J Paul Johnson
Quick: what do George Clinton, Elbridge Gerry, John Tyler, George Mifflin Dallas, William Rufus King, Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, Henry Wilson, and Levi Morton have in common? No, they are not former members of Parliament Funkadelic. (Well, I’ll give you Clinton.) You read the article title, so you guessed they are all holders of the second highest elected office in American government—and all but consigned to the dustbin of history. Buffs and scholars will know their names, but to the general electorate, or to history more broadly, vice presidents have normally mattered little. PBS’s deftly-timed new documentary, The American Vice President, sheds light on the history and relevance of this most curious elected office—a heartbeat away from the presidency and yet so often a meaningless title—from its inception through the adoption of the 25th Amendment and its subsequent implementation.
In the modern era, the position is one of enormous political consequence. Many a vice president ascends to the presidency, even if in the nearly 250-year history of the office only once has a sitting vice president been elected president. Five of the last ten American presidents—Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald Ford, George Bush, and Joe Biden—all served as vice presidents before taking office. The cases of Johnson, who succeeded John F. Kennedy after his assassination, and Ford, who succeeded Nixon in the wake of first VP Spiro Agnew’s and then Nixon’s resignations, frame an especially fraught period from 1963 to 1974, on which The American Vice President focuses most closely, as a traumatized and then scandalized America was forced to clarify the role of the vice president with greater urgency and clarity.
Produced, written and directed by Michelle Ferrari and executive produced by Cameo George, The American Vice President premieres Tuesday, October 1, 2024—not incidentally the same night as the debate between current vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and J. D. Vance—on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App. The stakes are high that night for the two candidates, as the office itself, while still amorphously defined in many ways, has been at the epicenter of American government and politics once again in recent years, following Mike Pence’s refusal to intercede on Donald Trump’s behalf following their ticket’s loss in the 2020 election and, most recently, current Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket in the 2024 campaign. Both episodes were, for the most part, unprecedented, as were the cases of Johnson, Ford, Agnew, and others, making the topic of the vice presidency both rich and timely.
Amazingly, as The American Vice President compellingly demonstrates, what happens when the President of the United States is unable to fulfill the duties of the office—whether due to illness, incapacity, or death—went without a definitive answer for much of American history. The framers of the Constitution had the foresight to imagine such a scenario and so instilled the office of the “vice” president for the purpose of serving as the designated successor to the commander-in-chief (and breaking a tie vote in the Senate) should the occasion warrant. But the framers but were vague about the details that would attend such a transfer of power. They simply could not foresee the incredible sets of circumstance—the assassinations of sitting presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), the deaths of more in office (Harrison, Taylor, Harding, FDR), or the crises engendered by the Watergate scandal—that would complicate succession.
It was the Kennedy assassination in 1963 that the ambiguity in the Constitution was finally deemed worthy of redress. Had JFK been not killed but disabled or debilitated by Oswald’s bullet, could–should?—Johnson have stepped in to serve as President? (Interestingly, The American Vice President charts just how many months of his presidency Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, spent in convalescence, his ability to perform his duties in question.) After Johnson became president and the vice presidency was left vacant with no constitutional mechanism to fill the office, Congress debated and approved, in an impressively bipartisan effort unimaginable today, a constitutional amendment, the 25th, detailing the procedures for both a transfer of presidential power and a means of filling a vice-presidential vacancy.
A good thing, too, it was, as just six years after its 1967 ratification the Amendment was invoked for the first time when in 1973, Vice President Agnew was forced from office and President Nixon named an obscure Michigan congressman to replace him. Eight months later, that man, Gerald Ford, became president when Nixon resigned. By the end of that year, neither of the two highest elected offices in the land (including Ford’s appointee as VP, Nelson Rockefeller) were held by men who had been elected. Yet in this period, as the documentary argues, the office of the vice presidency became redefined as one in close partnership to the president and a more important figure in the executive branch of American government.
The American Vice President‘s history lesson is an important one. It concludes, largely, with the end of Ford’s presidency. In the last four decades, we’ve seen vice presidents Bush and Biden elected to the nation’s highest office. We’ve seen others—Pence, in particular—bring with them a bloc of voters important to their running mate’s candidacy, and altering the trajectory of history. Still others have been, like the Clintons and Gerrys and Colfaxes named above, little more than punchlines in footnotes, like Dan Quayle, who lost a debate to fictional television character Murphy Brown, couldn’t spell potato without an e, and got told bluntly he was “no Jack Kennedy.” If history is any indication, one never knows when a Quayle, Biden, Pence, or Harris—or for that matter, a Johnson or Ford—will be shoved into the harsh spotlight of the presidency.
The American Vice President is well worth your watch, conveying this history with efficacy and verve. Many will be tuned into the Vance-Walz debate Oct. 1, but PBS’s app and website provide free viewing access on demand and almost any platform. It may be true that most of the time the vice presidency matters little and accomplishes less, but every now and then, the office is at the very core of the republic it is elected to represent.
