The current vice president is making news as she runs for the top job, but past VPs have often been relegated to the sidelines. Michelle Ferrari, writer, producer and director for American Experience, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the history of the vice presidency, the 25th amendment that helped to solidify the role, and why the U.S. Constitution doesn’t offer much guidance on defining the position. Her documentary “The American Vice President” airs on PBS and streams on PBS.org.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Down through history, the private papers of vice presidents reveal a lot of complaints about just how unsatisfying the role can be. Highly visible, sure. Perks like Air Force Two and a fancy government furnished home, a full staff, and a seat at the table at Cabinet meetings in modern times, Absolutely. And yet these public servants who often feel sidelined and superfluous, are literally a heartbeat away from a staggering amount of power and responsibility. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. The role of the vice president has actually evolved a great deal from its earliest, not very detailed description in the Constitution. But little by little, the events of history have served to define and refine what a vice president is meant to do beyond being ready in the event something could happen to the person who holds the job they most covet. Michelle Ferrari is writer, producer and director of the American Experience documentary that explores this evolution. It’s called The American Vice President. Michelle, welcome to Think.
Michelle Ferrari [00:01:03] Great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:05] The vice presidency really is a weird job. Like we want this person to be qualified to run the country at a moment’s notice. But in the meantime, the job is not viewed as all that relevant. And many vice presidents have found this frustrating.
Michelle Ferrari [00:01:20] That’s absolutely true. The vice president’s role depends very much on the president he’s serving with he or she is serving with. And until very recently in our history, most presidents did not regard their vice president as a partner in governance really at all. And so many of the vice presidents who served, particularly in the 19th century and the early 20th century, themselves derided the office at every opportunity. It was frequently referred to as a nullity. Richard Mentor Johnson, who was the vice president to Martin Van Buren in the 1830s, actually decamped to his native Kentucky after being installed as vice president, where he spent his term running a tavern. Teddy Roosevelt anticipated being able to go to law school during his term and famously remarked that the office was not a stepping stone to anything other than oblivion.
Krys Boyd [00:02:18] This was especially challenging for Lyndon Johnson, who, of course, was sworn into office as president after the Kennedy assassination, but Johnson had been such a dynamic presence as Senate majority leader. One has to imagine he was like a caged tiger after being promoted to vice president.
Michelle Ferrari [00:02:37] Yeah. Somebody noted during his term as vice president that he was like a very large horse in a very small corral. I mean, he certainly had more power as the majority leader and I think, you know, had agreed to and had, in fact, thrown his hat into the ring to be president and had expected to bast John Kennedy in the back rooms at the Democratic National Convention. Never imagining that Kennedy would get the nomination on the first ballot. But he agreed to be vice president, I think, in part because he felt a sense of duty. And also he had done the math. There had been six presidents who had succeeded to the presidency at that point in history. And he actually had an aide on his campaign figure out the odds that he might become president. It sounds very morbid, but he had done those calculations in advance, and I think that was part of his thinking, not that he was wishing ill on Kennedy, but he felt like he had a good chance of becoming president at some point.
Krys Boyd [00:03:51] The odds actually aren’t bad, are they, for a vice president hoping to be president?
Michelle Ferrari [00:03:57] At this point, 1 in 5, just by virtue of succession. Over the course of our history, 15 vice presidents have become president, eight by virtue of the president’s death in office. One, Gerald Ford, by virtue of Nixon’s resignation, only five have gone on to be elected to the office. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Joe Biden. I think it’s significant that three of the of the five have been in recent past.
Krys Boyd [00:04:36] Yeah, I would love to have you with me on trivia night, by the way. You’re able to rattle all of those off, speaks to the amount of research you did for this documentary. What role, Michelle, does the original text of the Constitution create for the vice president?
