FirstinLine 9780062668943 Final TM0404 PDF

First in Line
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also by kate andersen brower
The Residence
First Women

First in Line
pr esi dents, v ice pr esi dents,
a n d th e pursuit of pow er
*
k ate andersen brow er

first in line. Copyright © 2018 by Kate Andersen Brower. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information,
address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales
promotional use. For information, please email the Special Markets Department at
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first edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-266894-3
18 19 20 21 22 lsc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my radiant sister Kelly
&
For those who have patiently served:

Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Al Gore,
Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence

contents
Presidential Partners • ix
On the Vice Presidency • xi
PROLOGUE: “Safe Hands” • 1

I. You’re a Guest in My House • 7
II. Two Men, Two Hotel Suites • 25
III. The Art of the Vet • 39
IV. The Observatory • 69
V. The Second Lady • 79
VI. Tragedy and Trauma • 103
VII. From Senator to Subordinate: The Story of Nixon/
Eisenhower, Johnson/Kennedy, and Humphrey/
Johnson • 129
VIII. Confusion, Conflict, and Musical Chairs: The Rocky
Road of Agnew/Nixon, Ford/Nixon,
and Rockefeller/Ford • 149
IX. Getting to Know You . . . or Not: Mondale/Carter,
Bush/Reagan, and Quayle/Bush • 167
X. From Friendship to Betrayal: The Breakup of
Al Gore and Bill Clinton • 183

viii contents
XI. The Shadow President: Cheney and

His Sidekick Bush • 203
XII. Fanboy: The Love Story of
Joe and Barack • 223
XIII. Man on a Wire: Mike Pence’s
Tightrope Act • 263
EPILOGUE: A Heartbeat Away • 291
Acknowledgments • 297
Sources and Notes • 301
Bibliography • 317
Index • 321

p r e s i de n t i a l pa rt n e r s
richard m. nixon and dwight d. eisenhower, 1953–1961

lyndon b. johnson and john f. kennedy, 1961–1963
hubert h. humphrey and lyndon b. johnson, 1965–1969
spiro t. agnew and richard m. nixon, 1969–1973
gerald r. ford and richard m. nixon, 1973–1974
nelson rockefeller and gerald r. ford, 1974–1977
walter mondale and jimmy carter, 1977–1981
george h. w. bush and ronald reagan, 1981–1989
dan quayle and george h. w. bush, 1989–1993
al gore and bill clinton, 1993–2001
dick cheney and george w. bush, 2001–2009
joe biden and barack obama, 2009–2017
mike pence and donald trump, 2017–
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on t h e v ic e p r e s i de nc y
I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin.

—m assachusetts senator daniel webster’s reply when offered
the running-m ate spot on the whig party ticket in 1848
I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than Vice-
President.
—t heodore roosevelt, vice president
under president william mckinley
Once there were two brothers: one ran away to sea, the other was elected vice
president. Nothing was ever heard from either of them again.
—t homas r. marshall, vice president
under president woodrow wilson
The vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm piss [later cleaned up
to “warm spit”].
—john nance garner, vice president
under president franklin d. roosevelt
The vice presidency is “that rare opportunity in politics for a man to move
from a potential unknown to an actual unknown.”
—spiro agnew, vice president
under president richard nixon

xii on the vice presidency
Dick, I don’t know how you ever took the job.

—gerald ford, who spent less than a year as
richard nixon’s vice president, to dick cheney,
vice president under president george w. bush
You die, I fly.

—george h. w. bush, vice president under president ronald
reagan, on vice presidents being dispatched around the world
to attend dignitaries’ funerals
Let me make this pledge to you right here and now: For every American
who is trying to do the right thing, for all those people in government who
are honoring their pledge to uphold the law and respect our Constitution, no
longer will the eight most dreaded words in the English language be: “The
vice president’s office is on the phone.”
—joe biden, vice president under president barack obama,
lampooning his predecessor, dick cheney
Iron sharpens iron.

—m ike pence, vice president under president donald trump,
quoting from his favorite bible verse, proverbs 27:17:
“as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”
“Sue, did the president call?

“No.”
—selina meyer, fictional onetime vice president
on hbo’s veep, to her beleaguered secretary, sue

First in Line

prologue : “safe hands”
They felt called to do this. They knew what they were

getting into, they knew the history, they knew the challenges,
and they accepted that as part of their calling.
—J I M AT TER HOLT, MIK E PENCE’S GU BER NATOR I A L CHIEF OF STA F F, ON
MIK E A ND K A R EN PENCE’S DECISION TO JOIN DONA LD TRU MP ’S T ICK ET
T
he Trumps were hunkered down at their golf club in Bed-
minster, New Jersey, in the summer of 2016. It was the
final meeting in a series of discussions to decide on Don-
ald Trump’s running mate, and, as always, it was a family affair.
Some combination of Trump’s eldest children—Donald Jr., Eric,
Ivanka—and Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, had been mainstays
at meetings with Washington lawyers in charge of vetting vice
presidential candidates. But at this final decisive meeting it was
Melania Trump, the aloof former model married to the outspoken
and impulsive real estate tycoon, who drew the bottom line. Who-
ever is chosen must be “clean,” she insisted. That meant no affairs
and no messy financial entanglements. In short, it meant no drama.
She realized that her husband had a surplus of that already.
Melania was an important voice in the room during that last
critical meeting, even though she was conspicuously absent when
her husband actually announced Indiana governor Mike Pence as
his running mate. It was the first time in modern campaign his-
tory that the wife of a presidential candidate was not at the public
announcement, and it was an early indication of how uncomfort-
able she would be as first lady. It was decided at that final meeting

2 first in line
that what they needed was someone with “safe hands,” as vetting
lawyers call it. Someone who would be calm in a crisis; someone
who could instill a sense of confidence in the Republican base that
remained deeply skeptical of Trump. Most of all, what they needed
was someone who could take over the presidency, if necessary.
Melania was keenly aware of the need to balance her husband,
who has spent much of his public life—and most of his life was
lived clinging to the spotlight—awash in scandal. She wanted to
make sure that there were absolutely no skeletons in his running
mate’s closet. But one finalist had a closet full of them (still, Don-
ald Jr. backed him until the end), and another contender was so
controversial that he would be ousted within the first few weeks
of the administration when he served in a different position. Me-
lania’s shrewd instincts proved correct; Mike Pence was by far the
least controversial on Trump’s list of vice presidential candidates,
and Pence could help Trump win over conservative Republicans.
Melania is described by people who know her as “stubborn” and
“unapologetic about who she is.” “No one speaks for me,” Mela-
nia once said when her husband promised a TV news anchor that
she would do her show. In this case, she was decidedly in Pence’s
corner.
Trump came late to the search for a running mate and did not
reach out to Arthur B. Culvahouse, the well-connected Repub-
lican lawyer who led the vetting for John McCain in 2008, until
late May. Trump’s campaign chair, Paul Manafort, even consid-
ered paying a law firm to do the vetting, seemingly unaware of
the long-held tradition of lawyers in Washington and New York
clamoring to do it for free. Lawyers put together detailed reports
on each of the candidates, including their tax returns and any his-
tory of psychiatric treatment, and they dig into rumors of affairs. In
that secretive vetting ritual, Culvahouse makes a point of only us-
ing lawyers from his own Washington firm to guard against leaks.
Kushner, the then-thirty-five-year-old real estate scion married to
Ivanka, teased Culvahouse that one of his write-ups on a candidate

prologue: “safe hands” 3
read “like a legal treatise,” and another “like the script for House
of Cards.”
Trump’s options were limited. “Trump was hard to get your mind
around if you’re vetting vice presidential candidates because he had
made a number of provocative statements that would be potentially
disqualifying in a conventional vice presidential nominee,” said
Culvahouse, who was White House counsel to Ronald Reagan and
contributed to Jeb Bush’s and Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaigns. A
couple of Trump’s picks, including Republican senator Bob Corker
of Tennessee, took themselves out of the running, not because of
personal entanglements, but because of moral objections—they felt
they could not defend Trump every day, which is a key element of
the vice presidency. The two finalists who would be one heartbeat
away from the presidency could not have been more different, both
in temperament and reputation.
Trump crowdsourced the process, asking anyone and everyone
he met who he should pick. And even though he never released
his own tax returns, Trump asked for his potential running mate’s
financial information. He was looking for someone who fit the
part, someone who looked like a vice president. “Straight from cen-
tral casting,” Trump is reported to have said of Pence. Culvahouse
said Trump’s long list of candidates was much shorter than Mc-
Cain’s (nominees have a longer list of names at the beginning of
their search and a whittled down, shorter list toward the end of
the process). McCain had almost twenty-five people on his long
list, and Trump had just ten on his, including Michael Flynn, a
controversial retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former in-
telligence officer who was once the director of the Defense Intelli-
gence Agency during Barack Obama’s administration.
“He [Trump] was clearly fond of Flynn,” Culvahouse said, shak-
ing his head. Even though Culvahouse says he did not interview
Flynn for the position, Flynn remained on Trump’s list for a while,
no matter how many people tried to talk Trump out of it. There was
some discussion among Trump’s campaign staff and Culvahouse’s

4 first in line
team of lawyers about whether Flynn was actually a registered Dem-

ocrat until someone on Culvahouse’s staff produced a photo of his
voter ID card confirming it. It turns out, of course, that that was the
least of Flynn’s problems. Though Flynn did not make it on Trump’s
short list of VP candidates, Trump made him national security ad-
viser, where he served for less than a month before being forced out.
Flynn is one of the key figures in special counsel Robert Mueller’s
investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the
Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russian meddling. By the end of
2017, Flynn had pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI
about his conversations during the transition period with Russia’s
ambassador to the United States.
Unlike with Cabinet picks, the FBI does not do a background
check on vice presidents—when Trump picked Rex Tillerson as
secretary of state, the FBI did a background check, but not so with
Trump’s number two, the man who is next in line for the presi-
dency. “The real problem with vice presidential vetting that just
terrifies me, Flynn is the best example, is that you don’t have the
FBI to help you,” Culvahouse said, exasperated. Unlike a Cabinet
officer, whom a president can fire, there is no way for a president
to easily remove his vice president from office—only Congress
can impeach him. The FBI is not involved in the vice presidential
vetting process because nominees for vice president (like nomi-
nees for president) are not technically being considered for federal
office, they’re being considered for the nomination of a political
party. “It’s a huge hole I think in how we pick our vice presidents,”
Culvahouse said. “It absolutely should be changed.” The FBI has
considerably more resources than law firms do, and in the case of
Flynn, likely would have picked up troubling signs. Armed with
that information the FBI could have flagged the campaign to go
slow and think twice before giving him a role in the administration.
In the end, it was down to two men. Mike Pence, a devout evan-
gelical Christian in his late fifties, won out over former speaker of
the House Newt Gingrich, the much more controversial finalist,

prologue: “safe hands” 5
who, like Trump, was also in his seventies and had been married
three times. Gingrich left his first wife when she was in the hos-
pital recovering from cancer surgery and did not take his seat for a
third term as Speaker in part because of ethics violations. He was
far from “clean.” Pence had served six terms in the House, had
strong ties to Republican leaders, and, most important, he could
help Trump win votes in the Midwest.
David McIntosh, a friend of Pence’s, is a former Indiana con-
gressman who now heads the influential conservative group the
Club for Growth: “Trump needs Pence there as a less mercurial
and more stable conservative leader,” he said. Trump, who had
very little knowledge of how Capitol Hill works, told Culvahouse
he wanted Pence to be the COO, or chief operating officer, of the
White House. In this redefinition of the executive branch, Trump,
then, would be the CEO of the United States—an unprecedented
approach to the presidency. But how would someone so differ-
ent from the man he was being asked to serve respond to the of-
fer? One longtime friend of Pence’s said that Pence considered the
vice presidency his “divine appointment.” Pence told another close
friend, “It isn’t about Donald Trump. It’s about the country.”
Two years before Pence became vice president he and his friend
then–Indiana senator Dan Coats talked privately about their polit-
ical futures. Pence was weighing whether to run for governor for a
second term or to seek the presidency in 2016 and Coats was trying
to decide whether to run for reelection to the Senate. “We talked
about the future and where God might lead each of us,” Coats re-
called. “We prayed that God would be clear, and I think I raised
the question that we should pray for clarity, not for what we want
but clarity for what God would want. I’m always a little hesitant
to discuss it in these terms because people say, ‘Oh, you think you
were ordained.’ That’s not it at all, I think we both feel that it was a
question of how God could best use our talents in whatever direc-
tion He wants to take us . . . a whole number of miraculous things
happened in the political world that affected both of our lives.”

6 first in line
Coats went on to reluctantly accept Trump’s offer to head the in-

telligence community as director of national intelligence only after
Pence repeatedly asked him to take the job. “We need someone
with experience,” Pence pleaded with him. Both these men see
themselves as bulwarks against chaos.
The “miraculous” offer to be Trump’s running mate would rock
the Pences’ lives. Pence likes to say, “There are two types of people
in the world: Those who are called and those who are driven.” But
it is always a little bit of both. Jim Atterholt, who was Pence’s chief
of staff when he was governor of Indiana, said Pence and his wife,
Karen, “prayed a great deal” when they were considering the job.
Karen is her husband’s top adviser and the Pences are a “buy one,
get one free package,” not far off from Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Pence said he had two conditions before accepting Trump’s offer:
Their families had to get to know each other and he needed to
understand the job description. Trump replied, “I’m going to have
the most consequential vice president ever. That’s what I want.
That’s the job description.” It was music to Pence’s ears. Pence
called Trump with Karen on the line to accept his offer. There was
no specific agreement reached between Pence and Trump about
what Pence’s role would be as vice president, but in the end there
was very little hesitation on the part of both Pences. “They felt
called to do this,” Atterholt recalled. “They knew what they were
getting into, they knew the history, they knew the challenges, and
they accepted that as part of their calling.”
But Pence was not truly expecting to win—no one was. A week
after Trump’s shocking victory, Trump was still asking friends,
Can you believe I won this thing? Before election day, one of Hil-
lary Clinton’s campaign aides approached the residence manager at
the Naval Observatory, where the vice president lives, to see if he
would agree to stay on and help transition Clinton’s running mate,
Virginia senator Tim Kaine, and his family into the residence. No
one from the Trump campaign ever bothered to call.

I
You’re a Guest in My House
I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.

—J OHN A DA MS, A MER ICA’S F IR ST V ICE PR ESIDENT, W HO
SERV ED U NDER PR ESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON
The vice presidency plays head games with you. You

start to wonder if you matter that much.
—M IK E DONILON, A LONGT I ME CONF IDA NT OF JOE BIDEN’S
E
ven the best relationships between modern presidents and
their vice presidents can be difficult at times, especially
when they were once rivals for the nomination. Barack
Obama roundly beat Joe Biden in the 2008 Democratic primaries
and aides say Biden always respected Obama because of that. “Joe
Biden is not a humble person in some ways and he has great respect
for his own judgment,” quipped Ron Klain, who was chief of staff
to Biden and Al Gore, “but he does believe in the democratic
process, so there was never any confusion in his mind about how
all this worked out.” Obama was a global superstar who had run
laps around Delaware’s longest-serving senator. “I don’t think on
his best day Joe Biden believes that Barack Obama won in 2008
because of Joe Biden,” Klain added. So, he said, Obama clearly had
the upper hand in their relationship. According to Klain, Obama’s
perspective was simple, if not a bit condescending: This is my house,

8 first in line
these are my things, I’m interested in your views, Joe, I like your input, I
want you to be happy here, but you’re a guest in my house.
The thirteen men in this book, from Richard Nixon to Mike
Pence, eight Republicans and five Democrats, all share one thing in
common: the deeply humbling experience of being the president’s
understudy. When asked for his greatest accomplishment during his
eight years as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush,
still not wanting to take credit for any achievements, replied: “That
is for others to judge.” Vice presidents have only two constitutional
duties: to succeed the president if he is unable to serve for any rea-
son, and to act as president of the Senate to cast tiebreaking votes.
(Biden cast none, whereas Mike Pence cast nine tiebreaking votes in
just over a year on the job.) No matter how integrated they are, vice
presidents always play second fiddle; at best they are the politician
who was almost good enough, at worst they are a virtual unknown
who embarrasses the president.
The vice presidency has been a much- maligned and oft-
deprecated position. An important member of the constitutional
convention, Roger Sherman, thought the vice president would
have to be assigned the role of presiding officer of the Senate be-
cause, he said, without it the vice president “would be without
employment.” Benjamin Franklin suggested that the vice president
be addressed as “Your Superfluous Excellency.” Warren Harding’s
vice president, Calvin Coolidge, said: “I enjoyed my time as vice
president. It never interfered with my mandatory eleven hours of
sleep a day.” It is indeed an often-thankless job, the butt of count-
less jokes, many of which are from vice presidents themselves, from
both parties. Harry Truman, who served for less than three months
as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, complained,
“The vice president simply presides over the Senate and sits around
hoping for a funeral.” Upon hearing the news of a foreign leader’s
death George H. W. Bush would tell aides, only half-joking, “You
die, I fly.” When President Theodore Roosevelt grew irritated by
the tinkling of a glittering eleven-foot-h igh chandelier, purchased

you’re a guest in my house 9
by Thomas Jefferson and hanging in the Oval Office, Roosevelt

said, “Send it up to the Vice President. He never has anything to
do and the tinkling will keep him awake!” The chandelier was
brought to the vice president’s Senate office (the vice president
at the time was Charles W. Fairbanks) and remained there until
then–v ice president Lyndon B. Johnson got rid of it.
The job occupies what the late journalist David S. Broder called
“the strange no-man’s- land between legislative and executive
power.” It comes with a job description that is only slightly more
defined than that of first lady—which has none whatsoever. His-
torian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the vice presidency “a job of
spectacular and, I believe, incurable frustration.” In a vivid exam-
ple of the office’s muddled position, the vice president as president
of the Senate is paid by the Senate and makes $230,700 a year
compared to the president’s $400,000 (for Mike Pence, $230,700
is more than twice what he made as governor). His retirement
income is paid by the Senate as well, but, unlike the president’s, it
is not guaranteed. In order to receive retirement benefits, the vice
president would either need to have served in Congress or in some
federal office for at least five years, or served more than one term as
vice president. When they leave office, vice presidents are given a
budget to help them ease back into civilian life, but even that bud-
get is allocated to them by the presidents they served. When they
left office, President George H. W. Bush and Vice President Dan
Quayle were awarded a total of $1.5 million, of which Bush gave
Quayle and his staff $250,000. And unlike former presidents, who
receive lifetime Secret Service protection for themselves and their
spouses should they want it after they leave office (the children
of former presidents are allowed protection until they are sixteen
years old), vice presidents and their spouses and children under
sixteen years of age only get Secret Service protection for up to six
months after they leave the White House.
But in recent decades the vice presidency has been nothing to
laugh at. Like the president, modern vice presidents are followed

10 first in line
twenty-four hours a day by a military aide who carries a forty-

five-pound aluminum briefcase (called the “football”) and they
carry a card (“the biscuit”) that contains the nuclear verification
codes used to authorize a nuclear strike. If the president were to
become incapacitated, the vice president would have access to the
“football” and the authority to order a launch. In a 2008 interview,
Dick Cheney said of that power: “He [the president] could launch
a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen. He doesn’t have
to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He
doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority be-
cause of the nature of the world we live in.” The president or
vice president, if the president is unable, has an estimated twelve
minutes to decide to launch missiles if the United States is under
attack. A nuclear launch now would be unimaginably destructive
and much more powerful than the bombs that destroyed the Jap-
anese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. If the president is
dead, or incapacitated in any way, the vice president carries that
enormous responsibility.
Modern presidents have at least five times the staff of their vice
presidents in the White House complex alone, and the rest of the
government, including the vice president’s staff, technically works
for the president. Vice presidents typically have about eighty aides
who work out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, an
enormous granite, slate, and cast-iron post–Civil War–era building
next door to the White House. The center of power, though, is the
Oval Office, and the most influential vice presidents are the men
who have spent the most time there advising the president. They
are constantly fighting for “unstaffed” access to the president—or
alone time—and watching to make sure they are not excluded
from Oval Office and Cabinet meetings. Most vice presidents save
disagreements with the president for private conversations. “All of
us as human beings would rather have something said in private,”

Al Gore remarked, when asked whether he disagreed with Presi-

dent Clinton in front of others. But no matter how influential, vice
presidents are utility players who go to events that do not merit the
president’s attendance, and when they campaign they often play to
big crowds in small ponds. What tends to go wrong in these rela-
tionships between the president and the vice president is that this
gap eats at the understudy, who almost always sees himself as better
equipped for the top job than the president he serves. Biden some-
times got tired of the role, but it rarely affected his relationship
with the president because he was so personally fond of Obama. Al
Gore, however, had a more difficult time of it.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, Gore’s old Harvard pro-
fessor, the noted political scientist Richard E. Neustadt, sent him
cautionary notes about the complexity of the role he was seeking.
“The VP reminds the P [president] of his mortality,” Neustadt
warned him. “The White House staff lives in the present, the VP’s
staff in the future.” Three decades earlier, when it was suggested
that Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon Johnson, move from his
house, which was miles from downtown Washington, and into
a townhouse across the street from the White House, Kennedy
moaned, “You think I want Lyndon [ Johnson] listening across the park
for my heartbeat? NO!”
In the modern era, Dick Cheney is the only vice president who
had no presidential ambitions because he had abandoned them years
earlier. Vice presidents and their advisers insist their primary job is
to advance the president’s agenda, and not their own. But always,
in the back of their minds, the vice president is considering how
the president’s policies will affect him and his own chances of one
day being elected president. “I can’t say I was never thinking about
my own political career,” Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter
Mondale, confessed, “but I believe I made an honest commitment
that I would put his presidency above all other considerations and
I believe I did do that.”
Access and information are key. “The vice president’s real power

12 first in line
derives from his relationship with the president,” says Bruce Reed,
who was a policy adviser in the Clinton White House and Biden’s
chief of staff after Klain left. “In the end, the leash is only as long
as the president chooses to make it.” Powerful vice presidents, like
Gore, Biden, and Cheney, had an agreement with the presidents
they served that they would see every piece of paper that came
across the president’s desk. Biden and Cheney tried not to take on
many specific assignments like Gore’s mission to “reinvent” gov-
ernment and to cut down on waste; instead, they saw themselves
as the president’s most influential adviser. Even so, all of these men,
at times, felt underutilized. Dan Quayle, who became the butt of
endless jokes as VP and was less powerful than most of his fellow
vice presidents, said he had more interaction with George H. W.
Bush on national security matters when he was a senator on the
armed services committee and Bush was VP, than when he was
serving as Bush’s own vice president.
Even travel for vice presidents is fraught. There is a fleet of
planes called the Presidential Airlift Group docked at Joint Base
Andrews (formerly Andrews Air Force Base) in Prince George’s
County, Maryland, just outside of Washington. They work almost
like a carpool for VIPs and are made available to the vice president,
the secretary of state, the first lady, and, on certain occasions, the
second lady. Two Boeing VC-25As, referred to as Air Force One
when the president is on board, are everyone’s first choice. There is
a precedent and an order to who gets which plane, and in the past,
if then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton had a long trip and Biden
was traveling domestically, Biden would get a smaller plane and he
would sometimes not be happy about it.
But the vice presidency has its own perks and traditions. Like
former presidents, there is a unique camaraderie among vice pres-
idents forged not in the understanding of what it’s like to be the
most powerful political leader in the world but in the shared ex-
perience of proximity to power coupled with the ultimate power-
lessness that so often accompanies the vice presidency. Former vice

presidents do talk with Mike Pence, but they are reluctant to go

into details. One of them explained: “If I tell you and it’s written
then I’d drastically undercut him. He’d get his head chopped off
[by Trump],” he said, swiping his hand across his neck. They see
him as a stabilizing force in an unstable White House. Cheney has
been advising Pence, who finds himself in an incredibly perilous
position, not wanting to lose influence by upsetting Trump while
also not wanting to stand by statements from his boss that might
hurt his own chances at the presidency. Cheney was not as inter-
ested in advice when he was vice president. A couple of months af-
ter taking office, he invited Richard Moe, who was Vice President
Walter Mondale’s chief of staff, for lunch at the White House to
go over Mondale’s approach to the vice presidency. Moe remem-
bers a lot of long silences. “My lasting impression of that was that
Cheney was very incurious,” he said. “I don’t know why he was
going through the motions. He clearly had his own idea of what
to do. He had his own power center and a separate policy center.”
Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby did most of the talking.
Pence has been seeking advice from one very unlikely former
vice president: Joe Biden. Biden has become one of Donald Trump’s
most vocal critics. Shortly after the deadly 2017 white national-
ist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, Biden wrote in an Atlantic
op-ed, “We are living through a battle for the soul of this nation.”
But Biden and Pence talk at least once a month, which stands in
stark contrast to Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, who
have not spoken since the inauguration, nor have their wives, Me-
lania Trump and Michelle Obama. Biden says Pence told him how
much he admired his relationship with Obama and asked for his
advice on the office. Pence calls him occasionally to ask questions
about foreign policy. “Joe,” he says, “this is the decision that has to
be made. What went before it?” Biden says he has made himself
“available to him on mostly background things, to give him per-
spective.”
Biden has long-standing friendships with foreign leaders from

14 first in line
his years in the Senate and as vice president, and he frequently

fields calls from worried heads of state. He says he is in touch with
a dozen world leaders who ask for advice on how to work with the
Trump administration and how to interpret new policies. “The
king of Jordan comes to meet with him [President Trump] and gets
in a helicopter to come meet with me in Delaware,” Biden said,
sounding pleased.
During one trip to speak at a conference in Athens, Greece, five
months after leaving office, Biden met with Greek prime minister
Alexis Tsipras. “I thought it was going to be a ten-m inute conver-
sation, and it was two and a half hours,” he recalled. “What I do is,
whenever that occurs, I pick up the phone and I call Mike. What
I tell these leaders, who are somewhat diffident about the president,
I suggest they go see Mike. I explain it this way: I say that a lot of
this doesn’t fall within the president’s bandwidth, because he has
no experience in this area.”
Biden is quick to point out how different he and Pence are in
their politics, but, like so many others, he treats Pence like a lifeline
to a White House in a constant state of upheaval. “Mike and I have
talked about it a few times. I have fundamental disagreements with
Mike, particularly on social policy and what I consider basic civil
rights, civil liberties, but Mike’s a guy you can talk with, you can
deal with, in a traditional sense. Like [Bill] Clinton could talk to
[Newt] Gingrich.” Biden says he tries not to criticize the president
during private meetings with foreign leaders, though it is not al-
ways easy biting his tongue, and in some cases it sounds like he is
working as a conduit for the administration. Before he met with
former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko, Biden checked in
with Pence to make sure he did not misrepresent administration
policy and called him after the meeting and gave him a readout.
Unlike presidents, who leave notes behind for their successors, vice
presidents sign a drawer in their desk in the ceremonial office in

the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The desk was first used
by Teddy Roosevelt in 1902 and has been signed by the occupants
of the office since the 1940s. And marble busts of the vice presi-
dents are placed throughout the Senate wing of the Capitol. “Be-
ing cast in marble is something every vice president looks forward
to,” said Cheney. “It’s not only a high honor, it’s our one shot at
being remembered.”
The vice president is the only member of the president’s team
who cannot easily be fired (a fact Joe Biden liked to repeat), and
he is also usually one of the last people left standing in the ad-
ministration as other aides either resign out of exhaustion or are
pushed out. In the Obama White House it was top adviser Valerie
Jarrett and Joe Biden who were among the only people left after
eight years. And the relationship between a president and his vice
president has historically been forged in fire. The White House
is a relatively small place with fewer than a hundred people who
are most intimately involved in presidential and vice presidential
decision-making. These are weighty decisions and occasionally
vice presidents can help share the president’s burden.
In nearly every modern administration, beginning with Dwight
D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, the relationship between the
president and his vice president has deteriorated over time. Cheney
admits his influence waned in Bush’s second term, and the rela-
tionship between Gore and Clinton almost fully unraveled at the
end of their administration. “I think Vice President Gore was in-
creasingly living in the future, President Clinton was increasingly
living in the ticking clock that’s created by the Twenty-second
Amendment,” said Klain, referring to the constitutional amend-
ment that created term limits. Joe Biden and Barack Obama are
the only exception to the rule (George H. W. Bush and Ron-
ald Reagan grew closer, but they did not develop a close personal
friendship). But while Biden and Obama’s relationship did not start
out as well as people might think, it grew significantly over their
eight years together. “Their friendship is more interesting than it’s

16 first in line
often portrayed because it was not always easy,” said former White
House press secretary Josh Earnest. “They were a political odd
couple whose strengths were complementary and mutually rein-
forcing. But there were significant differences in style—and oc-
casionally in perspective.” A close aide to Biden said the message
was clear from the president’s staff from the beginning: We matter,
you don’t. Biden’s style clashed with the “no-drama Obama” team.
“Like most vice presidential nominations it was kind of a shotgun
wedding,” said Obama senior campaign and White House aide
David Axelrod. “They didn’t really know each other well and all of
a sudden they were married. That takes some adjustment.”
“You know what surprises me,” Obama told Biden at one of their
weekly lunches, about eight months into the administration.
“No,” Biden replied.
“We’ve really become close friends,” Obama said.
“Surprised you?” Biden replied with laughter. “What do you mean
it surprised you?”
They are two very different men. Working for Obama, an aide
said, there were days with twelve meetings on twelve different
subjects and the ball would be moved forward on each topic of
discussion. “When I worked for Biden,” the former staffer said,
“there were days when I’d spend eight or ten hours just sitting
in his office and he’d say, ‘Let’s have a meeting,’ and the meeting
would be three hours long.” Despite their different management
styles, Obama and Biden became remarkably close.
Fourteen vice presidents have become president, eight of them as-

cending to the highest office because of the death of the sitting pres-
ident. The eight vice presidents who succeeded presidents who died
in office are John Tyler (upon William Henry Harrison’s death in
1841), Millard Fillmore (upon Zachary Taylor’s death in 1850), An-
drew Johnson (upon Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865), Ches-
ter A. Arthur (upon James Garfield’s assassination in 1881), Theodore

Roosevelt (upon William McKinley’s assassination in 1901), Calvin

Coolidge (upon Warren Harding’s death in 1923), Harry Truman
(upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945), and Lyndon Johnson
(upon John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963).
In the post–World War II era, the vice presidency has become
more and more consequential. “Vice presidents are generally an
uninteresting lot,” Cheney admitted. “There are fascinating re-
lationships now. I think you’d have to say that the really conse-
quential vice presidents are the ones who get to be president”—an
ironic statement coming from the most powerful vice president in
modern history. Beginning with Harry Truman in 1945 and up
until George H. W. Bush, five out of nine presidents were former
vice presidents: Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush—two
by election, two by death, and one because of resignation.
In that same time span, three vice presidents became losing
nominees for the presidency: Nixon, who lost in 1960; Mondale,
who ran and lost four years after serving as Jimmy Carter’s VP;
and Gore, who lost in 2000. But vice presidents have a huge ad-
vantage over their rivals for the highest office if the president they
serve allows them to use it: they can do early fund-raising and
capitalize on the president’s supporters. Yet they have to use their
position wisely so that it does not look as if they are preoccupied
with their own ambition—either to the president they serve or to
the people whose votes they want to receive. It is a difficult needle
to thread; only four men have successfully run for president as sit-
ting vice presidents: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van
Buren, and Ronald Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush.
(Richard Nixon ran and won in 1968, eight years after he served as
vice president.) “It’s been a long time, Marty,” Bush said at his first
news conference after the 1988 election, when he became the first
incumbent vice president to win the presidency since Van Buren in
1836. Part of Bush’s victory can be attributed to Ronald Reagan’s
popularity, and his win was a virtual third term for Reagan. Bush
won 80 percent of the votes of those who approved of Reagan’s job

18 first in line
performance, and lost nine to one among those who disapproved.

