Teddy Roosevelt Meets his Match

Ninety years ago today, Teddy Roosevelt died at his home in Oyster Bay. He was sixty. Besides the grim reaper, there were few forces that could contain TR's energy. As VP he came face to face with two of them.

Theodore Rex did many tremendous things in his fascinating life. He authored dozens of books, was a war hero in the Spanish-American War, governor of New York, and he was an able President who won the Nobel Peace Prize while in office (for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War). With all of this on his resume, it is easy to forget that he was also vice president. He didn't really want to be, he had said,

I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than Vice-President.

Still, Roosevelt took the job figuring it would set him up for the Presidency (his plans came to fruition early when President McKinley was assassinated in September 1901.) But the Vice Presidency, boring to most politicians, was absolutely painful to a man of Teddy Roosevelt's energies. So he took a vacation during which, according to the Senate Historical Office's invaluable Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789-1993:

The lack of pressing business as vice president allowed Theodore to spend time playing football with his sons and sparring with his tempestuous older daughter, Alice.

It is unclear if these were verbal jousts or actual fisticuffs Teddy would have preferred the latter, especially since Alice became Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the Washington society figure who famously said,

If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.

Alice clearly had her father's number, once remarking

My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.

When he became President, TR stated,

I can be President of the United States, or I can attend to Alice. I can't do both.

Fathers of daughters, from King Lear to the present can no doubt relate.

Enough Veep

At a New Year's Eve party I was talking to a few friends in the kitchen. I saw my wife standing in the doorway, about to come in. Then she heard me say, "Vice President" and she turned around and walked out.

Joe & the King, Joe gets a Job

President-elect Obama has a truly unenviable task. Biden, however, has the luxury of following one of the least popular VPs ever. But maybe if he works at it...

But it remains an open question what Biden will do. He has stated that he wants to be "Counselor-in-Chief." An appropriate role, more or less filled by several of his predecessors, but whether or not he will be called upon to do so is a open question. Obama has stocked his cabinet with heavyweights, inspired by Lincoln's "Team of Rivals." It is worth remembering that Lincoln's VP (Hannibal Hamlin) was not a player.


Vice President-elect Biden just appeared on Larry King Live and talked about his role in the administration. He discussed his role heading The White House Task Force on Working Families. This commission is intended to strengthen the middle class. While it will include cabinet secretaries and other power players, it is unclear what it will actually do. This may be a throwback to the many well-intentioned, but essentially powerless commissions VPs have chaired since the 1960s. They can play a valuable political role, but rarely do they exercise real power. Considering that the issues before this committee will be the responsibilities major departments like Health and Human Services - and that the task force will include power players like HHS Secretary Tom Daschle and National Economic Advisor Larry Summers - it is tough to see Biden exercising much real power from this post.

In the interview, Biden mentioned taking a leading role in preventing the proliferation and infiltration of WMD. Again, a worthy cause. But the foreign policy team is also full of heavyweights. Hillary at State is likely to command center stage wherever she goes. Gates has several advantages in any power struggle: he is already in place and is considered to have been a success as SecDef. The National Security Advisor, James Jones, is a four-star general. Again, tough to see where he will have a spot in this line-up.

That being said, if Biden has the President's ear then he has the President's ear - and in any administration that is what matters most. However, smart VPs who did have this influence kept quiet about it.

Willacy County v. Cheney: Prosecutor Indicts Ham Sandwich

So, Dick Cheney has been indicted - not by the ICC or Spain's Baltasar Garzon (who has a thing for indicting international figures for crimes against humanity or by some other avatar of human rights.

No, this indictment stems from Cheney's holdings in a company that invests in for-profit prisons. Alberto Gonzalez, Bush confidant and the former Attorney General, was also indicted. Here's a descriptive bit from the San Antonio Express-News:

Cheney is accused of contributing to the neglect of federal immigration detainees by contracting for-profit prisons.

“By working through corporations as prisons for profit, Defendant Richard Cheney has committed at least misdemeanor assaults of our inmates and/or detainees,” the indictment reads, adding that a “money trail” can be traced to Cheney's substantial investments in the Vanguard Group, which invests in privately run prisons.

Megan Mitchell, spokeswoman for Cheney, said: “We have not received an indictment. We haven't received a call from the district attorney's office. ... We haven't heard anything from the district attorney.”

[Willacy County DA Juan Angel] Guerra said he kept Operation Goliath secret for four months over concern that pressure would be brought to bear to stop it.

He said “everything was being worked out of my house” and only one trusted member of his staff knew about it. He said he enlisted the help of people all over the country and talked to witnesses all over the country. Everyone who helped was assigned a biblical name. Guerra was known as David.

We've heard this story before, deranged local prosecutor goes through the looking glass to take on the powerful at the heart of a vast conspiracy. Paging Oliver Stone...

Guerra, the re-incarnation of Jim Garrison, issued a whole slew of indictments against local officials for "official abuse of official capacity and official corruption."

Guerra has been indicted himself (for public theft) and responded by camping out in front of the county jail with goats, roosters, and a horse. He was later defeated in the primary and will soon be out of office. No doubt he can find a gig on the international anti-Cheney circuit.

There is a very good chance the case will be dismissed, but it will be interesting to watch how this story moves through the international media, blogosphere, and labyrinth of conspiracy theories.

And of course it proves the old adage, a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

Agnew: The Rise & Fall of the Greek Veep

Thirty-five years ago a seminal event in the history of the Vice Presidency occurred. Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to one count of income tax evasion and resigned from his office. In the speech (see the YouTube audio below) he refers to this resignation as insignificant in the context of America's peace and prosperity. But in fact Agnew's rise and fall had a profound impact on the course of the Vice Presidency.