Michelle Ferrari [00:04:52] The Constitution is really very, very vague about the role of the vice president. I mean, it assigned some clearly two responsibilities: one is to cast a tie breaking vote in the Senate and the other is to succeed the president, should the president be unable to fulfill the duties of the office. In the latter case, that latter responsibility. Thus, the protocols and provisions are very, very vague, which I found really very surprising because this role as successor to the leader of the United States and ultimately the leader of the free world was not given much thought. And this was in a time when life expectancy was about half of what it is now.
Krys Boyd [00:05:41] Yeah. I mean, you know, you weren’t necessarily choosing the leader of the free world in the late 18th century, but as you say, before modern medicine, it wasn’t so unusual for people to suddenly die around the age that people were president.
Michelle Ferrari [00:05:56] Right. I mean, the first president to die in office, William Henry Harrison, which was in 1841, died of pneumonia barely a month into his term.
Krys Boyd [00:06:07] And there was a great deal of uncertainty about John Tyler’s accession then from the vice presidency to the presidency wasn’t there.
Michelle Ferrari [00:06:16] Yeah, there was a lot of controversy. I mean, John Tyler didn’t think there was any controversy. And as soon as he heard that Harrison was dead, he arranged to take the oath of office and declared himself president of the United States. Harrison’s cabinet really disagreed and felt that John Tyler was merely to act as president according to the Constitution. And there was a lot of controversy at the time, and the newspapers called John Tyler his great accident, see the great usurper. And he was derided, but he stuck to his guns when he received mail addressed to John Tyler, acting president. He refused to open them, returned them to sender, and really set a precedent that was followed by every vice president who succeeded a president who died in office thereafter. So Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson all ascended to the presidency based on the Tyler precedent.
Krys Boyd [00:07:24] These days, of course, president and vice president run together on a ticket. But it wasn’t that way in the beginning.
Michelle Ferrari [00:07:31] No. And in fact, the framers of the Constitution were very concerned that after George Washington, there would not be a national leader. And so they set up the original method of elections so that each elector would cast two votes for president. And one of those votes had to be for a person outside of their home state. And this was in an effort to find a figure who had some national recognition. And that system didn’t work very well. By 1800, it was already pretty clear that it was problematic. You had the rise of political parties and the prospect of I’m sorry, I should have said so, that the winner of that election became president and the person with the second most votes would become vice president. And by the time you get to the late 1790s, in the 1800s or early 1800s, you had the rise of political parties. So people who were really ideologically opposed were potentially going to serve in tandem. And even though the president did not regard the vice president as a partner in governance at this point, even having him casting tiebreaking votes in the Senate with an opposing ideological position would be problematic for the administration. And then you had a tie that had to be adjudicated by Congress. In any event, it became very clear that the system wasn’t working. And so in 1812, in 1804, rather, they passed the 12th Amendment, which stipulated that electors would cast one ballot for president and one for vice president. And after that, the number and quality of individuals who were willing to stand for vice president declined dramatically under the original scheme. You know, you were taking a shot and you might become president. But when it was clear that your only possible destination was the office of vice president and there was very little for the vice president to do, the whole thing sort of lost its allure. And as James Hyde says in the film, you’d be hard pressed to find very many Americans who can name a vice president from the 19th century.
Krys Boyd [00:09:54] I hadn’t realized until I saw your film, Michel, how long we live with no mechanism for replacing a vice president. What is the total number of years this country has literally had no VP in office?
Michelle Ferrari [00:10:08] It’s a cumulative total of 38 years. When Johnson ascended to the presidency, it was 36. But he served between Kennedy’s assassination and the next election without a vice president.
Krys Boyd [00:10:21] So in the interim, before we fix this, Congress set up that line of succession that starts with this after the vice president starts with the speaker of the House and goes down all the way through the cabinet. I think these days it’s like 18 people long. That had always seemed extreme to me. But it makes sense if we realize we didn’t have a rule for replacing the vice president. And therefore, like each, I guess each office below would domino to the next person?
Michelle Ferrari [00:10:50] Correct. Wow. There was no mechanism in the Constitution for replacing a vice president. And that didn’t get resolved until 1965. Well, really 1967 when it was when the 25th Amendment was ratified.
