'American Experience' Explores How the U.S. Vice President Went From a Joke to a Powerful Office

American Experience: The American Vice President premieres on WTTW and streaming Tuesday, October 1 at 7:00 pm, immediately before a simulcast by PBS News of the Vice Presidential debate at 8:00 pm.
Frontline: The VP Choice – Vance Vs. Walz premieres on WTTW and streaming Tuesday, October 8 at 9:00 pm.

It is possible under the United States Constitution to have a president who has never won or even run in a national election – and we’ve had one. When Richard Nixon resigned the presidency under the cloud of the Watergate scandal on August 9, 1974, his vice president, Gerald Ford, became president under the succession laid out in the 25th Amendment. Before being sworn in as vice president eight months earlier, Ford had been House Minority Leader; the biggest popular election he had ever won was a congressional district in Michigan.

“The thing that was most surprising to me was the level of ambiguity in the Constitution around the vice president’s role, and the way in which that really continued to haunt the nation on and off for 180-plus years,” says Michelle Ferrari, the filmmaker behind the new American Experience documentary The American Vice President.

Nixon won re-election in 1972 with Spiro Agnew on the ticket as his vice president. But the revelation of a corruption investigation into Agnew (separate from Watergate) in 1973 led to his eventual resignation. The 25th Amendment allowed Nixon to nominate a replacement to be approved by both houses of Congress. Nixon himself was under a cloud of corruption, as the Senate and others investigated Watergate and his involvement in the scandal.

If the Democratic Speaker of the House Carl Albert had so desired, he could have engineered his own accession to the presidency after Agnew’s resignation by launching an impeachment of Nixon for Watergate before confirming a new vice president. With Nixon removed from office and the vice presidential office unfilled, the Speaker of the House was next in line for the presidency.

Instead, Nixon nominated the amenable and popular Ford, who won the overwhelming support of Congress. Less than a year later, Ford became president after Nixon’s resignation. In a way, Nixon and Congress chose the next president. Ford and his own vice president Nelson Rockefeller are the only presidential team to have assumed their positions without winning a national election.

Had it not been for the 25th Amendment, which lays out the presidential succession process and had only been adopted in 1967, everything could have devolved into chaos.

The Constitution assigns only two responsibilities to the vice president: stand in for the president if something happens to him, and cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. But it is vague on succession of the president in case of disability or death. When William Henry Harrison became the first president to die in office after serving only a month in 1841, his vice president John Tyler asserted that he was now president – even though some people argued that the Constitution simply gave him the powers of the president while he remained vice president. He therefore set a precedent for the seven ensuing vice presidents who succeeded to the presidency following the death in office of the president – but it was just that, a precedent, until the 25th Amendment codified it into law.

The Constitution also failed to outline a process for filling a vice presidential vacancy, so none of those eight vice presidents-turned-presidents had their own vice president. By the time the 25th Amendment created a mechanism to do so, there had been a cumulative 36 years where there was no vice president ready to step in for the president.

It was only with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 that Congress decided to finally clarify the role of the vice president in case of presidential disability or death. Birch Bayh, the U.S. Senator from Indiana, was in a plane on the tarmac at O’Hare Airport when he heard that Kennedy had been shot. Given the dangers of the Cold War and the possibility of more political violence, Bayh worried about the lack of a vice president for Lyndon B. Johnson following his ascension to the presidency after Kennedy’s death.

So Bayh led a drive to draft and pass the 25th Amendment, which clarified succession, allowed for the filling of a vice presidential vacancy, and allowed for the transfer of presidential power to the vice president even for such short periods as when a president had to undergo surgery.

“Since the 25th Amendment and in particular since the Carter-Mondale Administration, there is an expectation both on the part of presidents and the veeps that there is going to be something to the role,” says Ferrari. “With few exceptions, it’s been true since the 25th Amendment that there is a more formal and reliable partnership between the president and the vice president, and the vice president is consulted on matters of consequence.”

While the role of the vice president was beginning to grow in importance before the 25th Amendment, it was still seen as a minor job: Agnew was the first vice president to have an office in the West Wing of the White House, but “it was really symbolic, and [he] wasn’t brought into decision-making in any kind of way,” says Ferrari.

For much of its history, the office of the vice president was “seen pretty much as a joke, even by the people who served in it,” Ferrari says. The utter unfamiliarity of names such as George M. Dallas, William A. Wheeler, and Thomas R. Marshall – who served under a president, Woodrow Wilson, who was incapacitated by a stroke for much of his second term – proves the point. One nineteenth century vice president ran a tavern in Kentucky while holding office. Teddy Roosevelt planned to go to law school while serving because the role involved so little; he said the office was “not a stepping stone to anything except oblivion.”

Unless, of course, the president died in office, as William McKinley did, making Roosevelt president. John Adams, the country’s first vice president, summed up the paradoxical powerlessness and possibility of the role for much of its existence. “I am the vice president. In this I am nothing,” he said. “But I may be everything.”