Position. From the gerald. Are. Ford president ial library, this is an hour. Good evening again. The timing for tonights program is prescient as is always the case at the ford library as we are on the verge of seeing who the current nominees for the presidency will select as their running mates. Some of you picked up copies of an article from the wall street journal recently as you entered the auditorium. Its on the impact of the Vice President ial nominee on election results. For those of you who didnt pick up copies, were having extras run right now and well have them for you after the program. Tonight were going to be discussing not just the electoral process but the evolving role of the vice presidency. And we have the honor of hosting professor joel goldstein, who is the author of a newly released book the white house vice presidency, the path to significance from mondale to biden. Dr. Goldstein is a highly respected scholar of the vice presidency, the presidency and constitutional law having written widely in all three areas. He has consistently sought out by national and International Media out lets for commentary and insight, especially during the president ial campaigns. In fact, in a 2012 article in the New York Times he was quoted as saying my wife says that i am an exotic plant that blooms every four years. [ laughter ] professor goldstein is best known for his work on the vice presidency. It came out of his doctoral work, his dissertation and led to his first book which was the modern american vice presidency, the transformation of a political institution. Over the years he has also authored numerous book chapters and articles on the executive branch, constitutional law, and admiralty law. He received a doctorate in Political Science at Oxford University where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar and then a law degree from Harvard Law School where he was a note editor for the harvard law review. After law school, he was a law clerk for a federal skbruj in massachusetts and then practiced admiralty law for 12 years in st. Louis. He joined the st. Louis University School of law in 1994, was associate dean of the faculty for three years and was awarded the Vincent Immelt professorship in 2005. One scholar commented the american vice presidency is long overdue for a robust reevaluation and joel goldstein, the premier chronicler of that special office has done a brilliant job in this perceptive wide ranging book and i can vouch for that. So please help me join professor goldstein to the ford president ial library. [ applause ] thank you very much. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. Im delighted to be back at the ford library, i did research here for my book and its wonderful to have the opportunity to be here. When most of you think about a president ford, you probably think about him as our 38th president , a man who served nearly 25 years in the house of representatives with the minority leader, the house of representatives for eight years and was a good and decent public servant. When i think about him, i think about the fact that he was our 40th Vice President , a position he held for nine months and was probably the least happy period of his public service. But he was an important figure in the vice presidency. He was the first Vice President appointed to the position through the 25th amendment which became part of the constitution in 1967. He was the second person to make an appointment of a Vice President under the 2 fifth amendment. He was the ninth and the most recent Vice President to succeed to the president to the presidency following an unexpected president ial Timothy Mcveigh kansi and the only one of those people to follow to succeed following a president ial resignation. And hes the only president in our history to seriously consider serving as Vice President after he had already served as president. And although president fords presidency and vice presidency really came before the period that ive called the white house vice presidency, he played an important part in developing and creating the office that we have today. We live in a period now where we have a very robust vice presidency. And whats so striking about that, in addition to the rather checkered history of the vice presidency for most of our history, is that the vice presidency has grown to its current importance at a time when many of our other Major Political institutions are being met with increasing dissatisfaction. If you think about the current situation, Vice President biden is completing the final year of a very consequential and involved vice presidency. If you lookt what he has done similarfully the past week or so he traveled to iraq to meet with its embattled Prime Minister and to support the military mission against the islamic state. He went to italy where he met with officials of the Italian Government and he met with officials of the vatican including pope francis. He spoke at a vatican conference on combatting disease. Hes met privately with president obama on numerous times during the past week, including receiving the president s Daily Briefing each day. He had private lunch with the president today and did two other events with him. He joined the president s meeting with secretary kerry within the last week. He met with the leaders of el salvador, guatemala, honduras, panama to discuss how to advance security and economic matters in central america. And if you recall Vice President bidens predecessor, dick cheney, who first came to National Attention as president fords chief of staff, during his vice presidency many people said that they thought that the vice presidency had become too powerful and spoke of an imperial vice presidency. And although i think that Vice President cheneys power was exaggerated in the sense that i think he never was president or never was copresident , and that his influence declined during the second term of president bushs administration, he clearly was a very, very significant Vice President. But it didnt start with biden and cheney. In fact, the last six Vice President s over the last 40 years ever since Walter Mondale was Vice President have really performed significant positions within the executive branch. The change in the vice presidency is institutional, its not personal. The vice presidency has now become one of our governments most important and contributing institutions in the executive branch. Not simply as a first president ial successor but as a critical instrument of the presidency on an ongoing basis. Well, it wasnt always this way. Our first Vice President , john adams, said that my country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the imagination of man contrived or his imagination conceived. I can do neither good nor evil. Woodrow wilson was a political scientist before he became a president and in 1885 he wrote about that the chief embarrassment in discussing the vice presidency is that when youve said how little there is to be said about it youve said all there is to be said. [ laughter ] his Vice President was thomas marshall. In retirement, mr. Marshall said i dont want to work anymore, but i wouldnt mind being Vice President again. [ laughter ] and when president ford became our 40th Vice President when he was sworn in to that position on december 6, 1973, he referred to the limited powers and duties of the vice presidency. His Vice President , Nelson Rockefeller, disparaged his final office as simply standby equipment in 1976. So how did we get from the office