Krys Boyd [00:11:07] There have also been questions about what happens if a president is alive but not capable of functioning in the office. James Garfield, people may know, was shot by an assassin in 1881, but it took the poor man like 88 days to die, which meant three months of functionally no president because Chester Arthur didn’t have the constitutional authority to step in and take over.
Michelle Ferrari [00:11:31] Exactly right. And he didn’t want to do what John Tyler had done since Garfield was still alive. He didn’t want to be thought of as a usurper. And so he just sort of hovered on the sidelines while Garfield slowly faded away. And there really was no one in charge.
Krys Boyd [00:11:50] It’s interesting, given the coarseness of political discourse today, to think about, you know, being called a usurper or being like something that people absolutely could not abide.
Michelle Ferrari [00:12:00] I mean, I will say that one of the things that most interested me about the story that we tell in the film is the way in which it kind of serves as the polar opposite of our current political climate, which is to say, people came together in a civil, bipartisan fashion and addressed a problem that had been dogging the country for most of its history and solved it.
Krys Boyd [00:12:26] Before everything was largely fixed by the 25th Amendment, which we’ll talk about later. Didn’t every time this came up, did people say, we really ought to do something about this? And then nothing really happened?
Michelle Ferrari [00:12:39] That’s more or less accurate. You know, it came up to greater and lesser degrees. I would say it really became a crisis, something that people regarded as a crisis during the Eisenhower administration because General Eisenhower spent President Eisenhower spent really most of his presidency in and out of the hospital. He had one sort of grave health event after another. And there was an awareness by the public at that point. I mean, it’s not a thing that the public typically concerned itself with prior, but an awareness by the public. By the late 1950s that, you know, this put the country in jeopardy. It was a different world. By this point, the president was not only the president of the United States, but truly the leader of the free world. You had nuclear weapons and there was a sense that it was no longer acceptable to have this kind of ambiguity around the transfer of power when the president was disabled. So Congress really took this up in the late 1950s and debated it for quite a while, but came to no conclusions and no action was taken at that point.
Krys Boyd [00:13:59] Michelle, When Woodrow Wilson suffered a devastating stroke, I think in 1919, he was in no condition to carry out really any presidential responsibilities. How did his vice president respond?
Michelle Ferrari [00:14:13] His vice president likewise sort of hovered on the sidelines like Chester Arthur in in the case of Wilson, his wife and his secretary elected to keep the president’s condition, the gravity of his condition a secret. And they really punted for a very long time on many of the issues of the day. A thing that I find sort of hilarious because Mrs. Wilson was an anti suffragist. She was against women having the vote and she was simultaneously sort of secretly running the country.
Krys Boyd [00:14:49] It’s extraordinary that this was kept under wraps for so long. But we have to remember this is a time before modern media. So people weren’t looking around and saying, obviously, why have we not seen the president on television for weeks?
Michelle Ferrari [00:15:03] There were headlines that addressed the fact that Wilson was ill, but no sense of how ill he really was and the extent to which he was uninvolved in the matters of state. And his vice president later said that, you know, part of the reason that he stood aside was that he didn’t want to tangle with a woman, particularly when the woman was the president, the wife of the president of the United States.
Krys Boyd [00:15:29] After this all came to light, Was anybody held accountable for not being honest with the American people?
Michelle Ferrari [00:15:36] Not to my knowledge, actually.
Krys Boyd [00:15:38] Richard Nixon, as you mentioned, you know, would ultimately be part of two different events that help to demonstrate the importance of the 25th Amendment. The first was when he himself was vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, before anybody was even talking about changes to the Constitution. What was Nixon’s role during the many times when Eisenhower was alive, but not well enough to really do anything?
