Vice President of the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vice President of the United States holds the second-highest office in the executive branch, yet for most of the nation's history the position was treated as an afterthought. John Adams, the very first person to hold the office, described it to his wife Abigail as "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." He was not alone. John Nance Garner, who served under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1941, called the vice presidency something not fit for polite company. Harry Truman compared it to "a cow's fifth teat." Yet when Roosevelt died on the 12th of April 1945, it was Truman who stepped into the Oval Office without ever having been told about the Manhattan Project, the ongoing war plans, or what would come next. That gap between the office's low standing and its sudden, crushing weight is the central tension of the American vice presidency. How did a position designed as an electoral footnote in 1787 become, by the 21st century, one of the most consequential offices in the world?

• 2. Born of a Quirk

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  On the 4th of September 1787, a committee assigned to handle leftover business at the Constitutional Convention proposed the Electoral College. The framers assumed that most electors would vote for a candidate from their own state, a so-called "favorite son." To ensure that at least one vote per elector would go to a candidate of national standing, they required each elector to cast two votes for president, with the runner-up becoming vice president. The office was not designed on its merits. It was a byproduct of the voting mechanics. Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 gave each state a number of electors equal to its combined Senate and House seats, with no distinction between first and second choice. The framers hoped this would surface men of broad national reputation; what it produced instead was a built-in rival. In 1796, Federalist John Adams won the presidency and his bitter adversary Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, came second and claimed the vice presidency. Four years later, Jefferson and fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr each received 73 electoral votes, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives, where Jefferson finally won on the 36th ballot. That crisis produced the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in time for the 1804 election, which required separate ballots for president and vice president and severed the runner-up logic entirely.

• 3. The Long Era of Insignificance

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  Thomas R. Marshall, who served under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921, told a story about two brothers. One ran away to sea. The other was elected Vice President. Nothing was heard from either of them again. Calvin Coolidge, Marshall's immediate successor, was so little-known that Major League Baseball sent him free passes with his name misspelled, and a fire marshal failed to recognize him during an evacuation of his Washington residence. These were not isolated embarrassments. In the first hundred years of the republic, no fewer than seven constitutional amendments were proposed to abolish the office entirely. The first, submitted by Samuel W. Dana in 1800, was rejected in the House by a vote of 27 to 85. A second, introduced by Senator James Hillhouse in 1808, also failed. James Mitchell Ashley, an advocate for abolition in the late 1860s, called the office "superfluous" and dangerous. Daniel Webster declined the vice presidency twice: once when William Henry Harrison offered it, and once when the Whig Party pressed him to run on Zachary Taylor's ticket. He said he did not propose to be buried until he was really dead and in his coffin. Both presidents who offered him the job died in office. Had Webster accepted either, he would have become president. Walter Bagehot, in The English Constitution, put the systemic problem plainly: the framers expected the vice president to be the second-wisest man in the country, but because the vice presidency was a sinecure, a second-rate man agreeable to the party machinery was always chosen instead.

• 4. The Tyler Precedent

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  William Henry Harrison died in 1841, only days into his term, and the question of what exactly happened next had no clear legal answer. Article II said the vice president would take over the "powers and duties" of the presidency, but it did not say whether the vice president became president or merely acted as one. John Tyler chose the more aggressive interpretation. He had himself sworn in as president and refused to acknowledge any document that addressed him as "Acting President." Congress denounced him. He ignored Congress. Both the Senate and the House eventually voted to acknowledge him as the full president, and a precedent was set by sheer force of will. That precedent held for more than a century before it was written into law. The Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, formally codified what Tyler had asserted: that a vice president succeeds to the full title and role upon the death, resignation, or removal of a president. Nine vice presidents have succeeded to the presidency this way. Four of them, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson, were later elected to full terms of their own. The amendment also created, for the first time, a procedure for filling a vacant vice presidency mid-term: the president nominates a replacement, confirmed by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. That process was used twice in rapid succession in the early 1970s, first when Gerald Ford replaced Spiro Agnew after Agnew's resignation on the 10th of October 1973, and then when Nelson Rockefeller replaced Ford after Nixon resigned on the 9th of August 1974.

