I know this might be considered redundant :), but my vote goes to:
William King: Sworn in in Cuba, then returned home to Alabama and died. Never set foot in DC as VP.
Runners-up:
Hannibal Hamlin: spent most of his term (during Civil War) back home in Maine. Part of that time was as a cook in the Maine Coast Guard. (I’ve got in-laws in Maine who worship him, so I’m careful not to express this opinion.)
Nelson Rockefeller: Ford’s VP. Dropped for 1976 election bid for Robert Dole.
Henry Wilson: who? exactly!
Future obscure:
J. Danforth Quayle
Walter Mondale
Al Gore, if not elected president
Adlai Stevenson, because when you say Adlai Stevenson everybody thinks of the two-time Presidential candidate, and has no idea that there was a VP with that name too.
Daniel D. Tompkins. (so obscure that even Kris Kringle, in the movie Miracle on 34th Street, paired him with the wrong president!)
George Dallas (Polk).
Millard Fillmore–even obscure after he succeeded Taylor as President.
Schuyler Colfax (Grant)–should be obscure, for obstructing a Crédit Mobilier probe.
Alben W. Barkley (Truman)
John C. Calhoun, like Colfax, should be obscure. I think his 20th Century antitype would be Huey Long.
Not John C. Calhoun, he’s famous (well, should be) for breaking with Jackson and his kitchen Cabinet. He was Veep under two Presidents, as well, and the first Vice President to resign. He was also instrumental in the Compromise of 1850. He was near death then, but he still made a difference.
Henry Wilson was the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs during the Civil War. He was a Senator from Massachusetts. I didn’t know he was a Vice President, though. What President did he serve under?
My vote for most obscure is Elbridge Gerry, who died in office as Madison’s 2nd in command.
Sorry xizor, Agnew is definately out. First off, everybody in MD knows him–he was the last Republican Governor we’ve had. But more importantly, he was caught for various cromes and forced to resign. This is only a short time before Nixon is forced to resign. Not nearly obscure enough.
“Most obscure vice-president”? What a redundancy. Christ, they’re ALL obscure! You’ll have better debates over a “least obscure” list, which should not include those veeps who later became Prezzes.
Max Torque wrote:
“You’ll have better debates over a “least obscure” list, which should not include those veeps who later became Prezzes.”
Max, thanks for giving me another opportunity of passing along one of my favorite VP fun facts. (I slipped it in another thread a couple of weeks ago, but it rapidly sank out of sight unread. My apologies to those of you who saw it the first time.)
Charles Gates Dawes (1865-1951), Calvin Coolidge’s Veep, shared in a Nobel Peace Prize in 1925. But he deserves a shot at “least obscure,” not because of his political or diplomatic skills, but because he is the only VP to have ever composed a bona fide pop hit tune. Dawes wrote the music to “It’s All in the Game (of Love).”
Originally called “A Melody in A,” the tune had modest success in the Swing Era. In 1951 Carl Sigman added lyrics. Tommy Edward’s do-woppy recording of “It’s All in the Game (of Love)” reached #18 on the Billboard charts soon thereafter. It has also been recorded by Van Morrison, Elton John, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and others.
Can’t fool me. He had no veep. He took over the presidency(much to many peoples opposition) after Wm. Harrison died. And there was no mechanism in place to fill the void until the 22nd Amendment. Other VPs that became president didn’t have their own VPs, unless they went on to win another term: Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman.
And dougie_monty, don’t put down Alben W. Barkley. There’s just something about Alben W. Barkley that I like.
Even Veeps who were well known before they gained the office tended to drop into instant obscurity once they assumed the mantle of second-in-command. Lyndon Johnson and Nelson Rockefeller were arguably the best known Veeps of the last 50 years the day they took the oath. Can you remember anything they did or said during their terms (of course Johnson became president, but that’s different.)
On the other hand, FDR had 3 people serve under him. Two of them (Garner and Wallace) were relatively well-known when they took office. The third was virtually unknown, but he was Harry Truman.
Thanks to The Right Stuff (both the Tom Wolfe bestselling novel and the film), Vice-President Johnson is celebrated for having terrorized astronaut John Glenn’s hapless stuttering wife.
25th Amendment, actually. The 22nd is the limitation on presidents to two terms.
And Lyndon Johnson, the last vice president to succeed to the presidency before the 25th Amendment was in force (February 10, 1967).
I have a real nomination for the distinction–John C. Breckinridge. He is mostly known (insofar as he’s known at all) today as the man who was the presidential candidate of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party in the election of 1860, after the Southerners found Steven Douglass unacceptable. It is frequently forgotten that he was the incumbent Vice President of the United States at the time, serving under James Buchanan.
Also, there were a couple of times when the VP died and he wasn’t replaced: George Clinton & William King. Or the VP quit: John Calhoun.
It would’ve been a more interesting history if the 2nd-place presidential candidate still became the VP. Kennedy-Nixon, Truman-Dewey (or Dewey-Truman if you read the papers), Clinton-Bush: can you imagine? :D:D