So while winning their party’s nomination is all but guaranteed,
vice presidents sometimes have a difficult time closing the deal.
When the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to

write the Constitution, the vice presidency was not at the center of
their attention. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution states that
the vice president will preside over the Senate “but shall have no
vote, unless they be equally divided.” The Founding Fathers, wary
of anything resembling a monarchy, were concerned that a presi-
dent may become too powerful if the vice president had any role
in the Senate greater than serving as tiebreaker, so the vice pres-
ident’s job description was kept deliberately diminutive. The line
between the executive and legislative branches of government was
not to be blurred, and too much power was not to be concentrated
in the White House. So, while a vice president can sit in the pre-
siding officer’s chair, he cannot speak on the Senate floor without
permission. Article II, Section 1 states that the vice president shall
succeed the president upon the death, resignation, or removal of
the president. Alexander Hamilton of New York wanted the most
fundamental aspect of the job— presidential succession— to be
strictly temporary. The vice president, Hamilton wrote in a draft
of the Constitution, would “exercise all the powers of this Con-
stitution vested in the President until another shall be appointed.”
The Constitution’s wording on succession was never clear until the
Twenty-fifth Amendment, which was ratified in 1967, and even
then at least one vice president, Dick Cheney, thought it should be
made more transparent. George H. W. Bush agrees. Bush has the
distinction of serving as president and vice president and says that
the Twenty-fifth Amendment should “probably” be revisited so
that succession is made more clear.
There was debate among the founders over an even more basic
concept: who would elect the president. In their quest to create a

democracy and their attempts, however vain, to avoid the creation

of competing political parties, some delegates to the Constitu-
tional Convention wanted the members of the national legislature
to vote for president, while others argued that it would lead to
tyranny if the president was beholden to the members of Congress
who had voted for him. So instead they created a system—the
electoral college—in which each state has a number of electors
equal to the number of the state’s senators and members of the
House of Representatives. But there was no differentiation be-
tween presidential and vice presidential candidates on the ballot,
and each elector cast two votes for president (for different can-
didates, sometimes from different parties) and no vote for vice
president. The candidate who won the majority of electoral votes
would become president and the runner-up would be named vice
president. The House of Representatives would break a tie. As
runner-up, the vice president was heir apparent to the presidency,
which explains why John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were the
nation’s first two vice presidents and its second and third presi-
dents. But the system was complicated and led to a president and
vice president from two different political parties being elected. In
1796, Adams, a Federalist, was elected president and Jefferson, a
Democratic-Republican, was the runner-up and therefore became
Adams’s vice president. Adams never consulted Jefferson on im-
portant national issues and Jefferson used his time as vice president
to secure his place as leader of his party. The system was untenable.
The presidential election of 1800 was another bitter contest that in
the end changed the way a vice president is elected. Instead of be-
coming vice president as a result of the presidential vote, the next
vice president would assume office as part of a party slate. In 1804
the Twelfth Amendment was adopted recognizing the reality of
political parties and dictating that each elector cast separate votes
for president and vice president. This significantly weakened the
position, making the vice president a stand-in and not the second-
most-qualified politician for the presidency.

20 first in line
In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt only agreed to seek a third

term as president if he could pick Henry Wallace as his running
mate; his demand that party convention delegates go along with
his decision changed the way vice presidents were chosen yet again,
taking the power away from party leaders. Since 1960 almost ev-
ery presidential candidate has named his running mate either at
his party’s national convention or a few days before. In the event
that the president died or was incapacitated for any number of rea-
sons, the Constitution did not make succession clear. An August
1961 Chicago Tribune headline, “kennedy picks johnson to be his
stand-in,” suggests just how tenuous the arrangement was at the
time. Kennedy and Johnson had an agreement that if Kennedy
became incapacitated and could no longer serve, he would tell
Johnson, who would then assume the presidency. If Kennedy was
unable to communicate with Johnson, then Johnson could assume
the powers of the presidency after consulting the Cabinet. The
president could then decide at any time when he would be ready to
take up the powers of the presidency again. It seemed like a hap-
hazard way to make such an important decision.
Kennedy’s assassination changed everything. On February 10,
1967, less than four years after Kennedy was killed, the Twenty-
fifth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted. The amend-
ment allows the vice president and Cabinet to remove the president
from power if they believe he is incapable of holding the job, and
it makes clear that the vice president will succeed the president:
“Section 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or
of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become Presi-
dent.” Under Section 4 of the Twenty-fi fth Amendment, the vice
president and a majority of either Cabinet officials or “such other
body as Congress may by law provide” may declare in writing
that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of
his office.” The amendment places the power to replace the pres-
ident squarely with the vice president—unless the vice president
agrees that the president is unfit to serve, he cannot be removed.

Such a declaration would be submitted to the Senate president pro

tempore, who presides over the Senate in the absence of the vice
president, and the Speaker of the House. If the president objects,
which he probably would, then a two-thirds vote by Congress
would sanction his removal. If a vice president dies or is unable
to serve, the amendment states that the president must name a
successor to be confirmed by Congress (after Kennedy’s death,
Johnson did not have a vice president until he won the presidency
himself in 1964).
But Cheney still does not think the wording is clear enough.
In March 2001 he asked his loyal general counsel, David Adding-
ton, “to make absolutely certain that we’re squared away because
my main job here is to take over if something happens.” Cheney
said Addington reviewed all the procedures, statutes, and prece-
dents, and the one very serious concern he had was that there was
no procedure for removing the vice president in the Twenty-fifth
Amendment. “Dave and I were concerned, especially given my
health history.” By that point Cheney had already had four heart
attacks, his first when he was just thirty-seven years old running
for Congress in Wyoming, and his fourth while he and George
W. Bush waited for the Florida recount in November 2000. He
thought of President Woodrow Wilson, who was incapacitated by
a major stroke while he was in office and who left his second wife,
Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, to run the country for well over a year.
An added concern was that, in order for the Twenty-fifth Amend-
ment to be carried out, the vice president would have to be part
of the effort to get rid of the president. An incapacitated Cheney
would mean that an incapacitated Bush could not be replaced. “I
thought it was very important that we not get into the situation
where I was in the office but I was incapacitated and unable to
function,” Cheney said, “so we came up with the idea of the signed
resignation.” He told Bush about his plan to write a resignation
letter. Bush was a little taken aback by the idea but thought it made
sense, given Cheney’s health issues. On March 28, 2001, Cheney

22 first in line
took out his stationery with the vice presidential seal and wrote:
“Dave Addington—You are to present the attached document to
President George W. Bush if the need ever arises.—R ichard B.
Cheney.”
He told Addington that it would be Bush’s decision alone if the
letter should be delivered to the secretary of state. “I won’t give
specific instructions about when this letter should be triggered,
but you need to understand something. This is not your decision
to make. This is not [his wife] Lynne’s decision to make. The only
thing you are to do if I become incapacitated, is get this letter out
and give it to the president,” Cheney instructed Addington. “It’s
his decision, and his alone.” Addington slipped the resignation let-
ter inside two manila envelopes and hid it in a dresser drawer at
his home—where he thought it would be safer than in the White
House. In a twist of fate, his house was destroyed by a fire a few
years later and, after getting his family safely out of the house,
Addington retrieved the folder.
The vice presidency has expanded from understudy to true presi-

dential partner. Presidential candidates now look for someone who
can complement them in office, not someone who simply comes
from a different part of the country and can balance the ticket
geographically so that they will be elected. “The rapid evolution
of technology, communications, and speed of travel has reduced
many of the perceived ticket balancing needs of the old politics
from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” said Jimmy Carter,
whose vice president, Walter Mondale, was picked in part because
he was from the north and could balance Carter, a Southerner. “I
believe personal compatibility, the balance of task assignments, and
political and intellectual skills needed for governing in the com-
plex world of today are much more important.”
Contrary to the experience of fictional vice president Selina
Meyer, who, in HBO’s Emmy-w inning show Veep, always got a

resounding “No” when she asked her secretary if the president had
called, the reality can be remarkably different.
“I worked for two vice presidents who spent most of their days,
every day with the president,” White House adviser Klain said.
“They didn’t have to sit by their phones and wait for a call.” But no
matter how close vice presidents are to the presidents they serve,
they cannot escape the reality that they are guests in the White
House.

II
Two Men, Two Hotel Suites
Shit, shit, shit.

—B OBBY K ENNEDY, A F TER HIS BROTHER TOLD HI M HE WAS
PICK ING LY NDON JOHNSON AS HIS RU NNING M ATE.
NINTH FLOOR, BILT MOR E HOTEL , LOS A NGELES, 1960
Now, where the hell’s Bush?

—R ONA LD R EAGA N, SEA RCHING FOR A NEW RU NNING M ATE
A F TER GER A LD FOR D T UR NED HI M DOW N.
SI X T Y-N INTH FLOOR, DETROIT R ENA ISSA NCE CENTER HOTEL , 1980
W
hen John Kennedy was a young senator recovering
from a serious back operation, he wrote a letter to
then–Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson re-
questing a spot on the coveted finance, appropriations, or foreign
relations committees. Johnson sent him a note: “It has been many
years since I have enjoyed working with anyone as much as I have
with you.” But three days later Kennedy received another letter
from Johnson, this one much less collegial: Kennedy would not
be getting a seat on any of the committees he requested. Johnson’s
power over him at that moment was absolute, and he intended to
use it.
Years after that exchange, much had changed. In 1960, Kennedy,
forty-three, overwhelmingly won the Democratic Party’s nomina-
tion and Johnson, fifty-one, was his main opponent. Johnson, who

26 first in line
was a looming presence in the campaign even though he had not

participated in the primaries, came in second in delegate voting at
the convention. Before he won the Democratic nomination, Ken-
nedy told his aides that he would name a “Midwestern liberal”
as his running mate. The other two men who were challenging
him for the Democratic nomination, Minnesota senator Hubert
Humphrey and Missouri senator Stuart Symington, were at the
top of Kennedy’s list. But Johnson had not only come in second
in the balloting, he had also won the South by a large margin,
and no Democrat had ever been elected president without carrying
the South. With only twenty-four hours to pick a running mate,
Kennedy had to reconsider. If elected, Kennedy would be the first
Catholic president at a time when many Americans feared that a
Catholic president would take orders from the Pope and disregard
the constitutional separation of church and state. In order for a
Catholic to win, Kennedy had to carry the South, and he felt that
he needed to bring Johnson on board—Johnson’s home state of
Texas alone had twenty-four electoral votes.
Both men were staying in Los Angeles’s elegant Biltmore Hotel,
where a delicate dance unfolded as the selection of a vice president
consumed Kennedy and his younger brother, Bobby, who ran his
campaign. Kennedy, Johnson, and their respective campaign teams
were in matching large corner suites two floors apart in the art
deco hotel, each with three main rooms and a series of standard
hotel bedrooms stretching down a poorly lit corridor—Kennedy’s
on the ninth floor and Johnson’s on the seventh. In both suites,
the doors to the bedrooms were kept open and the atmosphere felt
more like that of a standard company office than a luxury hotel.
Johnson and Kennedy were from two different worlds—
Johnson had grown up Protestant and dirt poor in Texas, Ken-
nedy was an Irish Catholic New Englander and the child of Joe
Kennedy, the incredibly wealthy former U.S. ambassador to the
United Kingdom. Johnson graduated from Southwest Texas State
Teachers College (now Texas State University), Kennedy from

two men, two hotel suites 27
Harvard. Johnson was unrefined and unaware of the absurdity

of some of his remarks (for instance when John Kennedy Jr. was
born, Johnson sent Kennedy a telegram: “Name that boy ‘Lyn-
don Johnson’ and a heifer calf will be his”). Johnson was six feet,
three inches and a powerful Senate leader who had a reputation for
looming over colleagues, an act of physical intimidation so famous
that it became known as the so-called Johnson treatment. Ken-
nedy was much more sophisticated and reserved, and so were most
of the people he surrounded himself with. As Kennedy’s personal
secretary Evelyn Lincoln would later write of the Johnson and
Kennedy aides, “It was almost as if Romeo and Juliet had gotten
married, and now Mr. Montague must somehow try to get along
with Mr. Capulet.”
But the union almost did not happen. Kennedy always thought
Johnson would reject an offer to join his ticket, but the night be-
fore, when Kennedy won the nomination, Johnson sent him a
telegram that suggested otherwise. It read, “LBJ now means Let’s
Back Jack.” Johnson was not-so-subtly signaling his interest. He
had already asked his aides to research how many vice presidents
had become president (ten at that point) and to report back with
the number of presidents who had died in office (then seven). At
around 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, July 14, 1960, the morning after
the Massachusetts senator won the Democratic nomination, Ken-
nedy called Johnson’s suite. Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, picked up
the phone and shook her husband, who was sleeping in the twin
bed next to hers. Kennedy told Johnson he wanted to talk with
him in private, and they agreed he would come down to Johnson’s
suite at around 10:00. Johnson jumped out of bed and told a secre-
tary to tidy up the suite’s living room—he knew what this meant.
Then he called his closest advisers, the future Texas governor John
Connally, and his campaign manager James Rowe.
“Kennedy is coming down here in a few minutes,” Johnson told
Rowe, “and I think he’s going to offer me the vice presidency.
What should I do?”

28 first in line
“What do you want that for? You’ve got the power now,” Rowe
replied, referring to Johnson’s position as Senate majority leader.
But Johnson was interested. “Power is where power goes,” he
said. He estimated his odds of ascension to the presidency if he
became vice president to be approximately one in four. He is said
to have told the politician and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce, “I’m a
gambling man, darling, and this is the only chance I’ve got.”
Before the call, the Kennedy brothers had huddled and, in
hushed voices, John told Bobby that he wasn’t going to choose
labor union leader Walter Reuther for vice president, as Bobby had
hoped. Several Southern governors had visited him and said he
needed Johnson on the ticket to win. Bobby was furious—“Shit,
shit, shit,” he muttered as he left his brother’s suite. Bobby hated
Johnson, and that hatred clouded his thinking and could not be
masked. Other Kennedy aides were just as apoplectic. “I was so
furious I could hardly talk,” Kennedy confidant Ken O’Donnell
recalled. “I thought of the promises we had made to the labor
leaders and the civil rights groups, the assurances we had given
that Johnson would not be on the ticket . . . I felt that we had been
double-crossed.”
O’Donnell insisted on talking to Kennedy himself. Bobby brought
him up to the ninth-floor suite and when Kennedy saw O’Don-
nell’s devastated face he told him that the offer was only pro forma
and that maybe Johnson wouldn’t accept, and if he did there was
an added benefit of keeping him off Capitol Hill. “I won’t be able
to live with Lyndon Johnson as leader,” Kennedy reasoned. “Did
it occur to you that if Lyndon Johnson becomes vice president, I’ll
have Mike Mansfield as the leader. . . . Somebody I can trust and
depend on.”
Johnson’s loyalty to Kennedy would be tested from the very
beginning during the humiliating behind-the-scenes ordeal at the
convention. Johnson had said that he could not accept the offer
without the blessing of his fellow Texan and mentor, Speaker of
the House Sam Rayburn. But Rayburn was against Johnson being

vice president, and he told Johnson and his wife that he “would
not be happy” without him on the Hill. Rayburn knew that John-
son had wanted to be president ever since he was a young boy,
and he knew he would not be content with being number two.
Rayburn was all too aware of the terrible experience of FDR’s
first vice president, John Nance Garner—in fact, he considered
Garner a mentor and had seen what happened after his friend,
who was himself Speaker of the House, accepted Roosevelt’s vice
presidential offer in 1932: Garner became so bitter and vengeful
toward Roosevelt, who he likened to a “dictator,” that he became
part of a “Stop Roosevelt” movement when FDR sought an un-
precedented third term. But maybe this would be different. Now,
Kennedy personally visited Rayburn in his hotel suite, promised
to treat Johnson well, and persuaded Rayburn to support the idea,
with caveats.
“I’m dead set against this but I’ve thought it over, and I’m going
to tell you several things,” Rayburn told Kennedy. “If you tell me
that you have to have Lyndon on the ticket in order to win the
election, and if you tell me that you’ll go before the world and tell
the world that Lyndon is your choice and that you insist on his
being the nominee, and if you’ll make every possible use of him in
the National Security Council and every other way to keep him
busy and keep him happy, then the objections that I have had I’m
willing to withdraw.”
But the Kennedy-Johnson alliance would always be difficult,
in part because of Bobby Kennedy. Bobby more than disliked
Johnson—he called him “mean, bitter, and vicious . . . an animal
in many ways.” It began when Bobby was a young aide to the
powerful Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. He had heard John-
son delight in telling a story that made fun of his father, family
patriarch Joe Kennedy. As Johnson told it, when he was a young
Texas congressman, President Franklin Roosevelt summoned him
to the White House and told him of his plans to fire Kennedy, who
was then ambassador to the United Kingdom. Bobby idolized his

30 first in line
father and was deeply offended that Johnson would make light of
his father’s dismissal. Johnson and Bobby first met in the Senate
cafeteria in 1953, when, one morning during breakfast, Johnson
walked by the twenty-seven-year-old, who was sitting with Mc-
Carthy and several other aides. Everyone stood to shake Johnson’s
hand and pay homage to the powerful senator. Everyone, that is,
except Bobby. Johnson aide Horace Busby described the look on
Bobby’s face as “sort of a glower.” After Johnson shook every-
one’s hand he looked down at Bobby, who was still seated, and
hovered over him until Bobby could not avoid standing and shak-
ing his hand, too. But even then he refused to make eye contact.
“He didn’t want to get up,” Busby recalled, “but Johnson was kind
of forcing him to.” To make matters worse, during the campaign
Johnson implied that the Kennedy patriarch had been friendly to
the “appeasement” government of British prime minister Neville
Chamberlain when Kennedy was U.S. ambassador to Britain be-
fore World War II broke out. Johnson even said that Joe Kennedy
thought “Hitler was right.”
Also during the campaign, Johnson’s decision to bring up John
Kennedy’s poor health—d ispatching campaign aides to relay Ken-
nedy’s afflictions to the press during the primary—only deepened
Bobby’s disdain. Kennedy needed daily doses of cortisone because
of his Addison’s disease, a painful illness that results from damaged
adrenal glands. Johnson described the older Kennedy brother as a
“little scrawny fellow with rickets” and “not a man’s man.” Then
he attacked Kennedy for his long campaign and said, “Jack was out
kissing babies while I was passing bills, including his bills.” Johnson
made it clear that he considered Kennedy an entitled elitist who
was too young and too inexperienced for the job. “Have you heard
the news?” he asked a congressman. “Jack’s pediatricians have just
given him a clean bill of health!” Bobby vowed never to forget any
of it.
Bobby spent three hours and made several feverish trips be-
tween that morning and Kennedy’s midafternoon announcement

of Johnson as his running mate, using the back stairs between his
suite on the ninth floor and Johnson’s on the seventh in a persistent
but vain attempt to get Johnson to reject his brother’s offer. At
around 1:30 p.m. Bobby went to the suite wanting to see Johnson
but Johnson refused. Rayburn and Connally instead agreed to sit
down with Bobby. They saw the younger Kennedy in a state of
sheer panic. “We’ve got to persuade Lyndon not to take this vice-
presidential thing,” Bobby begged. “I don’t know why my brother
made the offer, but it’s a terrible mistake. There’s a revolt brewing
on the floor. Labor is off the reservation, the liberals are in revolt.
You’ve just got to persuade him not to accept this.” Bobby wanted
to know if Johnson would be satisfied being chair of the Demo-
cratic National Committee instead.
“Shit,” Rayburn replied and went to the bedroom where John-
son and Lady Bird were mulling over the confusing events of that
morning. Rayburn asked if Johnson would agree to meet with
Bobby. Lady Bird told her husband not to do it, that Kennedy
needed to personally withdraw the offer himself. Although Bobby
was not able to convince Johnson to bow out, he did cement a
bitterness between the two men that would last until the end of
each of their lives.
Finally, at about 3:30 p.m., Kennedy called Johnson, who was
still sitting on his hotel room bed, and read him the press release
announcing Johnson as his running mate. “Well, if you really want
me, I’ll do it,” a confused and exhausted Johnson replied. Incredi-
bly, about a half-hour later Bobby made one more visit to Johnson,
begging him to reconsider, but Johnson again refused.
Bobby recalled later, “He is one of the greatest looking sad peo-
ple in the world—you know, he can turn that on. I thought he’d
burst into tears. He just shook, and tears came into his eyes, and
he said, swallowing his pride: ‘I want to be Vice President, and,
if the President will have me, I’ll join him in making a fight for
it.’ ” Up until a few minutes before Johnson announced that he
had accepted Kennedy’s offer, Bobby was still pressuring him to

32 first in line
say no. Finally, Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, who was
in Johnson’s suite part of the day, called Kennedy and asked him
what he wanted Johnson to do. “Oh,” Kennedy said, sounding
completely calm, “that’s all right; Bobby’s been out of touch and
doesn’t know what’s been happening.”
“Well, what do you want Lyndon to do?” Graham asked.
“I want him to make a statement right away,” Kennedy replied.
Johnson and Lady Bird, his dutiful wife, stood on chairs in the
hallway outside their suite to make the announcement as report-
ers jammed tightly together. Kennedy had made a statement at a
packed press conference a few minutes earlier. “We need men of
strength if we are to be strong and if we are to prevail and lead the
world on the road to freedom. Lyndon Johnson has demonstrated
on many occasions his brilliant qualifications for the leadership we
require today,” Kennedy told a stunned crowd, many of whom
gasped in disbelief at the pick. When Johnson was back in the
privacy of his suite he railed against Bobby, using his customary
colorful language, which included calling him a “little shitass.”
Johnson’s alliance with Kennedy marked the first time in Amer-
ican history that two sitting senators—who were at odds just the
day before—were nominated president and vice president. John-
son’s mentor Sam Rayburn was right to warn him against the vice
presidency, though—he absolutely hated it. At a dinner party in
1961, two months after taking office, Johnson told his friend the
journalist Drew Pearson, “You know there was only one reason
why I am playing second fiddle and why Lady Bird is playing sec-
ond fiddle and why I am not running the Senate anymore. It’s
because I didn’t want Nixon to win. If I hadn’t taken second place
on this ticket, Nixon would have won.”
Johnson began exacting his revenge before Kennedy even took
office. On November 17, 1960, nine days after they won the elec-
tion, Johnson invited Kennedy to his ranch along the Pedernales
River near Johnson City, Texas. It was an invitation Kennedy could
not refuse. The president-elect arrived late at night and Johnson in-

sisted on a guided tour to inspect his cattle and pay his respects to
the Johnson family gravesite. A Kennedy aide described the noc-
turnal expedition as payback for what Bobby put Johnson through
at the Biltmore Hotel. Then Johnson woke Kennedy up early the
next morning to go deer hunting. Kennedy, who did not like to
hunt, looked directly into the eyes of a deer, according to his wife,
Jacqueline, fired his gun, and ran back to his car. Jacqueline told
the writer William Manchester that the visit forever haunted her
husband.
Twenty years later, in another hotel, another sort of shuttle diplo-

macy took place as one aspiring Republican president tried des-
perately to broker an unprecedented deal with a former president
who was staying just one floor above him in the Detroit Renais-
sance Center Hotel during the Republican National Convention.
As with Johnson and Kennedy, the last-m inute negotiations and
frenzied back-and-forth had to do with the vice presidency.
California political consultant Stuart Spencer had just signed on
with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. On the plane traveling to
the convention in Detroit that July, according to Spencer, Reagan
spent the first half hour “dumping all over [George H. W.] Bush.”
He was finding it difficult to forgive Bush for calling his tax policy
“voodoo economics” during the primaries. “Reagan was not the
kind of guy to get mad, but boy did voodoo economics really stick
in his craw,” Spencer recalled.
“What do you think about a VP pick?” Reagan asked Spencer
after railing against Bush.
“Well,” Spencer said, “I think you should pick George Bush.”
Bush had finished second in the primaries, and polling data showed
that he could help Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.
“Haven’t you been listening?” Reagan snapped.
There was another, more interesting pick Reagan was consid-
ering, someone who one poll suggested could move the ticket by

34 first in line
eleven points, much more than any other vice presidential prospect.
This person, though, had been vice president and president, and it
would take a very generous offer to get him to consider stooping
so low.
When he was the sitting president Gerald Ford had resented
Ronald Reagan, then a former governor of California, for taking
the bold action of challenging him for the Republican nomina-
tion in 1976 and attacking him for being “too liberal” and too
soft on the Soviet Union. Reagan’s challenge, Ford thought, dis-
tracted him from the general election race against Carter. Ford
called the Republican convention in Kansas City, Missouri, that
year a “bloodbath.” After Ford secured the nomination he refused
to consider Reagan as his running mate, even when polls showed
he was the smartest choice. Reagan, it turns out, would not have
taken the job. He only agreed to meet with Ford after his defeat
if he could be guaranteed that Ford would not offer him the vice
presidency. Now, ironically, Reagan was begging Ford to join
his ticket. No president who had been elected would ever accept
the vice presidency, but maybe someone who had never been
elected president, like Ford, might consider it. (Ford was Nixon’s
vice president and he became president after Nixon resigned over
Watergate.)
In June 1980 Reagan had called his old rival and asked if he
could pay him a visit at his home in Rancho Mirage, California.
During that meeting Reagan offered Ford the vice presidency.
Ford, Reagan reasoned, had the credentials he was lacking. One
aide referred to the unlikely duo as a “dream ticket.” But Ford
declined Reagan’s offer; he was thinking of running for president
himself again. Dick Cheney, who was Ford’s chief of staff in the
White House, recalled a meeting with Ford and a handful of ad-
visers to discuss Ford’s own potential candidacy in 1980. They
spent an entire day going over the pros and cons of whether Ford
should run for president. The next morning the former president
called them into his office with an answer: “Guys,” Ford said,

“I’ve been thinking about it. Starting tomorrow you’re going to

be in here by noon and you’re going to have a list with all the
things we have to do. Frankly, I don’t want to do it. Deep inside,
I’d like to be president again but I’m just not interested in what
I’d have to do.”
But Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were not giving up. A month
later in Detroit the Reagans visited Ford and his wife, Betty, in
their hotel suite. At the convention Ford was thrilling Republicans
with his blistering attacks on Carter. “You’ve all heard Carter’s
alibis,” he told the crowd on the first night of the convention.
“Inflation cannot be controlled. The world has changed. We can
no longer protect our diplomats in foreign capitals, nor our work-
ing men on Detroit’s assembly lines. We must lower our expecta-
tions. We must be realistic. We must prudently retreat. Baloney!”
The crowd burst into applause; Ford was looking better and better.
During their visit to the Fords’ suite, the Reagans offered them an
elegantly wrapped gift—an Indian peace pipe. “Ron,” Ford said,
“I thought the matter had been settled.” Reagan pleaded with him,
“Would you take another look at it?” Ford relented and said, “In
deference to your request, I will.” And so, on the third evening
of the Republican convention, and on the very night of Reagan’s
nomination, a back- and-
forth began between a man who had
served as both vice president and president and a newly minted
presidential nominee determined to win him over.
At the convention Ford said: “Elder statesmen are supposed to
sit quietly by and smile wisely from the sidelines. I’ve never been
much for sitting. I’ve never spent much time on the sidelines.” Here
was his chance to get back in the game. As he was mulling over
the offer, he told journalists, he could imagine his partnership with
Reagan being like the one in some European countries “where you
have a head of state and a head of government.” The question was,
how much was each man willing to give up.
Spencer took his old friend Betty Ford aside. She was one per-
son who had made up her mind about Reagan’s offer. Betty was a

36 first in line
famously outspoken first lady who was now finally enjoying time
alone with her husband and family in southern California. “I don’t
know what’s going on but he’s looking for a divorce if he does
this,” she told Spencer. Meantime, Hamilton Jordan and Jerry Raf-
shoon, two of Democratic opponent Jimmy Carter’s most trusted
aides, were on separate vacations and giddy with excitement as they
watched the Republican convention on television. “We were hop-
ing that Ford would go through with it because rather than it being
an advantage, it would show that they knew that Reagan couldn’t
handle the job,” Rafshoon recalled.
Ford knew the perils of the vice presidency well and he did not
want to be “a useless appendage,” so he and his aides came up with
a broad list of demands. One of Ford’s unprecedented requests was
to be made Reagan’s chief of staff. “If the Vice President was the
chief of staff, he would know everything,” Ford reasoned, “and
if something happened to the President, he could step into those
shoes without any problem whatsoever.” Reagan campaign aides
called Cheney, then a congressman and delegate to the convention,
and Bob Teeter, a Republican pollster, and together, along with
former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, they made up Ford’s
makeshift team and went through his extensive list. Later, Rea-
gan’s team presented Ford’s staff with a one-and-a-half-page doc-
ument outlining exactly what Reagan was willing to offer, and
it was extraordinary: making Ford chief of staff and giving him
control over the National Security Council, the Council of Eco-
nomic Advisers, and the budget office. “It was amazing the ex-
tent to which they were going to give up parts of the presidency,”
Cheney recalled. “Reagan went a long way toward meeting that
list. We’re all scratching our heads thinking, This isn’t going to fly,
and if it does it’s delegating too much of the presidency. My belief always
was that Ford really did not want it, he figured if he asked for all of
those big requirements he wouldn’t get it.”
Their agreement began to unravel just as quickly as it came into
being. Reagan thought Ford was going too far when he demanded

that Henry Kissinger, who had been secretary of state in the Nixon
and Ford administrations, be appointed to the same position in
a Reagan White House. “Jerry, I know all of Kissinger’s strong
points and there’s no question that he should play a role. I would
use him a lot but not as secretary of state, I’ve been all over the
country the last several years and Kissinger carries a lot of baggage.
I couldn’t accept that. My own people, in fact, wouldn’t accept it,”
Reagan said. Kissinger was one of Ford’s negotiators going back
and forth between the hotel suites, which only added to the awk-
wardness of the situation.
The final straw came when Reagan, in the quiet of his hotel
suite, saw an interview Ford did with CBS News’s Walter Cronkite.
When Cronkite suggested that the power sharing agreement be-
tween the two men would look something like a “co-presidency,”
Ford did not flinch. “I have to have responsible assurances,” Ford
replied. A co-presidency agreed to in private was one thing; mak-
ing it public was quite another. Reagan, who was usually calm and
affable, was visibly disturbed by what he had seen. “Did you hear
what he said about a co-presidency?” he asked his aides. It was at
that moment that Reagan came to a realization: Wait a minute, this
is really two presidents he is talking about. At 9:15 p.m., Reagan called
Ford and said they needed to wrap up a deal that night. At 10:00
Ford’s aides asked for another day to consider the offer and were
told no, it was now or never. At 11:30 Ford changed into a business
suit, took the short walk downstairs to Reagan’s suite, and told
him, “This isn’t gonna work.” There was no way he could go back
to the vice presidency. It was a short but emotional meeting. The
two men hugged and Ford promised to campaign for Reagan in
the fall. At 11:35 Ford left the room and Reagan suddenly found
himself in desperate need of another option, and fast.
During the plane ride to Detroit days before, when Stuart Spen-
cer had told Reagan he should pick Bush, a man he barely knew,
he made this argument: “You’re going to the convention that has a
right-w ing platform, and you need someone perceived as moderate

38 first in line
on the ticket with you,” he advised him. “Hmmm,” Reagan mum-

bled, unconvinced, and the subject was dropped.
At that time he had his heart set on Ford. But now everything
had changed.
Reagan said aloud, to no one in particular, “Now, where the
hell’s Bush?” By 11:38 Bush was on the line.

