History’s Most Surprising Vice President Picks
Despite being only one degree away from the presidency, the Vice President of the United States has long been viewed as an inauspicious position. John Adams called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” And when Theodore Roosevelt had a noisy chandelier removed from the White House, he ordered, “Take it to the office of the Vice President. He doesn't have anything to do. It will keep him awake."
But the Vice President is one step of succession away from the Oval Office, and that simple fact lends weight to the selection. That weight can, in turn, make for some surprising results. These are some of the more unexpected U.S. Vice Presidents to take office.
Theodore Roosevelt as William McKinley’s VP
In 1899, in the months leading up to William McKinley’s 1900 reelection campaign, Vice President Garret Hobart began suffering from symptoms of a severe heart condition, including fainting spells. Though Republican Senator Mark Hanna tried to assure the public that "nothing but death or an earthquake can stop the re-nomination of Vice President Hobart," the former seemed to be exactly the concern. Unfortunately, Hobart’s health worsened, and he died on November 21, 1899. And McKinley found himself unexpectedly looking for a running mate for reelection.
At the time, Theodore Roosevelt was serving his first year as governor of New York, and immediately emphasized a slate of reforms that put him at odds with the establishment in his own party. Republican Party bosses realized that they could effectively remove "that damned cowboy" (as Hanna referred to Roosevelt) from New York politics by nominating him as McKinley’s running mate. Roosevelt realized the political exile the vice presidency would entail, and argued against his nomination. Hanna, for his part, was vehemently opposed to the idea of Roosevelt as Vice President, at one point pleading, “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between that madman and the presidency?”
The strangely aligned Roosevelt and Hanna were both unable to stem the tide, and the tally at the 1900 Republican National Convention concluded with 929 of a possible 930 votes in favor of Roosevelt as Vice President. The count was not unanimous only because there was one delegate who abstained from voting: Theodore Roosevelt himself. There was no choice but to accept the nomination, and party boss Thomas Platt quipped that he would attend McKinley’s second inauguration just “to see Theodore take the veil.” But Hanna’s warning would prove prescient just one year later, when McKinley was shot and killed, and Roosevelt assumed the presidency.
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Harry Truman as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s VP
Harry Truman’s surprising presidential victory in 1948 is much more famous than his vice presidential candidacy in 1944, but Truman being chosen to replace incumbent Henry Wallace as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate was unexpected in its own right. It wasn’t that FDR changing his Vice President was unprecedented: Wallace himself had replaced two-term VP John Nance Garner for the 1940 election. But Wallace was well established within Roosevelt’s cabinet, having served as secretary of agriculture since 1933, and Roosevelt had even suggested that he wouldn’t run for a third term without Wallace on the ticket.
By 1944, though, FDR was in poor health, and Democratic Party leaders who had disagreed with his choice of Wallace as Vice President in 1940 argued more intently for a different running mate. Perhaps concerned himself about how Wallace’s friendship with Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich left the previous campaign vulnerable to political attack in the form of the infamous “guru letters,” Roosevelt refrained from naming a preferred running mate for 1944. Still, when the first ballot was cast at the Democratic National Convention, Wallace led the pack — though he didn’t secure the number of delegates needed to win the nomination. By the second ballot, Southern states switched their delegates to Truman, allowing him to snare a come-from-behind victory. Years later, Wallace claimed in an article for TIME magazine that the convention leaders had maneuvered the delegates’ switch in favor of their preferred candidate.
Andrew Johnson as Abraham Lincoln’s VP
Andrew Johnson might be the most surprising “balance-the-ticket” candidate in history, since he wasn’t even in the same party as the President he was running with. But in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wanted a running mate to represent unity, so he advocated for the Southern Democrat to join the ticket. Despite Lincoln’s popularity, the proposal was met with a level of opposition that is probably not very surprising. When told of Lincoln’s intention for the Republican Party to nominate Johnson, Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens protested, “Can't you get a candidate for Vice President without going down into a damned rebel province for one?”