Michelle Ferrari [00:16:06] Well, Eisenhower had, you know, as was the president’s prerogative had given Nixon a fair bit to do, I think, you know, Eisenhower was very cognizant of the way in which the role of the president had expanded, and he welcomed assistance from his vice president in a way that was not necessarily typical at the time. But when he was ill after his heart attack, he became, you know, very concerned about the ambiguities in the Constitution surrounding succession, particularly given a case of inability. And he had the Justice Department drop a memorandum that he and Nixon signed that basically said, you know, if Eisenhower was unable to fulfill the duties of the office, Nixon would step in until Eisenhower was better. And it was a gentlemen’s agreement, and always it did not have the force of law. But the and the you know, the media was commenting, definitely aware and commenting on the fact that Eisenhower was kind of out of the picture and that Nixon was stepping in for him. But, you know, it was it was all very precarious and it was regarded as a moment of peril for the country.
Krys Boyd [00:17:27] Yeah, moment of peril, because as you mentioned, I mean, this was a time when the kinds of threats the United States faced, both domestically and globally, had begun to seem like things that might well require an urgent and immediate response. That was a relatively new thing, that it didn’t seem safe anymore to hold out and wait until a president either recovered or died.
Michelle Ferrari [00:17:48] Right, exactly. And by the time we get to the Kennedy administration, you know, that’s been magnified. So there’s nuclear weapons. There’s, you know, civil rights protests in the streets and civil rights leaders being killed. There’s a war brewing in Vietnam. And as for tri who shepherded the 25th Amendment to its ratification, famously said, you know, if there are missiles flying at the country, you don’t want there to be any question about who’s in charge.
Krys Boyd [00:18:19] So, as you said, Eisenhower extended some power to Nixon with this gentlemen’s agreement. Nixon was his vice president. But this was kind of a kind of a one off thing between them. I guess there’s no evidence that Nixon ever abused this. I mean, to what extent did Nixon step in and act as president without having the title of acting president?
Michelle Ferrari [00:18:41] Well, I mean, he was very careful to not overstep. So while he, you know, presided over cabinet meetings, he didn’t sit in Eisenhower’s chair. So there was always sort of a symbolic, referencing of the fact that he wasn’t actually the president, he was acting as president. And I think this helped to keep the channels clear between Eisenhower and Nixon because Nixon never infringed on his prerogatives.
Krys Boyd [00:19:17] To return to LBJ stepping up and taking the oath of office. Almost immediately after JFK was pronounced dead, the country was once again left without a vice president for the remainder of that term. And at this point, neither of the two people next in the line of succession seemed ideal. Why not?
Michelle Ferrari [00:19:38] The next two people in the line were the speaker of the House, who was 72 and had no international experience. And the president pro tem of the Senate, who was 86. And when Johnson gave his address to a joint session of Congress five days after the assassination, there was actual actually more interest than usual on those figures who were seated behind Johnson on the dias. And you saw in the newspapers and indeed on television a renewed concern with this issue. Indeed, it was considered a crisis, the crisis of presidential succession. We use a clip in the film from a one hour film made by CBS reports that addressed the crisis and interviewed Eisenhower and Nixon and Truman, all agreeing that something really, really needed to be done.
Krys Boyd [00:20:39] There had been assassinations before, but never had those assassinations been effectively witnessed by the entire country because of the technology of television. It must have felt personal and an imminent to people in a way that past deaths of presidents had not.
Michelle Ferrari [00:20:58] I mean, I think if you ask people of a certain age, virtually everyone in the United States remembers where they were when they heard that Kennedy had been shot. Which is, you know, telling. It’s very telling. It’s also true that for three days, from the point of the assassination, through the funeral service for Kennedy, the three major networks broadcast nothing else, not even commercials. So, you know, this was very and people were watching en masse, you know, and watching for four, six, seven hours a day. So it really was a national event and it was traumatic. And the way in which Johnson stepped in, in part because he was really very primed and right to do so and seized the reins of power and did so without hesitation and with, you know, a verbal commitment to the agenda of his predecessor, I think was very reassuring to people.
