A Brief History
On December 19, 1974, former governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, was sworn in as Vice President of the US. Gerald Ford had previously served as Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace in 1973, meaning that both the President and the Vice President in late 1974 had both not been elected to office!
Digging Deeper
The office of Vice President has long been derided as a trivial position, with John Adams, our first Vice President, calling it “the most insignificant Office,” and John Garner, FDR’s first VP calling the job, “almost wholly unimportant.”
Critics of the office must be reminded that the VP serves a single heartbeat away from the Oval Office, or in Ford’s case, a presidential resignation away. Not only have 15 Vice Presidents become President, 9 of them assumed the top job while still serving as Veep.
As President of the Senate, the VP casts the deciding vote in any senatorial tie that needs to be broken, an important factor recently.
(Note: With the age of President Trump and President Biden, the possibility of death or illness elevating the VP to the Presidency has been a real possibility. The impeachment of President Clinton in 1998-1999 and of President Trump in 2019, also points out the realistic possibility that a VP could become President quite unexpectedly.)
Question for students (and subscribers): Who is your favorite Vice President? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Waldrup, Carole. The Vice Presidents: Biographies of 45 Men Who Have Held the Second Highest Office in the United States. McFarland & Company, 2006.
Wallace, Morgan. Interesting Facts About American Vice Presidents. Lulu.com, 2023.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger Administering the Oath of Office to Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller in the Senate Chamber in the United States Capitol, is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.
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