Executive—from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt, from John Nance Garner to Harry Truman, and most recently from Al Gore through the current incumbent in the office, Kamala Harris. On even the most cursory evaluation of the office, the reasoning behind these attitudes becomes clearer. As an office, the responsibilities inherent with the Vice-Presidential office are enumerated to just a single task—breaking a tie vote in the Senate in their position as nominal President of that body. Aside from that, the second in command has been seen by many as merely a political wasteland where longtime political figures serve before concluding their public careers. In public perception, the office’s occupant is viewed largely as a kind of ghoul—skulking around the White House for ceremonial pictures, state dinners, and flying across the globe on foreign travels, waiting for the moment when they may, through unfortunate circumstances, find themselves succeeding to the Presidency itself.
There are four main ways that a Vice-President may succeed to the office aside from being elected in their own right—through impeachment and removal from office, resignation, medical disability, and of course, the death of the incumbent. This last tragic event has been exactly the way that most of our Vice-Presidents succeeded their predecessors into the top job. Starting in 1841 with the death of William Henry Harrison after barely a month in office (he died of pneumonia aged 68 after giving a marathon inaugural address in a driving storm without a coat, to prove how vibrant and healthy he was), and most recently occurring in Dallas on November 22, 1963, the death of an incumbent president has found eight men elevated to the presidency in this way. The most recent occasion that required that a Vice-President assume the Presidency was on August 9, 1974, following the resignation of Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal that had consumed the nation’s attention for nearly two years.
In this exciting election year, however, the main focus of political aficionados has been the odd history of those Vice-Presidents who have made the logical step of running to succeed their political partner and predecessor into the Oval Office. Surprisingly, those who have sought the Presidency directly after serving as a type of co-president for four to eight years have been singularly unsuccessful in their respective bids to attain the greatest political prize. Indeed, if you read the most recent articles focusing on those Vice-Presidents who have managed to pull off such a feat, some will state a factual mistake in their research, claiming that the last time a Vice-President was elected President in their own right was George H.W. Bush (Bush 41), who won the 1988 election to succeed the man he had served as VP for eight years—Ronald Reagan. Others will correctly state that there have been times when a Vice-President has been elected President after another administration has served—but in those cases, the only man ever mentioned is Richard Nixon. This misses the most recent example of a former Vice-President winning the Presidency after another administration had taken power.
Of course, I’m talking about our current and 46th President, Joe Biden. Remember him? Like Nixon in 1968, Biden became president after someone else had been president for four years (Donald Trump). Unlike Nixon, however, Biden never lost the Presidency after becoming his party’s nominee—he withdrew as a candidate in 1987 and 2008 well before the Convention, and we all know how his fortune changed after the debate on June 27 of this year. The only time he accepted the Democratic Presidential nomination, in 2020, he was, of course, elected.
On four separate occasions in the 20th century—in 1901, 1923, 1945, and 1963—the VP became President due to the death of the incumbent. Of those, all four former “Veeps” (a name coined by Truman VP Alben W. Barkley) were elected to and served only one term as President in their own right in the next election cycle (1904, 1924, 1948, and 1964). Of these four individuals, all won election to their terms by wide margins (Truman’s in 1948 being completely unexpected). Amazingly, three incumbents (LBJ, Truman, and Coolidge) announced their decision not to run for another term at the end of their first. In Theodore Roosevelt’s case, a brash promise not to run again after being elected in 1904 and the election of his hand-picked successor left him unable to win another GOP nomination, despite him being one of the most popular presidents of his time. His run as a third-party candidate in 1912 split the Republican party in two and assured the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson that year. Still a young man a decade after leaving office, Roosevelt was planning to bid for the 1920 Republican nomination when he died in his sleep in early 1919.
After the epic national career of Richard Nixon (who along with FDR is the only man nominated to a major party’s national ticket a total of five times), and excluding Bush 41 and Biden, former elected Veeps were nominated and ran for election in 1976, 1984, and 2000 (Ford, Mondale, and Gore), but did not win in November. The late Robert J. Dole, longtime Kansas Senator and Republican Senate Majority/Minority Leader, was Gerald Ford’s VP nominee in 1976, lost with Ford that year, and won the GOP nomination for the top job twenty years later, only to lose badly to Bill Clinton in November 1996.