III
The Art of the Vet
Several people didn’t want to be vetted because of girlfriends . . . People

know when they can’t take a frisk—they know that. If they’ve been sleeping
with their secretary for twenty years, they know that people know that.
—J I M JOHNSON, DEMOCR AT IC L AW Y ER W HO V ET TED V ICE
PR ESIDENT I A L CA NDIDATES FOR JOHN K ER RY A ND BA R ACK OBA M A
This is kind of like having a colonoscopy without anesthesia.

— C ONNECT ICU T SENATOR JOE LIEBER M A N ON BEING V ET TED
TO BECOME A L GOR E’S RU NNING M ATE IN 2000
A
fter eight years of being Reagan’s VP, George H. W. Bush
ran for president and won the Republican nomination in
1988. He then surprised everyone, including his close
friend and adviser James Baker, when he picked little-k nown forty-
one-year-old Indiana senator Dan Quayle as his running mate.
Bush hoped Quayle would help attract votes from baby boomers
and Christian conservatives who thought he was too moderate. In
the weeks leading up to the announcement, his closest advisers pre-
sented him with lists of the three strongest contenders, the names
constantly changing as seasoned Republican senators shuffled on
and off, including Kansas senator Bob Dole and New Mexico sen-
ator Pete Domenici. Quayle’s was the one permanent name on the
list, and he was the only young, telegenic option. Plus, he lobbied

40 first in line
for the job. “As I look back on it,” Dole recalled, “Dan spent a lot
of time in Bush’s office visiting with him. I think they developed
a closer relationship than we knew.”
In a 1990 interview, Gerald Ford said that Bush’s decision to
pick Quayle was his biggest mistake. But that was in part because
Bush did not let even his closest advisers in on his decision. He held
it so tightly that he only whispered it to Reagan as he was about to
board the plane that August to take him to New Orleans, where
he would announce his running mate at the Republican National
Convention. On the flight to Louisiana, Bush aide Craig Fuller
and other top advisers were still throwing out names of who they
thought Bush would pick, and no one guessed Quayle, including
Baker, who was one of Bush’s closest friends and a frequent tennis
partner. Even though Quayle was the one constant on the lists of
candidates, he was too much of an unknown, too much of a wild
card, they thought. But Bush wanted to show that he was capable
of bold decision-making, and the vice presidential pick is one of
the few decisions that truly belongs to the nominee. When Bush
called Quayle the Monday after the Democratic convention the
previous month and asked if he would consider being his running
mate, even members of Quayle’s family were surprised. One of his
children said they thought Bush was going to pick Dole, and an-
other said, “You’re not even a famous senator yet.”
“The only decision I would take back in a nanosecond was an-
nouncing Quayle the way we did,” Fuller reflected. “It did not give
Quayle time to collect his thoughts.” The announcement was in-
deed dramatic, with Bush and his wife, Barbara, arriving at Span-
ish Plaza, a riverside dock, on board a riverboat on the Mississippi.
The plaza was teeming with people on the sweltering August day,
and no one on board the boat could spot Quayle on the dock, in
part because so many of Bush’s team did not even have a good idea
of what he looked like; Secret Service agents had trouble recog-
nizing him. Quayle and his wife frantically pushed through the
crowd. Finally, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond spotted

the art of the vet 41
the Quayles and told Bush’s aides. “Dan and Marilyn had trou-
ble getting to the platform because they looked too young and
no one realized why they needed to be up there,” Barbara Bush
later joked. Once at the podium, Quayle grabbed Bush’s arm and
shouted, “Let’s go get ’em!” Quayle later acknowledged that it
might not have been the best move. “I was picked, in part, for my
youth, but this was a little too youthful—not vice presidential nor,
given the nature of that office, potentially presidential.” With that,
Quayle began his rocky relationship with members of the press,
who would question whether he had dodged the draft, smoked
pot, and gotten lousy grades. In short, from the moment he was
announced, questions arose about whether he had the credentials
or the temperament to be first in line for the presidency.
During the campaign, Quayle was watched over by the veteran
California political consultant Stuart Spencer, who worked for
Reagan and admits Quayle was done no favors by the way he was
selected. “If you pick someone like that you have to leak it early, you
have to let the candidate go through the vetting process through
the media,” Spencer said. The decision to keep Quayle away from
the press only further frayed his relationship with reporters. More-
over, Quayle and Spencer did not work well together. By the time
he left New Orleans, Quayle admitted, “I was finding it difficult
to trust myself.” But Spencer said he had to micromanage Quayle
because he was not prepared. “I was doing a press interview on the
campaign plane sitting at a table and he and his wife are on one side
and the reporter on the other side. The reporter asked him, ‘What’s
the favorite book you’ve read?’ He turns to his wife, Marilyn, and
asks her, ‘What’s the favorite book I’ve read?’ At that point I said,
‘Holy shit.’ ”
Vetting and politics are supposed to be separate. “Vetting means

wrongdoing, it doesn’t mean lack of a political match,” said Jim
Johnson, who ran the vetting for John Kerry in 2004 and for a brief

42 first in line
time for Barack Obama in 2008. Though most presidential candi-

dates start thinking about a running mate well before the nomi-
nation, long and bitter primary battles can be distracting. Vetters
often have less than a month to dig up everything they can possibly
find on a potential running mate. Many of the questions they ask
the finalists are cringeworthy. Rumors of infidelity or financial
impropriety are often the tip of the iceberg, and sometimes the
lawyers decide to call off a vet early if broader outreach will do
nothing more than embarrass the person being vetted.
As more women make it onto the list of vice presidential can-
didates, the mostly male, white-collar Washington and New York
lawyers who do most of the vetting are aware they need to rethink
their approach. Instead of asking the candidate whether he’s ever
paid for an abortion, now they have to directly ask a woman if
she’s ever had one. Or, instead of asking a man if he’s ever sexu-
ally harassed anyone, now the question is tweaked and the woman
being vetted is asked whether she has ever been sexually harassed.
One experienced vetting lawyer said that he prefers it when a fe-
male colleague sits in the room with him when he is asking such
personal questions. Often the most shocking revelations come up
in conversations rather than on written questionnaires, because no
one wants a paper trail.
Lawyers also have to vet the running mate’s spouse. When Wal-
ter Mondale ran against Ronald Reagan in 1984, he knew he had
to make a historic pick if he was to beat the wildly popular sitting
president. Tom Bradley, the first African American mayor of Los
Angeles, was on Mondale’s short list, along with Dianne Feinstein,
then the mayor of San Francisco, and New York congresswoman
Geraldine Ferraro. “We weren’t doing oppo [opposition research]
on Tom Bradley’s wife,” Mondale’s campaign manager Joe Trippi
explained—she was a private person who hosted teas and played
the part of the supportive political wife, she was not in charge of
a business. “Therefore why would you be doing oppo on Geral-
dine Ferraro and Dianne Feinstein’s husbands?” But after Mondale

picked Ferraro, the first woman to ever be the running mate of a

major presidential candidate, revelations surfaced about her hus-
band’s business dealings that badly damaged the campaign. “From
that day forward it was proven that you have to go much further
than looking at the person themselves,” Trippi said. Before then,
vice presidential candidates were all men with wives who were
mostly not working.
With less than a month to uncover every detail about a person’s
life, and without the help of the FBI, the job of vetting is more
private eye than white-collar attorney. Most people, no matter
how much they say they do not want to be vice president, eagerly
answer vetters’ questions. But the digging goes far beyond inter-
views with candidates. Jim Hamilton, a well-respected Democratic
lawyer who vetted running mates for Kerry, Obama, and Hillary
Clinton, said there are four standards for vetting: thoroughness,
confidentiality, expedition, and respect. He recognizes that there is
an inherent tension between them. Occasionally, he’ll tell his law-
yers not to interview too many people, especially when they travel
to the candidate’s hometown and track down their eighth-g rade
teacher. The more people who are interviewed, the more likely
there’ll be a leak.
When presidents consider what kind of person they want to serve

alongside them, they look for someone who can help them get
elected and who can step up to the presidency. Usually, the most
important consideration is whether the nominee is ready to take
over. But presidential candidates also want something much sim-
pler: they do not want to be embarrassed. In 1972, South Dakota
senator George McGovern picked Missouri senator Thomas Eagle-
ton as his running mate. At a time when mental health was even
less understood than it is now, Eagleton was forced to leave the
ticket after just eighteen days when it was revealed that he suffered
from depression and had undergone electroshock therapy. Since

44 first in line
that embarrassing episode the vetting process has become deliber-

ate and methodical. Is there anything you would not want to see on the
front page of the Washington Post? is a standard catch-a ll.
The list of questions is now well over a hundred. Vetters collect
everything that the candidate has ever written, they sit down with
spouses, they ask for details of former relationships, they log into
private social media accounts, and they insist on tax returns. They
even look at the potential nominee’s children’s, and in many cases
grandchildren’s, Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. They
want to know everything, even if it’s not disqualifying. In order
to make sure embarrassing revelations do not see the light of day,
anything that is written, including notes about what the candi-
date said during his or her interviews with the lawyers, is either
destroyed or given back to the person being vetted. “There are
no written reports of the vets,” said Hamilton. “The reports are
made to the nominee orally. I don’t want any written record.” At
the beginning of the vetting process lawyers put together a “black
book” on each contender on the long list. The book is compiled
from publicly available material and is part of what is referred to as
a “blind vet,” because the people being vetted do not know they
are under consideration.
Donald Rumsfeld was vetted for the vice presidency in 1974
(when Ford picked Rockefeller), 1976, and 1980. “There was a
guy walking around with me from the campaign at the convention
with a phone to be called if I happened to be the person picked,”
he recalled. He said it got easier every time he was on the list of
so-called usual suspects. When Ford had him vetted when he ran
in 1976, Rumsfeld was, at the time, Ford’s secretary of defense. “I
laughed it off,” he recalled. “The last thing in the world you’re go-
ing to do is pick a former congressman from Illinois and a former
congressman from Michigan [Ford was a Michigan congressman
for twenty-four years]. It didn’t make any sense. I think he proba-
bly had me on there for backup.”
Richard Moe helped Warren Christopher do the vice presi-

dential vetting for Bill Clinton in 1992. Moe gathered a team of

lawyers and assigned each of them to one of the potential can-
didates. He said, “We would just take the guy apart financially
and every which way.” Former Johnson aide Harry McPherson
oversaw Gore’s vetting. Other candidates included Senator Bob
Graham of Florida (whose daily diary, in which he cataloged
the most mundane details of his life, was considered a disquali-
fier because it was deemed too eccentric), Nebraska senator Bob
Kerrey, Pennsylvania senator Harris Wofford, and Congressman
Lee Hamilton of Indiana. Gore was a senator from Tennessee,
a relatively small Southern state like Clinton’s Arkansas, who
had run for president in 1988 and lost the Democratic nomina-
tion. Though they did not know each other well, Clinton, Gore
said, was deferential and sent him a message through two mutual
friends in 1991 that if Gore decided to run again, Clinton would
bow out. It is a surprising concession for Clinton, who so desper-
ately wanted to be president.
On June 30, 1992, under the cover of darkness, a red Bronco
with tinted windows picked Gore up from his Capitol Hill apart-
ment and brought him to the Washington Hilton for a meeting at
11:00 p.m. with Clinton. Gore’s aides were worried that he would
not be at his best so late at night—unlike Clinton, Gore is not a
night owl. And Gore said he had “zero expectation” that he would
be asked to join Clinton’s ticket. They were fellow baby boomers
and came from adjoining states, so picking Gore would be dou-
bling down instead of balancing the ticket. “I really and truly felt
that it was kind of a courtesy,” Gore said of that night. “We spent
a good bit of the time with me recommending who he ought to
pick.” Every other meeting with a finalist lasted no more than an
hour, but this one went on until 1:40 a.m., almost three hours after
it began. “I remember coming away after the three hours thinking
to myself that, to my surprise, I thought he might actually want
me to run with him.” Despite their close age and geographic base,
Gore balanced Clinton in other ways: he was considered more

46 first in line
conservative (he had voted for the first Gulf War), and he was
a Vietnam veteran (Clinton’s patriotism was called into question
during the campaign because of his efforts to avoid being drafted).
And, if his reputation was correct, Gore was straitlaced and devoid
of Clinton’s messy personal life.
Even though Clinton advisers James Carville and Paul Begala
were not sold on Gore, it was clear that Gore and Clinton got
along and shared a similar worldview. “I told him at the beginning
of our eight-year journey that he would never have any reason to
doubt my loyalty or to not feel comfortable in putting one hundred
percent trust in me,” Gore recalled. But Clinton needed to be sure
about Gore. The morning after their late-n ight meeting, Clinton
set about personally investigating Gore and called his friends in
Tennessee. When a friend of Gore’s told Clinton, “Al Gore will
not knife you in the back,” the deal was sealed.
McPherson, the prominent Washington lawyer in charge of
Gore vetting, also made off-the-record calls to Gore’s old friends,
reporters, and congressional colleagues looking for anything lurk-
ing in his past that the campaign should know about. He went to
Gore’s Capitol Hill apartment for an interview. It was a particu-
larly hot day in Washington and the windows were open. The day
before McPherson had called a reporter he knew in Tennessee and
asked if there was anything at all that he should know about Gore.
The reporter mentioned a rumor that Gore may have had a brief
affair during his presidential campaign. But that was all it was—a
rumor. Still, McPherson had to ask. One of Gore’s selling points
was that he had no dirty laundry. “Al,” he said during their inter-
view, “I don’t want to ask you this question, and I’m embarrassed
to ask you, but you’ll understand more than anybody that with
Clinton undergoing the scrutiny that he is, that he really would be
in a bad way if he has a running mate with the same problems of
the same kind.”
Gore answered before McPherson could finish the sentence. But
the windows were open and a diesel bus roared by the moment

Gore replied. McPherson could not quite make out what he said.
He thought he said, “There won’t be any problems,” but he was
not completely sure. The question was so awkward, especially for
someone who seemed as prudish as Gore, that McPherson could
not bring himself to repeat it. There is a self-righteousness about
Gore that made those kinds of personal questions even more dif-
ficult to ask. During the campaign, Gore was incensed when a
reporter asked if he had ever smoked pot. He was riding in a car
with the reporter, his wife, Tipper, and an aide at the time and he
sat there speechless until he finally asked the driver to stop the car.
He told the reporter to step outside with him and asked him if he
really wanted to ask that particular question. He had been through
this before. When he ran for president in 1988 Gore admitted to
smoking pot while at Harvard and in the army and he wanted the
matter to be closed for good.
In 2000 George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, wanted his fa-

ther’s former secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, to run his presi-
dential campaign. Cheney, who was then the CEO of Halliburton,
the Texas-based oil and gas extraction firm, said no. Bush then sent
his chief of staff from the governor’s office to see if Cheney would
agree to be considered as his running mate, and again Cheney de-
clined. Finally, Bush called Cheney and asked him, if he would not
agree to be his vice president, would he at least agree to run the
search to help him find one. Cheney finally relented and agreed to
do it. Even Lynne Cheney never thought that her husband would
become vice president—she told a close friend how relieved she
was when Cheney told her that he would be on the committee to
select Bush’s running mate, thinking that it would ensure that he
himself was out of the running.
Weeks before the Republican National Convention at the end of
July, Cheney went to visit Bush at his ranch outside of Crawford,
Texas. The two men sat at Bush’s dining room table and flipped

48 first in line
through binders crammed with the most intimate details of the

lives of the actual candidates up for the job. Cheney had put to-
gether an especially rigorous questionnaire that included nearly two
hundred questions under seventy-n ine headings. One of Cheney’s
specific questions was whether there was anything in a candidate’s
past that would make him “vulnerable to blackmail or coercion.”
Bush asked Cheney to set the binders aside. “The man I really want
to be the vice president is here at the table,” Bush told him. Cheney
said nothing. The two men went out to the back porch and in the
searing summer heat Cheney recited the long list of reasons why
he was not a wise choice: his bad heart; his two drunk-driving
convictions; his flunking out of Yale University; and his daughter
Mary, who is gay, and could be a lightning rod in the Republican
Party, which still defines marriage as a legal union between one
man and one woman. Gerald Ford had told Cheney that being vice
president was “the worst eight months of my life”—those words
were surely ringing in his ears at that moment. Cheney said he
would have to think long and hard about Bush’s offer. “I always
saw the vice president as expendable in a sense,” he said years later.
And there was a housekeeping issue to attend to: Cheney would
have to change his voter registration because both he and Bush
were registered to vote in Texas, and the president and vice pres-
ident cannot be registered to vote in the same state. Eventually,
of course, he agreed to take the job, but only if he was given the
power to overhaul it. Bush and Cheney made clandestine trips in
the weeks leading up to the convention to interview other candi-
dates. Cheney sat in the room quietly, knowing all along that the
decision had already been made.
When Jim Johnson was running the vetting for Democratic pres-
idential nominee John Kerry in 2004, he was particularly worried
about two candidates who had inadequate medical records. One
had been examined by a staff member who happened to be a doc-

tor. That would not do. It was conveyed to the potential nominee,
whom Johnson would not name, that he would be picked up the
next morning and taken to a local hospital and examined by doc-
tors who were not on his payroll. The health of the vice president
is a critical part of the very secretive vetting process. When Indiana
senator Evan Bayh was being vetted as Obama’s running mate in
2008, he had to pay several thousand dollars for medical tests to
find out why he was having such bad stomachaches. It turned out
he had adult-onset gluten sensitivity. “They wanted to make sure I
wasn’t dying,” he said.
In 2004, Democrat John Kerry’s first choice for his running
mate was Republican senator John McCain of Arizona. The two
knew each other from Vietnam and from their years in the Senate.
“It was clear that it wouldn’t fly. McCain didn’t want to do it, it
was clear that it would have been too controversial in other quar-
ters,” according to a person familiar with Kerry’s decision-making.
“But if you said where was his heart when this was moving along,
I would say McCain.” In the end, the vetters gave John Edwards,
then a charismatic young Democratic senator from North Carolina
who had sought the nomination that year, a long look. They read
every legal submission that Edwards made in his career as a lawyer,
and they looked at every speech he had ever delivered. They inves-
tigated reports that he had had affairs but, in the end, they found
nothing conclusive. An affair with former campaign aide Rielle
Hunter would later derail his own presidential run in 2008.
In the early summer of 2008 Barack Obama, then the Democrat’s

presidential nominee, held a first round of meetings with his advis-
ers on Capitol Hill to focus on running-mate options. Jim Johnson
initially oversaw the vetting process along with Eric Holder, who,
at the time was Obama’s top legal adviser, and Caroline Kennedy,
the daughter of President John F. Kennedy. More than seventy
top Washington- a nd New York–based lawyers volunteered to be

50 first in line
on the team. “When you say to somebody, ‘Help me choose the

top candidate’s running mate,’ they make time for that,” Johnson
quipped. “A lot of lawyers love doing this because it’s being a part
of history,” said Hamilton. “I have no trouble finding people.”
The vetting team initially focused on twenty-three people. Obama
asked for the so-called black book on each of the candidates. Vet-
ters flew to Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters to present him
with the books. But there were twenty-two, not twenty-three.
“I have twenty-t wo books for you,” a person who was involved
in the process, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told
Obama.
“But we agreed to twenty-three,” Obama replied.
“Yes,” the person said, “and I decided not to bring the twenty-
third.”
“I wanted twenty-three,” Obama, who is famously unemotional,
said, sounding a bit annoyed.
“It would be very bad politics for you to have a book that had
been prepared on one of the candidates,” the person told him, “be-
cause it’s got so much dirt in it.” The vetting lawyers were so con-
cerned about this one person that they were worried about even
putting a binder together on him, fearing it could be traced back
to the Obama campaign. The information was too scandalous.
Obama, of course, wanted to know who it was. The room was
packed with campaign staff, so the person told Obama they should
speak alone in the hallway.
“So, who didn’t you do a book on?” Obama asked.
“Mike Bloomberg.”
Obama nodded his head, but this time he kept his poker face
and returned to the room. Once the lawyers had started consid-
ering Bloomberg, then mayor of New York City who had left the
Republican Party in 2007 to become an independent, they began
investigating his financial services and media company, Bloomberg
L.P. They were surprised by what they found. One New York
Times article published on May 2, 2008, noted that more than fifty

women were accusing Bloomberg L.P. of discriminating against

pregnant employees. One former sales executive claimed that af-
ter she became pregnant, Bloomberg encouraged her to have an
abortion because so many female employees were taking maternity
leave. He adamantly denied the allegations and settled that case
out of court for an undisclosed amount. There was no disputing it,
though: Bloomberg was absolutely off the table.
Joe Biden was decided on very early—Obama, who had served
less than a full term as a senator from Illinois, wanted him as his
running mate even before he won the nomination. He had the
experience that Obama was lacking, and he came from a working-
class Catholic family and could appeal to skeptical Democrats in
the Rust Belt, particularly in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Biden had
been a senator for thirty-six years and chair or ranking member of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Judiciary Commit-
tee for more than a dozen years apiece. Rahm Emanuel, who later
became Obama’s chief of staff, asked the vetting lawyers, “Why are
you making this so complicated? The obvious choice is Biden, so
why not just do that and forget about the rest of it?”
But all that time in the public arena also meant that Biden car-
ried baggage. He ran for president in 1988 and was forced to drop
out of the race after delivering passages from a speech by British
Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution. Kinnock
lost the election, but his lyrical speeches and populist message ap-
pealed to Biden. In one commercial Kinnock asked rhetorically
why he was “the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able
to get to university?” And pointed to his wife, who was sitting in
the audience: “Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a
thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it be-
cause all our predecessors were thick?” At the Iowa State Fair, an
important stop for any presidential hopeful, Biden said nearly the
exact same thing, just swapping out names: “I started thinking as
I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his
family ever to go to a university?” he asked. Then, pointing to his

52 first in line
wife, Jill, he continued: “Why is it that my wife who is sitting out

there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college?
Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because
I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a
graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”
Biden explained that one of the reasons for the slip was his dis-
traction with the Senate hearings for Ronald Reagan’s Supreme
Court nominee Robert Bork, but he admitted that part of it was
also his arrogant belief that he “could talk my way through the
most important campaign event of the summer.” He often speaks in
the third person and exaggerates his biography, including in 2007
when he said he was “shot at” in Iraq, which he later corrected to
say, “I was near where a shot landed.” But the good far outweighed
the bad. Biden has a Bill Clinton–esque ability to connect with
people, drawing energy from a crowd, resting his hand on people’s
shoulders, hugging them, and generally being less professorial than
the man who picked him as his number two.
Biden had dropped out of the presidential race in January 2008,
after coming in a distant fifth in the Iowa caucuses. At Bush’s last
State of the Union address, Obama asked Biden for his support.
“If you win, I’ll do anything you ask me to do,” Biden told him.
Obama replied, “Be careful, because I may ask you a lot.” During
the remaining primaries, Obama sought Biden’s advice about twice
a week and was particularly interested in Biden’s perspective on
foreign policy matters. “The only question I have is not whether
I want you in this administration,” Obama told him. “It’s which
job you’d like best.” At one point, Obama asked him if he would
be more interested in being secretary of state than vice president,
an offer Biden said he seriously considered. When it came to the
vice presidency, Biden was not immediately convinced. “It wasn’t
self-evident to me that being vice president would be a better job.”
Biden got a call from Obama asking him if he would agree to
be vetted when he was on the Amtrak train, traveling from Wash-
ington to his home in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a commute

he made almost every weekday while he was in the Senate. He was

not enthusiastic. “I never wanted to be vice president, I thought
I could help him more as chairman of the foreign relations com-
mittee,” Biden said. “I thought I could be his fixer in the Sen-
ate between Democrats and Republicans.” Biden told Obama he
would get back to him and he had a family meeting that night to
discuss the offer. Everyone in his family told him he should say yes,
especially his wife, Jill, who thought he would be home more as
vice president than if he agreed to be secretary of state, a job that
requires constant travel.
Before Obama approached him to join the ticket, Biden’s ninety-
year-old mother, Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan Biden, had
asked him what kind of man he thought Obama was. Biden told
her he thought he was a good man. His mother was at the family
meeting that night as they were all gathered on the back porch
of Joe and Jill’s Delaware house. She had not said a word, which,
Biden said, was unusual for his chatty mother, who he absolutely
worshipped.
“Honey, you haven’t said anything. What do you think?” Biden
asked her.
“Joey, remember when I asked you what kind of man he was?
And you said he was a good man.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And remember when you were fourteen that realtor sold a
house to a black couple and all those people came out and protested
and I told you not to go down there and stand with the people
who bought the house, and you went down and the police arrested
you and brought you home because they were worried about your
safety?”
“Yes,” he repeated.
“And remember you had that good job at Windybush swim-
ming pool and you were a lifeguard but you wanted to work in the
inner city, you wanted to be the only white employee on the east
side of Wilmington, Delaware?”

54 first in line
“Yeah, Mom, I remember that,” he said.

“Remember after the city was burned down and you had that
job with that white-shoe law firm, the oldest law firm in Delaware
and after six months you quit and became a public defender?”
“Yes, Mom,” he said.
“Let me get this straight, honey. The first black man in history
who has the chance to be president says he needs you to win and
you told him no.”
Son of a bitch, he thought to himself, she’s right. Biden said it
was at that moment when he knew he had to say yes and accept
Obama’s offer. When he agreed to be vetted, he said, “I knew that
once I did that that I’d crossed the Rubicon, that if he wanted me
I would do it.”
Obama chief campaign strategists David Axelrod and David
Plouffe went to see each of the three finalists: Biden, Indiana senator
Evan Bayh, and Virginia senator Tim Kaine. They flew into Wilm-
ington in a cloak-and-dagger mission trying to avoid the press so
that Obama’s pick would be a surprise, and arrived at Biden’s sister’s
house. Biden’s eldest son, Beau, and Jill Biden then picked them up
and brought them to Biden’s house. Biden walked into the room
wearing a baseball cap and his signature aviator sunglasses.
“The thing I remember very clearly was him kissing Beau and
saying, ‘I love you, I may be by later to see the kids,’ ” Axelrod re-
called. Once they were seated, Axelrod delivered some blunt crit-
icism. “Obviously, Senator Obama is really interested in you. The
one big concern is that we have to work in concert, and frankly
the whole loquaciousness thing can be an issue.” Biden nodded and
proceeded to launch into “a two-hour oration,” Axelrod said with
a laugh.
“I ran for president because I thought I would be the best pres-
ident,” Biden said. “And I still think that. But Barack won and I
think it’s important that he succeed and I want to help him suc-
ceed.”
Axelrod was impressed. “I thought that was disarmingly honest.
FirstinLine_9780062668943_final_TM0404_cc17.indd 54 4/24/18 10:14 AM

I took that well because I thought he was leveling with us. Every
ten minutes or so he’d come up for air and he’d say, ‘Am I making
sense here?’ And, in fact, he was brilliant in a lot of his observa-
tions. It was a tour de force, honestly.”
Biden said he needed at least two or three hours alone with
Obama to hash out details of how he saw the job. Biden talked to
Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, and Mondale sent
him his formal agreement with Carter and encouraged him to act
as a general adviser, and not to request specific assignments. Biden
also asked Gore for advice. On August 6, the Obama campaign
snuck Biden into Obama’s Minneapolis hotel suite, where they
stayed up late discussing how each of them saw the role. Obama
told him the vetting had gone well, particularly because Biden did
not have complicated finances. “All these years,” Obama teased
him, “and you still have no money.”
In his lifetime Biden had seen too many vice presidents fail, and
he felt like he was at the peak of his career and he did not want to
waste time. His best friend and adviser, Ted Kaufman, told him,
“If you become vice president I’m not going to be the one who
goes into your office in the morning and tells you, ‘You know
what you wanted to do today, you’re not going to be able to do it
because some junior staffer from the White House said they want
you to fly to Indiana to do something else.’ I don’t want to sit there
and watch you get upset.” Biden knew the pitfalls and told Obama
what he really wanted, which was “to be the last guy in the room.”
Biden said, “It wasn’t a throwaway line. I meant it literally, not
figuratively.”
Biden and Obama agreed to five ground rules in a private writ-
ten document: “JRB and BO have weekly unstaffed meeting; JRB
can sit in on any BO meeting; JRB must have contemporaneous
receipt of all paper—A ll printed words that go to BO go to JRB;
JRB staff must be included in any meeting with their parallel BO
staff; JRB will not have a portfolio, because he will be involved in
everything.”

56 first in line
One other thing, Biden told Obama: “I’m not changing my brand.
I am what I am.”
Eight years before Donald Trump put A. B. Culvahouse in charge

of his VP search, Culvahouse was running McCain’s vice presi-
dential vetting team. And he was instrumental in McCain’s un-
conventional and controversial selection of Alaska governor Sarah
Palin. McCain, aware that he faced an uphill battle against Barack
Obama, the first African American to win the nomination of a
major political party, felt that he needed a game changer. Hillary
Clinton never made it onto Obama’s final list of vice presiden-
tial possibilities, according to a person familiar with his decision-
making, and that made nominating Palin, who would be the first
Republican woman running mate, even more attractive.
Culvahouse was given a long list of twenty-six possibilities by
the campaign, more than twice as many people as would be on
Trump’s initial list. The people on the short list—McCain’s close
friend Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Minnesota gover-
nor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney,
and Florida governor Charlie Crist— had personal interviews
with Culvahouse and were given nearly a hundred written ques-
tions to answer. Bloomberg, who was originally on Obama’s long
list of potential running mates before he was deemed radioactive,
was also on the long list of people who were vetted using public
material by McCain’s team. McCain’s lawyers, unlike Obama’s,
prepared a report for the candidate on Bloomberg but he was not
interviewed.
McCain saw the decision as an opportunity to show that he
was a maverick, a politician who was unafraid to take a risk and
pick someone outside the mainstream Republican Party. Before
he settled on Palin, Lieberman was McCain’s top choice. Lieb-
erman had the added advantage of having already been vetted as
a running mate when he was picked by Gore eight years earlier.