Krys Boyd [00:22:09] So everybody understood that something needed to change. What were some of the ideas proposed for what would go into the 25th Amendment?
Michelle Ferrari [00:22:18] Well, I mean, the main thing they were concerned with was the role of the vice president. So number one was to ensure that we were never without a vice president, that rather than waiting until the next election, were there to be a succession scenario and the a vacancy in the vice presidency, the president would have the ability to nominate a new vice president whose actual ascension to the role would be contingent upon a majority confirmation in both houses of Congress. And secondarily, there was a desire to kind of streamline and codify the procedures for a case of inability and how and when and under what circumstances a vice president would step in.
Krys Boyd [00:23:26] It was ultimately ratified almost three years later. Was it a challenging process to get that through Congress and then through the states?
Michelle Ferrari [00:23:35] Absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned before, there was a lot of disagreement, particularly around the issue of inability in large measure because people were afraid of a president being ousted unreasonably or against his will the way, you know, Garfield might have been ousted if Arthur had stepped in. And then, you know, Garfield had recovered. What then? So there was a lot of disagreement. And in addition to that, so Birch Bayh, this freshman senator from Indiana, who’s newly appointed to the subcommittee on constitutional amendments when Kennedy was assassinated, decides that he’s going to take on this issue. And very early on, after he’s presented his resolution to Congress, he has people contacts, Johnson’s people. He wants President Johnson to endorse what will become the 25th Amendment. And Johnson is very much behind it. But he won’t say so publicly for fear of offending the speaker of the House, who at that point was next in line. And so it wasn’t until after the national election and a moment where Johnson finally had a vice president. So there was someone in between the president and the speaker of the House that he finally came out in favor of the 25th Amendment. So it took an extra session of Congress to kind of push this through. And I think, you know, the fact that it made it through in what is for a constitutional amendment, a relatively short time had to do with Birch Bayh’s commitment and energy and his understanding that he really needed to get his colleagues to focus on what they could agree on rather than what they disagreed on. And everybody understood that the fix, such as it was, was not perfect, but it was far better than the situation that we had.
Krys Boyd [00:25:44] Presumably Michelle, you know, the 25th Amendment is ratified. Everybody who has been working on this and campaigning for it thinks, great, now we can sit back and relax. But then we get back to Richard Nixon. Everybody will remember that he ultimately resigned in disgrace to avoid impeachment around the Watergate scandal. But there was this other enormous upheaval from around the same time that isn’t such common knowledge anymore involving Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew. How did Agnew get himself in trouble?
Michelle Ferrari [00:26:16] Agnew was targeted in a corruption investigation in his home state of Maryland and was found to be taking bribes not only when he was the governor of Maryland, but in the White House as vice president. I mean, it should be said that when Congress was debating the 25th Amendment and thinking about all the things that might befall a president and create a situation in which there was a transfer of power, there needed to be a transfer of power. They were imagining things like the president being kidnaped or being in a coma. No one was imagining that both the vice president and the president would be swept up in a cloud of scandal having to do with misuse of their offices. So Watergate had already, you know, made headlines at the point that Agnew was being investigated, and he vowed to stay on. He maintained his innocence and vowed to stay on. But because Nixon himself was in jeopardy, it was inconceivable that Agnew would be allowed to maintain his office because were Nixon to be removed. So if he were to resign or be impeached, then Agnew would have become president. And Agnew was about to be indicted on criminal charges. So felony charges. So Nixon’s Justice Department persuaded Agnew to accept a plea deal. He pleaded no contest to one charge, but in exchange, he had to resign the vice presidency.
Krys Boyd [00:28:16] It’s worth drawing a line under this for folks who may not have been alive when this was all going down. Agnew’s issues were a totally separate thing from the Watergate conspiracy and associated cover ups that brought Nixon down.
Michelle Ferrari [00:28:29] Exactly right.
