The best vice president ever?

Billy House
Published: July 7, 2008

By BILLY HOUSE

Media General News Service

WASHINGTON

Thomas Riley Marshall may have been the best, even if known mainly as the guy who once quipped: “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar!”

But then, describing someone as being a great vice president is a bit like damning with feint praise, suggests Steve Tally.

“It’s a job for someone who wants to be something — not for somebody who wants to do something,” says Tally, author of the book “Bland Ambition: From Adams to Quayle — The Cranks, Criminals,
Tax Cheats, and Golfers Who Made It to Vice President.”

Tally, who also is a science writer at Purdue University, has been taking note of the sheer quantity of names being trotted out as potential GOP and Democratic running mates to John McCain and Barack
Obama.

Presidential candidates, he explains, benefit by floating as many names as possible. Such talk is a way to flatter various states and constituencies with little expense or effort. It can also build up good
will from those being mentioned, even if not selected.

But the actual choices — made by a presidential candidate nowadays after a grueling private vetting — sometimes end up being surprises, said Tally.

In 1984, then-New York Rep. Geraldine Ferraro’s selection by Democrat Walter Mondale proved to be groundbreaking. In 1988, then-Indiana GOP Sen. Dan Quayle wasn’t on anybody’s lists when picked
to run with George H.W. Bush. And in 2000, Dick Cheney went from heading George W. Bush’s vice presidential search committee to being the choice.

Tally is critical of Cheney’s leading role in shaping Bush Administration policy in areas of national security, calling it an unchecked usurpation of presidential responsibility that Bush’s predecessors would
not have permitted, and neither likely will his successors. But as a result, the historical complaints about the job’s limitations may not be fully recollected, he said.

John Adams — the nation’s first vice president under George Washington from 1789 to 1797 — summed it up sourly when he complained: “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most
insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” Vice presidents do have the official duty of being the presiding officer of the Senate. They can only vote in the case
of a tie, though.

Often brimming with ambition, most vice presidents end up as mediocre, quintessential non-entities who have passed from the nation’s collective memory, like Levi Parsons Morton, Charles Curtis or
James Schoolcraft Sherman

Yet, there’s little reason to believe that whoever McCain or Obama choose will turn it down.

After all, 13 vice presidents have gone on to the highest office, nine after the deaths of presidents. The job does put presidential aspirants on the runway to the Oval Office, even if in a holding pattern.

That is why Tally comes to regard one man, the affable former Indiana governor named Thomas Riley Marshall, above all other vice presidents.

Historians quibble over exact details.

But when Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him in 1919, there were fears he was near death. Some cabinet members and senators urged the then-vice president Marshall to
assume the presidency.

Inside the White House, Edith Wilson essentially began serving in her husband’s place. And she fought suggestions the presidency should be turned over to Marshall, even as her husband remained
unable to fulfill his duties and was being kept out of sight.

Whether a vice president would become acting president when the president is unable to carry on, and whether the president could resume his office upon recovery, were questions that the Constitution
had not spelled out (the 25th Amendment later did so.)

But Tally said any court likely would have sustained Marshall’s right to take the office, only Marshall worried that such action would create a constitutional crisis. Instead, he worked quietly as sort of a de
facto president, a decision Tally says other vice presidents with more-typical “overweening ambition” might not have made.

Seven months after his stroke, Wilson recovered enough to sit in cabinet meetings, and Marshall was freed from his dilemma.

“The public and history should view him as someone who was willing to set aside the politics of the moment and his own ambition for the greater good,” said Tally.

Looking at the list of politicians and others now being mentioned as potential vice presidents, Tally said he can only hope there might be another Thomas Riley Marshall among them.

Reporter Billy House can be reached at or at 1 (202) 662-7673.