Gore’s team had reviewed more than eight hundred legal opinions
Lieberman rendered when he was attorney general of Connecticut
in the 1980s. But he would be a risky choice—Lieberman was
a Democrat-turned-independent who supported abortion rights.
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who is very close to both
McCain and Lieberman, leaked his name to the press. Culvahouse
said that hurt Lieberman’s chances because it gave conservatives
the opportunity to mobilize against him: “If they had announced
Lieberman when they announced Palin I’m not sure that the con-
servatives could have organized that quickly against Lieberman.”
McCain was left scrambling for a running mate. Sarah Palin,
who was not nationally known and had been governor of Alaska
for less than three years, was not even on McCain’s long list of
potential candidates. She came to his attention because the other
choices were too predictable and not the game changers he and his
campaign strategists thought he needed in order to win. In mid-
August 2008, less than a month before the convention, McCain
met in Aspen with several people on his short list. A pollster told
him, “Senator, a middle-aged white guy doesn’t do it for you. If
you’re going to beat Obama you need to shake it up, you need a
minority or a woman.” The Republican Party’s bench in those de-
mographics was very thin. His top aides, including Steve Schmidt
and Rick Davis, urged him to pick Palin, because, like McCain,
she was a “maverick.”
McCain’s vetting lawyers had just seventy-two hours to vet
Palin, who was forty-four years old and just six years removed from
being mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. It was one of the biggest gambles
in modern politics. Culvahouse asked Palin the questions he had
asked McCain’s other candidates, including one that made sense
before President Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin
Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind the 9/11 terror attacks: “You’re
the acting president, the president just had surgery and the director
of intelligence comes in and says they have a confirmed sighting of
Bin Laden in the northwest territories of Afghanistan. He tells you

58 first in line
that we have a plane overhead ready to take the shot, but there will
be multiple civilian casualties. Do you take the shot?”
Palin replied, “Yes, I would take the shot because I’m the Presi-
dent of the United States, this is our archenemy who took the lives
of three-thousand-plus Americans. And then I would get down on
my knees and ask for forgiveness for the innocent souls whose lives
I would be taking.”
“Now that’s a brilliant answer,” Culvahouse said, his voice filled
with admiration nearly a decade after that conversation.
Palin did not reveal the pregnancy of her seventeen-year-old
daughter, Bristol, on the written questionnaire, but she told Culva-
house during a phone conversation, “You’ve got to know that my
daughter is pregnant and I’m not sure she’s going to get married
to the father.” It was thought to be a deal breaker among some in
McCain’s orbit, but John and his wife, Cindy, were less risk averse.
One matter Culvahouse was particularly concerned about was so-
called Troopergate, which centered around Governor Palin’s de-
cision to fire Alaska’s public safety commissioner Walt Monegan
because he would not fire Mike Wooten, a state trooper who was
going through a messy divorce and custody dispute with Palin’s
sister. Palin, Culvahouse said, had so much charisma that it over-
shadowed their concerns. “She had immense presence, she filled
the room,” he recalled.
McCain had only met Palin once, at the National Governors
Association meeting six months earlier, and they had only spoken
for fifteen minutes. They spoke once by phone before Palin and
her husband were flown down to the McCains’ home near Se-
dona, Arizona, where McCain formally made the offer. When he
announced Palin as his choice the day after that meeting, McCain
had spent less than three hours with her. Palin’s personal issues and
her lack of exposure to national media attention led to a caricature
of her as an unsophisticated and inexperienced vice presidential
candidate. Campaign aides understand that vice presidents cannot
help their candidate get elected, but they can certainly hurt. Palin

proved that to be true. Palin cost McCain 2.1 million votes, or 1.6
percentage points, according to a 2010 study by researchers at Stan-
ford University. Culvahouse is not apologetic about the decision,
though, and says that Palin was “plenty bright.” He thought she
could get up to speed. But during a moment of reflection he ad-
mitted, “In retrospect, were we all dazzled by the force of her per-
sonality? That was part of her political appeal, she was a real force.”
Trump had several women on his long list, including former sec-
retary of state Condoleezza Rice; South Carolina governor Nikki
Haley, who is now ambassador to the United Nations; and Iowa
senator Joni Ernst. Rice and Ernst took themselves off the list—
Ernst bowed out because she thought she would not be picked and
Rice, a perennial favorite, had taken herself off lists twice before,
in 2008 and 2012. The biggest sticking point for Rice was Trump’s
position on the Iraq War and his criticism of the Bush admin-
istration in which she had served—during the campaign Trump
said the invasion of Iraq was based on a “lie.” No women made it
onto Trump’s short list, which was an eclectic collection of men
who hold very different worldviews: Alabama senator Jeff Sessions,
later named Trump’s attorney general; New Jersey governor Chris
Christie; Tennessee senator Bob Corker; Ohio governor John Ka-
sich; former Speaker of the House and Republican firebrand Newt
Gingrich; and of course Indiana governor Mike Pence. According
to someone familiar with the process, Corker took himself out of
the running at the very end because he was so conflicted about
working for Trump, and he knew that if he agreed to be his vice
president, Trump would expect absolute loyalty. In the final days,
Gingrich and Pence, two very different men with very different
backgrounds, were Trump’s finalists.
Kasich, who challenged Trump in the Republican primaries
and whose poll numbers Trump regularly mocked, was surpris-
ingly on the list, no matter how many times he insisted he was not

60 first in line
interested in the job. Kasich’s campaign manager, John Weaver,

provides a hint at how much power a vice president in the Trump
administration might actually wield, or at least how much Trump’s
tight-k nit family hoped he would wield. Weaver exchanged several
text messages with Donald Trump Jr. in May 2016, shortly after
Kasich dropped out of the race. “He asked to meet me at Trump
Tower, which I told him I couldn’t do. As Kasich’s strategist, I
can’t just waltz into Trump Tower, so he called me while I was at
home in Austin and made the offer,” Weaver recounted. The offer
was incredible, presenting a co-presidency not unlike what Reagan
offered Ford during their negotiations in Detroit. “Kasich’s the
perfect choice,” Trump Jr. told Weaver. “My father would really
like him to do it. He would be the most powerful vice president in
history.” Weaver, skeptical that his boss and Trump, who had de-
veloped a visceral dislike for each other, could ever make it work,
told Trump’s son, “I’ve been around the block a few times, I’ve
heard that before.” (Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, uses simi-
lar flattery in job interviews. According to one person who Kush-
ner interviewed for a White House job, when asked exactly what
his job description would be, Kushner simply told him: “You’ll be
in charge of everything.”)
Trump Jr. further unnerved Weaver when he said, “You don’t
seem to understand, he would have control over domestic and for-
eign policy.”
A puzzled Weaver replied, “Well, that’s interesting, and what would
the president be doing?”
“My father would be making America great again,” Trump’s eldest
son assured him.
Weaver was shocked at how much Trump was willing to del-
egate to his number two. Trump Jr. was generally affable during
the call, Weaver said, but he was “surprised that we didn’t seem
to grasp what an earth-shattering offer this was and he didn’t un-
derstand why we didn’t jump at it.” Kasich did not even attend
the Republican National Convention, which was held in his home

state, because of his deep disdain for the Republican nominee, but
up until the end Trump clung to the hope that he would recon-
sider, according to a person familiar with Trump’s deliberations.
It was not going to happen: Kasich did not even vote for Trump;
instead he wrote in McCain’s name. Weaver says he himself threw
up for three hours straight on election night.
Trump Jr. was courting someone else at the same time. He is
close with Fox News host Sean Hannity and aggressively pushed
his father to pick Gingrich, a Fox News contributor and Hannity
friend. (Hannity even provided a private plane for Gingrich to fly
to Indianapolis when Trump was meeting with Pence.) But Gin-
grich had some major drawbacks. One top Republican state party
chairman said that when Trump asked him what he thought—as
he did nearly every Republican he encountered—he told Trump:
“Newt is a brilliant person, a brilliant mind, but I do not believe
that you need another lightning rod at the top of the ticket.” Like
Trump, Gingrich had been married three times, and he still owed
his failed 2012 presidential campaign more than $4 million. A debt
that large raises questions about what kind of leverage someone
who helps him pay it off might have over him. Also, Gingrich’s
wife, Callista, insisted on continuing to run Gingrich Productions,
a Virginia-based multimedia production company that produces
documentaries such as Divine Mercy: The Canonization of John Paul
II and Rediscovering God in America. “She wouldn’t let that one go,”
said a person with direct knowledge of Trump’s vetting process. A
second lady raising money for a private enterprise is unheard of,
and, as with their campaign debt, it would also beg questions about
the leverage benefactors might have over the Gingriches while in
office. (Callista has since been confirmed as Trump’s ambassador to
the Vatican.) Ethical questions remain surrounding Trump’s own
ties to his family real estate business while he is in office. An issue
with the Gingriches would only compound the scandal.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who ended his campaign
for the presidency in February 2016 and was one of the first major

62 first in line
politicians to back Trump during the primaries, was fully vetted.

But the so-called Bridgegate scandal, involving the deliberate clos-
ing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge linking Fort Lee,
New Jersey, and Manhattan in 2013, derailed Christie’s chances.
The lane closures led to severe traffic jams and were an effort by
Christie allies to retaliate against the Democratic mayor of Fort
Lee because he did not endorse Christie’s reelection bid. “The
timing of the Bridgegate trial was just impossible,” said Trump’s
vetting lawyer Culvahouse, who noted that the trial of two former
Christie associates was scheduled to begin in September, just two
months before the election. The Trumps were consumed with the
story. “The Trump family, Trump himself, they read the New York
Times, the New York media,” Culvahouse said. “And it had been
all Bridgegate, all the time for a couple of years.” It did not help
Christie that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, resented Chris-
tie, who, as U.S. attorney for New Jersey back in 2005, had played
a role in sending his father, billionaire real estate developer Charles
Kushner, to prison for tax evasion and retaliating against a federal
witness. “He was knifed in the back by Trump insiders,” said a
Christie aide. “But he and Trump have a very good relationship
and Trump asks him for his advice often.” The aide said his boss
has turned down a half-dozen other offers to serve in Trump’s
administration.
Toward the end of his three-week-long hunt for a vice president, a

flat tire grounded Donald Trump’s plane in Indianapolis. Rumors
circulated that Trump’s then–campaign chairman Paul Manafort
made up the story to keep Trump in town so that Indiana gov-
ernor Mike Pence could make his case for the vice presidential
nomination. Pence certainly took advantage of the opportunity.
Trump and his son Eric were in town for a rally the night be-
fore, when Pence effectively auditioned for the role of running
mate, and while stranded they had dinner with Pence and his wife,

Karen, at an Indianapolis restaurant. At dawn the next morning,

Trump’s other two eldest children, Don Jr. and Ivanka, who, with
Eric, formed his loyal kitchen cabinet during the campaign, flew
in. They were concerned that their father might make the wrong
decision and pick Gingrich, or even Christie, so they came in
time for breakfast hosted by the Pences at the governor’s mansion.
During the meal Pence summoned some of what he had learned
as a conservative radio host and railed against Hillary Clinton and
the scandals that plagued the Clintons in the White House. It was
a soothing sign for Trump’s family members, who wanted to make
sure that Pence would gel with Trump’s aggressively anti-Hillary
team. They were also working against some of Trump’s top aides,
including Steve Bannon, the antiestablishment agitator who would
become Trump’s chief White House strategist during his first sev-
eral months in office and who was less than enthusiastic about
Pence. According to leaked emails, Bannon called a Pence pick “an
unfortunate necessity.”
There was no great fanfare at the governor’s residence. Accord-
ing to Pence’s gubernatorial chief of staff, Jim Atterholt, “People
assume you’ll have a chef with a professional staff. Well, there’s
no chef at Indiana’s governor’s residence, there’s no professional
staff.” Atterholt said Mike and Karen picked fresh flowers for the
table, heated up breakfast, set the table themselves, and served the
Trumps. “It was all very natural, it’s what they do all the time,”
said Atterholt, to whom Pence talked privately about the breakfast.
“I think the Trumps were fascinated by that.” The fact that the
Pences served breakfast and picked up the dishes afterward was for-
eign to members of a family who are used to an army of household
help. The Trumps were mesmerized by the normalcy. “I can’t con-
vey to you how powerful that was,” Atterholt said. “The humility
they showed, they were just fascinated by them.” Trump has said
privately how incredible it is that Mike and Karen always seem to
be holding hands (he and Melania rarely do in public). The Pences,
in turn, were fascinated by Trump, a billionaire businessman with

64 first in line
a glamorous wife who used to be a model. It was an odd chemistry

that just happened to work.
Jeff Cardwell, chair of the Indiana Republican Party, recalled
Trump grilling him about Pence at a fund-raiser days before he was
picked. Trump said, “I understand you’ve known Mike Pence a long
time.” By then Trump had narrowed it down to Pence and Ging-
rich. He asked Cardwell why he should pick Pence—he wanted to
know about his track record in Indiana. Cardwell listed the years
Pence served in Congress and talked about his solid relationships
with Republican governors. Finally, Cardwell told Trump, “He
has great relationships with governors in the Midwest, like Rick
Snyder in Michigan and Scott Walker in Wisconsin. No Repub-
lican is going to win the election without winning the Midwest.”
His words proved prophetic.
Pence was not the most obvious choice. During the campaign
he called Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the
United States “offensive and unconstitutional.” And in the days
leading up to the Indiana Republican primary there was great in-
ternal debate in the governor’s office as to whether he should en-
dorse anyone. His staff, almost to a person, was unanimous that he
should stay out of it. “We could tell that Trump was very popular
in Indiana, but the governor for whatever reason, pretty much on
his own on this as best as we could tell, felt like he should endorse
Senator Cruz because he saw him as a principled conservative,”
said Atterholt. “He really wasn’t anti-Trump, he just felt that in
order to stay true to his conservative principles he had to endorse
Cruz.” Trump even had a meeting with Pence in April, facili-
tated by Chris Christie, in an effort to keep him neutral, but Pence
would not budge.
Pence went on a local radio show before the Indiana primary and
endorsed Cruz, but he devoted much of the time talking up Trump
and praising him for giving voice to working men and women in
the country. Later Trump told Pence privately, “I’m used to fist-
fights in politics, I’ve never seen somebody endorse somebody else

and say something kind about the other person at the same time.”
Once again, Trump was fascinated by Pence—he’d assumed that
Pence was just going to trash him and he was totally prepared for
it—and Pence’s generosity left him dumbfounded.
Pence was in the right place at the right time. In fact, if Trump
had not picked him as his running mate, polls show he might
not have won reelection as governor. There was some concern
about his years as a radio host, though. Trump’s lawyers could not
find most of the tapes from his radio days and privately wondered
whether they had simply been recorded over or were purposely
destroyed. Ultimately, Trump’s lawyers decided that nothing Pence
said in his past was cause for real concern. Pence’s wife had had a
short first marriage, and that was a brief consideration ( Jill Biden
had been married once before, too). There was some pressure on
Trump to make up his mind because Pence had to decide whether
he was going to run for reelection as governor and the deadline
to remove his name from the ballot was looming. “We certainly
were not going to file to take his name off the ballot for reelection
until we were certain he was the pick,” Atterholt said. “It came
down to the last couple of days. I think that the filing deadline
accelerated the overall selection process for Trump.”
On Friday, June 10, the day before the Indiana state Republican
convention, Steve Hilbert, a business tycoon with ties to Indianap-
olis and a long-standing friendship with the Trumps (he was part
of a failed business deal to promote Melania Trump’s makeup line),
texted Pence to see if he would consider being Trump’s running
mate. Trump wanted to know if he would accept the offer if he
was picked—he had already been rebuffed by Corker and Kasich,
and it would be embarrassing if Trump offered it to him and it was
rejected. Karen Pence, a ubiquitous presence, was huddled with
her husband and Atterholt. To ensure privacy, Pence dismissed the
state police guarding them and showed Atterholt the text and asked
him what he thought. Pence said it would depend on what Trump
envisioned, but he was clearly very interested.

66 first in line
In early July, the Pences went to Trump’s golf club in Bedmin-

ster, New Jersey. After a round of golf, Pence, already keenly aware
of Trump’s desperate desire to be flattered, announced to the press
that Trump “beat me like a drum.” Privately, the Pences told the
Trumps, “We’ve been praying for this meeting. We’ve been pray-
ing for you.” The Trumps were stunned and replied, “What do you
mean ‘praying for us’?” The Pences told them they were “praying
for wisdom, for clarity of thought.” Neither Donald nor Mela-
nia knew what to say. According to a person familiar with their
conversation, there was no cynicism or skepticism, but pure fasci-
nation. Karen and Mike talked about their Christian faith. “The
Trumps were intrigued,” the person said, “and that drew them
closer together as couples.” Three months later, Pence was touched
when, on the night of the vice presidential debate, Trump left him
a voice mail saying he had just said a prayer for him.
But when Trump called to offer Pence the job on July 14, he
was not entirely enthusiastic. In a late-n ight phone call with se-
nior aides, he sought their reassurance that he had made the right
choice. He originally wanted to wait until the Republican Na-
tional Convention to make the announcement, but Pence had to
withdraw his name from his reelection race for governor by July
15, so the timing forced Trump’s hand. On the day of the deadline,
Pence’s lawyer filed the paperwork withdrawing his name from the
governor’s race. Trump called Pence to offer him the job and asked
him to pass the phone to Karen after they spoke because he knew
she was by her husband’s side.
When Dave McIntosh, a friend of Pence’s, talks about Pence’s
decision to join the ticket, he compares Pence and Trump, rather
grandiosely, to Jonathan and David from the Bible. The two were
natural rivals for the crown but they became friends. “Typically,”
McIntosh said, “those two would hate each other because they’re
rivals, but they have this friendship and bond of brotherly love, and
Jonathan’s view was that he wanted to support David in what he
needed. I think Mike’s view is, I might be in a place where I have differ-

ent views, but my role now is to support the leader.” Pence told McIntosh
that if Trump asked him to join the ticket, he felt that it would be
his calling and his mission in life to do it. For Pence, it is a sense
of destiny, and he views it as part of a servant leadership model
grounded in the Christian faith that extols the virtues of submis-
sion and obedience. The concept is rooted in the Bible, when Je-
sus washes his disciples’ feet and says, “Whoever wants to become
great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be
first must be your slave.” When Pence called his brother, Greg, to
tell him that Trump had tapped him, they both cried. Greg, who is
running for his brother’s old congressional seat in eastern Indiana,
told his little brother: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
Pence’s friends and colleagues speak in hushed tones about Trump’s
infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape, afraid to say anything that might
offend Pence’s mercurial boss. In the tape, which was made public a
month before the election, Trump was caught in a recording talking
with host Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women. “When you’re
a star they let you do it,” he said. “You can do anything . . . Grab them
by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Trump called Pence to apologize when the tape came out, but
the Pences initially refused his calls. Eventually Pence answered
and, after apologizing to him, Trump asked Pence to pass the
phone to Karen so that he could apologize to her, too. She was
particularly offended by his comments. It was a stunning develop-
ment. “My brother would never say anything like that,” said Greg
Pence. “He’s just not that kind of guy.” As Trump’s poll numbers
took a beating, Pence, for a brief time, had the upper hand in
their relationship. If he left the ticket, he could have torpedoed
the campaign. The tape was made public on a Friday, and on Sat-
urday Pence canceled a campaign appearance and said he could
not defend Trump. He kept Trump waiting and did not express
any public support until Monday, after spending a tense week-
end deliberating with his wife and top aides. But the Pences stuck
by Trump—their joint ambition overruling their concerns—and

68 first in line
proved their unshakable loyalty. Hate the sin, love the sinner is an
oft-repeated refrain that friends of the Pences use to describe their
deliberations.
“I believe in forgiveness,” Pence said, “and we are called to for-
give as we have been forgiven.”

IV
The Observatory
I always say, “People don’t think you’re human.” And he just laughs.
—N AV Y A IDE ON TA LK ING TO DICK CHENEY AT THE OBSERVATORY
L
ocated at One Observatory Circle in Northwest Washington,
about three miles from the White House and at the north-
west end of Embassy Row, the Observatory is a hidden world
with its own housekeepers, cooks, and traditions. Unlike the White
House, the vice president’s residence is not open for public tours.
The elegant, white, nineteenth-century Queen Anne–style house
sits on thirteen pristine acres where frustration simmers for some
and power is cemented by others. The home used to be the official
residence of the chief of naval operations, a four-star admiral at the
helm of the navy. It is part of the U.S. Naval Observatory and is still
run by the navy. The 9,150-square-foot, three-story house was built
in 1893 and the grounds have been home to scientists who calculate
the official mean distance between the Sun and Earth and who are
considered authorities on astronomy and time calculation. A slew of
atomic clocks and the largest collection of astronomical books in the
United States can be found on the Observatory’s expansive grounds.
There are tours of the Observatory campus on Monday nights, when
astronomers offer a glimpse of the heavens to visitors through an
1895-vintage twelve-inch refractor telescope.

70 first in line
In 1893 the Naval Observatory moved from a foggy spot on

the banks of the Potomac River in downtown Washington to its
current location on a hill, where the stars are much easier to view.
It is a highly coveted and little-k nown property in Washington
and it was the Observatory superintendent’s residence before the
chief of naval operations commandeered it in 1929 because it was
so lovely. Congress passed a law in 1966 that set aside ten acres
on the grounds of the Naval Observatory for an official home to
be built for the vice president. Vice President Hubert Humphrey,
looking ahead to his own presidential campaign in 1968, asked
that the project be delayed because he worried that spending the
seventy-five thousand dollars allocated to build the home would
be considered a frivolous expense as the Vietnam War raged on.
In July 1974, 174 years after the president first occupied the White
House, Congress designated the already-occupied home as the of-
ficial vice presidential residence. The resident at the time, Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, was so furious that he was expected to give up his
home that he ran unsuccessfully against Virginia senator Harry
Byrd, who was head of the congressional committee that approved
the decision.
The charming thirty-three-room mansion has a wraparound
porch, hunter green shutters, a white turret, and seven wood-
burning fireplaces. It is known to White House staff as the VPR,
“vice presidential residence,” or NAVOBS, short for its more for-
mal name, the Naval Observatory. The house and the scientific
offices that surround it resemble a leafy New England college cam-
pus. Mature magnolia and boxwood trees are scattered throughout
the grounds, making it feel more like a sanctuary than a “great
white jail,” as the White House has famously been called. Vice
presidents have the best of both worlds, living in the Observatory
and working at the White House. They can sit on their porch and
no one will be standing at a fence gazing into their yard. It is much
more personal and private than the White House. But, like most
old homes, it has its quirks. Part of the basement floor was still cov-

the observatory 71
ered in dirt when the first vice president moved in, hot water was
not always reliable, and rust-colored water came out of the faucets.
George H. W. Bush preferred living in the Observatory, where
he and his wife, Barbara, lived for eight years, over life at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, where they lived for four. Barbara said,
“There was a big difference between opening the door at the Vice
President’s House, where there wasn’t a soul around, in your bath-
robe and letting the dog out at 6:00 a.m., and throwing on your
warm-up suit at the White House, where the morning crew al-
ready was hard at work.” Bush’s own vice president, Dan Quayle,
lived in the Observatory for four years and echoed the Bushes’s
feelings. Life in the White House, he said, is “lonely” and “very
cold.” At the White House, you walk outside and you’re in down-
town Washington; at the Naval Observatory there is a tennis
court, a basketball court, and a swimming pool dotting the lush
acreage. “You’re away from everything,” Quayle said. And the
president and first lady rarely visit. Asked why not, Mondale said,
with a smile, “You go to the president.” But Secret Service agents
are one part of the package no sitting vice president and his family
can escape—they trail them even if they just want to take a walk
around the grounds.
The home, with its large rooms and elegant furniture, feels
more like a house from the set of Gone with the Wind than the place
where Dick Cheney received classified briefings early each morn-
ing ahead of the president, or where lawmakers and donors have
gathered for thousands of receptions over the years, or where vice
presidents plan their own presidential campaigns. If the private
residence of the White House, located on the second and third
floors of the 132-room mansion, feels like an elegant Manhattan
apartment—as it was described by Michelle Obama’s first press
secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld—then the Observatory feels
like a country estate.
But there has been very little time for stargazing for the most
recent occupants of the house.

72 first in line
Gerald Ford was the first vice president eligible to live at the Ob-
servatory, but he assumed the presidency before renovations were
completed. Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, an heir to
the Rockefeller fortune, used the house mainly to entertain. He
had a much more luxurious and even more private twenty-seven-
acre estate on Foxhall Road that was one of the most expensive
homes in Washington. Rockefeller spent only one night in the
Observatory, but he made a striking contribution to its décor when
he installed a mink-covered bed designed by famed German artist
Max Ernst said to be worth $35,000. (It was later moved to a mu-
seum after a backlash over its exorbitant price tag.) The first full-
time vice presidential occupants of the Observatory were Walter
and Joan Mondale, who took up residence in 1977. Every vice
president since has lived there.
Unlike the White House, where changes to the main floor have
to go through an elaborate clearance process, redecorating is a
much more casual affair at the Observatory, and each family has left
its mark. The Quayles installed the heated pool, pool house, and
putting green; the Gores removed the putting green and planted
native trees and shrubs; the Cheneys borrowed art from museums
around the country to decorate; and the Bidens have left behind
seventy-five “Biden blue” Lenox china place settings with the vice
presidential seal.
Like presidents and first ladies, vice presidents and their wives
bring in interior designers to redecorate, and they make use of some
of the furniture that is already there. Interior designers donate their
services because it is considered an honor to work on the historic
home. The Cheneys’ social secretary, Elizabeth Haenle, who also
managed the residence, created a museum database to catalog and
inventory everything in the house with its provenance and valua-
tion, and helped establish a secure storage facility to house pieces
not being used, some dating back to the Rockefellers. (There is
an intricate system in place to do the same for every piece in the

the observatory 73
White House collection, which is stored in a climate-controlled fa-

cility outside of Washington. White House pieces date back to the
eighteenth century.) The Vice President’s Residence Foundation
provides private funds for the redecoration.
“When we first moved into the residence, I would see navy
enlisted aides who had no idea they were using a valuable pottery
jar that Mrs. Mondale had commissioned Native American Indians
to make for the residence as a milk creamer,” said Haenle. “They
had no idea because the continuity of the enlisted aides and the
political staff wasn’t there.” The staff is composed of fewer than
a dozen navy enlisted aides who cook, clean, and maintain the
home—by comparison, the White House has about a hundred res-
idence staffers, most of whom are not in the military. The longest
a naval aide might work at the Observatory is two to four years
because of career rotation in the Navy and eight years if they are a
political appointee. Like at the White House, they work in shifts,
with an early 6:00 a.m. shift and an evening shift that starts at 2:00
p.m. When the Cheneys left, they handed over the database and
inventory to the Bidens. Haenle and her staff worked with Lynne
Cheney to create a vice presidential library with books written
about every vice president dating back to John Adams, and mem-
oirs written by vice presidents and their wives.
The navy aides are usually experienced cooks who are loyal and
discreet. Because it is such an intimate environment, friendships
between the staff and the vice presidents they serve can be deep
and long-lasting. The Cheneys brought a navy aide to work with
them at their home in McLean, Virginia, after leaving office. The
staff sees a side of the vice presidents that few others ever get to
see. A person who worked for the Cheneys at the Observatory said
that she always was a little intimidated by him. “He didn’t have to
demand respect, his voice commanded it. When he speaks, you lis-
ten.” But his approval ratings during his eight years in office were
often abysmal. She told him on more than one occasion, “People
don’t think you’re human,” which always made him laugh. Cheney

74 first in line
said, “I don’t feel sorry for myself or feel that I am unjustly or

unduly criticized by those who disagree with me. I mean, I don’t
worry about it.” But the aide could remember seeing Cheney in
the summer of 2001, shortly after his family moved in and after he
was fitted for a pacemaker (following his fourth heart attack at the
end of 2000). She saw him sitting in the sunroom surrounded by
mountains of flowers, and in that moment she saw how vulnerable
he was. When Cheney needed his implanted defibrillator replaced
in 2007, his doctors had the wireless feature disabled out of con-
cern that a terrorist could hack into the device and shock his heart
into cardiac arrest—a scene later portrayed in the Showtime drama
Homeland.
Cheney’s reputation among critics as a warmonger was a strange
juxtaposition to how he behaved in the Observatory, where the
Cheneys’ grandchildren would stay for the occasional sleepover,
putting their sleeping bags at the foot of their grandparents’ bed.
(Later, the four bedrooms on the third floor would become the fa-
vorite spot for sleepovers for the Biden grandchildren.) The Cheneys
redid the upstairs kitchen because it had been a galley kitchen and
they wanted more space. They also disliked using the formal din-
ing room on the first floor; instead, when no official events were
on the calendar, they ate their dinners on small trays while they
watched TV or a movie upstairs. Cheney called the home “a very
special place.” It’s a fantastic place for kids, he said, recalling how,
whenever someone was having a birthday, they would have a big
party on the lawn with donkeys and clowns. “The kids loved it,”
he said. “You miss it when you leave.”
Haenle said that they used a portion of their official entertaining
budget to host wounded warriors for BBQs and concerts at the
Observatory. Haenle’s brother was serving in the military in Iraq
and Afghanistan when she was working for the Cheneys, and she
was in the unique position of working in a house that was at the
epicenter of decision-making about the war. “It was much more
personal when my brother was in Mosul and there were days when

the observatory 75
they were voting or an attack had happened, or a raid was being

prepared, when the vice president would call me over when he
came home from the office to tell me, ‘Listen, I wanted you to
know that today they voted in Mosul and they had the highest
turnout of anywhere. Your brother and his team really were amaz-
ing to get that out.’ ” On more than one occasion the vice president
started a dinner he was hosting at the residence by calling Haenle
into the dining room and telling his guests, “I want you all to
know Liz and the story of what her brother and his troops did to-
day in Mosul.” Once he called Haenle from Air Force Two to tell
her he met a wounded soldier in Houston who knew her brother
and he wanted to give her the soldier’s contact information. “He
never failed to remember that I was one of those close personal
connections to the war.” It took a physical toll on the vice presi-
dent. There were nights, a Naval aide said, when she took dinner
up to the Cheneys and no one ate a thing. “He pushed it around a
bit. It’s war, it’s ugly.”
The navy still owns and maintains the house. A navy engineer is
in charge of upkeep and maintenance of the house and grounds,
and there are two gardeners and a couple of maintenance workers.
The house was not always modern living: when the Quayles lived
there they had window air-conditioning units on the second floor,
and when the Cheneys added central air-conditioning they had
to deal with brick on brick and no insulation. The windows were
painted shut and they would often get jammed. “Come up with a
sledgehammer!” Lynne Cheney jokingly bellowed to an aide from
her room upstairs. The Cheneys were asked to delay moving into
the house for six weeks after Bush’s first inauguration because new
wood floors needed to be installed on the first and second floors.
The old floors in the nineteenth-century house had been refin-
ished so many times that nails were dangerously sticking up.
An aide at the Observatory who worked for the Cheneys and

76 first in line
the Bidens said, “The Cheneys are very introverted, very quiet,
and Joe Biden and Jill Biden are very extroverted. They both keep
their friends close. It was amazing because you have these moments
when they forget you’re there and you watch them watch their
grandchildren and you see that sparkle in their eyes and that smile
when they don’t have the weight of the world on their shoulders,
where they can just be in the moment with their wife and their
grandchildren.” The day before the 2009 inauguration, the staff
gathered with the Cheneys for what they called “the last latte,” a
reference to the Cheneys’ love of Starbucks coffee. “You had to
collect yourself because at noon the next day there was a new fam-
ily,” said a navy enlisted aide. “I was a Dell computer and now I
was a Mac, I had to drop all my operating procedures.”
The Bidens filled the house with art on loan from the National
Gallery. “I wanted it to feel warm and comfortable,” Jill said. “I
didn’t want people to walk through the front door and feel like
they can’t sit on the sofa.” New York designer Victoria Hagan, who
has been described by one home magazine as “the reigning queen
of restrained elegance,” donated her design services and helped the
Bidens decorate. Hagan described the residence as a “very wel-
coming home and not pretentious.” The Bidens switched up some
of the more muted tones that the Cheneys had used. Light cream
colors were replaced with sapphire blues and deep greens.
The Bidens personalized the house in unique ways, one of which
included drawing attention to other, lesser-k nown occupants of
the Observatory. Jill created the Family Heritage Garden of the
Vice President with the names of everyone who has lived in the
house, including their pets, etched onto pavers and placed around
a fountain off the front lawn. She got the idea from the White
House Children’s Garden, which honors presidential children and
grandchildren. She and Carlos Elizondo, the Bidens’ social secre-
tary and residence manager at the Observatory, contacted each vice
presidential family to get a list of names. They placed a sculpture
of their beloved German shepherd, Champ, alongside the fountain.

the observatory 77
And in 2010, Biden surprised Jill with a plaque on a tall tree on

the residence grounds with a special inscription: “Joe Loves Jill,
Valentine’s Day 2010.”
When the Pences visited the Bidens in the Observatory, one of
the Bidens’ granddaughters met with one of the Pences’ two daugh-
ters and told her “what it’s like having Secret Service following you
everywhere,” Biden said. The Pences are making their own mark
on the historic home. They have hung a plaque over the fireplace
with a passage from the Bible: “ ‘For I know the plans I have for
you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

V
The Second Lady
I don’t think that passes the K Factor.