An opposition Republican National Convention was even called in Cleveland to promote California Senator John Frémont for President, with Union General John Cochrane as his running mate. But the unity Lincoln was seeking was evident in the support Johnson had from moderate Republicans. The Republican Party was temporarily renamed the National Union Party, and when the convention took place, Johnson won the vice presidential nomination.
Elbridge Gerry as James Madison’s VP
By the presidential election of 1812, Elbridge Gerry was nearly 20 years past his intended (and short) retirement from a storied career in government. He had signed the Declaration of Independence, served two stints in the Continental Congress, acted as a delegate in the Constitutional Convention, and was elected governor of Massachusetts. He was also a firebrand who refused to sign the Constitution, and his frequent overall dissent earned him accusations of partisanship; in a 1787 letter to Thomas Jefferson, an unidentified confidant called Gerry a “Grumbletonian” prone to “objecting to [anything] he did not propose.” His perceived failure to rebuke an attempted bribery scheme by French diplomats in 1796 (known as the XYZ Affair) nearly sunk his post-retirement reentry into politics from the outset. And the redistricting bill he signed early in 1812 while governor was derided to the point that the resulting district was referred to as a “Gerry-mander.”
Gerry was not originally looking to join President James Madison’s 1812 reelection bid; he was attempting to win another term as governor of Massachusetts. Besides, Vice President George Clinton was firmly entrenched in the position, having served in the office since 1805 under both Madison and Thomas Jefferson. But then something unprecedented happened: On April 20, 1812, Clinton died at age 72, marking the first time a sitting Vice President had passed away. Two months later, Gerry’s gubernatorial reelection campaign failed, and he appealed to Madison for a federal position due to the poor state of his finances. Since Madison’s first choice to replace Clinton, James Langdon, declined, Madison ended up asking Gerry to join his election ticket. This aligned with the Democratic-Republican’s desire for a Northerner to complement Madison’s Virginia origins. The Madison-Gerry ticket was a success at the polls, and Gerry served as Vice President for two years before also dying in office at age 70.
William Rufus King as Franklin Pierce’s VP
When William Rufus King was chosen as Franklin Pierce’s running mate for the 1852 election, he became the first U.S. senator to be nominated for Vice President. Pierce hailed from New Hampshire, and the Alabama senator was chosen for the classic “balance the ticket” strategy. At the time, nearly a decade before the Civil War, balancing the ticket meant nominating a VP who was an ardent supporter of slavery — precisely the attitude needed to appeal to the South.
During the election, however, King was ill with tuberculosis, and was unable to campaign. He spent much of the race seeking a cure in Cuba, and was still there when he and Pierce were elected. As he was not able to travel back to Washington, D.C., in time for their inauguration, Congress needed to pass special legislation in order for King to be sworn in abroad, making him the only Vice President to have ever been sworn into office outside the U.S.
Thomas Marshall as Woodrow Wilson’s VP
On the surface, Thomas Marshall’s nomination as Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President seems fairly straightforward. As the governor of Indiana, he was the popular leader of what had been a critical swing state — since 1880, no presidential candidate had won the election without carrying Indiana. But there were a few underlying problems: For one, Wilson did not want Marshall on the ticket, referring to him as “a very small caliber man.” And Marshall himself had a similar attitude toward the vice presidency as Theodore Roosevelt before him. He wryly joked, “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected Vice President of the United States. And nothing was heard of either of them again.”
By the time of the 1912 Democratic National Convention, the party was still split on who would serve as Wilson’s running mate. Democratic powerhouse William Jennings Bryan was proposed as a candidate by a delegate from the District of Columbia, but declined consideration in a response speech, and instead advocated for both North Dakota Governor John Burke and Oregon Senator George Chamberlain. Meanwhile, rumors circulated that Wilson himself was delaying the vote in order to persuade Missouri Congressman James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark to be his running mate. The first vote was held at 1 a.m., and resulted in no decision. After nearly an hour of angling and debate, Marshall was finally elected the party’s vice presidential nominee — and even then, he considered rejecting the office due to its inadequate pay.