At the beginning of the Federal Republic in 1789, the first VP who succeeded to the presidency by election was John Adams, who succeeded Washington in only our third presidential cycle following the Constitution’s ratification. Throughout the nineteenth century, most people wishing to be President (including Adams’s own son John Quincy), did so from either congressional seats or the Cabinet—usually the Secretary of State post (like Secretary Clinton in 2016). Two presidential deaths (1841, 1850) and the first two assassinations in our history (1865, 1881) elevated VPs to the Presidency, but the only Veep of the same party as their immediate predecessor in the 1800s who successfully attained election to the top job was Martin Van Buren in 1837.
That leaves only Thomas Jefferson—who served as our second VP under Adams and who did directly succeed him as our third President in 1801. Because of a quirk of the Constitution prior to the enactment of the 12th Amendment, the candidate who won the most electoral votes was elected President, and the runner-up in the College “won” the Veep slot. When Adams became the first VP in 1789 and 1792, then succeeded Washington as the second President in 1797, this hadn’t been a big political deal for Adams, as both he and Washington belonged to the same political faction—the Federalists. After all the electoral votes were counted, however, it turned out that by a mere three-vote margin, the new Vice-President was Thomas Jefferson—who was the head of the Federalist opposition, the Democratic-Republicans! As a result, the second presidential administration was frustrated by a VP who actively campaigned for the Presidency the entire four years he ostensibly was serving as “support” for Adams, whom he despised at the time. By the time of the 1800 election, Jefferson had so successfully turned public opinion against Adams and the Federalists that he was elected President in a romp over Adams (along with Aaron Burr as it turned out, but that’s another coloring book and another box of crayons for another time).
Ironically, President Biden’s withdrawal from this year’s race follows a curious trend. Of the five Vice-Presidents who have managed to win election to the Presidency in their own right without having succeeded to the office beforehand due to death or resignation (Jefferson, Van Buren, Nixon, Bush 41, and Biden), only Jefferson was able to be reelected to and served a complete eight-year term. Likely beating an incumbent of an opposition party helped, incumbent Veep or no, but this is the only successful Veep-turned-two-term-President example our history has to date.
Only two Vice-Presidents in our history were elected and directly succeeded the president they served under (Van Buren and Bush 41). In both cases, both men (who are historically listed as being the most politically adept and diplomatically adroit to have ever served prior to becoming President) lost their reelection campaigns in humiliating fashion. In both cases, they had followed two-term presidents (Jackson and Reagan) who were wildly popular in office and arguably could have been elected again had they not either chosen to retire (Jackson) or been barred by the 22nd Amendment limiting elected presidential terms to two (Reagan).
By contrast, Joe Biden and Richard Nixon both also served under historically popular two-term presidents (Obama and Eisenhower), but their fortunes once elected after being out of office for a time after serving as Veep is markedly different. Eight years after retirement as Veep and three-plus years having served as our current President, Joe Biden had successfully secured the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination for himself prior to his withdrawal in favor of his VP, Kamala Harris. While the president’s chances for
reelection seemed daunting at the time he decided (?) to pull out, depending on the final election outcome it will always be a subject for historians as to whether he could have won a second term against an opponent who is now so obviously running scared from the real threat of political oblivion at the hands of the voters. Indeed, if Harris pulls off a more impressive victory in November than current polling suggests, it may become a point of contention that Biden, while perhaps not winning in a landslide fashion, could have eventually won the baseline 270 electoral votes needed to secure a second term.
Nixon, of course, remains the only former Vice-President aside from Jefferson to have actually won a second term; he was well into serving it when his complicity in covering up the Watergate scandal forced him from office. Unlike Biden, who ran for president four years after serving as Veep, Nixon not only ran for President eight years after serving as Ike’s #2, he also, like Jefferson, is the only other Veep to win election to the Presidency on his second attempt. After losing a close election to succeed Eisenhower in 1960, Nixon was considered a dead political duck after losing the 1962 California governor election. Both Nixon’s and Biden’s political revival and unlikely careers as President following a hiatus from public service as Vice-President are as amazing as they were and are historic.
In both narratives, a nagging question remains for the ages: had it not been for the disgrace of Watergate and the arguably inevitable decline of a master political force exposed at a critical moment in our history as a Democracy, what would America have looked like after an alternate history of the presidency where a popular Richard Nixon oversaw our nation’s Bicentennial, and where Joe Biden remained as sharp on the debate stage at eighty-one as he was when he first ran for the job when he was forty-four?
Obviously, we’ll never know. However, one thing remains a concern. If she does win the White House in November and succeeds Joe Biden as President, Kamala Harris will join Van Buren and George H.W. Bush as only the third Vice-President to have done so. Although she will have only spent four years as Biden’s second instead of eight, it will be interesting, to say the least, to see whether she can, like Jefferson, leave the White House in 2033, rather than in 2029.
