Anyone who ever placed an
order with the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school is probably familiar
with Barbara Seuling's The Last Cow On The White House Lawn, a breezy collection of
off-the-wall factoids about the executive branch of the U.S. government. Bill
Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger's Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance puts an amusing spin on
the Last Cow
concept, taking a closer look at arguably the wackiest part of presidential
life: the selection and inevitable shunning of vice-presidents. Between Shellabarger's
dark, scratchy illustrations and Kelter's mix of straight info and offbeat
anecdotes, Veeps
gives the men who take a pointless job for political reasons about as much
space as they probably deserve.
Still, Veeps could have been more
thorough, or nuttier. Each profile runs about three pages, which is just enough
space for some basic who-what-where and only a little "Hey did you know?" And
after the first few VPs, the details start running together. But that's okay. Veeps is more a book for browsing,
and for picking up conversational tidbits about Schuyler Colfax's financial
scandals, or how Hannibal Hamlin once avoided being beaten by an anti-Lincoln
mob because no one recognized him.
The most fascinating
characters in Veeps are the ones who went on to be fairly undistinguished
presidents to boot: the Millard Fillmores and Gerald Fords. Veeps is too schematic to offer
much of a strong point of view, but in dwelling on the banality of an
unglamorous bureaucratic position, Kelter and Shellabarger do emphasize how
much the history of American leadership has been about administrative drudgery,
political expediency, and plain dumb luck.