While Agnew was a political cipher in the Nixon Administration and glad-handed by staffers to keep him away from anything important - his limitations and malfeasance set the stage for new trends in national politics.

The resignations in short order of both a Vice President (Agnew) and a President (Nixon)led to the "outsider" candidacy of Jimmy Carter. Since then, almost every Presidential election has featured an "outsider" candidate and anti-Washington "insider" rhetoric has become a stock feature of the American political scene. It took an outsider President to seriously consider an empowered Vice President - and that too has become an important (although still relatively new) feature of American politics.

It is possible that this would have occurred without Agnew's resignation - Nixon's resignation alone would have been sufficient to shock the political system (although considering how close the 1976 election was - Carter won 50.1% vs. Ford's 48% of the popular vote) Agnew's actions may in fact have been an important factor.

However, Agnew's resignation led to Ford's appointment and ultimately taking office not having won a national election to anything. The rapid turnover in the nation's highest offices, as Marie Natoli wrote in her American Prince, American Pauper: The Contemporary Vice Presidency in Perspective, changed views of the Vice Presidency, focusing on "the job which the Vice-President is really all about: the Presidency."

Bonus video: Agnew castigating effete snobs

VP Debate Review

It is all too easy to fall into the Pundit trap, and attempt to provide instant canned insights. With a hot Vice Presidential race (that includes a hot VP), the temptation is overwhelming. But the point of this blog (and my dissertation) is deeper than that – it is using the Vice President as a window into the national security process and trying to figure out how the Vice President can both be helpful to the President and better prepared for the Presidency if need be.

So I’ll try to push things that way, but some punditry is unavoidable.

Unfortunately, it isn’t easy. Reading all of the pundits before the debate, I realized, I had nothing new to say about it. Biden needed to not bully Palin and not gaffe. Palin needed to not gaffe and needed to stand there and take her lumps and not look to miserable doing it. There was a substantial chance that one or the other would not be up to it – but they both managed. Biden definitely won (was really quite masterful on the whole), but not by a knockout. Palin was good enough (having set expectations very low, not drooling was probably sufficient.) It is possible that radio listeners thought she lost by a huge margin, since her statements were not terribly clear or coherent. But combined with a nice smile and some winks, she was appealing enough on screen. In my preview of the Obama-McCain debate I described McCain’s lack of polish as a speaker, his apparent lack of artifice, as the most clever artifice of all. Perhaps the same will apply to Palin’s debate performance.

(It is possible that she is studying Tina Fey and imitating herself. On that note, my wife burst into laughter about ten minutes into the debate when she realized that the inevitable SNL sketch will feature Keenan Thompson as Gwen Ifill.)

Defining their Roles

There were a few times when the debate turned to the role of the Vice President. Ifill asked a specific question about the Administration’s claim that the Vice Presidency resides in both the executive and legislative branches. Biden rejected this as ridiculous. He explained that the VP’s role in the Senate is very limited and that the Administration had been out of bounds in its efforts to expand the VP’s role in the legislative branch. Palin (probably less familiar with the issue) said that she was hoping the Constitution would provide some flexibility in terms of shaping the Vice President’s role.

Interesting, in that light, that Biden said he would be the administration’s pointman on legislative affairs. The Senate is extremely jealous of its prerogatives and (starting with John Adams) has pushed back against Vice Presidents who tried to ride herd on the Senate. No less formidable a figure than Lyndon Baines Johnson (a true master of the Senate) was pushed from power when he became Vice President. Nelson Rockefeller, a formidable figure – but without Senate experience – tried act as lobbyist-in-chief and quickly became persona non grata in the cloakrooms where the real deals are done.

Vice Presidents who presided with a light hand did much better, and some Vice Presidents (such as Mondale) did some very careful lobbying. However, Vice Presidential lobbying can create questions about the Vice President’s impartiality as a Presiding officer. Therefore, the executive branch lobbying operations are kept separate from the Vice President, who serves rather as a point of contact between the two branches might be a better term for this role. Biden is an experienced Senator and it will be interesting to see how he adapts to this role.

Palin should be extremely careful in how she handles the Senate. If she displays the brash confidence for which she has become known, the Senate will quickly put her in her place. The last governors to preside over the Senate were Rockefeller and Agnew – both had troubles in that role.

Palin also said she looked forward to leading on the administration’s energy policy. It is certainly possible that she will have real authority in this role, but more than likely (particularly since she has no real DC powerbase or experience) this will be a throwback to the commissioner role that Vice Presidents played in the 1960s. These commissions were generally “feel-good” initiatives intended to make it appear something was being done but had little actual power.

As I’ve written before, an ongoing challenge for a McCain administration will be giving her substantial work that both makes use of her talents and prepares her for power – should that become necessary.

VP Assessments

The real action today is over at Veep Critique where I assess the two Vice Presidential candidates and how the might fit into the national security process. An important question as we live in a complicated and dangerous world.

Aaron Mannes on Covert Radio disussing FARC, Georgia, and the VP and National Security

Covert Radio just posted a podcast where we discuss a number of topics. My perennials, FARC, Chavez, and Hezbollah, but also the implications of Russian moves in Georgia.

We also spent a lot of time discussing my new hobby-horse, the Vice President and the national security process - for more see my other blog - Veep Critique.

Checkout my new blog on the Vice Presidency

So I've started a new blog VeepCritique about the Vice Presidency, with a focus on the VP's role in the national security process.

Current events made now a great time to get it started. My first post examines the challenges facing McCain's VP selection. The best President-VP relationships have been between DC-outsider Presidents and DC-insider VPs. But McCain is a definite insider.