Who was the best US VP and why?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In my lifetime, Bush the Elder seemed pretty good and with a real job. In fact I would say he was a better VP then President.

Truman proved a good enough President, but didn’t really do anything as VP.
I don’t recall Ford, Gore or Mondale having much to do as VP. Biden does not do much.
Quayle was not trusted with anything more complicated then a paddle-ball.
Agnew was convicted.
Cheney should have been but someone might decide he was good for actually running the Government for a lot of the first term. I don’t clearly.
I’ve read Nixon played a large roll in running the country in Ike’s 2nd term.

Jefferson undermined Adams and should not qualify.
Adams felt he was in the most useless job in the country and thus should not qualify.

TR was only VP for 6 months.

I’m not aware of what Johnson did as VP.

Who am I missing? Someone was probably better than Nixon or Bush but I just don’t know.

2

Biden did kick off the 2011 debt deal negotiations.

3

Mondale, Gore, Biden and Cheney were all picked because they had far more foreign policy/defense experience than Carter, Clinton, Obama and Bush II. Whatever their contributions were, they were behind the scenes.

Nixon presided over a few Cabinet meetings while Eisenhower was ill, but he did not play a substantial role in policy-making. Johnson was pretty much frozen out of any responsibility while he was VP, as was Nelson Rockefeller.

Actually the best Vice President might have been Gerald Ford. Party leaders were confident enough in him that they could tell Nixon it was time to quit. I doubt they would have had that much confidence in Agnew.

4

Interesting that you discount TR for being VP for just 6 months, but you didn’t notice that Truman didn’t do much because he was VP for less than 3 months.

Jackie Kennedy headed up a high-profile “Beautify America” campaign. Hillary Clinton headed up a doomed campaign to develop a national health care plan. Oh, wait. I don’t think they were actually vice presidents.

ETA: It was widely said that Cheney was the most powerful VP ever, and was thought to be the real “power behind the throne” in the Bush II years. I’ve always personally felt it was indeed that way, and by intention right from the start. I always thought Bush and Cheney had an agreement when Cheney headed up Bush’s search for a VP and ended up choosing himself.

5

Also, that was Lady Bird Johnson.

6

I vote for Garret Hobart, William McKinley’s vice president from 1897-99. Nicknamed “The Assistant President”, Hobart was a very trusted advisor to McKinley, took his duties as vice-president quite seriously, consistently attended Senate sessions and mediated disputes therein, and was instrumental in helping to ratify the 1898 Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-American War.

As a nice bonus, Hobart’s wife Jennie became very close to McKinley’s wife Ida, who had health issues, and often substituted for her in White House functions.

I first read about him in the excellent book * The Warm Bucket Brigade* by Jeremy Lott, which details some of the more extraordinary vice presidents. A highly informative and entertaining read.

7

Ignorance fought! I swear, I remember it being Jackie. What the H, I was in the sixth grade at the time. IIRC, Lady Bird Johnson wasn’t ever Vice President either, though. I think I’m remembering that right. But this very SDMB has caught me mis-remembering things a few other times too.

8

Cheney really did get of lot of the heavy lifting done for GWB.

9

I think there are really two components to this question: (1) was a given veep given substantial responsibilities; and (2) to the extent that he did, what is your opinion on how he handled them?

Of the vice-presidents in my lifetime, it’s clear that veeps from Nixon through Rockefeller were given essentially no responsibilities in the Executive Branch. Of those since then, Cheney clearly played the largest role in policymaking (much to our nation’s detriment, IMHO), followed by Gore (and perhaps Biden, but it sounds like we won’t really have a handle on what Biden’s role has been until he begins running for President).

So I’d say Gore.

10

Sorry about that, I recently read a very thorough Truman Bio and it made it clear he was given nothing to do, rarely saw the President and there was little expectations of that changing. TR was given more to do and may well have proven a valuable adviser if McKinley was not assassinated. To me TR is disqualified for lack of time, Truman would have been a do nothing VP though also as you pointed out disqualified for lack of time.

Cheney is probably the most powerful VP ever but he was truly horrible in my opinion.

I feel Bush & Gore both made positive contributions. Bush was often the point man in negotiations with the USSR. He gave Reagan 2 very good Secretaries of State is how I remember it. (James Baker the other and official one). It felt like Bush did more than Gore or Biden.

**ekedolphin, **I know very little about Garret Hobart, that is fascinating and makes sense as it looked like Teddy was being given more responsibilities than most VPs of earlier times.

Does anyone know if any of the FDR VPs had much power or importance?

11

Al Gore was given quite a bit of responsibility, especially in the area of cutting government redundancies. But it was all behind the scenes and technical stuff that didn’t make the news.

