The President gets the Oval Office. What does the Vice President get?
(This is a real question, but smart-ass jokes are also welcome. :))
According to the official White House site (whitehouse.gov), the Vice President occupies the former office of the Secretary of the Navy (this previous use ending in 1960). However, the site says that the VP’s current use of the office is considered “ceremonial,” which makes it sound like the VP has a “real” office elsewhere. I browsed the site, and did some other searches, but no other information was immediately available.
Not an earthshaking inquiry, of course, but I’m curious. Anyone happen to know?
The Vice President lives on the grounds of the old Naval Observatory. I imagine that he has an office that he works out of there.
The “official” office is used for ceremonial purposes. I believe that’s been the case for a while. In reading “Truman”, Truman had a ceremonial office in the Capitol, but he did his real “work” out of a different office in one of the Senate office buildings.
I think the VP just tries to find office space wherever he can find it. He’s obviously a busy man.
The VP has an office at the Old Exexutive Buildling, which is next to the White House grounds. I imagine he has one at his residence at the Naval Observatory for some purposes, but the one in the OEB is closer to where he needs to practice his business, the White House or the US Capitol.
VP Jack Garner (1933-1941) was previously a powerful man in the Senate, Majority Leader IIRC. Instead of using the VP’s office up the street, he kept his old Senate office which was in the Capitol Builing.
I thought Garner was the former Speaker of the House. He might have had a Senate office just so he could hang around the Senators. Johnson was the former Majority Leader who became VP.
Again, citing McCullouch’s “Truman”, in the first half of the 20th Century, senators were not highly regarded. Most presidential candidates were governors, cabinet officers, or judges
The only sitting senator who elected president in the 20th century, prior to Kennedy in 1960 was Harding in 1920.
I think the 17th amendment changed the nature of the senate. Previous to this amendment, the senators from each state were nominated by the governor and elected by the legislature of the state, ensuring that they would be complete political hacks, usually disgraced governors who still had a lot of markers outstanding or major fund raisers for the state party in power. With the 17th amendment, senators were elected by the voters of a state. This made the senate a less deliberative body and more like the house–more in tune to day to day affairs. The senate was intended to be a brake on the system. Whereas the house would tend to pass bills of temporary interest, the senate was supposed to harumph and gesticulate and generally sit on things, locked in philibusters and obscure cloture issues until the mood of the public changed and the bill died of natural causes. There were six amendments to the constitution before the 17th (not counting the bill of rights) and ten after, so you can see some of the effect of the senate’s change right there. So while the character of senators up to the 17th amendment was probably inferior to their current character, the character of the senate has also changed, and not necessarily for the better. Three of the four major contenders for the presidency (McCain, Gore, and Bradley) were all senators. Lieberman is a senator. Dole and Mondale were senators. The senate, once a graveyard for political hacks, has become a training ground for the oval office.
As the president of the senate, the vice president also has an office in the senate. If he’s anything like me, he probably is always in the office most distant from the papers he most desperately needs.
I think that every VP since Mondale has had an office in the West Wing of the Whitehouse. I couldn’t find the book where I read about it, though, so I can’t be sure that I’m remembering right.
