the end of Roosevelt’s second term, Garner, like other vice presidents before him, was openly running for president, expecting that Roosevelt would abide by the then unwritten rule that presidents only serve two terms. And yet, even when Roosevelt made it clear that he would go for a third term, Garner stayed in the race. Not surprisingly, he was replaced as vice president and retired from politics in 1941 after serving two not very happy terms. Perhaps Garner’s most significant contribution to the vice presidency was his famous declaration that the office was “not worth a warm bucket of piss.” (The quote has been cleaned up from time to time to read “not worth a warm bucket of spit,” but the essential meaning has lived on.)
Even when presidents themselves were publicly respectful of their vice presidents (many of whom represented a different faction of their party), the same rules didn’t apply to their staffs. Kennedy’s staff, especially his brother and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was well known for their nonstop derision of Vice President Lyndon Johnson. To many on the Kennedy staff Johnson was an affront to Camelot, someone they tried to ignore as much as possible and who they secretly referred to as Uncle Cornpone.8 In the White House real estate is everything and the closer to the Oval Office the better the real estate. Johnson’s vice-presidential office was in the Old Executive Office building—outdoors and across the driveway from the Oval Office. In other words, it was about as far away as one can get from the Oval Office and still be in the compound. And his attempts to be read into important information in the White House were frequently rebuffed.9
In a pattern that psychologists will recognize from case histories of family abuse, where the abused child becomes an abusing parent, Lyndon Johnson, formerly the all-powerful Majority Leader of the Senate, became an abused and neutered vice president who went on to do the same to his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey’s list of projects included a wide variety of second-class assignments, such as chairing the President’s Council on Youth and Opportunity, presiding over the Council on Marine Resources and Engineering, and heading a task force on Native American opportunity, another on recreation and natural beauty, and another on promoting tourism.
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