Vice President of the United States

Article Outline

Introduction; Powers and Responsibilities; Qualifications and Candidacy; The Life of the Vice President; History of the Vice Presidency

Early Years

For much of U. S. history the vice presidency was considered a minor position. Vice President John Adams, who served as vice president from 1789 to 1797, called it 'the most insignificant office ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.' Until the 1950s the vice presidents served mainly as social stand-ins for their presidents. This particular role has grown with the increase in presidential responsibilities. During his years as the nation’s first president, George Washington set aside times to receive ordinary citizens in his office and at the presidential residence. The growth of the country's population, and the rise of numerous interest groups demanding special attention, led presidents after Washington to turn over some of this responsibility to their vice presidents.

In the early 19th century competing political parties jockeyed for control of the presidency and the vice presidency. In the election of 1800 the Democratic-Republican Party, which advocated states’ rights, offered Thomas Jefferson as president and Aaron Burr as vice president. The Constitution specifies that the candidate who wins a majority of votes in the electoral college wins the presidency, but Jefferson and Burr each polled 73 electoral votes. The tie in the electoral college sent the decision to the House of Representatives, which was controlled by the Federalist Party. The Federalists, who supported a strong central government, opposed both Burr and Jefferson, and voted 35 times over six days before Jefferson secured the necessary majority to win the presidency. The lengthy partisan spectacle in the House led to the adoption of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution in 1804, which specifies that the electoral college use separate ballots to vote for the president and vice president.

During the first four presidential elections, vice presidents were selected on the basis of their qualifications to assume the presidency. Beginning in 1804, presidential candidates and their political parties sought vice-presidential candidates who could draw support from voters who might not otherwise back the presidential ticket. One of the clearest examples of this ticket balancing came in 1840, when the Whigs selected John Tyler, a former Democrat, as the vice-presidential candidate to complement presidential candidate William Henry Harrison. Harrison, a military hero who appealed to the growing nationalistic feelings of the American people, won the election largely because of Tyler’s support among Democrats and his reputation as a champion of states' rights.

Tyler’s Fight to Control the Presidency

Tyler’s vice presidency became a landmark in the history of the vice presidency when Harrison died after just a month in office. Harrison was the first president to die in office, and his death thrust Vice President Tyler into the center of a political debate over the rules of presidential succession. The Constitution does not specify if a vice president who replaces a president assumes the full responsibilities of the office for the remainder of the term, or if the vice president merely becomes an acting president until a special election can be held to fill the presidency. Tyler claimed the right to serve out all of the nearly four years left in Harrison’s term, but Whigs and Democrats in Congress and the Cabinet united in opposition. Many of Tyler’s opponents insisted on calling him the acting president, and newspapers referred to him as His Accidency. Tyler resisted the attempts to deny him full presidential powers and successfully completed Harrison's term as president. Since Tyler, no one has seriously challenged the right of a vice president to the full powers of the presidency on a president's death.

A Job with Few Duties

For more than a century, vice presidents had few responsibilities. Between the vice presidencies of John Adams (from 1789 to 1797) and Thomas Marshall (from 1913 to 1921), for example, no vice president attended a meeting of the president’s Cabinet. Marshall attended the meetings only when President Woodrow Wilson was in Europe for the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 and 1919. Under President Warren G. Harding, Vice President Calvin Coolidge attended Cabinet meetings, but this practice was discontinued after Coolidge replaced Harding, who died in office in 1923.

Until the vice presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, most of those who held the office remained marginal political figures. Before Roosevelt, none of the four vice presidents who replaced a sitting president went on to win election to a full term in his own right. Roosevelt was vice president to President William McKinley, who was struck down by an assassin in 1901. The quirky and brash Roosevelt proved enormously popular, and he easily won the presidential election in 1904. After Roosevelt, three other vice presidents who replaced sitting presidents—Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson—won subsequent elections to a full four-year term.

Increased Responsibilities in the 1930s and After

In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt revived the practice of including vice presidents in Cabinet meetings, and since then vice presidents have regularly attended Cabinet meetings. Roosevelt’s action signaled an increase in stature for the vice presidency, but Roosevelt failed to keep the last of his own vice presidents, Harry Truman, informed about key national security issues. Most importantly, Roosevelt kept Truman in the dark about the Manhattan Project, the top-secret program to develop atomic weapons during World War II. Roosevelt died in April 1945 with the war still raging in the Pacific. Upon Roosevelt’s death, Truman suddenly found himself in the difficult position of being a wartime president who was unaware of all of the military’s strategic options. Truman was forced to rely on briefings from Secretary of War Henry Stimson and other officials. The need to keep vice presidents informed about issues of national security led Congress to include the vice president as one of four statutory (legal) members of the National Security Council, which was established in 1947 to advise the president on military matters and foreign affairs.

In the years after World War II the vice presidency became more prominent, gaining staff, office space, policy responsibility, and public visibility. Franklin Roosevelt’s second vice president, Henry Wallace, established the vice president’s role as an important foreign emissary with his many trips to China, South America, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the 1940s, and this practice became the norm for subsequent vice presidents. Richard Nixon, vice president under Dwight Eisenhower, made headlines around the world when he traveled to the USSR in 1955 and engaged in a political debate with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The vice presidency gained new policy responsibilities in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy created NASA to guide his aggressive space program under the leadership of Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

Kennedy’s Assassination and Constitutional Reform

The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 shocked the nation and raised questions about presidential succession that the Constitution left unanswered. With Vice President Johnson assuming the presidency, there was no mechanism to fill the vacant vice presidency. In addition, the shooting of Kennedy and his subsequent hospitalization raised the question of who leads the country if the president is unable to perform duties, and who has the power to declare that the president is in such a state. In some previous administrations, the president and vice president had informal agreements to deal with succession, but such agreements did not have any legal status and might have led to political disputes. The long-standing questions of vice-presidential succession and presidential disability were answered in 1967 with ratification of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. The amendment provides that a president fill a vacancy in the vice presidency by nominating a candidate who must be confirmed by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. The amendment also specifies that the vice president should take over if the president resigns from office. Further, the 25th Amendment details procedures for replacing a president who is incapacitated.

The 25th Amendment’s provision for filling a vacancy in the vice presidency was first used in 1973, when President Richard Nixon appointed Gerald Ford as vice president. Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned to avoid a trial on corruption charges. It was used again in 1974 when Ford, who succeeded Nixon as president upon Nixon’s resignation, appointed Nelson A. Rockefeller to fill the vacated vice presidency.

Presidents have rarely become incapacitated since the 1967 ratification of the 25th Amendment, and its official provisions have never been formally invoked. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan was shot and seriously wounded, but Reagan’s aides never attempted to hand over power to Vice President George Bush.