Veeps

In light of the historic US election (hurray for Obama!), I was digging around for some interesting stories. Noting that the Republican nominee for vice president, Sarah Palin, seemed so unfit for the job, I began thinking of ways in which the office of vice president is really not much of a job at all. It turns out that I’m not alone.

Veeps is a book about the anonymous, sometimes ignominious office of Vice President of the United States. Authored by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger, lifelong veep obsessives, if you can believe it, the book explores the largely unknown world of the men who have lived in the shadow of presidents for more than two hundred years.

Sure, there were some who eventually went on to assume the presidency (Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson), and some who ran unsuccessfully for the office (Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Al Gore), but what about those who were just plain forgotten? Some of them may have been bland stand-ins, but Kelter and Shellabarger have unearthed stories about some of the more colourful men to have been “one heartbeat away from the Presidency.”

For instance, have you heard of Henry Agard Wallace, FDR’s veep from 1941-1945? A dabbler in world religions, he once sent letters to his “guru” that contained lines like these:

I have been thinking of holding the casket—the sacred, most precious casket. And I have thought of the New Country going forth to meet the seven stars under the sign of the three stars. And I have thought of the admonition ‘Await the Stone.’ We await the Stone and we welcome you again to this glorious land of destiny.

Fortunately, Roosevelt dumped Wallace from the ticket in 1944 and his replacement, Harry S. Truman, assumed the presidency just 82 days after Wallace left office.

That’s just one of the fascinating stories in the book. I can’t wait to read the whole thing. For more, check out the preview available here.

Order Veeps from Amazon.com