Only four sitting vice presidents have been elected U.S. president.
America has had 50 vice presidents, 15 of whom went on to become president. Only four of them were elected president while still serving as veep, however: John Adams (1796), Thomas Jefferson (1800), Martin Van Buren (1836), and George H.W. Bush (1988). Several other sitting vice presidents have run for the highest office in the land but were unsuccessful, including Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Al Gore in 2000. So while the vice presidency stands as perhaps the single best springboard for the Oval Office, it’s far from a sure thing.
Elsewhere in government, 19 House of Representatives members, 17 senators, 17 governors, and 12 military generals have gone on to become president of the United States. In other anomalies, Woodrow Wilson is the only commander in chief to have obtained a Ph.D., Andrew Johnson is the sole president to later be elected to the Senate, and William Howard Taft is the only one to also serve as chief justice (which was his real ambition all along). Only two vice presidents have resigned: John C. Calhoun, who found serving under Andrew Jackson frustrating and moved to the Senate in 1832, and Spiro Agnew, who left office in 1973 after pleading no contest to a felony charge of tax evasion. Nixon replaced Agnew with Gerald Ford, who became president when Nixon himself resigned less than a year later.