• 5. The Office Expands

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  The transformation of the vice presidency from an embarrassment into a governing instrument happened in stages across the 20th century. Herbert Hoover renewed the practice of inviting the vice president to cabinet meetings in 1929, a practice every president since has maintained. John Nance Garner, despite his later famous complaint about the office's worth, was the first vice president to be sworn in alongside the president on the Capitol steps, on the 20th of January 1937, a ceremony tradition that has continued ever since. After the shock of Roosevelt's death and Truman's unpreparedness, Truman moved deliberately to fix the structural gap. In 1949 he made the vice president a statutory member of the National Security Council, a participant in cabinet meetings, and a recipient of regular intelligence briefings. Richard Nixon, serving under Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961, took on still more. Eisenhower authorized Nixon to preside at cabinet meetings in his absence. After Eisenhower suffered a heart attack on the 24th of September 1955, then ileitis in June 1956, and a stroke in November 1957, Nixon informally assumed some presidential duties on three separate occasions. Lyndon B. Johnson was the first vice president given an office in the White House complex, in the Old Executive Office Building. Jimmy Carter went further: he was the first president to give his vice president, Walter Mondale, an office in the West Wing itself, and every vice president since has kept one. Carter considered the historical treatment of the vice presidency a wasted asset, and he cited, according to scholar Joel Goldstein, Roosevelt's handling of Truman as "immoral."

• 6. Power, Partnership, and Rivalry

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  Walter Mondale wrote President-elect Carter a memo after the 1976 election arguing that his most important contribution would be as a general adviser rather than a manager of specific policy portfolios. That model proved influential. Al Gore advised Bill Clinton on foreign policy and environmental matters. Dick Cheney, serving from 2001 to 2009, went further than anyone before him, frequently making policy decisions on his own without informing the president. Barack Obama assigned Joe Biden to oversee Iraq policy with a brevity that became famous: "Joe, you do Iraq." In February 2020, Donald Trump put Mike Pence in charge of the federal response to COVID-19. In March 2021, Biden assigned Kamala Harris to address the migration situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Harris had already made history on the 19th of November 2021, when President Biden invoked Section 3 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment during a medical procedure and Harris temporarily held presidential powers, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to do so. Cheney's expansive use of the role also prompted a backlash. Matthew Yglesias and Bruce Ackerman publicly called for abolishing the vice presidency in response, and both of the 2008 vice presidential candidates, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, said they would reduce the role back to that of a presidential adviser. The pendulum, it seems, is always swinging. Harris also set the record for tie-breaking Senate votes, casting 33, surpassing the previous record of 31 held by John C. Calhoun.

• 7. Residence, Ceremony, and Succession

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  For most of the republic's history, vice presidents lived in private homes, apartments, or hotels, and received only a housing allowance. Congress allotted $75,000 in 1966 to build an official residence, but the plan stalled. Eight years later, in 1974, One Observatory Circle was designated as the official temporary residence. The three-story Queen Anne mansion on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. was built in 1893 to house the superintendent of the Observatory. In 1923 it became the home of the Chief of Naval Operations, and it was transferred to the vice president fifty years after that. The salary in 2019 was $235,100; for 2024 the posted figure is $284,600, though a pay freeze means the actual payable salary remains $235,100. The vice president does not receive a pension tied to that office but instead draws the same pension as other members of Congress, in recognition of the role as president of the Senate, with a minimum of two years of service required to qualify. Former vice presidents have been entitled since 2008, under the Former Vice President Protection Act of that year, to Secret Service protection for up to six months after leaving office. Every former vice president is also entitled, under an 1886 Senate resolution, to a portrait bust in the Senate wing of the Capitol. As of the most recent addition, Dick Cheney is the last vice president in that collection.