Profiles in Insignificance
With centuries of warfare, slavery, and struggles for civil rights to chronicle, there’s usually not much room for cheap laughs in the annals of American history. Perhaps the most reliable source of comedy comes somewhat surprisingly from the second-most powerful office in the land, the scandal-plagued, mediocrity-ridden, largely irrelevant position described by its first holder, Vice President John Adams, as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”
This is the tawdry, tragic, often hilarious tale told by Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance, by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger. From Aaron Burr’s arguable treason to Charles Dawes’s notorious napping to Spiro T. Agnew’s cash kickbacks in the White House basement, the legacies of the men the authors describe as “a heartbeat or lower intestinal obstruction away from the Presidency” are revealed here in all their dubious splendor.
One of the more shocking facts revealed in Veeps is the number of years our glorious nation has managed to survive with a literal empty chair where most often there simply sat an empty suit. Since the death of James Madison’s Vice President, George Clinton, in 1812, the United States has somehow muddled along for a total of 37 years and 290 days without a Veep in office. Keller and Shellabarger’s chronicle convinces readers that this was not necessarily a major bummer for American democracy.
Veeps is handsomely illustrated with a series of slightly caricatured portraits that, like the cover image of William Almon Wheeler, reveal the frustrated ambitions and utter hopelessness of so many of the men tabbed for second place:
“Theodore Roosevelt planned to enroll in law school to fill the time he would surely have on his hands. Wheeler, of course, donned his displeasure like a death mask. John Nance Garner would have traded the job for a tepid receptacle of an expelled bodily fluid had he not thought the lopsided bargain would have been unfair to his fellow barterer.”
While Garner famously described the gig as “not worth a bucket of warm piss,” Kelter and Shellabarger’s entertaining account of this rogues’ gallery of American history ought to convince voters to pay a bit more attention to the second name on the Presidential ticket. After all, a rather impressive number of these “incompetents, empty suits, abysmal spellers, degenerate golfers, and corrupt Marylanders” have ended up assuming the highest office in the land thanks to assassins’ bullets, the odd case of food poisoning, or on exceedingly rare occasions the will of an actual majority of American voters.
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