Krys Boyd [00:28:30] I mean, what are the chances you have to ask. I mean, Nixon never really had trusted Agnew. Is that because he sensed Agnew was untrustworthy or because Nixon was not a guy who placed a lot of confidence in other people?
Michelle Ferrari [00:28:44] I think probably the latter, based on everything that we know about Nixon. I mean, I think, you know, they were a pretty winning team and Nixon certainly embraced the energy of that team in 1972 when they ran for a second term and they won by a landslide. But I think he wasn’t one to invite others into his inner circle. And, you know, despite his own experience as vice president, I don’t think he was inclined to share the wealth.
Krys Boyd [00:29:19] He did, however, put Agnew in an office, a permanent office in the West Wing. That was the first time that had happened. Right?
Michelle Ferrari [00:29:28] Yes, that was the first time that a vice president had an office in the West Wing. You know, this was definitely an issue when we were beginning the film and sort of looking at how we were going to tell the story in the brief was, you know, to create a punchy, punchy one hour about the history of the vice presidency, and we couldn’t figure out what the what the visual palate was going to be because… So imagine you’re doing a film about the presidency and you’re speaking your narration is speaking generally or abstractly about the presidency, not about any one particular president. Well, it would make sense to be looking at the White House or the Oval Office while you’re having that talk. But there was no comparable location, often photograph location for the vice president because he had neither a permanent office nor a permanent dwelling in Washington, D.C., until the 1970s. So it was really quite challenging. In any event, to come back to your question. So Agnew was given an office in the West Wing, but it was very, very soon taken back. And the reason given to Agnew was that they needed the space. But I think that Agnew had done something or said something that offended Nixon. And he decided, actually, no, I don’t want him not nearby.
Krys Boyd [00:30:56] All right. So Michelle, Nixon sees the writing on the wall for himself with regard to the Watergate investigation. Agnew has been persuaded to resign to avoid going to prison for his unrelated crimes. This means Nixon is allowed to select a new vice president for himself. But it didn’t sit well with many Americans, did it? This idea that an embattled figure would get to handpick his successor.
Michelle Ferrari [00:31:28] Right. Well, so first he’s replacing Agnew and that actually goes pretty smoothly. He nominates Gerald Ford and Gerald Ford is well liked. He’s the minority leader in the House, long serving congressman from Michigan. And his confirmation proceeding goes fairly swiftly. But it does raise this question because Nixon is embattled and is being investigated and there is a fear that he will be impeached and forced from office. And so there is an awareness that Ford might well become president. And he is vetted in a way that no vice presidential candidate has ever been vetted before. And FBI agents fanned out over the country to investigate every aspect of his life. One of my favorite anecdotes has to do with two field agents tracking down a story from Ford’s days as a college football player and a penalty that he’d received for unnecessary roughness.
Krys Boyd [00:32:43] They really were going to cross every T and dotevery I on that.
Michelle Ferrari [00:32:47] Exactly.
Krys Boyd [00:32:50] What you’re describing is a confirmation process that was going to take some time. Therefore, for a while it seemed at least possible that both the presidency and the vice presidency might be vacant.
Michelle Ferrari [00:33:03] It was definitely possible. So at that moment, you know, Ford’s been nominated but not yet confirmed. And impeachment proceedings are beginning against Nixon. And the person in the hot seat at that moment is Carl Albert, the Democratic speaker of the House. And so I guess, you know, under certain circumstances or given a particular inclination to do so, Albert could have stalled the confirmation proceedings for Ford and intensified the impeachment proceedings against Nixon and installed himself as president, which would have been very, very, very problematic since he was a Democrat and the Republicans had won the previous election by a landslide.
Krys Boyd [00:33:58] Do we know how and why Nixon settled on Ford as his selection?
Michelle Ferrari [00:34:03] Well, I think in part because Ford didn’t have presidential ambitions, and other people that that were on Nixon’s short list did have presidential ambitions or were thought to be more presidential. And Nixon was eager for the confirmation process to go quickly and smoothly. So he wisely chose a nominee who was likely to not ruffle too many feathers.