—M IK E PENCE’S CLOSE FR IEND ON THE EV ER-P R ESENT
INFLU ENCE OF PENCE’S W IFE, K A R EN
The life of a second lady is very different from the life of a first
lady. It comes with all the trappings and none of the luxuries.
—M A RGUER ITE SU LLIVA N, A IDE TO M A R ILY N A ND
DA N QUAY LE A ND LY NNE CHENEY
A
n antique red phone has sat on Mike Pence’s desk since
he was a member of Congress. Only one person has the
number, and when that person calls Pence stands at atten-
tion. “When that phone rings, everything stops,” said Pete Seat,
an official with the Indiana Republican Party. One aide jokingly
compared Pence’s red phone to the red phone that Police Commis-
sioner Gordon used to call Batman in the 1960s television show.
The phone, a Christmas gift from Karen, reminded everyone who
visited Pence in his office of her influence and stayed with him
even when he was governor of Indiana. While it is not in any of
Pence’s vice presidential offices—it could be a source of embarrass-
ment for a man who some say relies too much on his wife—the
couple have kept it in the Observatory, where it serves as a re-
minder of their shared history as political partners. Pence had such

80 first in line
a small group of top advisers that aides describe it as a triangle, not

a circle. When he was governor there were three people in that tri-
angle: Mike, Karen, and Bill Smith, who was Pence’s chief of staff
in Congress and in the governor’s office and is still a close adviser
to Pence. Aides say the triangular relationship has been in place
since Pence first ran for office in the late 1980s. Karen is a sounding
board and a counselor to her husband. If a decision was made and
abruptly changed, Pence’s staff knew Karen had something to do
with it. “On personnel decisions she would often interview folks,”
Atterholt said. “You could tell that they had discussed these issues
the night before.”
Karen is an unassuming Midwestern mother of three who has
been wildly underestimated. Headlines about her include the
seemingly frivolous decision to install beehives at the Naval Ob-
servatory and her line of towel charms that help identify whose
towel is whose, a business she started as the governor’s wife and
is now defunct. The company’s website tries to make the case for
the bizarre tchotchkes: “I have had so many times where I was
swimming at a friend’s beach house, pool, or lake house, using
their matching beautiful beach towels. Lo and behold, I would go
in the water for a dip or up to the house for a beverage, and when I
came back to my towel, it was gone! Someone else had grabbed my
towel unknowingly . . . because all of the towels looked the same.”
She is a trained pilot, enjoys painting, and worked as an art teacher.
Her signature issue as second lady has been art therapy, using art to
help treat people suffering from traumatic brain injuries and other
health issues.
While towel charms and beekeeping are seen as hobbies fit for a
suburban housewife, being a top political adviser is not. But Karen
attended meetings when Pence was governor and acted as his chief
counselor. When he was not in the room people who worked for
him talked in hushed tones about “the K Factor.” K for Karen.
Sometimes, when Pence would bring up an idea that they had not
discussed before, and after he and Karen left the room, his staff

the second lady 81
would explain the new strategy: “That’s the K Factor.” Or when

he rejected an idea they would say, “I don’t think that passes the K
Factor.” Karen has read Stephen Covey’s bestseller, The 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People, more than once, and it shows. Most surpris-
ing changes of direction, staffers say, would come after Pence had
time to discuss an issue with his wife.
As the first lady of Indiana, Karen’s influence included staffing
and policy, from tax cuts to education reform. Pence often told
his staff that he would have to go home and “sleep on” decisions
and “talk to Karen.” “Karen is protective of him,” said Pence’s
friend David McIntosh. “She’s got very good antenna. She seeks
out people to be working for him who are loyal. She has thought
through a lot of the same issues that Mike has and she bucks him
up on a lot of very conservative issues based on her faith.” When
Pence was governor, she played a role in making sure the personnel
that surrounded her husband were both competent and loyal. “She
would meet with the key people Mike wanted to surround himself
with before they were hired, and I know Mike asked and valued
her opinion on his key hires,” said Atterholt.
She provided high-level strategic guidance to her husband as a
member of Congress and as governor, and still does in the White
House, where she has an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office
Building, near where her husband’s staff works. She sat in on at
least one interview when Pence was putting together his staff. “No
question in my mind,” said one friend of the Pences, “he would not
make any major, or perhaps even minor, decision without Karen.”
During the 2016 campaign, Pence introduced his wife as “the
highest-ranking official in the state of Indiana.” It was meant as a
joke, but it is closer to the truth than most people in the audience
would suspect.
Karen Sue Batten was born in Kansas in 1957 and was raised
just north of Indianapolis, where she met her first husband, Steve
Whitaker, in high school, and where she was valedictorian. Karen
and Whitaker, a medical student, married in 1978 when she was

82 first in line
just twenty-one, and they divorced not long after. “We were kids,”
Whitaker said. She graduated from Butler University in Indianap-
olis with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in elementary education,
and in 1983 she met Pence when she was playing guitar at Mass
at St. Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic church in Indianapolis. Pence
approached her after Mass and learned that her sister was enrolled
in the same law school he attended. “When I first met Mike Pence,
it was love at first sight,” Karen said in a television ad from Pence’s
gubernatorial campaign. “On our first date, we went skating at the
Pepsi Coliseum at the state fairgrounds. We skated around for a
little while, then he reached over and took my hand.”
After dating for eight months she had a small gold cross engraved
with the word “Yes,” and slipped it into her purse so that she could
show it to him when he proposed. A month later, Pence asked her
to marry him while they were feeding ducks at a local canal. He
hollowed out two loaves of bread, one held a ring box and another
a small bottle of champagne. Pence still has the cross Karen carried
with her while they were dating, but he does not wear it because
he’s worried he’ll lose it.
After marrying in 1985, they struggled with infertility for six
years and were on an adoption wait list before Karen became preg-
nant with their son Michael, who is in the U.S. Marine Corps. “By
the time they called us with a possible child, we already knew that
I was pregnant with Michael,” Karen said. “And we just felt like it
wasn’t right for us to still be on that list of parents who wanted to
be considered by the birth parents, and so we withdrew our name.
Of course, our son has never forgiven us. He goes, ‘Really, Mom, I
could’ve had a brother! Really? What were you thinking?!’ But we
just felt like God had shown us He was going to bring us a family,
and we needed to pull our name off.” They later had two daugh-
ters: Charlotte and Audrey.
“All I ever wanted to be was to be a mom,” Karen said. “I didn’t
care about fame or fortune, big house, fancy career, nice car—none
of that has ever been important to me. I just wanted to be a mom.

the second lady 83
And so my main thing was, how could God put this desire in my
heart and not bring me kids?” But, it seems, she wanted much
more. It was Karen, friends say, who was the biggest influence on
their decision to leave the Catholic church—after they got mar-
ried they became evangelical Christians. A Pence aide called her
a “prayer warrior” who, in the loading dock in the garage of the
Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, where the Republican Na-
tional Convention was held, led Pence’s small team of advisers in
prayer. On the campaign she was omnipresent, and a month into
his vice presidency she accompanied her husband on his first over-
seas trip to the Munich Security Conference.
Friends of the Pences like to tell a story to make clear just how
close they are as a couple. At the governor’s prayer breakfast in
Indiana the governor is traditionally seated at the head table and
spouses are seated at a reserved table in the front of the room.
When the Pences arrived and a coordinator explained the setup
to then-governor Pence, he was not happy. “This is where you’re
sitting,” the staffer said, pointing to the head table, “and Karen
will be down at table two, right in front.” Pence said he needed his
wife to sit with him, but he was told that could not happen. “That’s
OK,” he said, “I’ll just go down and sit with her then.” After a few
minutes of discussion with the event planners, the host returned
and told Pence, “We’ll rearrange things up there.”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a first lady of Indiana have an
office on the ground floor of the Capitol,” said former Indiana at-
torney general Greg Zoeller, who has known the Pences for years.
“I can’t remember who got moved out, but the office of the attor-
ney general is on the north atrium and just down the hall there’s
the court of appeals and right next to that was the first lady’s office
and she even had office hours. She was a player, not just as a con-
sultant and an adviser to the governor, but she had an office eight
feet down the hall from mine!”
Former Indiana secretary of state Ed Simcox has known Pence
for more than thirty years. The two attended Bible study together

84 first in line
when Pence was governor and occasionally, Simcox said, he emails

Pence now with a word of encouragement or a Bible verse or
quote. Karen is undeniably influential, he says. “I’ve known eight
governors of Indiana. Five rather intimately. Karen is the ultimate
example of a political wife who is a totally engaged member of
the team, with opinions, with suggestions, with critiques.” Mike
Pence, he said, “is not complete without Karen.”
Friends say Karen is more conservative than her husband, es-
pecially on social issues, and has backed Pence up when he was
governor in his opposition to gay marriage and his support of the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that makes it easier for
businesses to discriminate against gays. In 1991, Karen wrote a
letter to the editor in the Indianapolis Star, complaining that the
paper’s “Children’s Express” section had run a story that “encour-
ages children to think they’re gay or lesbian if they have a close
relationship with a child of the same sex” or are close to a teacher
of the same gender. She wrote, “I only pray that most parents were
able to intercept your article before their children were encouraged
to call the Gay/Lesbian Youth Hotline, which encourages them to
‘accept their homosexuality’ instead of reassuring them that they
are not.” Pence’s friends from Indiana say that the pair consider the
world engaged in a moral conflict between those who are against
Christianity and those who support it.
Bill Oesterle managed Republican Mitch Daniels’s campaign for
governor in 2004 and originally supported Pence, but says he wor-
ried that he was too easily influenced. “It’s pretty clear that Pence
hears voices,” Oesterle said. “He pulled the federal funding for
pre-K in the eleventh hour and no one knows what the influence
was. Someone whispered to him that it was going to impact him
nationally, that it was going to hurt him with Republican donors.”
Oesterle, who was the CEO of Angie’s List until he stepped down
in 2015, said he suspects that Karen played a role in Pence’s about-
face. In 2014 Pence rejected tens of millions of dollars in federal
preschool funding, citing fears about “federal intrusion,” but in

the second lady 85
2016, during his tough fight for reelection before he was named
Trump’s running mate, Pence said he wanted to revisit the subject
of federal funding. Karen was featured in a television ad. In it she
said, “education is a priority for Mike.” Critics saw it as pure po-
litical opportunism. Oesterle added, “He prays on stuff, and amaz-
ingly God is really looking out for his political interests.”
The Pences live modestly—they rented a small colonial house
in Washington, D.C., before moving into the Naval Observatory.
(According to a campaign-finance disclosure form, in 2016 Mike
Pence had one bank account, and it had less than fifteen thousand
dollars in it—something that both alarmed and intrigued Trump.)
Trump’s inaugural committee raised an unprecedented $107 mil-
lion, and while the group pledged to give leftover money to char-
ity, eight months after the inauguration no money had yet gone
to charity, and funds were used to help pay for the redecoration of
the White House and the Observatory. That kind of spending runs
contrary to the image Karen and her husband channel of 1950s
Eisenhower Republicans. “When he got picked my first thought
was, Oh dear, how is Karen going to deal with Melania?” said Scott
Pelath, Democratic minority leader in the Indiana House of Rep-
resentatives who worked with Pence. For her official White House
portrait Melania wore her twenty- five-
carat-
d iamond tenth-
anniversary ring that reportedly cost $3 million (her engagement
ring is a twelve-carat diamond that cost $1.5 million). Trump’s
wealth stands in stark contrast to the understated Karen, whose
inaugural gown was made by seamstresses at a small Indianapolis
shop called Something Wonderful; the store’s original owner cre-
ated her wedding dress and came out of retirement to help. (Karen
had two dresses made and waited to find out what color Melania
was wearing before she decided which to wear—the first lady’s as-
sistant told her she did not need to worry, she should wear what she
wanted.) The Pences can be remarkably old-fashioned and stilted
in their interactions with each other. When Pence was governor
he invited Democratic members of the state legislature to the

86 first in line
governor’s mansion for dinner. One attendee recalled Pence re-

ferring to Karen as “mother.” “Mother, Mother,” he said, “who
prepared our meal this evening?”
Far from the public image of a woman content to stay at home
and who “just wanted to be a mom,” it is as though Karen has been
planning for this moment her entire life. On the piano in the living
room of the Observatory, there is a framed photograph of Karen
with Barbara Bush in the 1980s, when Bush hosted a lunch for the
spouses of Republicans running for Congress. Karen kept a paper
napkin from the visit with the vice presidential seal on it and placed
it in a scrapbook.
Karen Pence’s predecessors Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Betty

Ford, and Barbara Bush are all second ladies who went on to be-
come remarkable first ladies. Life changed dramatically once they
moved into the White House. Craig Fuller, George H. W. Bush’s
chief of staff when he was vice president, remembers how difficult
the relationship was between Nancy Reagan, as first lady, and Bar-
bara Bush, as second lady. “Nancy Reagan was a very complicated
person who was fiercely loyal to Ronald Reagan,” Fuller said, add-
ing that Nancy never appreciated the sacrifices Barbara made for
her. In some ways, he said, Nancy’s obsession with her husband
prevented her from thinking about other people. The Bushes loved
entertaining, but they socialized less in the Observatory, Fuller
said, so they would not take any of the spotlight away from the
Reagans. Bush, he said, stepped back and did not articulate his
views on subjects to a group. “Barbara Bush didn’t want the light
to be shining on her in a way that offended Nancy. I think it’s fair
to say that Nancy never appreciated that.”
In his personal diary, George H. W. Bush wrote in a 1988 entry,
“Nancy does not like Barbara.” Nancy, he said, was jealous of his
wife. “She feels that Barbara has the very things that she, Nancy,
doesn’t have, and that she’ll never be in Barbara’s class.” The feel-

the second lady 87
ing was mutual. When a negative biography of Nancy Reagan

was published, Barbara snapped it up but slapped on another book
jacket so that no one would know what she was reading.
Nancy and Barbara had such a frosty relationship that Barbara
rarely set foot in the White House family quarters over those
eight years that her husband was vice president. Paula Trivette was
George H. W. Bush’s nurse when he was vice president (as with
presidents, vice presidents are taken care of by White House med-
ical staff ), and she, too, thought the underlying cause of Nancy’s
animosity was her jealousy. Nancy, Trivette said, was jealous of the
close relationship Barbara had with her children and grandchil-
dren. The Reagans had a famously strained relationship with their
own children. “I think Mrs. Reagan wished in her heart that she
had that type of relationship,” Trivette said.
The loving marriage and deep mutual devotion that the Rea-
gans shared was also true of the Bushes. Barbara defended her
husband, who, as vice president, was dispatched to attend so many
funerals for heads of state that he became a punch line for late-
night television hosts. “George met with many current and future
heads of state at the funerals he attended, enabling him to forge
personal relationships that were important to President Reagan—
and later, President Bush,” she said. Barbara told Fuller during
the early days of her husband’s vice presidency: “I will do almost
anything you ask me to do,” yet added a very personal addendum:
“But if at all possible, I’d like to end my day in the same city where
George is.”
Traditions that help define the job of second lady have eroded in
recent years. Senate spouses have a bipartisan lunch on Tuesdays,
and Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, said that his
wife had to remind Karen Pence that she is technically the president
of the Senate Spouses Club. Lady Bird, Pat, Betty, and Barbara all
took the position as the presiding officer of the Senate Wives’ Club
(now the Senate Spouses’ Club in acknowledgment of the grow-
ing number of women in Congress) very seriously. When George

88 first in line
H. W. Bush became vice president in 1981, making Barbara Bush

president of the Senate Spouses’ Club, she told the group: “I’m so
happy to be here, I finally get to be a Senate wife!” (Bush ran un-
successfully for the Senate twice, in 1964 and 1970.) Now, with so
many members of Congress deciding not to move their families to
Washington, the club is largely defunct, with fewer than a dozen
members meeting once a month.
Happy Rockefeller, Joan Mondale, Marilyn Quayle, and Tipper
Gore are modern second ladies who never became first lady. Nel-
son Rockefeller’s wife, nicknamed “Happy” because of her sunny
disposition, never lived in the Observatory, preferring instead to
spend her time at their New York estate and their Washington
mansion; she is best known for going public with her breast cancer
diagnosis and the two mastectomies she had five weeks apart. She
credited First Lady Betty Ford’s brave announcement of her own
breast cancer diagnosis a few weeks before for saving her life. It
was Betty’s experience that made Happy examine her own breasts.
Happy was a socialite whose 1963 marriage to Nelson, the most fa-
mous scion of America’s most notable wealthy family, was marred
by rumors of their extramarital affair and the decision they both
made to abandon their respective spouses and children. The mar-
riage was said to have partly cost Rockefeller the Republican pres-
idential nomination in 1964. Happy’s successor, Joan Mondale, was
nicknamed “Joan of Art” because of her work to promote the arts.
She was a student of pottery, and when she moved into the Ob-
servatory she showcased contemporary art, pottery, and American
glassware. She made her mark as a leader in the national crafts re-
vival of the 1970s and she chaired the federal Arts and Humanities
Council.
The partnership between Karen and Mike Pence is more closely
aligned with the interdependent relationship between Hillary and
Bill Clinton and Marilyn and Dan Quayle. At the 1988 vice pres-
idential debate, sixty-seven-year-old Democrat Lloyd Bentsen fa-
mously humiliated forty-one-year-old Dan Quayle: “I served with

the second lady 89
Jack Kennedy,” he said, his tone escalating toward steady indigna-

tion. “I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.
Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Two aides to Quayle on the
campaign said that Marilyn was the person who kept telling her
husband to use the comparison, that his experience matched that of
John Kennedy’s when he ran in 1960. A friend of Quayle’s said his
aides were skeptical from the start about Marilyn’s suggestion. “In
politics you don’t compare yourself to Kennedy. He has become
mythical.”
Quayle said his wife, whom he met at law school at the Univer-
sity of Indiana, was his de facto campaign manager during his first
congressional campaign in 1976. Many of their classmates thought
Marilyn was better suited to run for office than he was. “She has
very good political instincts,” he said. “I think [then Indiana gov-
ernor Bob Orr ] would have appointed her senator to fill my va-
cancy. When I became vice president Governor Orr and I talked
about it. I talked to the president about it, and neither one of us
thought it was a great idea. Bush said, Whatever you want to work
out. But I know him well; it would not have worked. She would
have been a great senator, she had many folks wanting her to run
for governor in Indiana and later in Arizona.”
Marilyn told the Washington Post that before the 1980s politicians
never acknowledged that “your little wifey . . . helps you.” Marilyn
was her husband’s fiercest defender and was unhappy with how he
was being treated in the press. She became suspicious of White
House aides, including James Baker, who questioned the wisdom
of Bush’s selection of Quayle. Like first ladies, second ladies un-
dergo constant scrutiny, though to a much lesser degree because
they are less visible. When she was second lady, Marilyn did not
wear her wedding band for a photo shoot and there was immediate
speculation that the Quayles were headed toward divorce when,
in fact, she was late that morning and forgot to put her ring on
after taking a shower. Quayle said his wife had “a very professional
relationship” with First Lady Barbara Bush. But, he added, “It was

90 first in line
not a mother/daughter relationship.” The Quayles were decades

younger than the Bushes and were raising their three children.
Their children played with the Bushes’ grandchildren in the White
House and occasionally at Camp David, the president’s rustic re-
treat nestled in the Catoctin Mountains about sixty miles outside
of Washington.
Marguerite Sullivan, Marilyn’s chief of staff, said the Quayles
were treated unfairly by the media. Sullivan recalled Marilyn per-
sonally helping the mother of a student at her daughter’s school who
had breast cancer and was having trouble with her healthcare cov-
erage. “A lot of them are portrayed as steel princesses, but they’re
not at all. Marilyn did a lot to help people, she herself would pick
up the phone or get someone on her staff to make a call.” There
are challenges that come along with being second lady—apart from
the name itself seeming old-fashioned and diminutive. “The life of
a second lady is very different from the life of a first lady,” Sullivan
said. “It has all of the trappings and none of the luxuries.” Unlike
the first lady, the second lady often cannot use a government plane
but still has to travel with a security detail. Second ladies often fly
commercial or rely on chartered planes.
Like their husbands, second ladies must remember one principle:
never outshine the first lady. Lynne Cheney was naturally a better
public speaker than Laura Bush, but she was not sent out on the
campaign trail often, and when she was it was to introduce her
husband. Campaigns, Sullivan said, tend to send second ladies to
smaller, less politically important cities, and because most cam-
paigns are preoccupied with media markets they would not send a
second lady to a bigger market than a first lady.
Al Gore stole his classmate’s prom date. At a party after the 1965
prom at St. Albans, the elite all-boys prep school in Northwest
Washington that Gore attended, Gore was introduced to a fun-
loving girl named Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson. Her nickname,

the second lady 91
“Tipper,” was given to her by her mother and was from one of
her favorite songs from her childhood, “Tippy Tippy Tin.” She
was someone else’s date that night, but when she was introduced
to Gore she thought, Oh, boy! He’s good-looking. “We had a good
conversation. We connected,” she said. Wasting no time, Gore got
her phone number and asked her out the next weekend. That sum-
mer he worked in Arlington, Virginia, not far from the Aitchesons’
house, and stopped by to see her during his lunch break almost ev-
ery day. Tipper made him bologna and cheese sandwiches. “Can’t
you make anything else?” he eventually asked her.
“No,” she said simply. They got married in 1970.
When Gore told Tipper that he was running for Congress in
1976, she said, “I wanted to faint. They would have to bring me
back with smelling salts.” Tipper had a job in the photography
department of the Tennessean, and when they were married Gore
promised a quiet life in the country where he would buy a local
paper and write books. But Gore was the son of a U.S. senator
and from birth was destined for a life in politics, whether his wife
wanted it or not. The Gores had four children and Tipper sup-
ported her husband’s career, but she treasured her time alone and
her privacy. She is artistic and was once the drummer of an all-
female rock group called the Wildcats. She has played drums with
members of the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson. When Gore was
in Congress, she built a darkroom in the basement of their home in
Arlington, and has published books on photography.
And she used her husband’s influence to promote causes she
cared about. In the 1980s Tipper co-founded the Parents Music
Resource Center after being horrified by lyrics on her daughter
Karenna’s Prince album Purple Rain. Her very public advocacy led
to “Parental Advisory” warning labels on records with explicit lyr-
ics. It makes sense, then, that Tipper was particularly disgusted by
Bill Clinton’s more-than-one-year-long affair with twenty-t wo-
year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky was
just a few years older than the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, and the

92 first in line
same age as the Gores’ eldest daughter, Karenna. “She felt person-
ally offended by the scandal,” said Jamal Simmons, who worked on
Gore’s presidential campaign. A close aide to Gore in the White
House said, “In Gore’s case there’s no way he would have gotten to
such a dark place if Tipper hadn’t been so mad.” That “dark place”
was Gore’s decision to refuse Bill Clinton’s help during the 2000
campaign, even as Clinton repeatedly offered to campaign on his
behalf.
In the last two years of the Clinton administration, Tipper went
to few White House events and, aides say, kept her distance from
the president. According to Gore’s vice presidential records, there
were just a handful of phone calls and meetings between him
and Bill and Hillary Clinton during the fall and early winter of
2000, after the November election and before the Supreme Court
5–4 decision that ended the recount of ballots in Florida and es-
sentially called the election for Bush. Clinton and Gore had one
two-m inute conversation on December 13, 2000, a day after the
devastating decision that ended Gore’s presidential ambitions. Ac-
cording to Clinton’s presidential daily diary, between November 6,
2000, and December 14, 2000, two days after the Supreme Court
ruling, Gore and Clinton only spoke seven times with most calls
lasting just a few minutes.
It is difficult in politics to separate what is business from what
is personal, and elected officials have to do things all the time that
are strictly business but feel personal, including firing staffers who
have been loyal to them but who are no longer needed. It is dif-
ferent for family members, an aide said. “For them, it’s all personal
and if their families get slighted in some ways—which happens
all the time—then for the politicians it’s personal.” When a late-
night talk-show host made a suggestive joke about Gore taking
his daughters through the gym locker room in the Senate, and
imagined how excited Senator Ted Kennedy would be to see them,
Tipper, for the duration of the campaign, banned Gore from going
on the show again.

the second lady 93
It was a far cry from the image forged in the early days of the 1992
campaign of baby boomers, the Clintons and the Gores, on a double
date. When the two telegenic young couples set off on bus tours in
the summer of 1992, they hit every major media market, and they
were picture perfect. By all accounts, Al Gore and Bill Clinton
were genuinely fond of each other and had more in common than
their age—Clinton was forty-five and Gore was forty-four—and
their Southern roots. Tipper and Bill were the fun-loving personal-
ities, and Hillary and Al were more studious and reserved. (Tipper
and Bill share the same birthday, except she is two years younger.)
They made each other laugh, and a photo of Tipper and Hillary
sitting on their respective husbands’ laps on board the bus gave the
impression of genuine affection between them.
In the early days of the administration, Tipper played a valu-
able role and became an advocate for people suffering from mental
illness. “My work on mental health while in the White House is
among the most gratifying things I’ve done in my life,” she said.
She is most proud of her role passing the Mental Health Parity Act
in 1996. The bill required health insurers to cover mental health
treatment. She held dinners in the Observatory with members of
Congress from both parties to discuss mental health legislation.
Second ladies can operate under the radar in a way first ladies
cannot. Tipper said that because she “didn’t have the same level
of media coverage as others in the administration,” she was able
to host roundtable discussions with teenagers around the country
and hold private conversations with people struggling with men-
tal illness. She invited Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter, both of
whom had been mental health advocates, for dinner at the Naval
Observatory to get their ideas. “I believe it was I who suggested
to President Clinton that we organize the first White House Con-
ference on Mental Health,” she said, “and he agreed.” She still
remembers a flight attendant who thanked her for her work on the
issue. “Someone slipped a simple note to me once that said I had
helped save his life. I still have that note.”

94 first in line
After her husband ascended to the vice presidency she yearned

for a connection to reality, and in Washington, with no fanfare, she
walked through local parks and talked with homeless people, some
of them mentally ill. She tried to persuade them to go to a shelter
for a meal and a shower. “It all started one day when I was driving
the kids home from lunch on the Hill with their dad. After passing
a woman on the street, the girls asked, ‘Why is that woman talking
to herself?’ ” When Tipper replied, “Not everyone has a home, and
many have a mental illness,” her daughters asked, “Can we take her
home with us?”
“We don’t have room at home for her, but let’s find a way to
help,” Tipper told them. Shortly after that, she and her children be-
gan volunteering at Martha’s Table, a soup kitchen in Washington.
She’d begun working with Health Care for the Homeless during
the 1990s, and in 1994 she started driving around the Washington
area with a friend in search of people with schizophrenia, depres-
sion, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses to try to convince
them to go to a shelter or help them get treatment. She became
friends with some of them, including a man named Captain Kersh
who was a Vietnam veteran, and invited them for lunch at the
Observatory. “They had become my friends and were leading pro-
ductive, healthy lives eventually,” she said. “So I was delighted to
have them over to lunch at the Naval Observatory, and they were
delighted to join me.”
At the Observatory they toasted with sparkling cider. Some of
her guests had no idea who she was. One guest told a friend of Tip-
per’s, “Nice house. Her husband must have a good job.”
“Well, he does,” Tipper’s friend said. “He’s the vice president.”
Trooper Sanders was a White House policy adviser to the Gores
and remembered when there was opposition in the West Wing to
a more aggressive approach to mental healthcare. Clinton took one
of Tipper’s aides aside after a meeting on healthcare and asked her,
“What does Tipper want me to do?” “You have to be judicious
when you’re in the vice president’s orbit,” Sanders said. “You have

the second lady 95
to pick your battles. So when Mrs. Gore’s pushing on something,

because it doesn’t happen every day, there’s a lot of judgment and
thought that goes into that.” And it helps when one of the four
principals—either the president or the vice president or the first lady
or the second lady—has a stake in a particular issue, Sanders added.
“Because the president knew this was something that Mrs. Gore
cared about, mental health got more time and perhaps a greater look
than might have been the case otherwise.”
When Gore ran for president in 2000, Tipper revealed that
she herself had been treated for depression. It was brought on by
trauma she suffered after their son, Albert III, was hit by a car when
he was six years old. He survived, and in her book Picture This, A
Visual Diary she described the terror she felt. “I watched in horror
as he flew through the air, scraped along the pavement and then lay
still.” (In his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic National
Convention Gore was criticized for using the accident for political
ends when he rather incongruously described “waiting for a sec-
ond breath of life” from his son, and linking it to the nation which
he said was “lying in the gutter, waiting for us to give it a second
breath of life.”)
Tipper received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychol-
ogy, and at one point she planned on becoming a therapist. “But,”
she said, “life went in another direction for me.” Tipper’s mother
also suffered from depression and was hospitalized at least twice.
“Once, when my mother was in the hospital for something else, I
wanted to tell the doctors about the medication she was taking,”
Tipper wrote in her memoir. “But she was so terribly fearful of
anyone finding out—even a doctor—that she wouldn’t let me tell
them. It broke my heart.”
The famously affectionate Gores shocked everyone when they
announced their separation in 2010, a couple of weeks short of
their fortieth wedding anniversary. At the 2000 Democratic Na-
tional Convention in Los Angeles the two shared an awkward but
passionate kiss. After the devastating loss of the 2000 election, they

96 first in line
began to drift apart and aides speculate that the family’s history of
depression made the loss even more difficult. “She was like, ‘You
don’t want to stop working, you don’t want to stop this. I don’t
want to do it anymore,’ ” said Sarah Bianchi, who worked for Gore
and is close to the Gores’ daughter Karenna. “I think it was very
genuine. They really wanted different things.” Bianchi said that
for Karenna her parents’ divorce was harder than her own divorce.
Like the rest of the country Karenna had a vision of her parents as
a team and hopelessly in love.
By the time Lynne Cheney moved into the White House she was
used to being married to a politician. Dick Cheney had worked
for Nixon and Ford, he was in Congress from 1979 to 1989, and
he was U.S. defense secretary under George H. W. Bush. “The
Cheneys are a very close family and politics is their family busi-
ness,” said Neil Patel, who was a policy adviser to Dick Cheney in
the White House. “They all weigh in on everything freely.”
Dick and Lynne both grew up in Casper, Wyoming, where
Lynne’s mother was the deputy sheriff. They met when they were
students at Natrona County High School. Cheney was a popular
football player and Lynne was a majorette, a dancer with a baton
who is usually part of a school marching band. During one alarm-
ingly dangerous routine, the ends of her baton were set on fire and
Dick Cheney waited with a can of water to extinguish it as she
twirled toward him.
They were married in 1964 and have two daughters. Their eldest
daughter, Liz, is a Republican congresswoman from Wyoming,
and their other daughter, Mary, is openly gay, a gay-r ights activist,
and one of her father’s closest confidantes. The Cheneys’ private
life became public when, in 2004, John Kerry invoked Mary in
a presidential debate when he was asked whether he thought be-
ing gay was a choice. “I think if you were to ask Dick Cheney’s
daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who

the second lady 97
she was, she’s being who she was born as.” In the audience Laura
Bush and her daughters, Jenna and Barbara, gasped. Lynne called
it “cheap and tawdry.” George W. Bush had come out in support
of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, com-
plicating his relationship with Cheney. “My general view is that
freedom means freedom for everyone,” Cheney has said. He thinks
that Bush “agonized over [his position against gay marriage] more
than I did.”
Lynne is more self-assured and more outspoken than the re-
served Laura Bush. She even considered running for the Senate
from Wyoming in 1994. “I don’t think they’re buds,” said a close
Cheney friend of the relationship between Lynne and Laura. But
the two women shared the painful experience of September 11
together. When Laura was hustled into the Presidential Emergency
Operations Center, known as the PEOC, an emergency command
center located in the basement of the White House, Lynne was
one of the first people she saw. (Cheney, National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, counselor to the president Karen Hughes, and
deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten were also there.) Lynne had been
there since that morning. She hugged the first lady and whispered
in her ear, “The plane that hit the Pentagon circled the White
House first.” The terrorists had originally planned to hit the White
House but they decided on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon,
and the U.S. Capitol instead.
A couple of days after 9/11, Lynne gathered her small staff, many
of whom were women in their late twenties and early thirties, and
they sat together on the beautiful veranda at the vice president’s res-
idence. She brought a copy of David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to
War, a book about the capital at the beginning of World War II.
“She wanted us to talk about it,” meaning 9/11, said the Cheneys’
social secretary Liz Haenle. “What does this mean for us as a coun-
try, what did this mean for us as an administration who suddenly
found ourselves at war.” What followed were many nights when
the Cheneys were told to leave their home and were brought to

