It's a shame Jeremy Lott's
lighthearted history of the Vice Presidency has to end, as chronology warrants,
with the most recent holder of the office. When John Nance Garner, who held the
office for eight years under FDR, characterized his position as "not worth a
bucket of warm piss," he obviously had no idea what Vice President Dick Cheney
would be able to barter for that bucket less than a hundred years later. After
seven years as the seemingly uncontrollable right-hand man to the president,
Cheney can't even stand to the side quietly at a press conference without making the public nervous.
Luckily, Lott isn't out to
justify Cheney alone; instead, his book The Warm Bucket Brigade rehashes many widely
known stories and a few mistakenly spread ones about the vice presidents,
spanning from John Tyler—who ascended to the presidency after his running
mate, William Henry Harrison, died in office, and who subsequently returned all
correspondence addressed to the vice president—to the mistreatment of
Hubert Humphrey at the hands of LBJ. VPs who became president get more ink than
those who didn't, but Lott even devotes a slim chapter to Thomas Marshall,
Woodrow Wilson's second-in-command, who wasn't even allowed to see the
president for the last 18 months of his term, while Wilson's wife, secretary,
and doctor ran the country in Wilson's name.
Lott theorizes that while the
second-in-command office may not command anyone in particular, it made good
presidents of indifferent public servants while thwarting the ambitions of
those who saw the office primarily as a stepping stone. (Dan Quayle gets an
undue ribbing on this count because of Lott's trip to the U.S. Vice
Presidential Museum in Huntington, Indiana, formed when a Quayle collector
expanded his purview.) His quips, particularly those presented in inset text
bubbles (gastroenteritis is "not recommended"; Warren G. Harding was
"misunderestimated") frequently interrupt otherwise sober discussions of
national policy, but he also hits bulls-eyes, like encapsulating Gerald Ford's
post-Nixon platform as "He was also for ice cream and against mean people." The
Warm Bucket Brigade
will bore hardcore history buffs who already understand the debate over the
first national bank, or the motives behind Andrew Johnson's impeachment, and
who might not find Lott's case for the "do-something" Veep compelling, but it's
an altogether amusing, digressive account of "the drunk tank for the
power-mad."