Krys Boyd [00:34:32] Is there any evidence that the two discussed the possibility of a pardon for Nixon once Ford was sworn into office? If things went down the way they ultimately did?
Michelle Ferrari [00:34:43] I suppose there’s a possibility. I actually don’t know whether or not such a conversation took place. But we do know that Ford did, in fact, pardon Nixon.
Krys Boyd [00:34:55] How long was Gerald Ford in the job as vice president before Nixon resigned?
Michelle Ferrari [00:35:02] Fewer than eight months.
Krys Boyd [00:35:07] Wow, wow. It feels like a like a very quick ramp up to to get done what needed to get done and to sort of learn everything. I mean, Ford had never even run for national office before, right?
Michelle Ferrari [00:35:19] Correct. Yeah, it’s pretty astonishing. I mean, we in the film, there’s footage of Ford standing on the south lawn just after, you know, or just before actually Nixon departs the White House for the last time. And a reporter asks him, this is not actually in the film, but a reporter asks him, you know, how he’s feeling that Harry Truman had said once that when he became president, it was as if the sun and the moon and the stars had all fallen onto him. And Ford said, yeah, that sounds about right. But, get back to me at noon when it actually when I actually take the oath of office. But I do think when you look at him in that footage, some of which is in the film, you can see the strain on his face. I mean, this is kind of a situation that would, I think, with most normal humans would cause a certain degree of whiplash to not have any ambition necessarily for this office never to have run for it and to have had no plans for stepping into it.
Krys Boyd [00:36:29] If Ford remains in the record books as the only person in the history of the United States to have never been elected to the office of president in any capacity. And in fact, I mean, that may never change. He may he may always be the one and only.
Michelle Ferrari [00:36:45] That may be true. And also never to have been elected to the office of vice president. So he is vice president and president without having been elected to either. And then, of course, one of his first acts as president is to nominate a new vice president. So by the time his pick, Nelson Rockefeller, is confirmed, you know, we have by virtue of the 25th Amendment, a president and a vice president our two highest elected offices in the land filled by people who neither of them have been elected.
Krys Boyd [00:37:19] You know, you think back to this time in history, Michelle, and it’s often cited as a moment when many Americans who had had a great deal of implicit trust in governance in this country started to lose it, become much more cynical. On the one hand, you have people like Nixon and excuse me, like Ford and Rockefeller doing the best that they could in a difficult situation. But it’s also understandable that people began to see cracks in the facade that, you know, once told us that everything was going to be fine if we just trusted the people in charge.
Michelle Ferrari [00:37:53] Yeah. I mean, in our research for the film, I didn’t see a lot of evidence of this being a moment where, you know, the bottom sort of fell out in terms of confidence in government. I do think, you know, people were questioning very much the idea that we’re a democracy and yet our top two leaders had not been democratically elected, but by all indications, you know, Ford and Rockefeller kind of like, you know, shepherded the nation through a pretty rocky time and establish something close to normalcy, which people were craving after the Agnew Nixon scandals, the twin scandals that brought down an administration. So I’m not sure that that’s the genesis of our cynicism. It may have been a contributing factor.
Krys Boyd [00:38:57] Ford did go on to run for, we can’t quite call it reelection, but to run for election in his own right. Can we assume that by the time he ran ultimately against Jimmy Carter and lost, that he did want the job?
Michelle Ferrari [00:39:13] I can’t imagine running for it if he didn’t want it.
Krys Boyd [00:39:16] Yeah. I can’t imagine wanting it, to be honest.
Michelle Ferrari [00:39:19] Well, that’s a whole other thing.
Krys Boyd [00:39:20] Yeah. It is interesting to think about all the movies and television shows that that have these fanciful plots around people who sort of accidentally become president. I guess it depends what kind of person you are, whether that sounds like a dream or a nightmare.