98 first in line
a series of “undisclosed secure locations” to preserve presidential

succession in case another attack happened. Often the location they
were brought to was no more exotic than Camp David, but it
was done simply to keep Bush and Cheney apart in case some-
thing happened to Bush. Concerns about a “second wave” of at-
tacks in the weeks and months following 9/11, and the anxiety of
those ensuing days, is difficult to overstate. A color-coded sched-
ule was devised to show Cheney’s location and the president’s so
they would not accidentally be in the same place at the same time;
Cheney often appeared in meetings via teleconference after the
attack. Haenle said, “Continuity for the Cheneys was living out of
a duffle bag.”
Lynn has a doctorate in nineteenth-century British literature
from the University of Wisconsin and is a bestselling author and
college professor. She oversaw the National Endowment for the
Humanities during the Reagan and George H. W. Bush adminis-
trations from 1986 to 1993, and, after she left government, she was
a regular on CNN’s Crossfire, as an unapologetically conservative
woman who fought against political correctness. She has ardently
defended the study of Western civilization while arguing it is being
trumped by an emphasis on multiculturalism. Her occasional sign-
off, until she stopped going on Crossfire in 1998 was, “From the
right, and right on every issue, I’m Lynne Cheney.”
She sounds more like Hillary Clinton, though with very differ-
ent political views, than Laura Bush. She was an education adviser
in 2000 to then-candidate George W. Bush, and her name was
floated as a possible education secretary. Liberal commentator Bill
Press, who often argued the opposing side in televised debates with
Lynne, described her as a “fierce competitor” and “a true believer.”
During the 2004 election he joked, “John Edwards [who was John
Kerry’s running mate in 2004] should feel lucky that he’s debating
Dick Cheney rather than Lynne Cheney.”
A New York Times profile written shortly after her husband be-
came vice president described her as “tart, take-charge and too

the second lady 99
busy to shop.” When her husband became vice president she was on
the boards of several companies and resigned from two of them—
Lockheed Martin Corp. and Exide Corp. Dick Cheney still sounds
exasperated when he recalls the changes she had to make when he
was elected so there would be no allegations of conflicts of inter-
est. “It changed her world,” Cheney said. Lynne said if a woman
were president or vice president, “and that is going to happen,” and
the spouse was a man, “everyone would think it odd if he didn’t
continue with his career.” She did not give up her job as senior fel-
low at the American Enterprise Institute, however, and continued
writing about education when her husband was vice president.
After 9/11 Lynne found a new calling and worked on several
American history books for children from a second-floor office
at the Observatory. Several of her books, including A is for Abigail
and America: A Patriotic Primer, were bestsellers, but a lesser-k nown
work is a novel, Sisters, that was published in 1981 and features a
lesbian love affair. Her biography on the White House website
highlighted the nine books she wrote and notably excluded Sis-
ters. She convinced her publishers not to reissue the book in 2004
during the reelection campaign. The book is set in the nineteenth-
century American West, “when men were men, and women were
property,” and includes marital rape. Lynne had to address con-
troversy surrounding the book in 2004 after Republican senator
George Allen of Virginia used passages from controversial novels
written by his Democratic challenger, Jim Webb, during the cam-
paign. Webb said, “I mean we can go and read Lynne Cheney’s
lesbian love scenes if you want to, you know, get graphic on stuff.”
Lynne said, “I’m not going to analyze a novel I wrote a long time
ago. I don’t remember the plot.” Today, a new copy on Amazon
costs more than seventy dollars.
Sisters was surprising because of Lynne’s politics, which are more
conservative than her husband’s. “She is as hardline conservative as
Dick Cheney or more,” said a close friend of the Cheneys’. “And she
has a tough personality. She’s hard-charging, he’s very easygoing

100 first in line
on a personal level. Cheney scares people when they hear his name
but when they meet him, he’s a nice guy.” Lynne Cheney is more
intimidating in person than her husband. The Cheneys’ friend said,
“When people meet her, they’re like, ‘Wow, I wasn’t expecting
that.’ ”
Jill Biden was nicknamed “Captain of the Vice Squad” inside the
Obama White House. She dressed as a server at a party she threw,
and hid in the overhead compartment of Air Force Two to scare
Biden’s top staffers during a trip. She has a doctorate in education
and continued working at her job as an English professor after her
husband became vice president—she is the only second lady to
continue working full-time. She commuted from the Observatory
to Northern Virginia Community College nearly every day during
the week. She told Biden that she had to continue teaching after
he became vice president because the job is part of her identity.
She graded papers on Air Force Two, and friends say Jill was more
drawn to teaching than to the job of being second lady. But over
time the spotlight bothered her less. Though less involved than
Karen Pence, Jill said that she sometimes Scotch-taped messages
on Biden’s bathroom mirror with an article that she wanted him
to see, especially if it helped bolster her side of a policy discussion.
Biden is a Blue Star mom—Beau Biden was a captain in the
Army National Guard—and she worked with First Lady Michelle
Obama to honor military families. “She just seems to walk this
Earth so lightly, spreads her joy so freely. And she reminds us that
although we’re in a serious business, we don’t have to take our-
selves too seriously,” Barack Obama has said of Jill.
Trooper Sanders, who worked for Michelle Obama in the East
Wing after he worked for Tipper Gore, said Michelle’s and Jill’s
staffs coordinated seamlessly. On the military families initiative it
was Jill who brought “authenticity” and “an expertise” to the issue.
“It’s great for a first lady to have such a strong partner in the second

the second lady 101
lady . . . because they can pass the baton back and forth when dif-
ferent things come up.” Because Michelle Obama was a global ce-
lebrity, she realized that she could help Jill get attention for causes
she cared about, like supporting community colleges.
When asked why she fell in love with her husband, Jill is quick
to say, “I fell in love with the boys [Biden’s sons, Beau and Hunter]
first.” Three years after his first wife, Neilia Biden, and their one-
year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident, Biden’s
brother set him up on a blind date with Jill Jacobs when he was
thirty-three and Jill was a senior studying English at the University
of Delaware. She worked part-time as a model and Biden recog-
nized her from an ad. “I was a senior, and I had been dating guys
in jeans and clogs and T-shirts, he came to the door and he had a
sport coat and loafers, and I thought, ‘God, this is never going to
work, not in a million years.’ He is nine years older than I am,”
she recalled. “But we went out to see A Man and a Woman at the
movie theater in Philadelphia, and we really hit it off. When we
came home . . . he shook my hand good night . . . I went up-
stairs and called my mother at 1:00 a.m. and said, ‘Mom, I finally
met a gentleman.’ ” After their second date, Biden asked her if she
would mind not seeing anyone else. Biden proposed to Jill five
times before she accepted. She wanted to wait because she wanted
to make sure their marriage could work since she had grown so
close to Biden’s two young sons. “They had lost their mom,” she
said, “and I couldn’t have them lose another mother. So I had to be
one-hundred percent sure.” Biden’s sons were certainly sure about
Jill. Beau told his father, “Daddy, we were talking and we think
we should marry Jill,” referring to a conversation he had with his
younger brother, Hunter. She finally accepted in 1977 after Biden
gave her an ultimatum.
The Bidens’ social secretary, Carlos Elizondo, describes the Bidens
as “very social” and talks about Jill as a friend and not a boss. On
Inauguration Day in 2009 he told Jill he would move them into the
Observatory and that he planned to attend an inaugural ball that

102 first in line
night. He went home to get ready and was surprised to get a call
from Jill on her cell. She was getting her hair done ahead of the
balls and checking in to see how he was doing. He could not believe
that she would be thinking of him at such an important moment in
her life. When Elizondo’s mother passed away the Bidens hosted a
private memorial Mass and brunch at the Observatory for about a
hundred of his family and friends. “That is who they are and I will
never forget it.”
In the 2008 election campaign, Joe Biden’s description of his
wife as “drop-dead gorgeous” upset some Democratic voters. Jill,
however, was not bothered in the least. “Sometimes I get a little
put off by things he might say that are too personal for me,” she
said. “But, the thing is, I think Joe believes that.” She laughed.
“How can you get offended when your husband thinks that about
you?”

VI
Tragedy and Trauma
I’ve lived a week since this morning.

—LY NDON B. JOHNSON ON THE FLIGHT BACK FROM DA LL AS, NOV EMBER 22, 1963
S
ince World War II the vice presidency has become strikingly
important. Five twentieth-century vice presidents have suc-
ceeded to the presidency because of tragedy, and, in one case,
self-
destruction: Theodore Roosevelt when William McKinley
was killed in 1901; Calvin Coolidge, when Warren G. Harding
died in 1923; Harry Truman, when FDR died in 1945; Lyndon B.
Johnson, when John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963; and Gerald
Ford, when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974.
On March 1, 1945, in the final months of World War II and not
long after being elected to an unprecedented fourth term, Presi-
dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint meeting of Con-
gress seated, an unusual position for the commander in chief. He
was unable to bear the pain of standing with the heavy braces he
wore after contracting polio, a paralyzing illness, at age thirty-
nine. “Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, and members of the Con-
gress,” he said, “I hope that you will pardon me for the unusual
posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to
say, but I know that you will realize it makes it a lot easier for me in
not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom

104 first in line
of my legs, and also because of the fact that I have just completed
a 14,000-mile trip.” Roosevelt had just returned from the Yalta
conference in Crimea, where he laid out plans for Europe’s postwar
reorganization with British prime minister Winston Churchill and
Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. “As soon as I can,” Roosevelt told
his vice president, Harry Truman, after his address, “I will go to
Warm Springs [a warm-water resort in Georgia that helped ease
his pain] for a rest, I can be in trim again if I can stay there for two
or three weeks.” Roosevelt left Washington on March 30, 1945,
and as Truman hauntingly wrote in his memoir, he “never saw or
spoke with him again.”
On April 12, President Franklin Roosevelt died at his cottage in
Warm Springs, with his longtime mistress, Lucy Mercer Ruther-
furd, by his side. His wife, Eleanor, was at work back in Washing-
ton; she had delivered a speech that afternoon and was listening
to a piano performance when she was told to return to the White
House. When she learned of her husband’s death she immedi-
ately called their four sons, who were on active military duty,
and changed into a black mourning dress. Just before 5:00 p.m.,
Roosevelt’s vice president, Harry Truman, was on Capitol Hill
in House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office. As he walked in, Ray-
burn told Truman that Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, had
just called looking for him. When Truman reached Early his voice
sounded unusually strained. “Please come right over,” he told Tru-
man, “and come in through the main Pennsylvania Avenue en-
trance.” Truman asked Rayburn to keep the call quiet, assuming
the president had cut short his trip to Warm Springs to go to the
funeral of his friend Bishop Atwood. It was odd, though, as on the
rare occasion when Roosevelt summoned him for a secret meeting
he asked him to use the east entrance so that no one would see him.
Because the president was out of town, Truman had more Secret
Service agents protecting him than usual and he longed for privacy.
So instead of leaving Rayburn’s office and going to his own office
in the Capitol, where his agents were waiting to bring him to the

tragedy and trauma 105
White House, Truman ran through the basement trying to escape

his stifling security detail. “This was the only time in eight years
that I enjoyed the luxury of privacy by escaping from the ever-
present vigil of official protection,” Truman wrote in his diary. He
had no idea that he was about to become president and have a far
bigger security detail.
Around 5:30 p.m. Truman was at the White House and was
brought up to Eleanor’s study in the residence on the second floor,
where the first lady, Early, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, the Roo-
sevelts’ only daughter, and her husband, Colonel John Boettiger,
were gathered. “Harry,” Eleanor said softly, placing her hand on
Truman’s shoulder, “the president is dead.” Truman, in shock, let
a moment pass and asked her if there was anything he could do to
help. She shook her head and asked, “Is there anything we can do for
you? For you are the one in trouble now.” Secretary of State Edward
Stettinius knocked on Eleanor’s door. He was in tears. Truman
called a meeting of the Cabinet, arranged for Eleanor to go to Warm
Springs, and got a car for his wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret,
to bring them to the White House. He called Chief Justice Harlan
Fiske Stone and asked him to come to deliver the oath of office.
After scrambling to find a Bible, with his wife and only daughter
standing inches to his left (with the exception of Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins, they were the only women there) and a scattered
group of Cabinet members and members of Congress surrounding
them, the chief justice raised his right hand and Truman held the
Bible in his left and placed his right hand on top of it. Truman
placed an index card on the Bible with the oath printed on it so that
he wouldn’t stumble on any of the words. “I, Harry S. Truman, do
solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the Presi-
dent of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” A little
after 7:00 p.m., after a ceremony that took less than a minute, and
less than two hours after he learned of FDR’s death, Truman was
now in charge of one of the deadliest wars in world history.

106 first in line
When Roosevelt was alive, Truman tried not to think about his
health and what was essentially Truman’s entire reason for being—to
succeed to the presidency in case something happened to Roose
velt. The president only indicated once that he was not well when
he asked Truman, in the fall of 1944 when Truman was campaign-
ing, how he was planning to travel. When Truman said by plane,
Roosevelt vetoed the idea: “One of us has to stay alive.” Like many
of his predecessors, Truman, who was vice president only from
January 20 until April 12, 1945, was not terribly happy in the sub-
servient role. He famously said, “The vice president simply presides
over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral.” He wrote to
his daughter, Margaret, and said, “Hope I can dodge it [the vice
presidency]. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a nice address but I’d
rather not move in through the back door—or any other door at
60.” Shortly before being nominated as FDR’s VP, Truman told a
reporter: “Do you recall what happened to most Vice Presidents
who succeeded to the Presidency? Usually, they were ridiculed in
office, had their hearts broken, lost any vestige of respect they had
had before. I don’t want that to happen to me.” After Roosevelt’s
death, Truman met with the Cabinet and asked its members to stay
on. Roosevelt was beloved, and Truman promised to continue his
policies and needed their help to do so.
When the short meeting was over and members of the Cabinet
left the room, one person stayed behind: Secretary of War Henry
Stimson. He had an important message to deliver to the new pres-
ident. An enormous project was under way, “a new explosive of
almost unbelievable destructive power.” Truman recalled how
“puzzled” he was by this and by the fact that Stimson felt he could
not say more at that moment. “I had known,” Truman wrote, “and
probably others had, that something that was unusually import-
ant was brewing in our war plants.” In the Senate, as chair of the
Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, Truman
had sent investigators to factories where weapons were being man-
ufactured to find out what was happening. Stimson then had paid

him a visit. “Senator,” he said, “I can’t tell you what it is, but it is
the greatest project in the history of the world. It is most top secret,
many of the people who are actually engaged in the work have no
idea what it is, and we who do would appreciate your not going
into those plants.” Truman complied, ended the investigations, and
never heard another word of it until the day Roosevelt died.
The day after that Cabinet meeting, Truman learned more from
Jimmy Byrnes, who was Roosevelt’s director of war mobilization.
The United States was “perfecting an explosive great enough to
destroy the whole world,” Byrnes told him. Later, Vannevar Bush,
who was head of the Office of Scientific Research and Develop-
ment, visited Truman at the White House. “That is the biggest fool
thing we have ever done,” he said. “The bomb will never go off,
and I speak as an expert in explosives.” But Truman soon learned
that Bush was wrong when the bomb was successfully tested on
July 16 in New Mexico. Truman had only met with FDR twice
in private after they were inaugurated. Before becoming president,
Truman did not know about the $2 billion Manhattan Project that
resulted in the creation of the atomic bomb, and he found him-
self faced with the most terrible decision any president has had
to make: to end World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Ja-
pan. Less than four months after assuming the presidency, on the
morning of August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola
Gay, dropped the world’s first atom bomb over Hiroshima. Bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 200,000
people.
In his February 5, 1953, diary entry, after eight years as president,
Truman called the presidency “the greatest office in the history of
the world—the greatest honor and the most awful responsibility to
come to any man.” A letter to his wife, Bess, who often escaped
the White House to return to the peace of their home in Inde-
pendence, Missouri, dated June 3, 1945, makes his isolation clear:
“Dear Bess,” he wrote. “This is a lonesome place.” Now he had
the top job and was astonished by the isolation that comes with it.

108 first in line
The deeply private Bess had been second lady and first lady, and
she much preferred the less visible role of the former because it
allowed her and the Trumans’ daughter, Margaret, to lead a fairly
normal life at their apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, less
than five miles from the White House. While thousands of Harry
Truman’s notes and letters are publicly available at his presidential
library in Independence, Missouri, Bess burned most of hers. “One
evening in 1955, around Christmastime, Grandpa came home and
found her in front of the fireplace with a roaring fire, throwing
in bundles of her letters to him,” said Truman’s eldest grandson,
Clifton Truman Daniel. “And he stopped her and said, ‘Bess! Dear
God, what are you doing, think of history!’ And she said, ‘Oh, I
have,’ and kept throwing letters in the fire. She destroyed almost
all of them.”
Truman’s ascension to the presidency at such a consequential
time in American history has made him one of the most important
presidents of the twentieth century. Just before leaving the White
House, Truman hosted a small dinner for British prime minis-
ter Winston Churchill. Churchill made a confession to Truman
during his visit to Washington: he was concerned when Roosevelt
died and Truman had to take over so suddenly at such a perilous
time. “I misjudged you badly,” Churchill said. “Since that time,
you, more than any other man, have saved Western Civilization.”
In many ways fate determines the vice president’s role and
whether he will be remembered as a key figure in history or as an
occasional stand-in for the president. “The main role of the vice
president is to take over when something happens to the presi-
dent,” Cheney mused. “Harry Truman and others were there to do
what the job was created for . . . Teddy Roosevelt—we got some
great presidents because something happened.”
“I’m forty-three years old,” John F. Kennedy told his aide Ken
O’Donnell, to calm his nerves after Kennedy named Lyndon John-

son as his running mate, “and I’m the healthiest candidate for pres-
ident in the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to
know that I’m not going to die in office. So the vice presidency
doesn’t mean anything.” Sometimes Kennedy would joke about
his own death, like when he knew he would have to fly through
bad weather on Air Force One on one particular trip to Ohio. “If
that plane goes down, Lyndon will have this place cleared out from
stem to stern in twenty-four hours,” Kennedy joked to his friend
and aide Ted Sorensen, with his valet George Thomas listening in
as he buttoned up his shirt. “And you and George will be the first
to go.” Just when you think the position doesn’t mean something,
it does. Less than three years later Vice President Johnson would
become president after Kennedy’s assassination.
Concerns that Johnson would be dumped from the ticket in the
reelection year of 1964 were real. Johnson had spent ten hours and
nineteen minutes alone with Kennedy in their first year in office,
but by the third year they were down to one hour and fifty-three
minutes. At the president’s surprise forty-sixth birthday party on
May 29, 1963, Johnson was absent—no one had remembered to
invite him. On the Hill, Johnson was furious, devastated by his
impotence. “I’d like to get out of this damn town, go back to Texas
and never come back,” he yelled. Kennedy’s personal secretary, Ev-
elyn Lincoln, recorded a startling conversation in her diary before
Kennedy left for his fateful November 1963 trip to Texas. Kennedy
sat in the rocking chair in the Oval Office, with his legs crossed
and his head resting on the back of the chair, and mentioned that
naming a running mate could wait until the convention. Thinking
out loud, but according to Lincoln without hesitation, the president
said, “At this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford
of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.” One of Johnson’s
longtime aides, Bobby Baker, was being investigated by the Senate
for bribery and Johnson was getting embroiled in the scandal. Life
magazine was investigating the vice president’s personal finances
and editors were discussing whether to run a story in the next issue.

110 first in line
Johnson was aware that he was in danger of losing his job—no

matter how much he hated the vice presidency, being forced out
of it would have been humiliating. He was looking forward to
the swing through his home state of Texas to show the president
he needed him. Kennedy hoped that Johnson could help repair
the rift in the Democratic Party in Texas between Johnson’s old
friend Texas governor John Connally and Senator Ralph Yarbor-
ough, the head of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. But things
started out badly at the very beginning of the two-day Texas trip
when Yarborough refused to ride in the same car with Johnson.
Johnson and Lady Bird intended to impress the Kennedys with a
relaxing couple of days at their ranch in Texas. Lady Bird had gone
down a week early to prepare for the Kennedy visit. The Kennedys’
every whim was catered to: Ballantine’s Scotch was ordered for
Jack; champagne, Salem cigarettes, and terry-cloth hand towels for
Jackie, who, Lady Bird had heard, hated linen ones. Lady Bird
herself made up the double bed with the president’s plywood board
and horsehair mattress for his bad back. They even had a Tennessee
walking horse at the ready in case the Kennedys wanted to go for
a ride—they knew how much Jackie sought sanctuary in riding.
But the Kennedys would never make it to the ranch. On Novem-
ber 22, 1963, Vice President Johnson and Lady Bird were riding
in the third car in Kennedy’s motorcade traveling through down-
town Dallas. At 12:30 p.m. the car turned onto Elm Street past
the Texas School Book Depository traveling at eleven miles per
hour, and Johnson could hear the roar of the crowds cheering for
the president. Seconds later he heard a cracking sound that he said
“startled” him. It sounded like a firecracker or a motorcycle back-
firing. Three seconds later a second loud blast could be heard. The
first shot hit the president in his back and exited through his neck,
the second tore through his skull. Jackie climbed on the trunk of
the limousine reaching for a piece of her husband’s skull. She went
back into the limo and held Kennedy and cried, “Oh, my God,
they have shot my husband. I love you, Jack.” A half-block behind,

the Johnsons could not see what was happening, but Special Agent
Rufus Youngblood shouted, “Get down! Get down!”
Another shot rang out (according to the Warren Commission
there were three shots fired), but by then Johnson was on the floor
of the backseat of the car with Youngblood shielding him. Young-
blood yelled to the driver to follow Kennedy’s car as it raced through
the streets to Parkland Memorial Hospital. “Stay with them—keep
close!” Youngblood shouted to the driver. When they got to the
hospital a few minutes later, Youngblood issued directions: “I want
you and Mrs. Johnson to stick with me and the other agents as close
as you can. We are going into the hospital and we aren’t gonna stop
for anything or anybody. Do you understand?” Johnson, who was
so often emotional and unpredictable under normal circumstances,
replied uncharacteristically calm, “Okay, pardner, I understand.”
At Parkland the Johnsons were rushed into a small room where
they waited as the president and Texas governor John Connally,
who was also shot, were being treated in separate trauma rooms.
“Lyndon and I didn’t speak,” Lady Bird said. “We just looked at each
other, exchanging messages with our eyes. We knew what it might
mean.” Confusion took hold and conspiracy theories began to take
shape as people tried to find out who had shot the president. The
Secret Service thought it the wisest move to get Johnson out of
Dallas as soon as possible. Johnson refused to leave until he could
find out what happened to Kennedy. Twelve minutes after being
wheeled into Trauma Room 1 Kennedy was pronounced dead. At
1:20 p.m. the president’s close friend and adviser Ken O’Donnell, a
founding member of Kennedy’s close-k nit circle of friends, the so-
called Irish mafia, walked into the small curtained room where the
Johnsons were waiting. “He’s gone,” O’Donnell told them. John-
son would become the thirty-sixth president of the United States
and the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson succeeded
Abraham Lincoln after his assassination in 1865.
Johnson and Lady Bird were rushed to Air Force One, which
was idling on the tarmac at Love Field. Once on board—the plane’s

112 first in line
Secret Service code-name was Angel—Johnson immediately took

charge, though he had never been on Air Force One in flight be-
cause Kennedy had always refused. Johnson asked his secretary,
Marie Fehmer, for a cup of hot vegetable soup. “I’ve lived a week
since this morning,” he told her. Johnson aide Jack Valenti was
struck when his boss requested a glass of ice water with “more ice
than water” and when it was brought to him he reached for it with
a calm, steady hand. The cabin of the Boeing 707 was stifling be-
cause the mobile air-conditioning unit was disconnected and the
pilot had decided that only one engine should be on in order to
conserve fuel. The power was mostly turned off, few lights were
on, and the shades were drawn out of fear that the president’s death
was part of a wider conspiracy to kill everyone at the top of the
government. The Johnsons spent a couple of minutes in the bed-
room, the same room where Jackie had gotten ready before de-
planing, with two single beds and a painting of a farmhouse on the
wall. They left to sit in the stateroom instead; it was all too surreal.
When Johnson entered the main cabin of the plane three Texas
congressmen rose and Congressman Albert Thomas told him, “We
are ready to carry out any orders that you have, Mr. President.”
Lady Bird had not felt the weight of what was happening until, on
the drive to Love Field, she noticed a flag at half-staff. As John-
son considered his first moves as president there was a hammering
sound as two rows of seats were being removed in the rear of the
plane to make room for the former president’s casket.
Johnson called Kennedy’s mother, Rose, from the plane’s confer-
ence room. “Mrs. Kennedy,” he said softly, “I wish to God there was
something I could do for you.” He passed the phone to his wife. He
then got to the business of governing and called national security ad-
viser McGeorge “Mac” Bundy and his closest aide, Walter Jenkins,
and told them to schedule a Cabinet meeting for the next day, Satur-
day. “Get hold of the congressional leaders. Tell them I want to meet
with them as soon as I get to the White House.” Johnson was being
told by the Defense Department to go back to Washington as soon as

possible and fighter planes were being scrambled to escort Air Force
One home. But he would not give the order to go knowing how bad
it would look to leave without Kennedy’s body.
Sid Davis, a correspondent with Westinghouse Broadcasting, was
one of three reporters in the motorcade and would recall the scene at
Love Field. Davis could not forget the look on the faces of shattered
Kennedy staffers. “I saw a lot of the press office staff. These were
young people who made the long march with him and won the vic-
tory and now all was lost. They were in tears.”
Johnson placed another difficult call to Kennedy’s brother, Bobby,
the attorney general, who was at his Hickory Hill estate outside of
Washington. Johnson expressed his sympathy and asked Bobby if
anyone had taken responsibility. Then he asked Bobby, who was
reeling from news of his brother’s murder, if he had the wording
for the oath of office. It was a shockingly insensitive request. Bobby
said he would have to call him back. Johnson was already president
but he felt that taking the oath was a necessary formality to calm the
country and provide a sense of continuity. Johnson called Deputy
Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and asked him to read the
oath as it is written in the Constitution as Kennedy listened in and
his secretary typed it up.
Meanwhile, Jackie rode with her husband’s body in the back
of a hearse, and after boarding the plane she went straight to the
bedroom. There she found Johnson, his secretary, and his Secret
Service agent Rufus Youngblood. They left and headed to the
stateroom, embarrassed that the woman who was first lady just
hours before had discovered them in the room that was still hers to
use. For a brief time Johnson and Lady Bird returned with Jackie
to the bedroom and sat next to her on a bed. No one knew what
to say. In her diary Lady Bird revisited that moment. “Oh, Mrs.
Kennedy,” she told her. “You know we never even wanted to be
vice president and now, dear God, it’s come to this.”
Jackie said, “Oh, what if I had not been there. I was so glad I
was there.”

