Never Cared to Say Goodbye: Presidential Legacies and Vice Presidential Campaigns

There is an old story about a mother who has two sons. One goes to sea and the other becomes Vice President of the United States. Neither is ever heard from again. --Hubert H. Humphrey (1991, 320) President Eisenhower's comment became notorious. Clearly tired and eager to end another press conference filled with presumptuous and annoying questions, he called on one last reporter, a fellow interested in the influence Vice President Richard Nixon had wielded in the White House. Asked to name "an example of a major idea of his that you had adopted," the normally sunny Eisenhower snapped, "If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don't remember" (1960d, 658). The remark, regardless of Eisenhower's intent, haunted Richard Nixon for years. In the midst of the hard-fought 1968 presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson, in one of his rare forays into public humor, called on it once again. He claimed that one of his daughters had asked him, Tell me Daddy, how was it that after losing a national election in 1960 to President Kennedy and then after losing a state election as Governor of California in 1962 to Pat Brown, how does it happen that Richard Nixon has been able to win his party's nomination for the presidency in 1968? One can only imagine the relish with which LBJ delivered the punch line: "I told her if she would give me a week, I would try to think of some reasons" (1968f, 1087). The irony of Johnson's remark should not pass without notice; he made the comment while campaigning for yet another vice president, a candidate crippled throughout much of that year by Johnson's unyielding determination to force the poor man to toe the line on Vietnam. Hubert Humphrey might have preferred Johnson to "take a week" to think of any contribution that Humphrey had made to that administration. Its record had become an albatross around his neck, and, partly as a result of that association, Vice President Humphrey went down to defeat, adding his name to the long roster of vice presidential failures in presidential campaigns. Throughout American history, most vice presidents have not been considered for their party's subsequent presidential nomination; something about the office taints the man. Only four people have been elected to the presidency directly after serving as vice president. The first two, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, won election prior to passage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, the one establishing that the president and the vice president were to run as a team: one ticket, yet clearly separate and most assuredly unequal. The other two, Martin Van Buren and George Herbert Walker Bush, each managed to win a term, but both were denied reelection, partly because it was perceived that they had departed from their predecessors' key policies. The record offers little encouragement to those who wish to move on up from a corner office to the Oval Office. Yet as Vice President Gore's campaign demonstrates, they continue to try. While a variety of reasons can be forwarded to explain this record of nearly unrelieved failure, we focus in this article on the campaign rhetoric of presidents as they stump for their chosen heirs. Oceans of ink have been spilled in an effort to explicate the problems that vice presidents face as they try to create their own identities (Nelson 2000). In 2000 alone, a variety of pundits sought to delineate the relationship between President Clinton and Vice President Gore (Duffy and Tumulty 1999; Seelye 2000). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to the efforts of the president on behalf of the vice president (for an exception, see Chisholm 1997). This discourse is important for a number of reasons. First, the typical strategies used by the president, however well intentioned, tend to impede the campaign of the vice president. In their rhetoric, presidents almost invariably cast vice presidents as subordinates, diminishing the perceived presidential capacity of these "partners. …