Michelle Ferrari [00:39:35] Yeah, I don’t. I think I would likely never sleep again if I were president.
Krys Boyd [00:39:42] Same. I guess by coincidence, Ford would have been the first person to occupy new housing set aside for the vice president, although it ultimately wasn’t ready in time, and he ended up moving into the White House instead. How were decisions made? Were the conversations around creating a special mansion that would be reserved for the use of the second family, the vice president and family?
Michelle Ferrari [00:40:08] The Congress passed a resolution shortly after the ratification of the 25th Amendment, setting aside housing for creating a permanent dwelling for the vice president in Washington, D.C.. And it didn’t actually get built in part because there were a lot of fiscal strains on the government as the 1960s. And in the end, they didn’t actually build a dwelling. They purchased an existing dwelling at the National Observatory. And so Ford was going to be the first to move into that dwelling, the first official residence. But Nixon resigned while it was clear that Nixon was going to resign by the time that Ford and his wife Betty, went to look at the house. And although Betty was excited and picking out china, Ford told her, sotto voce, that they weren’t going to live there.
Krys Boyd [00:41:13] So currently we have one candidate running for president who has been serving as vice president. I’m curious, just based on this extensive study of vice presidential history, Michelle, if you think being vice president is good preparation for someone who wants to hold the top job, does it just vary depending on the administration in which one serves?
Michelle Ferrari [00:41:36] It certainly varies. It depends in large measure on the administration. That being said, I will say that the 25th Amendment articulated a new vision of the vice presidency as a close and, you know, important companion and partner for the president. And that model was really embraced and fully articulated by the Carter Mondale administration. They really did approach governing the country as a partnership. And you’ve seen that establish a kind of precedent in every succeeding administration such that at this point, you know, give or take, depending on the personalities of the people involved and the extent to which a president wants to include their vice president. I think most presidents these days do bring the vice president into their inner circle in a way that was certainly not true in the 19th century and certainly never thought of by the framers of the Constitution. So that it is actually good preparation. I mean, it was never regarded as a springboard to the presidency in the past. But in the 20th century, late 20th century and in the 21st century, is increasingly seen as a springboard to the presidency. And in part, that’s because you gain an understanding of governance at the federal level. That’s really impossible to get any other way.
Krys Boyd [00:43:14] Do you think people running for the presidency select running mates with an eye toward who might continue their legacy after, eight years of serving themselves?
Michelle Ferrari [00:43:29] I’m not sure about that. I think. I think the primary thing candidates think about when they’re selecting a vice president is a thing that’s always been thought about, which is sort of like. In the party is under represented by my, the president’s candidacy and who might be brought into the fold by the vice presidential pick. I’m not sure anyone with the ambition to be president thinks either about their demise or the years when they will be out of office.
Krys Boyd [00:44:08] Broadly speaking, how would you say the job of the vice president has and has not evolved? I mean, I would imagine that vice presidents still, even if they have a seat at the table and they are attending those cabinet meetings and are sent around the world to represent the president, they probably still feel like they don’t have the kind of power they would like to be able to exercise.
Michelle Ferrari [00:44:30] Well, I guess it depends on the, you know, the personality of the vice president. I mean, I think there are a lot of people in government who actually derive a lot of satisfaction from playing a supporting role. If you’re talking about somebody who really wants to be president, then yes, likely the the role of the vice president, the office of the vice president is likely to be somewhat stultifying, as you know, portrayed in Veep on HBO. But I think that many people go into public service with the idea of actually serving and are not necessarily approaching the role of the vice president as a stepping stone, but rather as a way to achieve good during the administration.
Krys Boyd [00:45:28] Michelle Ferrari is producer, writer and director of the American Experience documentary The American Vice President. Michelle, this has been so interesting. Thank you for making time to talk.
Michelle Ferrari [00:45:38] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:45:40] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast where you like to get podcasts. You can also listen at our web site think.kera.org. And while you’re there, check out upcoming shows we’re planning and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