114 first in line
“I don’t know what to say,” Lady Bird said. “What wounds me

most of all is that this should happen in my beloved state of Texas.”
Lady Bird gently asked if she could get someone to help Jackie
change out of her bloodstained pink suit. “No,” Jackie said. “Per-
haps later I’ll ask Mary Gallagher [ Jackie’s personal secretary], but
not right now. I want them to see what they have done to Jack.”
Lady Bird later wrote how alarming it was to see “that immaculate
woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” When she was
alone, Jackie lit a cigarette.
Johnson instructed Kennedy aide Ken O’Donnell to ask Jackie
to come to the cabin for the swearing-in. “You can’t do that!”
O’Donnell told him. “The poor little kid has had enough for one
day, to sit here and hear that oath that she heard a few years ago!
You just can’t do that, Mr. President!”
“Well, she said she wanted to do it,” Johnson replied. And it was
true, Jackie knew she would have to bear witness.
Johnson made it clear he would not accept no for an answer.
“We’re going to have the swearing-in and I want all you people
over here because I want to leave room for the Kennedy people be-
cause I want them to observe this.” Twenty-seven people jammed
into the small and stifling stateroom to witness the ceremony. They
needed a Bible but could only find a Catholic missal, or prayer
book, in the nightstand in the bedroom. “There’s no question in
[my] mind,” O’Donnell said later, that Johnson “was afraid some-
body was going to take the thing away from him if he didn’t get it
quick.” Johnson recognized how important it was to take the oath
of office to stem the rising fear. He got his friend Judge Sarah T.
Hughes to swear him in and he made sure White House photogra-
pher and former army captain Cecil Stoughton was there to record
it. Stoughton stood on a stool against the bulkhead to capture the
iconic moment.
The ceremony lasted less than thirty seconds. Lady Bird, who
was suddenly first lady, thought to herself: This is a moment which is
altogether dreamlike, because the thing is so unreal; we’re just like charac-

ters in a play; this is the beginning of something for us that’s dreadful and
heavy, and you don’t know what it holds. Jackie wanted to be with her
husband and spent the rest of the flight with the casket.
When Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base, Bobby
Kennedy was waiting out of sight, hunched over in an army truck,
avoiding the swarm of reporters gathered for the plane’s arrival. He
quickly got on board the plane and rushed down the cabin aisle,
looking through everyone who stood in his way, including the new
president, to console Jackie. He did not say a word to Johnson. A
few minutes later, at 6:10 p.m., Johnson spoke his first public words
as president: “This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a
loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep personal tragedy. I
know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her
family bear. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your
help—and God’s.”
When Johnson got to the White House, according to his aide
Jack Valenti, he did not go to the Oval Office; instead he entered
the Diplomatic Reception Room and walked through the base-
ment to the West Wing portico. From there he walked across West
Executive Avenue, a guarded street between the White House and
what is now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building,
and took the elevator to his second-floor vice presidential offices.
There he found Bundy waiting. Johnson met with other important
advisers, including Averell Harriman, who was undersecretary of
state for political affairs. Afterward, Johnson spoke by phone with
President Truman, President Eisenhower, and Sargent Shriver,
Kennedy’s brother-in-law.
The Johnsons’ younger daughter, Luci, was sixteen years old and
sitting in Spanish class at Washington’s National Cathedral School
when she learned about what happened in Dallas. She knew the
president had been killed but nothing else. “No one ever said a
word about my father or mother,” she said. She and her classmates
were dismissed, and as she walked into the school’s courtyard she
saw a member of her father’s Secret Service detail. She ran in the

116 first in line
other direction, afraid of what he might tell her. He reached for

her hand and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Luci.” He never said
that the president was dead, she recalled, “because the words were
just unsayable.” Once she learned that her parents were all right her
mind raced to the next step: their lives would never be the same
again.
“President Kennedy was our president but he was also my father’s
boss,” she said, describing a different relationship between her fam-
ily and the Kennedys. “He also had befriended me and so had Mrs.
Kennedy. She had invited me to the White House and made me
feel valued and important. Every adolescent is trying to figure out
how they fit into the greater scheme of things. She had done a lot
to make me feel like I had a place.” Luci bought a toy fire engine
for John Kennedy Jr.’s third birthday, which was the day of his fa-
ther’s funeral. “She [ Jackie] saw my attempt as what it was, just an
attempt of a young girl trying to show some love and empathy.”
Lyndon Johnson wrote letters to John Kennedy Jr. and Caroline
that night. His letter to John, written at 7:20 p.m., one hour and
fifteen minutes after Air Force One touched down in Washing-
ton, shows how complicated his ascendancy to the presidency was.
Johnson had wanted to be president ever since he was a little boy,
but not this way. “Dear John,” he wrote. “It will be many years
before you understand fully what a great man your father was. His
loss is a deep personal tragedy for all of us, but I wanted you par-
ticularly to know that I share your grief—You can always be proud
of him—A ffectionately, LYNDON B. JOHNSON.”
Shortly after 9:00 p.m. he went home to The Elms, his private
residence in northwest Washington, with aides Bill Moyers, Cliff
Carter, and Valenti. Lady Bird went upstairs with her press secre-
tary Liz Carpenter, called her daughter Lynda Bird, and changed
clothes. “How do you feel?” Lady Bird asked Carpenter. “Chilly,”
Carpenter replied. “I’m freezing,” Lady Bird said as she heaped blan-
kets on herself. The day was too much to bear. She sat on the bed
to watch one of several television sets scattered around their oth-

erwise elegant home. Bess Abell, the Johnsons’ social secretary, re-
called going to visit Lady Bird the morning after the assassination.
“There was this wonderful little French room off the foyer, it was
one of those rooms that Mrs. Johnson liked because there was only
one door and she craved privacy. I remember her putting her arms
around me and saying, ‘Oh Bess, what you’ve been through.’ ” It
seemed absurd, considering what she had been through. But Lady
Bird was moving forward.
There had been no time to install secure phone lines before
they returned home. As vice president Johnson had no need for
them because he had so little responsibility. Two days after the
assassination, on November 24, 1963, Johnson asked his friend and
speechwriter Horace Busby, or “Buzz,” to come to The Elms. That
night Busby dutifully sat beside Johnson’s bed as he struggled to
sleep. At about 10:00 p.m. Lady Bird got into bed. It seemed like a
good time for Busby to leave, but Johnson said, “Now, Buzz, don’t
you leave me. I want you to stay right there till I go to sleep.” The
room got quiet until Lady Bird sat up and exclaimed, “Lyndon, I
just can’t stand it.” There was less than a year left before the 1964
election, and Johnson and Busby were plotting his 1964 campaign
and beyond, and now that they had the presidency Lady Bird was
not so sure she wanted it. “Bird, you’re just going to have to stand
it.” Several times, just when it seemed like Johnson had dozed off
he would wake up and ask, without opening his eyes, as though
just checking his commitment to the job, “Buzz, Buzz, are you still
here?” He did that until Busby finally left at 2:00 a.m.
After the funeral, Johnson aides said, Jackie and her children
were given plenty of time to move out of the White House. Her
one request was to allow Caroline to continue attending the kin-
dergarten she had set up in the third-floor Solarium. But the story
is different from Kennedy’s staff: according to Gustavo Paredes, the
son of Jackie’s maid, Providencia, “Everybody was scrambling to
get stuff out of there . . . they wanted her out, out, out. My mother
was scrambling packing up the stuff. OUT.” The transition for the

118 first in line
Johnsons was nothing like the Kennedys’—there was no jubilation,

no inaugural festivities. At Jackie’s request the house was draped
in black cambric so that it would look like it had nearly a hundred
years earlier after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. The Johnsons
moved into the White House on December 7 and the trauma of
the assassination was everywhere they looked. “The main thing
I remember was how black it all was,” Lady Bird recalled. “The
White House was full of beautiful chandeliers, but they were all
swabbed in black net. Everywhere I looked, the house was draped
in black.” Lyndon Johnson ordered the fabric taken down on De-
cember 22, one month after the assassination.
Johnson asked Kennedy’s staff to stay on for a year and most of
them, even Ken O’Donnell, agreed. Lady Bird Johnson under-
stood how hard it would be to gain the loyalty and respect of the
West Wing aides who had loved Kennedy. In an effort to win
over Kennedy aides who were not fans of Johnson’s, Lady Bird and
the Johnsons’ cook, Zephyr Wright, walked through the halls of
the West Wing with a grocery cart, passing out warm homemade
bread wrapped in aluminum foil and tied with a neat ribbon.
When Gerald Ford first heard about Watergate, he was campaigning

in Michigan for reelection to his House seat. In the early-morning
hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972, several burglars with ties to Pres-
ident Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught breaking into the
Democratic National Committee offices at the luxury Watergate
hotel and apartment complex in Washington, D.C., where they
tried to steal documents and wiretap phones. When Ford caught a
glimpse of the story in the papers that following Monday—it was
not yet the massive scandal that would lead to the first presiden-
tial resignation in American history—h is first reaction was, “Who
would be so stupid as to do something like that?”
But Ford would soon find himself in the middle of the story
when, in 1973, Nixon picked him to replace his first vice president,

Spiro Agnew, who resigned from office because of tax evasion

and corruption. Nixon assured Ford time and time again that he
had nothing to do with Watergate and insisted that he was far too
busy to be involved with his reelection campaign (Committee to
Re-Elect the President, ironically and mockingly referred to as
CREEP): “I didn’t pay any attention to the details of my campaign.
I was involved with opening the door to the People’s Republic of
China. I was involved in negotiations with [Soviet leader Leonid]
Brezhnev in Salt II. I was trying to end the war in Vietnam. I had
turned all of this over to other people.”
Ford was suspicious but later said he did not want to believe the
president knew about the break-in because he had no desire to take
on the presidency if there was an impeachment trial. One after-
noon in 1974, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and Senate
Minority Leader Hugh Scott asked Ford to meet them in a smoke-
filled office on Capitol Hill. The meeting was confidential and its
purpose was to discuss exactly what would happen if Nixon was
impeached. “We never asked for an opinion from Ford,” Mansfield
said, “but we told him, as the leaders of the Senate, that it would
be our intention, providing the House impeached him [Nixon], to
follow the rules, and we were most seriously considering opening
it up to television because it was of such national importance and
such international significance.”
On the afternoon of August 1, 1974, White House chief of staff
Al Haig was upset when he went to the vice president’s office.
Haig sat on a Davenport sofa with Ford beside him. Haig told
Ford that there was information that if verified would be delivered
to straight-talking federal judge John Sirica on Monday, August
5, and it would be “catastrophic” to Nixon. The newly discov-
ered tapes of private conversations recorded by Nixon in the Oval
Office would become known as the “smoking gun” because they
proved that Nixon had tried to obstruct justice by covering up the
break-in. The June 23, 1972, Oval Office conversation between
Nixon and his chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman revealed that

120 first in line
Nixon was part of the cover-up. “When that conversation [with

Haig] ended, it was obvious to me that either he would be im-
peached, and I would become president; or he would resign,” Ford
recalled. “And for the next four or five days the pendulum would
swing back and forth, and nobody knew for sure what Nixon’s de-
cision would be. I think Betty and I in our own minds knew it was
going to take place, and we reassured one another that although we
hadn’t planned it, and hadn’t expected it, we were prepared to do
our best.” He had been vice president for only eight months.
The next morning, August 2, Ford met with Nixon’s lawyer,
James St. Clair, who told Ford, “I just want to alert you that things
are deteriorating, the whole ball game may be over, and you better
start thinking about a change in your plans, a change in your life.
I just can’t tell you what’s going to happen. But I’ve got to tell you
what I know.” Ford did not want to weigh in too much with his
opinion of what Nixon should do because, if he advised him to
resign, it would look like he was shamelessly angling for the presi-
dency. He got home around 7:00 p.m. that night and he and Betty
had a dinner to go to. “Things have really totally changed. I want
to talk to you,” he told her. “We certainly can’t talk about it until
we get home tonight.” He went for a swim, got changed, and then
went for dinner at the house of Washington Star society columnist
Betty Beale and her husband, businessman George Graeber. The
Fords got home around 11:00 p.m., made their usual bourbon and
water nightcap, and sat in the family room. Ford told Betty that
either he would become president in a matter of days or “we would
be dangling for six months while an impeachment process went
through in the House and an impeachment trial went through in
the Senate.”
They spoke for more than an hour that night, and it was a pain-
ful conversation. They were friends with the Nixons, and Betty
worried about how Pat was handling her husband’s public down-
fall. Betty was not outwardly angry at Nixon, Ford said. “I think
she was more overwhelmed with sadness on the one hand vis-à-v is

the Nixons, and wondering how things would develop as far as we

were concerned.” Betty told her husband, “My God, this is going
to change our whole life.” Ford got a call late that night from Haig,
who said the situation had not changed. At midnight the Fords
prayed in their small bedroom together. They had twin beds with
a single headboard, and with Ford on the right and Betty on the
left he reached out his left hand and clasped hers. Every night Ford
said a particular prayer that he used to recite when he was at sea
in World War II. On this night though they prayed for guidance.
“I was real scared,” Betty recalled. “I think my thoughts were
more toward the responsibility as a woman and a wife and a mother,
‘How was it going to affect the family?’ As wives and mothers we
tend to project as ‘what’s going to happen to everybody else?’ And
not ‘how is it going to affect us?’ That’s one of our failings I think.
We forget to consider our own impact.”
Just the week before Nixon resigned, the Fords were getting
ready to move into the official vice presidential residence at One
Observatory Circle, about three miles from the White House.
When he and Betty arrived at the Victorian-style house to talk
with interior decorators about the décor, Ford already knew that
the president would be resigning in a matter of days. Betty had
already selected the china, cobalt blue and gold trim with the vice
presidential seal along the border. When they finally had a moment
alone he whispered to her, “Betty, we are never going to live in
this house.”
Before 8:00 on the morning of Wednesday, August 7, 1974,
Haig met again with Ford in his vice presidential office in the
Executive Office Building. He came with a clear message after
all the months of questions: “Mr. Vice President, it is time for
you to prepare to assume the office of President.” Ford summoned
his closest advisers—Robert Hartmann, Jack Marsh, and Philip
Buchen—to begin the transition. At 11:15 Ford went to Capitol
Hill for his usual Wednesday prayer meeting with old friends from
Congress and former defense secretary Melvin Laird. Ford could

122 first in line
not tell them what he knew, but they offered prayers for Nixon’s
successor—everyone in the room knew that it would be Ford. Ford
later summed up the situation: “It struck me that the ball game was
in the bottom of the 9th, and we didn’t have anybody on base, and
we had two outs, and we didn’t have much chance of prevailing.”
The next day, August 8, Ford was summoned to the Oval Office
at 11:00 a.m. When he walked in alone he found Nixon and Haig.
Nixon told Haig to get White House photographer Ollie Atkins
and Ford knew then that Nixon wanted a picture to record the his-
toric meeting. Nixon asked Ford to sit down and told him, calmly,
“Jerry, I am resigning. You will become President. I know you’ll
do a good job. I have complete faith that you will carry out my
foreign policy, that your views and mine will continue to be simi-
lar on domestic policy.” During their twenty-m inute conversation,
Nixon urged Ford to keep Henry Kissinger on as secretary of state.
“Henry is not the easiest person to work with, but he is an out-
standing foreign policy strategist . . . and you and the country need
him.” Nixon’s face was drawn after only three hours of sleep, and
the two men reminisced about their families’ long friendship. They
had known each other since 1949, when Ford was first elected to
Congress and Nixon had been first elected two years earlier. That
night, in a televised prime-time address, Nixon would announce
his resignation.
As Ford rose to go, Nixon said, “This is the last time I’ll call
you Jerry, Mr. President.” They shook hands and Ford left with
the feeling that Nixon felt victimized by the circumstances. Nixon
told Ford the transition would happen the next day when he was
flying over St. Louis. Years later Ford said the whole situation just
“tore at your insides,” but that it was complicated because he also
felt betrayed by Nixon for lying to him about Watergate. Betty
described August 9, 1974, the day the Nixons left Washington and
she became first lady, as “the saddest day of my life.”
Connie Stuart was Pat Nixon’s chief of staff and press secretary
at the time. She remembers thinking Pat seemed relieved when her

husband resigned after living under a cloud of deepening suspicion

for two years. “They were so shell-shocked and ripped apart,” Stu-
art remembered. Up until her death in 1993, Pat maintained that
no one knew the full story of Watergate. She knew intellectually
that her husband had done something wrong, but she did not want
to acknowledge it to herself. Stuart compares Pat’s willful igno-
rance to that of a woman whose husband has been having a long
affair. Pat was such a loyal defender of her husband that she cut
out news articles about other presidents, such as President Frank-
lin Roosevelt, who were said to have bugged the White House,
and set them aside. Nixon had done nothing uniquely wrong, she
reasoned. All that rationalizing was exhausting, Stuart said. The
end was almost a relief. “It’s kind of like having a sick parent who’s
dying, you want them to live, because they’re your parent, but on
the other hand it would be so much better if they just went.”
On September 8, 1974, a month after Nixon announced his res-
ignation, Ford granted the disgraced former president a “full, free,
and absolute” pardon. The decision contributed to his 1976 loss,
with one aide likening it to hara-k iri, the Japanese ritual suicide.
The Fords’ youngest son, Steve, said he remembers warning his
father, “They’re going to crush you if you pardon Nixon.” He said
his father used an analogy to explain his decision: “The president
is like the father of a family,” Ford told his son, “and sometimes the
father of the family has to hand out discipline or justice that may
seem unfair but it’s really done in a way to keep the whole family
together.”
Section 3 of the Constitution’s Twenty-fifth Amendment enables

the president to declare himself temporarily disabled, and it has
been invoked only three times, allowing the vice president to serve
as president: in 1985, when President Reagan underwent surgery
to remove cancerous polyps in his colon; in 2002, when President
George W. Bush had a colonoscopy; and in 2007, when Bush had

124 first in line
a second colonoscopy. In each case the president sent a letter to the

president pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House
stating that he was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of
the office.” The vice president became president until the presi-
dent sent a letter to those same congressional leaders stating that he
could resume the presidency.
But in the most dramatic case when a vice president actually
had to assume presidential duties, there were no such formalities.
Sixty-n ine days into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, at 2:25 p.m. on
March 30, 1981, a nondescript twenty-five-year-old named John
Hinckley Jr., bizarrely obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver and the
actress in it, Jodie Foster, fired six bullets at President Reagan and
his entourage as they left the Washington Hilton hotel. It was part
of a misguided attempt to impress Foster. One bullet struck the
president in the lung and another struck his press secretary, James
Brady, in the head. He also wounded a police officer and a Secret
Service agent.
At the time Vice President George H. W. Bush had just deliv-
ered a speech at the Southwestern Cattlemen’s Association in Fort
Worth, Texas, and was on Air Force Two. As the plane was about
to take off to fly him to another speech, this one before the state
legislature in Austin, his Secret Service agent, Ed Pollard, entered
his private compartment. “There was a shooting incident at the
Washington Hilton involving the President,” he said, “and two
agents are down.” The president, Pollard told Bush, was not hurt.
It was decided that Bush would give the address in Austin and
cancel the rest of the day’s events and fly back to Washington. But
then a second report came through and Pollard told Bush, who
remained composed in a navy blue flight jacket and a loosened tie,
that the president had in fact been shot. “We’ll go right back to
Washington,” Bush said.
As the rest of the world watched video of the shooting on tele-
vision, chaos consumed the White House. Emotions ran high.
Learning that the gun was a .38, national security adviser Richard

Allen exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” With Bush on board Air Force

Two on a four-hour flight back from Texas, a power struggle
emerged in the Situation Room, a long paneled windowless room
in the White House basement that is secured behind electronic
locks and guarded by uniformed Secret Service agents. Secretary
of State Al Haig and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger were
there locked in a battle over who was in charge. Simultaneously,
aides were being told that Brady was being administered last rites
and an incorrect news report pronounced him dead. Reagan aides
tried to locate Brady’s daughter and bring her to Washington. In
the meantime, the Pentagon was reporting more Soviet submarines
than usual off the East Coast, and transcripts of the conversation
between Weinberger and Haig show a bitter tug-of-war over what
to do about it. Weinberger did not want to raise the military’s alert
condition—DEFCON—and the two men wondered about the lo-
cation of the “football,” a briefcase containing the nuclear release-
codes that is always at the president’s side. Aboard Air Force Two,
Bush told two Texas congressmen who were traveling with him,
Democratic Majority Leader Jim Wright and Republican James
Collins, “I was thinking, how could anyone have taken a shot at
Ronald Reagan?” Bush was confident in his abilities to take over
the presidency but was very worried about his friend. He told his
executive assistant, “My innermost thoughts are [that] this guy is
a friend . . . I think about Nancy Reagan: Is anybody holding her
hand?”
Haig gave a bizarre press conference meant to reassure the pub-
lic, but it only caused more confusion and concern. When asked
by a reporter who was in charge, Haig ignored the rules of succes-
sion (under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967, after
the vice president the Speaker of the House and the president pro
tempore of the Senate are next in the line to succeed the presi-
dent, ahead of the secretary of state) and said without seeming at
all calm, “As of now, I am in control here, in the White House,
pending return of the Vice President and in close touch with him.”

126 first in line
Bush was on his way back, but he had no means of secure voice
communications from Air Force Two. Around 3:30 p.m. White
House counsel Fred Fielding asked an aide to draft a letter for the
transfer of authority from the president to the vice president pur-
suant to the Twenty-fifth Amendment. In the flurry of activity the
letter was mistakenly addressed to Senate Majority Leader Howard
Baker instead of Strom Thurmond, who was the president pro tem-
pore of the Senate. A letter withdrawing that transfer, to be used
once the president was no longer incapacitated, was also drafted.
But the first letter was never sent and authority was never formally
transferred to Bush. Secretaries and attorneys were told not to tell
anyone about the drafting of the letters.
Watching the drama unfold aboard Air Force Two, Bush re-
mained calm. Shortly before landing he got a call from Reagan
aide Ed Meese, who was at the hospital. After a moment Bush said,
“Well, that’s wonderful. That’s great news.” “The bullet has been
removed,” Bush told everyone on board, “the operation has been a
success, and the president is fine.” Bush felt strongly about the line
of succession and did not want to appear to be taking over prema-
turely from the president or to cause alarm. The seventy-year-old
Reagan, we now know, was much closer to death than the public
knew at the time, having lost 40 to 50 percent of his blood volume.
Bush landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 6:30 p.m. The plane
taxied into a hangar as an extra level of security. There was some
debate about whether Bush should take the waiting helicopter
straight to the White House, but he put an end to it. Only the
president lands at the White House, he said. The helicopter landed
at the Naval Observatory and Bush was driven in an armored lim-
ousine to the White House. He gathered Reagan’s chief of staff
James Baker, Haig, Fielding, national security adviser Richard Al-
len, treasury secretary Donald T. Regan, domestic adviser Martin
Anderson, and David Gergen, who was then an assistant to the
president, to accompany him to the Situation Room. Bush and
Baker asked if everyone present had the proper security clearance

to be there and some people shuffled out of the crowded room.

“The President is still the President,” Bush told them. “He is not
incapacitated and I am not going to be a substitute President.”
At 8:30 p.m. Bush said in a televised statement, “I can assure
this nation and a watching world that this government is func-
tioning fully and effectively.” He went to see Nancy in the private
residence (she had wanted to stay with her husband in the hospital
but was advised against it because it would send the message that
the situation was dire). Bush later told friends that she looked “tiny
and afraid.” When asked for his favorite memory of his eight years
with Reagan, Bush remembered visiting him in the hospital after
he had been shot. “When I first entered the room, he was nowhere
to be found. He called from around the corner, where I found him
on his knees wiping the floor. He had spilled a glass of water, and
didn’t want the nurses to get into trouble. So thoughtful, so typi-
cally thoughtful.”
During the following days Bush worked out of his West Wing
office and his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
James Baker ordered a review of the administration’s response and
the Secret Service reviewed and formalized unwritten procedures
to increase protection for the vice president and other successors
to the presidency in the event of a future attempt on the life of a
president.
With Reagan recuperating in the hospital, Bush held a Cabinet
meeting and still sat in his usual chair, across from an empty seat at
the center of the table—that chair, Bush knew, was always reserved
for the president, whether he was there or not.

VII
From Senator to Subordinate:

The Story of Nixon/Eisenhower, Johnson/
Kennedy, and Humphrey/Johnson
Ike [Dwight D. Eisenhower] had the military attitude toward

a subordinate. And Nixon was a subordinate. He admired
George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, because he had
money, but Nixon had no money and was inferior in rank.
—S U PR EME COURT CHIEF J UST ICE EA R L WA R R EN
TO JOUR NA LIST DR EW PEA R SON
Humphrey knew LBJ before he took the vice presidency, and

he knew he could be a son of a bitch. And he was.
—A FR IEND OF H U BERT H U MPHR EY ’S
D
wight David Eisenhower, a five-star general and supreme
commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World
War II, was an almost mythical figure. When he turned
seventy in 1960, toward the end of his second term, General Ike
became the oldest president to serve in office. (He no longer holds
the record as the oldest elected president—Ronald Reagan took
the oath of office when he was sixty-n ine and Donald Trump was
sworn in at seventy.) Eisenhower suffered a series of health emer-
gencies while president, including a massive heart attack in 1955,

130 first in line
intestinal surgery in 1956, and a stroke in 1957. His vice president,

Richard Nixon, was watching and waiting. After Eisenhower’s
stroke, Nixon got a call from Eisenhower’s top White House aide,
Sherman Adams, who said, “This is a terribly, terribly difficult
thing to handle. You may be president in the next twenty-four
hours.”
Well before the Twenty-fifth Amendment was ratified, Eisen-
hower sent Nixon a memo laying out how Nixon should deal with
a situation in which he was unable to serve but was still alive: “The
existence of this agreement recognizing your clear and exclusive
responsibility for deciding upon the inability of the president to
perform his duties and exercise his powers will remove any ne-
cessity or desire on the part of friends and staffs to impede the
right and authority of the vice president in reaching his decision on
the matter.” After visiting Eisenhower, who was recovering from
one of his many illnesses, Nixon jotted down notes to himself on
White House stationery. Eisenhower, he wrote, “looked like [a]
corpse . . . waxen face.” But Eisenhower insisted, “Drs. say I’m
getting better!” Nixon, like most vice presidents, was following
the president’s health more closely than anyone else.
Richard Milhous Nixon is best known as the first and only
president to resign the office, but before then he had a swift rise
to power. In six years, he went from a member of the House of
Representatives to vice president. He was born in 1913 in Yorba
Linda, a small California town, and grew up in East Whittier, an-
other small town in California. He was the second of five brothers
and his parents ran a combination grocery store and gas station
and struggled financially. Nixon excelled at Duke University’s law
school and enlisted in the navy during World War II. When he re-
turned after the war he was drafted to run for Congress by a group
of prominent southern California Republicans. In 1946 he defeated
the five-term incumbent, Democrat Jerry Voorhis, by more than
fifteen thousand votes, winning with 56 percent of the vote. GOP
leadership rewarded him with a seat on the House Un-A merican

from senator to subordinate 131
Activities Committee, where he became famous during the inves-

tigation of Alger Hiss, a State Department employee accused of
passing secrets to the Soviets. Nixon won reelection in 1948, and
in 1950 he won a seat in the Senate. In 1952 Eisenhower, sixty-
two, picked Nixon, thirty-n ine, as his running mate. Eisenhower,
who was used to commanding total respect and obedience, was
old enough to be Nixon’s father and he often treated Nixon like a
junior officer. “There were times,” said Nixon’s friend, journalist
Ralph de Toledano, “when I would find Nixon literally close to
tears after a session at the White House during which Eisenhower
humiliated Nixon.”
Controversy struck during the campaign when Nixon was ac-
cused of misusing campaign funds amounting to about $18,000 to
offset day-to-day office expenses and the New York Post’s headline
screamed, “secret rich men’s trust fund keeps nixon in style
far beyond his salary.” Eisenhower weighed the possibility of
dropping him from the ticket and the two did not speak for days.
Right after the story broke, Eisenhower told an adviser, “I do not
see how we can win unless Nixon is persuaded to withdraw.” The
silent treatment was agonizing for Nixon and he was forced to
interpret Eisenhower’s public statements as a private rebuke. At a
speech to the National Federation of Republican Women’s Clubs
in St. Louis, Eisenhower repeated phrases like “Honesty is the best
policy” and “He that goes a-borrowing, goes a-sorrowing.” It
seemed like a passive aggressive way to communicate his displea-
sure with his vice president. When they finally talked, after sixty
hours had passed, Eisenhower at first sympathized with Nixon:
“You’ve been taking a lot of heat the last couple of days.” But then
he directed his running mate to go on national television to ex-
plain himself. Nixon agreed but he wanted Eisenhower to promise
his support.
“After the television [appearance], General, if you think I should
stay on, I think you should say so,” Nixon said. “The great trouble
here is the indecision.”

132 first in line
“We ought to wait three or four days after the television show to
see what the effect of the program was,” Eisenhower replied, not
giving an inch.
A furious Nixon replied with something decidedly less reveren-
tial and told the man who led the Allies to victory in World War
II, “There comes a time in matters like this, when you’ve either got
to shit or get off the pot.”
“Well, Dick,” Ike replied, ignoring Nixon’s insubordination, “go
on the television show, and good luck. Keep your chin up.” Nixon’s
wife, Pat, who never liked politics, was made furious by their ex-
change. She asked her husband, “Why should we keep taking this?”
Nixon, a good soldier, prepared his so-called Checkers speech,
a nationally televised address defending his actions, but a half-hour
before he was supposed to go on he received a call from New York
governor Thomas Dewey, who was a sometimes intermediary be-
tween Nixon and Eisenhower. “I hate to tell you this, Dick,” he
said. “There has just been a meeting of all of Eisenhower’s top
advisers and they have asked me to tell you that it is their opinion
that at the conclusion of the broadcast tonight you should submit
your resignation to Eisenhower.”
“It’s kind of late for them to pass on this kind of recommenda-
tion to me now,” Nixon said, before hanging up. The seeds of the
paranoia that led to his downfall were sown in those humiliating
thirty minutes when he felt truly disposable. But Nixon collected
himself, stuck with his original plan not to leave the ticket, and
saved his political future in the process. “Pat and I have the satis-
faction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours,” Nixon de-
clared, referring to his wife. “I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have
a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat,
and I always tell her she’d look good in anything.” The speech got
its famous name because he vowed to keep one gift: a black-and-
white dog that his daughters named Checkers. It was considered a
success, and though at first noncommittal, Eisenhower let Nixon
stay on the ticket and they won the election in a landslide.

New York Times reporter James Reston asked Eisenhower, a proud

political novice, what his role was in the selection of Nixon and he
replied, with surprising honesty, “The first thing I knew about the
president or any presidential nominee having any great influence
on the vice presidential selection was, I think, about the moment
that I was nominated.” He said he wrote down the “names of five,
or maybe it was six” palatable possibilities. It was important to
Eisenhower that his vice president be younger and represent the
future of the party. Nixon was on that list but he never was able
to garner Eisenhower’s respect. Eisenhower campaign aide Herb
Brownell called Nixon and said dispassionately, “We picked you.”
Nixon was summoned to meet Eisenhower in his suite and in a
moment of pure exuberance said, “Hi, Chief,” when he saw him.
At that moment, he later said, he sensed “a little coolness develop-
ing” between them. Eisenhower did not like Nixon’s giddy tone.
At the convention, Nixon grabbed Eisenhower’s wrist when they
were at the podium, he said years later, “I sensed when I held the
general’s arm up that he resisted it just a little.” Nixon was hope-
ful that he would play a large role in Eisenhower’s White House,
and he tried very hard to please the president, taking up golf (Ei-
senhower’s favorite sport) and filling in for the president at social
functions. He revered Eisenhower but Eisenhower had a decid-
edly suspicious view of Nixon, whom he considered a professional
politician, which in Ike’s eyes did not earn Nixon his immediate
respect.
Nixon had high hopes at the beginning of his vice presidency.
“He [Eisenhower] has also indicated on several occasions that he
believed it is essential that a Vice President know what is going
on,” Nixon wrote after meeting with Eisenhower in 1953. But Ei-
senhower demurred and said that though he wanted to give Nixon
more responsibility, the law would not allow it. Because the Sen-
ate was so closely divided between Republicans and Democrats,
he needed Nixon to focus on Congress. “On several occasions,”
Nixon said, “the President and sometimes a Cabinet officer will ask

134 first in line
in a meeting what I believe the congressional viewpoint will be on

a certain matter . . . When I became Vice President I thought that
one of the greatest services I could render would be to interpret the
administration’s program to individual members of the House and
Senate who might otherwise not receive this information.”
Nixon kept in touch with Lyndon Johnson, who became major-
ity leader in 1955 after the Democrats won control of the Senate,
and a few key Senate Democrats with whom he had long-standing
relationships. Years later Johnson told his vice president, Hubert
Humphrey: “Eisenhower cut his guts out and didn’t want Nixon
to have any power.” When Eisenhower was weighing whether to
run for a second term he invited friends and associates, including
Nixon, to sit with him in the Red Room of the White House.
“We must present the able, personable young men of the Repub-
lican Party, on television, on radio, on platforms and forums, and
do it right away.” He continued, with Nixon looking on, “Take
Bob Anderson [Eisenhower’s forty-four-year-old deputy defense
secretary], for instance. That man’s got Texas in the palm of his
hand. I think he is a perfectly wonderful young man. My God,
he could run for Pope on the Presbyterian ticket and get elected.
That’s the kind of Republican face and voice that ought to be seen
and heard.” Nixon, who was obviously ambitious and at the time
forty-one, could not have ignored the slight.
As Eisenhower’s health declined, he relied more and more on his
vice president. In a note dated October 1, 1955, as he was recovering
from a heart attack in a Denver hospital, Eisenhower wrote: “Dear
Dick: I hope you will continue to have meetings of the National
Security Council and of the Cabinet over which you will preside
in accordance with the procedure which you have followed at my
request in the past during my absence from Washington.” Well
before the Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted in 1967, Nixon
and Eisenhower had a gentleman’s agreement that Nixon would
take charge while Eisenhower recovered. Even though Nixon did
an admirable job, Eisenhower still weighed the possibility of drop-

ping Nixon from the ticket in 1956. He told Nixon that he might
get better training for the presidency if he ran the Pentagon instead
of being his vice president in his second term. Eisenhower acted
as guidance counselor to Nixon and told him, “There has never
been a job I have given you that you haven’t done to perfection.”
He added condescendingly, “The thing that concerns me is that
the public does not realize adequately the job you’ve done.” As he
was considering what to do, Eisenhower excluded Nixon from an
important strategy session. “Ordinarily you would be the first one
I would ask,” Eisenhower explained. But “since you are going to
be so much the object of conversation, it would be embarrassing to
you.” Nixon felt it necessary to outmaneuver his boss and orches-
trated a write-in effort in the New Hampshire primary to prove
his own popularity. He garnered an unexpectedly high number of
votes, which made him more valuable to the reelection.
Still, when Eisenhower announced that he would be seeking a
second term, he declined to comment on whether Nixon would
be staying on the ticket; he even said that he would have to wait
for the Republican National Convention, which was nearly six
months away, to decide. Ultimately, Nixon forced himself to re-
main on the ticket and Eisenhower complied—but not before put-
ting Nixon through the wringer. As he had in 1952, Nixon served
as Eisenhower’s hatchet man and was dispatched on grueling cam-
paign trips. During the 1954 midterm elections, between mid-
September and Election Day, he traveled more than twenty-five
thousand miles and visited nearly a hundred cities in thirty states.
But Democrats won control of both houses of Congress, despite
Nixon’s efforts. During the 1956 reelection campaign Nixon was
sent on a thirty-two-state tour of the United States. He dutifully
praised Eisenhower on the stump, calling him “a man of destiny,
both at home and abroad,” and “a man who ranks among the great-
est of the legendary heroes of this nation.”
As vice president, Nixon set aside his own ego and thirst for
power. “The first responsibility of a vice president,” he said, “is