that president ford called the limited powers and duties of the vice presidency and rockefeller referred to as simply standby equipment in the mid1970s to the very different Robust Office that we have today . What i want to do in the next few minutes is to give a brief overview of the vice presidency as it existed for most of our history then to sketch the office as it exists today, what ive called the white house vice presidency and then to make a few suggestions as to what i think we can learn from this transformation. The vice presidency wasnt one of the Founding Fathers great successes. It was created for reasons that are now obsolete. The founders were concerned that after George Washington it would be impossible to elect a national president. They were worried that parochial considerations would force electors in the different states to vote for their states favorite son rather than to elect a national president. So in order to combat that concern, what they did is they created the original president ial election system and they gave each elector two votes for president. But they required that one of those votes had to be cast for somebody who wasnt from the electors home state. And so what they hoped would happen is that the second vote, the vote that wasnt going to the home state favorite son would actually produce a National Consensus president. In essence, they created the vice presidency to then to provide an incentive for electors to vote seriously so that there would be a consequence to their vote. There would be somebody who would be elected to the second office. Hugh william sson from North Carolina a delegate to the philadelphia convention, at the convention said the vice presidency wasnt wanted it was created simply to facilitate a valuable mode of president ial election. Well, alexander hamilton, who recently has experienced something of a resurgence wrote in federalist 68 that the president ial electoral system, including the vice presidency, is if not perfect at least excellent. I hesitate to take mr. Hamilton on given his current standing. [ laughter ] but i think history would demonstrate that he was wrong at least in that judgment. By 1796, National Parties have begun to form and what they were doing was slating tickets of one candidate for president , one candidate for Vice President. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and aaron burr were running together with the understanding that jefferson was the president ial candidate, burr was the Vice President ial candidate. But all of the Jefferson Burr electors voted for each one of them so they ended up in a tie. Although jeffersons votes were really for president and burrs were for Vice President , they it resulted in a tie, it took the house of representatives 36 ballots to break the tie and to elect jefferson as the president and after that, the jeffersonians were afraid that the federalists in the future could bargain with whoever was jeffersons running mate to make a deal with him and thereby elect jeffersons Vice President ial running mate as the president. So they arranged to have the constitution amended and to entact 12th amendment to the constitution which separated the election of president and Vice President so that the electors would vote not twice for president but would vote once for president and once for Vice President. Well, that change really eliminated the original reason to have the vice presidency and the discussions over the 12th amendment some people said, you know, we should get rid of the vice presidency now. But they decided it was simpler to keep it than to get rid of it and so the vice presidency continued. And it continued really entirely as a legislative office. The Vice President s sole responsibility was to preside over the senate. At the philadelphia convention, Roger Sherman from connecticut said if the Vice President is not the president of the senate hes not going to have anything to do. So they agreed that the Vice President would be the president of the senate and thats what our Vice President s really up until Alvin Barkley who was president trumans Vice President did. They spent most of their professional time presiding over the senate. But the senate didnt elect the Vice President and they couldnt remove the Vice President so the senate was never interested in letting the Vice President have much control so the Vice President would preside but really have no power over the senate. Of course, the other function of the Vice President was to serve as a president ial successor. But that was an entirely contingent role. So for most of our history, the vice presidency was pretty insignificant. Vice president s had little to do so they looked for other things to keep their themselves busy. Richard mentor johnson, who was Martin Van BurensVice President spent much of his time when he wasnt presiding over the Senate Running a tavern in washington. [ laughter ] henry wilson, who was ulysses grants second Vice President wrote history books during his vice presidency and Theodore Roosevelt who didnt want to be Vice President and said hed rather be anything other than Vice President , it was too little work for a man of only 42 years old thought he might spend his vice presidency going to law school. In the 19th century and up through the first third or so of the 20th century the president ial candidate didnt choose his running mate. The conventions chose the running mate and they often generally chose the running mate in order to balance the ticket either on ideological grounds or geographical grounds. Sometimes youd have president ial candidates and Vice President ial candidates who disagreed were on opposite sides of major issues of the day. Sometimes it was used to secure a deal for the nomination of a president ial candidate. Sometimes a politician from a swing state was chosen as the Vice President ial candidate between 1904 and 1916 there were eight Vice President ial candidate, five of them from the state of indiana. Often times the Vice President ial candidates in the 19th century were really pretty undistinguished people. Chester arthur, who was james garfields Vice President before he succeeded president garfield, before he became Vice President the highest position that he ever held was as the collector of customs in the port of new york garrett hobart, Vice President mckinleys Vice President , never held any Public Office other than state legislature in the state of new jersey. William king, who was franklin pierces Vice President did have a lot of experience but he was very sick when he was chosen to be Vice President. In fact, so sick he resigned from the senate because he couldnt continue to perform his role in the senate and he died soon after his election. Being Vice President wasnt a good career move for somebody in most of the 19th century. Only three 19th century Vice President s were elected to a second term and none after 1836. Although five president s in the period from 1828 to 1900 were elected to a second term, none with the same Vice President. The four Vice President s who succeeded to the presidency in the 19th century, none of them were elected to their own term as president and the vice presidency wasnt a good president ial springboard. When Daniel Webster was offered a position on the 1848 ticket with Zachary Taylor he refused saying i dont propose to be buried until im dead. [ laughter ] it wasnt the wisest move of the great websters career. He always wanted to be president. Some months later Zachary Taylor died and Millar