The office of the Vice President really is designed to give it nothing to do. VPs did very little for most of our history; it wasn’t until the 60s and 70s that they were expected to do more than just wake up each day, find out if the president was still alive, then go back to sleep.*

*To paraphrase Mr. Dooley.

12

Biden’s primary job seems to be comic relief. To the extent you every hear of him (which isn’t often) it’s because he’s said something stupid.

13

One of the most powerful, yes. One of the best? I’d say no.

I’d say Al Gore, for many reasons highlighted here. And I was/am no huge supporter of his.

14

Quayle, he ensured no one would assassinate Bush the Elder.

15

Yes.

It was a kaiser roll he played, lightly buttered.

Actually, that was just about Ike’s assessment. When asked in 1960 what important tasks Nixon had performed in his administration, Ike said, “Well, if you give me a week , I might be able to think of one.”

How’d you like to have your boss say that about you, asked the same question?

16

Jackie’s thing was restoring the White House to a beautiful and historically-accurate condition; she even led a televised tour. Lady Bird’s thing was highway beautification.

Among best VPs, Hobart would be right up there, I think, for the reasons stated by ekedolphin.

Cheney was hands-down the most powerful, but he used that power IMHO for malign purposes (the leadup to the Iraq invasion, discouraging energy conservation, advancing Halliburton’s interests, insisting on government secrecy and secretiveness, and encouraging the use of torture by the U.S. intelligence community and military).

LBJ was a good VP. He felt powerless, which was he was when compared to his years as Senate majority leader, but JFK placed him in charge of supervising the space program, and included him in Cabinet meetings and, most importantly, in EXCOMM discussions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He went on several high-profile foreign trips. All I’ve read suggests that JFK was aware of LBJ’s sensitivity and unhappiness, and went out of his way to include him - more than his predecessors, including Nixon in the previous administration. RFK and JFK’s own staff held LBJ in low regard, though, and were needlessly petty in their treatment of him. Still, he was well-prepared to become President after the tragedy in Dallas.

Walter Mondale insisted on having a West Wing office and being included in all high-level meetings. He was, from all I’ve read, a trusted advisor to Carter. I think he may have been the first to also insist on a weekly or semi-weekly lunch with the President, which most since then have also had. Access to POTUS is important to any VP.

I must admit that I’ve been very disapppointed in Biden. He’s only in the news when he says something stupid, which is all too often. I think it was a mistake to pick him, and again to retain him for a second term (although I understand the political costs of dropping him from the ticket).

Lincoln and FDR, both great Presidents in many ways, lose points with me for not making better use of their running mates. But that, of course, was the custom of the day.

17

Upon assuming the office of president, Harry Truman was astonished at how much he’d been kept out of the loop on matters of national security. He quickly passed a bill through Congress that assured the VP would get the same intelligence briefing the President got.

18

I had heard he was left in the dark, but didn’t know about the bill. Do you have a cite I can read about it?

19

Yes, I’ve never heard of any such bill either. The VP is a statutory member of the National Security Council, but not every NSC member necessarily sees the same papers as the President.

20

It’s impossible to judge the pre-1945 (roughly) vice presidents by the standards of today. Nowadays we expect the VP to be an advocate for and a part of the administration, to be given at least one policy area in which to specialize, and to be personally selected by the presidential candidate after a careful vetting process.

None of this was true before 1945. VP candidates were chosen as an afterthought by party bosses at party conventions, and were often chosen specifically because they represented an opposite party faction and had opposed the presidential candidate. Lincoln had never met Hamlin and barely knew who he was. Coolidge hated Dawes. During his second term, at least, Roosevelt hated Garner.

The early VP’s did not view themselves as part of the administration. Many died in office, and those who survived were often not renominated for a second term. Nor were outgoing VP’s usually prominent candidates for the presidential nomination when the president retired.

One big exception, an early VP who fit the modern template, was Martin Van Buren. He was handpicked by Andrew Jackson, who willed the first Democratic National Convention into existence to give Van Buren national legitimacy. Van Buren lobbied effectively for Jackson in the Senate, and continued his party building activities which helped to create the modern Democratic Party which dominated national politics until the Civil War.

So Van Buren was certainly one of the most effective Vice Presidents. But, it’s hard to call him one of the best. He wasn’t a particularly savory individual. He was that lowest life form, a proslavery northerner, until he cynically decided to accept the Free Soil nomination for president in 1848. He carried Jackson’s brutal Indian removal policy into effect, with maximum harshness. And he presided ineffectively over economic calamity in the Panic of 1837.

But hey, as vice president, he was great.