136 first in line
loyalty to the President and I have some very definite ideas, for
example, about defense, about organization of government gener-
ally, but I prefer not to express them at this point.” He desperately
wanted to be president, but as vice president he had to check with
the president or his staff before doing anything. “Once the decision
is made as to what the Administration’s program is . . .” he said, “all
members of the Administration should either support that decision
or get out.”
As his health deteriorated, Eisenhower asked the Nixons to take
an eighteen-day diplomatic trip to South America in the spring of
1958. The point of the trip was to celebrate the inauguration of
Arturo Frondizi, who was the first democratically elected presi-
dent in Argentina in two decades. The visit was going well un-
til the Nixons arrived at the University of San Marcos in Lima,
Peru, where rocks were thrown at them by leftist demonstrators.
Things got worse during a later stop in Caracas, Venezuela, when
the Nixons arrived at the airport and protestors spat on them and
threw fruit and garbage at them. Protestors blocked their route
with a vehicle, and their motorcade was under attack as rocks and
pipes were thrown at their car. Nixon’s wife, Pat, was not sure if
they would survive. A rock struck the vice president’s window
and a piece of glass hit the foreign minister’s eye and he started to
bleed. The demonstrators began rocking the vice president’s car,
trying to overturn it. Secret Service agents did not want to draw
their guns for fear it would cause more violence. After more than
ten minutes, agents were able to use a press car to block traffic and
give the Nixons’ motorcade a path to speed away and escape to the
American embassy.
The next day members of the press gathered around the cars that
Nixon insisted be left in full view so that their harrowing jour-
ney could be documented. Several American reporters burst into
spontaneous applause when the Nixons left the embassy to attend a
government luncheon. Tears welled up in the normally stoic Pat’s
eyes. The Nixons were welcomed home as heroes. The Eisenhow-

ers met them at Andrews Air Force Base, along with thousands of
supporters, half of Congress, and the full Cabinet.
Even after all that, Nixon was never brought into Eisenhower’s
inner circle. He and Pat were never invited to the president’s Get-
tysburg Farm when he was vice president, and they were never
even invited to the White House residence for a party. “Ike had the
military attitude toward a subordinate,” Chief Justice Earl Warren,
whom Eisenhower had appointed to the Supreme Court, told jour-
nalist Drew Pearson. “And Nixon was a subordinate. He admired
George Humphrey, the secretary of the treasury, because he had
money, but Nixon had no money and was inferior in rank.”
In 1960, Nixon sent a birthday note to Eisenhower in the final
days of his campaign for the presidency against John F. Kennedy.
“When I talked to you on the telephone it was 6:30 am California
time and I failed to realize how significant this particular day was
for you and for the nation,” he wrote timidly. “Pat joins me in
sending our very best to the man who is oldest in years and young-
est in spirit ever to grace the White House.—Dick Nixon.”
Eisenhower did not endorse his vice president until he was nom-
inated at the Republican convention. When a reporter asked Eisen-
hower at a press conference if he would endorse Nixon, he replied,
“There are a number of Republicans, eminent men, big men that
could fulfill the requirements of the position.” At an August 24,
1960, press conference, a month after the convention, Eisenhower
was asked if he could point to a specific accomplishment of his vice
president. He replied warily, “If you give me a week, I might think
of one. I don’t remember.” A week later, he still could not offer a
single example.
Eisenhower’s shadow never left Nixon. During his 1968 cam-
paign for president (he lost in 1960), Nixon asked his aides to al-
ways keep Eisenhower updated on how he was doing in the polls.
He wanted to make sure that Eisenhower knew when he was do-
ing well. And he all but begged Eisenhower for his endorsement,
which he finally gave less than four months before Nixon won the

138 first in line
election. “After Nixon got elected, he invited a few of us to go

upstairs and see what the living quarters were like,” said Nixon’s
political strategist John Sears. “And all he talked about was how it
looked when Eisenhower was president—where he had his medals
and what he had over there and where he had his desk.”
John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Nixon in 1960 in one of the

closest presidential races in U.S. history. Kennedy and his vice
president, Lyndon Johnson, could not have been more different,
but Johnson, who prided himself on his ability to size people up,
had a grudging respect for Kennedy. After a few months in office,
he told New York Times reporter Russell Baker how much he ad-
mired Kennedy. The president, Johnson said, “looks you straight
in the eye and puts that knife into you without flinching.” It would
be a backhanded compliment to some, but for Johnson it was gen-
uine praise. In the early days of their partnership they behaved like
a married couple. Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was with
Kennedy at the family’s Palm Beach compound before the inau-
guration, and during that period Johnson visited three times. She
arrived at the house early one morning from her hotel to find John-
son sitting at one end of the large dining room table in a mono-
grammed “LBJ” terry-cloth robe (to Johnson it was a sign that he
had risen in stature if he could be known by his initials, like FDR)
with the New York Times, Kennedy’s favorite newspaper, sitting,
untouched, by his side.
“Good morning, Lyndon, you’re up early this morning,” Ken-
nedy, who was also wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe, said when he
sat down for breakfast at the opposite end of the table. When he
noticed the New York Times was missing, he glanced up and saw
it sitting on the table next to Johnson, who apparently was not
interested in reading it. Kennedy was not amused. Johnson en-
ergetically talked to Kennedy throughout breakfast. Later, when
Lincoln went to bring Kennedy a cup of coffee in his bedroom, the

president-elect said, “What gall. If he had the paper why didn’t he

read it? Or at least give someone else a chance to see it.”
Johnson wielded tremendous power as Senate majority leader
and was so desperate to cling to it that, in a remarkable move, he
had persuaded the Texas state legislature to pass a law that allowed
him to run for reelection to his Senate seat at the same time that
he was running for vice president. After he was elected vice pres-
ident, Johnson tried to keep hold of his power over the Senate by
asking Mike Mansfield, the senator who would take his place as
majority leader, to allow him to continue as conference chairman
so that he would be in charge of Senate Democrats whenever they
conferenced. It would have been an unprecedented consolidation
of power. The mild-mannered Mansfield was amenable to the ar-
rangement, but Senators Robert Byrd and Richard Russell refused
to agree to such a breach of the constitutional separation of powers
that would give a member of the executive branch too much influ-
ence over the legislative branch.
Johnson’s impression that Eisenhower “cut his [Nixon’s] guts out”

is ironic since Kennedy did far worse to him. He allowed Johnson
to be routinely humiliated. Johnson never liked being first in line.
Being a stand-in was less than satisfying for a man who had once
ruled the Senate. His base of conservative Southern Democrats
abandoned him once he joined the administration—they thought
Kennedy was too liberal. His less than three years as vice presi-
dent were agony for him. “Every time I came into John Kennedy’s
presence, I felt like a goddamn raven hovering over his shoulder,”
Johnson said after leaving the White House. “Away from the Oval
Office, it was even worse. The vice presidency is filled with trips
around the world, chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping, chair-
manships of councils, but in the end, it is nothing. I detested every
minute of it.”
Johnson was born in 1908 in central Texas. He grew up with

140 first in line
little money and became passionate about civil rights in part be-
cause of his experience teaching students of Mexican descent in
Cotulla, Texas. He ran and won a seat in the House in 1937, and
after six terms he was elected to the Senate in 1948. In 1953 he be-
came the youngest minority leader in the Senate, and the follow-
ing year, when Democrats won control of the Senate, he became
majority leader. He used his imposing physical presence—he was
six-foot-four—and his larger-than-life personality to convince his
colleagues to vote for legislation, often looming over them. Be-
coming vice president was in many ways a step down for Johnson
because he had wielded so much power in the Senate.
Never one to do things halfway, in 1960, Johnson threw him-
self into the presidential campaign. Tyler Abell, who was on his
advance team and charged with making sure that crowds showed
up at rallies, recalled how Johnson did “whatever it took” to get
Kennedy elected. He never wanted to get off the stage. He would
be giving a speech and ignore the alarm on his wristwatch for
several minutes until he would finally tell the crowd: “Lady Bird
keeps tugging at me and says I should stop, so I guess I better stop.”
The first advance trip Abell did was in Boston, where “nobody had
ever heard of him.” Johnson arrived on a weekday afternoon and
Abell was surprised to see people come running out on the street
to see his motorcade pass by. He soon discovered why. Johnson had
a trick—he brought thousands of Senate passes to hand out to the
crowd. “He had suitcases full and handed them out to everybody.
People came flocking down from the buildings out into the street.”
Boston was a distance from Washington, but it was a personal, and
even a little bit hokey, touch that they appreciated. Lyndon John-
son may not have been a household name, but he intended to use
his place on the ticket to become one.
During one motorcade, Johnson got out of his car and ap-
proached a mounted police officer and asked him to get off his
horse. LBJ then demonstrated to the crowd his experience growing
up in Texas, placing his foot in the stirrup and hoisting himself up.

“Sitting in the saddle,” Lincoln wrote in her memoir, “he began to

talk to the crowd—about our foreign policy!” Kennedy’s staffers
might have been laughing at him, but there was no denying that
Johnson helped Kennedy win the South and that, because Kennedy
was Catholic, Johnson’s presence on the ticket was important. Even
Bobby Kennedy gave Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, credit for
helping his brother win the South.
With his power stripped away as vice president, Johnson obsessed
over the smallest things. There was no official vice presidential
residence then, so the Johnsons lived at The Elms, their sprawling
mansion that once belonged to socialite Perle Mesta in Washing-
ton, D.C.’s leafy Spring Valley neighborhood. Johnson called his
assistant Bess Abell, Tyler’s wife, “the maintenance engineer” of
The Elms. Her phone rang so often in the middle of the night with
one request or another that she began keeping a small notebook on
her bedside table so she could take notes. When Tyler first started
working for Johnson, his boss, who had worked for LBJ for years,
warned him: “You’ve got to be very careful. This man wants ev-
erything done his way. The soda water has to be Clicquot Club
and the scotch has to be Cutty Sark.” Once, Tyler recalled, Johnson
was sitting by the swimming pool at The Elms where Bess had
arranged a swim and a picnic for him and his family. Sitting in his
own swimsuit, Johnson got on the phone and called an assistant
with an urgent request: he wanted more bathing suits at the house.
“I want you to get some bathing suits so people who come to swim
at this pool, if they don’t have a swimsuit, they’ll be able to use
one of ours. Get some big ones and get some small ones,” Johnson
instructed. He had nothing better to do.
The vice presidency was torture for a man who had run the
Senate and was used to commanding attention when he entered
a room. Kennedy aides turned their backs on him at cocktail par-
ties. “Oh, that’s just the vice president,” a West Wing staffer said
to a party guest who did not even recognize Johnson. Their fa-
vorite nicknames for him and his wife, Lady Bird, were “Uncle

142 first in line
Cornpone and his Little Pork Chop.” Johnson referred with con-
tempt to the elite Kennedy clan and their aides as “Bostons” and
“Harvards.” Things got so bad that when Kennedy asked Congress
for Secret Service protection for the vice president and his wife,
Johnson told his friends, “He [Kennedy] just wants to spy on me.”
Johnson was well aware of the Kennedy aides’ disdain for him and
the snickering behind his back.
Johnson sometimes asked to fly with Kennedy. “That’s ridicu-
lous,” Kennedy told his staff. “He has his own plane. It wouldn’t
be practical for both of us to be traveling together.” Kennedy
added, exasperated, “How many times must I tell him that the
President and the Vice President, as a matter of security, should
never ride on the same plane?” Whatever happened to Lyndon? be-
came a running joke among Johnson’s former congressional col-
leagues. Johnson requested an office in the West Wing of the
White House, which Kennedy deemed absurd. To make it look
like he was included in big decisions, Johnson had his driver drop
him off near the sidewalk leading to the Oval Office. He would
walk along the colonnade, stroll past the Oval, and enter through
a door to the president’s secretary’s office. “Nearly every morning
he would open that door, grunt, and pause for a moment to look
around to see what was going on,” according to Lincoln. From
there he would check to see if Kennedy was in and if he was not
he would walk into the hall leading to the reception room and
make sure the reporters who were gathered there got a good look
at him. When he came out to cross the street to his office in the
Executive Office Building, it gave the impression that he had just
been in a meeting with the president.
Johnson was further humiliated when, on foreign trips, Kennedy
insisted that a State Department official accompany him to make
sure that he kept his appointments. The vice president did not trust
these officials and thought they were spying on him. When John
Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth on February
20, 1962, Johnson wanted credit as chairman of the National Aero-

nautics and Space Council. He insisted on being included in the

ticker tape parade down Broadway with Glenn. Inside the West
Wing this was seen as yet another desperate attempt by the vice
president to claim credit and further his own career. Johnson aide
Bill Moyers felt that Johnson had become “a man without pur-
pose . . . a great horse in a very small corral.”
Even after all that, Johnson desperately wanted to be accepted
by Kennedy. After a breakfast meeting with members of Congress,
Johnson and Kennedy were walking to the Oval Office when
Johnson surprised Kennedy with a gift. He would be sending some
cattle and a horse named “Tex” for Kennedy’s daughter Caroline
to their Middleburg, Virginia, estate. Kennedy already had a me-
nagerie of pets, including dogs, birds, a cat, and a rabbit, and he
had a rule that he would not accept gifts worth more than fifteen
dollars (or the equivalent of $120 today). But he knew he was
trapped—rejecting the gift would deeply hurt his already emo-
tionally fragile vice president. When the horse arrived, Kennedy,
Jackie, and their young daughter dutifully posed for a photograph
on the South Lawn of the White House with a beaming Johnson
before “Tex” was sent to the Kennedys’ country house. Not long
after that, Johnson saw Caroline, who was just four years old at the
time, drawing in Evelyn Lincoln’s office. “Do you know who I am,
Caroline?” he asked. Caroline said nothing. Lincoln leaned down
and whispered, “That’s Mr. Johnson, Caroline.”
“That’s right. I’m your uncle Lyndon, remember?” Johnson said.
“I’m the one who gave you that fine riding horse, Tex.”
Caroline mumbled shyly, “Oh.”
“Now remember what I told you, Caroline,” Johnson continued,
“I want you to call me ‘Uncle Lyndon’ whenever you see me. Will
you remember to do that?” Caroline looked confused, and after
Johnson walked out of the room she asked Lincoln, “Is he really my
uncle?”
During a 1961 trip to Southeast Asia, Johnson famously invited a
Pakistani camel driver named Bashir Ahmad to visit him in Texas

144 first in line
and to meet the president at the White House. He told reporters,

“What we need on our side are the camel drivers of the world.”
What followed was a media spectacle. Johnson flew to New York
to welcome Ahmad and then flew with him to Texas, where he
hosted a barbecue lunch. In Washington, Lady Bird introduced
Ahmad to President Kennedy in the Oval Office. Political car-
toonists lampooned the visit, but it was largely considered a diplo-
matic success.
In August 1961, Johnson was given a key assignment when Ken-
nedy sent him to Berlin after the communists built the Berlin Wall
to separate East and West Berlin. The Wall was to become a defin-
ing symbol of the Cold War. Johnson’s job was to voice American
solidarity with the people of West Berlin. Hundreds of thousands
of people gathered at City Hall in West Berlin to hear him speak.
He told the crowd that Kennedy had sent him to communicate
the same commitment that “our ancestors pledged in forming the
United States: our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” It was
Johnson’s most important trip as vice president, but during much
of the transatlantic flight aboard Air Force Two, reporter Al Spivak
recalled how frustrated and broken Johnson seemed. “On virtually
the entire flight over the Atlantic he [ Johnson] talked the whole
time,” Spivak said. “The main topic of the conversation was that
Kennedy wasn’t using him to promote his legislative program.”
Johnson was a dutiful vice president and did what was asked of
him, but he did not hide his resentment well. His nemesis, Ken-
nedy’s brother Bobby, was attorney general and much closer to the
president than Johnson was. Adam Frankel, who was a speech-
writer for President Obama and worked with Kennedy aide Ted
Sorensen on his memoir Counselor, recalled attending a dinner de-
cades later at the Kennedy Library where the former diplomat and
Kennedy friend John Kenneth Galbraith paid tribute to Sorensen.
Galbraith joked, “We all knew who the second most powerful man
in the White House was . . .” But before he could utter the words,
Sorensen himself interjected and shouted, “Lyndon, of course!”

Everyone at the table had a good laugh. The truth, and everyone
knew it, was really Bobby Kennedy.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson went without a vice pres-

ident for the remainder of Kennedy’s term, which was well over
a year. Before ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment there
was no constitutional mechanism for filling a vacancy in the vice
presidency—the next in line to the presidency was the Speaker
of the House, at the time John W. McCormack of Massachusetts.
When he ran for president in 1964, Johnson picked Hubert Hum-
phrey to be his running mate. Humphrey was Johnson’s protégé
when both men were in the Senate, and when Johnson was ma-
jority leader Humphrey was his conduit to the liberal wing of the
Democratic Party. Johnson picked Humphrey, who was a well-
respected Minnesotan, to help balance the ticket both ideologically
and geographically.
The Johnson-Humphrey relationship has been described as one
of domination-subordination. Their solid working relationship on
Capitol Hill quickly deteriorated and became a disastrous one in
the White House. Outwardly Humphrey seemed busy, overseeing
the space program and acting as the administration’s go-between
to local governments, but within the walls of the White House
he was miserable. Johnson adviser Joe Califano said his boss was
“essentially a manic depressive, up and down,” and he regularly be-
rated Humphrey in front of others. Because Johnson had suffered
as Kennedy’s vice president, he intended to make sure Humphrey
did the same. He insisted that Humphrey stay out of the headlines,
leaving more room for himself, and issued a decree that no member
of the national press could accompany Humphrey on out-of-town
trips. Johnson was obsessive about leaks, and when there was one
the first suspect was always the vice president. “Goddammit, Hu-
bert, can’t you keep your mouth shut?” he would bellow. “Every
time I say something I find your friends writing stories about it.”

146 first in line
Humphrey revealed the humiliating subservience that so often

comes with the vice presidency in a candid interview with For-
tune. The reporter asked him what had changed in his life since
becoming vice president and he replied, “Don’t let anyone ever
tell you that it’s just a change of office. It’s a change of lifestyle,
even a change of attitude. For one who is naturally effusive and
gregarious and outgoing, it surely require[s] a great deal of self-
discipline . . . I’ve changed. I’ve become more prudent. I’ve be-
come more tolerant, too.”
Tolerant was the least of it. Humphrey was a self-proclaimed “jolly
Santa” and struggled to comply with Johnson’s orders at times. When
he let it slip in a talk to a group of labor leaders that the administra-
tion was planning to ask Congress for an increase in the minimum
wage, the news was picked up in the newspapers. Johnson fumed, “I
see by the papers where I have a minimum wage program.” Hum-
phrey had to ask Johnson for permission to use an official plane, and
he had to clear the text of all his prepared speeches—invariably, West
Wing aides stripped them of anything meaningful. He was truly in
an impossible position working for a larger-than-life president.
Johnson was eventually consumed by the quagmire of the Viet-
nam War, with protestors gathering every day in Lafayette Park
across the street from the White House and chanting, “Hey, hey,
LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Their cries could be heard
in the private residence, and their pleas grew louder and louder
each month. Humphrey publicly supported the government’s war
policy and was tainted by his association with the administration.
Privately, however, Humphrey had warned Johnson against mili-
tary escalation in Vietnam, and for a year he was shut out of any
decision-making. Humphrey was torn between personal loyalty to
the president he served and his own conscience. “I did not become
vice president with Lyndon Johnson to cause him trouble,” he said.
Johnson shocked the country when he announced he would not
seek the presidency in 1968, leaving room for Humphrey to run
instead. But Johnson did not want his vice president to win, in part

because he knew that he had turned against the war and would
not continue the administration’s approach to Vietnam. In a call to
Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, a Republican, just days
before the 1968 election, Johnson said, “I’ve told Nixon every bit
as much, if not more, than Humphrey knows. I’ve given Hum-
phrey not one thing, and up to now, Nixon and the Republicans
have supported me just as well as the Democrats.” He had even
convinced Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York
to run, hoping that he would beat Nixon and Humphrey. “He
told me he could not sleep at night if Nixon was president, and
he wasn’t all that sure about Hubert [Humphrey] either,” recalled
Rockefeller, who would later find himself becoming vice president
in the wake of Nixon’s collapse and disgrace. Five weeks before
the 1968 election, Humphrey broke with Johnson and called for
a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam in a nationally televised
campaign speech. His poll numbers shot up, but it was too late.
Just days before the election, Johnson called Humphrey to tell him
he had decided to halt bombing of North Vietnam but he wanted
to make sure Humphrey did not take too much credit. “If I were
you,” Johnson instructed, “I would let the laurels come to me, but
I certainly wouldn’t crow about it.” Humphrey was punished for
being Johnson’s vice president and ultimately lost the election to
Nixon.
Jimmy Carter recalled inviting Humphrey to Camp David one
weekend when he was president, years after Humphrey left office.
It was the very first time he had ever been there. “Poor Humphrey,
my friend, they just ruined him there,” Carter’s vice president Wal-
ter Mondale sighed. “He had no status . . . Johnson had this sort of
dark, mean side to him. He’d bite.”

VIII
Confusion, Conflict, and Musical Chairs:

The Rocky Road of Agnew/Nixon,
Ford/Nixon, and Rockefeller/Ford
When Ford became vice president, I don’t think we thought that Nixon
was doomed. I think we thought that he’ d been badly wounded.
— G ER A LD FOR D’S SPEECH W R ITER ROBERT H A RT M A NN
A
fter Richard Nixon won the nomination at the Republi-
can National Convention in Miami Beach in August 1968,
Donald Rumsfeld, who was then an Illinois congressman,
was summoned to Nixon’s penthouse suite at the Hilton Plaza hotel
in the middle of the night. There he found a room packed with
the men who were closest to Nixon, including John Mitchell, who
would become attorney general; Senator Barry Goldwater, who ran
against Lyndon Johnson in 1964; and the Reverend Billy Graham.
The question at hand was who Nixon should pick as his running
mate. “What about Mark Hatfield [a Republican senator from Ore-
gon]?” Graham asked. “He’s liberal but he’s a Christian and I think
it would sell in the south.”
Nixon responded immediately: “I don’t want anyone from the far
right or the far left.” In the end Nixon’s choice, Maryland governor
Spiro Agnew, came as a surprise to Rumsfeld and most people in

150 first in line
the country, who had never heard of Agnew. Nixon had a few ma-
jor criteria for choosing a vice president: he must be fully qualified
to take over the presidency; he must share similar philosophical and
political views; and he must be loyal. Nixon, eight years removed
from his demeaning duty under Eisenhower, said, “The president
and the vice president need not be personal friends but they must
under no circumstances be personally incompatible.”
Agnew beat out other much more experienced candidates, in-
cluding Tennessee senator Howard Baker. Nixon told reporters,
referring to himself in the third person: “There is a mysticism
about men. There is a quiet confidence. You look a man in the eye
and you know he’s got it—brains. This guy has got it. If he doesn’t,
Nixon has made a bum choice.” By all accounts, he made a very
“bum choice.”
“Nixon made a terrible mistake, he was a perfectly unacceptable
nominee,” Rumsfeld said of Agnew. Not only was he ethically
challenged, but he was also lazy. Nixon made Agnew chairman of
the Desegregation of the South Committee (a Cabinet commit-
tee to manage the transition to desegregated schools), but Agnew,
Rumsfeld said, never showed up for any meetings. “Finally, those
of us involved got George Shultz to replace him,” Rumsfeld re-
called, referring to Nixon’s secretary of labor. Rumsfeld remem-
bered Agnew being incredibly vain and preoccupied with how he
looked, constantly smoothing out the creases of his suit pants in
the meetings he did choose to attend. “He was an unusual per-
son, he was interested in his clothes,” Rumsfeld said. “I never saw
him very interested in substance.” Dick Cheney, who worked for
Nixon, described the relationship between Agnew and Nixon as a
“train wreck.”
Like the president he served, Agnew is best known for being
forced from office when he resigned in 1973 and pleaded no con-
test to a charge of federal income tax evasion. He was the first and,
so far the only, vice president to ever resign in disgrace. But before
then he was Nixon’s bullet-headed, well-dressed hatchet man.

confusion, conflict, and musical chairs 151
Spiro Theodore Agnew was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in

1918, the son of a Greek immigrant whose family name originally
was Anagnostopoulos. He worked as a grocery store clerk and at
an insurance company during the day and studied law at the Uni-
versity of Baltimore at night. He served in western Europe during
World War II and was awarded a Bronze Star. After the war he
completed his law degree and set up his own practice outside of
Baltimore. He switched his registration from Democrat to Repub-
lican and in 1962 ran for county executive and won. In 1966 he
was elected governor of Maryland. After Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s assassination in the spring of 1968, riots engulfed Baltimore
and Agnew took a hard line against protestors and African Amer-
ican leaders. Agnew’s response to the rioting helped his bona fides
with conservatives and was a major reason why Nixon picked him,
hoping to win over white Southerners. But outside of Maryland,
Agnew was an unknown. When Nixon announced Agnew as his
running mate, headlines asked “spiro who?”
Though Agnew was the first vice president with an office in the
West Wing, he soon learned that he would not be permitted to ex-
ert much power. But at the very beginning of his vice presidency,
he enthusiastically embraced his role as president of the Senate and
spent time each morning with the Senate parliamentarian, Floyd
Riddick, to learn parliamentary procedures. He knew he would
have to administer the oath to new senators and break tie votes. He
diligently studied the names and faces of senators, but his ego was
quickly deflated when, after preparing for a speech to the Senate,
he was told by Majority Leader Mike Mansfield that he would be
given half the time he thought he would have. Agnew considered
it an insult, but he would soon learn that it was merely part of the
job. He did not fare much better in the White House, where he
was put in his place routinely by Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. “Bob”
Haldeman. “The President does not like you to take an opposite
view at a Cabinet meeting, or say anything that can be construed
to be mildly not in accord with his thinking,” Haldeman told him.

152 first in line
Agnew did not agree with Nixon’s groundbreaking efforts to nor-

malize relations with Communist China but felt powerless to stop
them. As he began to understand the constraints of the vice pres-
idency he retreated: “A little over a week ago, I took a rather un-
usual step for a Vice President,” Agnew complained in his memoir.
“I said something.”
What bit of power and influence he was able to cobble together
came from his famous attacks against the media, which he singled
out as the enemy during nationwide protests against the Vietnam
War. He was a strident critic of the protestors and he was the admin-
istration’s main attack dog, allowing Nixon to stay above the fray,
and earning him the nickname “Nixon’s Nixon.” Agnew enjoyed
his adversarial relationship with the press, famously and contemp-
tuously referring to reporters as “nattering nabobs of negativism”
and “impudent snobs.” Critics of Nixon’s Vietnam War policy were
“pusillanimous pussyfooters.” The creative alliterative putdowns,
many of which were penned by Nixon speechwriter William Safire,
who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning political colum-
nist, earned Agnew praise in the West Wing. One Nixon adviser
glowingly referred to Agnew as “the Robespierre of the Great Silent
Majority.”
But Agnew’s popularity among the conservative wing of the
Republican Party soon began to threaten Nixon, and the president
never wanted Agnew to forget his place. Aides worried that Agnew’s
war with the press was going too far and creating enemies for
Nixon. “If [Walter] Cronkite and [David] Brinkley et al. should
figure they are in a fight for their lives, we would have our hands
full with a war we don’t need,” an aide wrote in one 1969 memo.
In a 1972 memo issuing “talking points” to Agnew, the first note
is underlined: “No attacks on press at all,” and included a forceful
reminder to put his own obvious presidential ambitions aside: “No
discussion or comment on ’76.”
When Agnew became embroiled in the corruption scandal that
led to his resignation, he turned into a pariah. Two years before Ag-

new resigned Nixon and his top aides John Ehrlichman and Halde-
man talked about pushing him out. “Being ahead of the power
curve, as you are at the moment,” Ehrlichman told the president, “is
the time for him to resign. I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know
what the inducement to him is or how you engineer it, but I just see
him as a liability from here forward.” As the three men talked Nixon
fumed at press reports of Agnew’s golfing on foreign trips. His vice
president is “not over there on a goddamn vacation,” he said. “Jesus
Christ, you know, when I went on these trips with my wife, we
worked our butts off, and it made an impression.”
Agnew was routinely refused one-on-one meetings with the
president. When he was asked to help defend Nixon after the Wa-
tergate break-in, he said he would under one condition: he wanted
a meeting alone with the president. Nixon would not agree to it.
Charges that Agnew took thousands of dollars in bribes from con-
tractors while he was governor of Maryland were front-page news
and particularly harmful as Watergate dragged on. Nixon’s aides,
not Nixon himself (like most presidents, he had a deep aversion to
personal confrontation), eventually put an end to Agnew’s misery.
Bryce Harlow and Al Haig went to Agnew’s office late one night
in 1973 with a clear purpose.
“This is a national crisis,” Harlow said. “Congress will undoubt-
edly act. You will be impeached.”
After a long pause Agnew said, “What are you here to tell me?
What do you want?”
“We think you should resign,” Haig replied.
“Resign? Without even having a chance to talk to the President?”
“Yes, resign immediately,” Haig said. “This case is so serious there
is no other way it can be resolved.”
Agnew was defiant and refused to resign for several more weeks.
He wrote in his memoir, “Without even an opportunity to be
heard in my own defense, I was to be jettisoned, a political weight
too heavy to allow the presidential plane—now laboring on its last
engine—to remain airborne.” The day before Agnew resigned,

154 first in line
Nixon met with him alone in the early evening. Agnew finally got
his one-on-one meeting, but it was not under the circumstances
he had hoped for. Nixon told him he needed to leave office. Now.
Agnew was devastated and wrote in his memoir: “I had become a
nonperson. The Vice-President, who had shared the tremendous
victory in the national election less than a year before, was sud-
denly hurled into outer darkness, into the limbo of forgotten men.”
Nixon needed to find a new vice president. On October 10,
1973, he summoned Michigan congressman and House Minority
Leader Gerald Ford to the White House for a meeting. “Sit down,”
Nixon told him.
“How serious is it?” Ford asked. “I don’t know the details. I only
know what I’ve read in the papers.”
During a two-hour conversation Nixon sat, smoking a pipe, siz-
ing up Ford. “Agnew is in trouble, real trouble,” he told him. By
the time Ford was back on the Hill, Agnew had resigned.
Weeks later, Nixon sent a letter to Agnew’s home address in
Kenwood, Maryland: “The chair you occupied across from mine
at the Cabinet table is, to me, a symbol of the strength and wisdom
you brought to that task as well as to the highest councils of the
Government itself.” But Agnew and Nixon never spoke again. In
his memoir, aptly named Go Quietly . . . Or Else, Agnew wrote that
Nixon “played me as a pawn in the desperate game for his survival”
and “I believe he had an inherent distrust of anyone who had an
independent political identity.”
When Nixon died in 1994, his daughters, Tricia and Julie, in-
vited Agnew to the funeral at his presidential library in Nixon’s
hometown of Yorba Linda, California. At first Agnew refused, but
he eventually relented. He wrote to a friend that he would go even
though, he said, “Nixon was an asshole.”
Gerald Ford was a well-liked senior member of Congress who

represented Michigan’s very Republican fifth district. He served

a quarter century in the House, where he was the minority

leader from 1965 to 1973. He and Nixon were very different in
temperament—Nixon was moody and formal and Ford was affable
and beloved by his colleagues in Congress. But the two men had
a lot in common: they were born six months apart in 1913, they
grew up in small towns with very little money, they served in the
navy during World War II, and they graduated from law school.
Nixon was elected to the House in 1946, Ford was elected two
years later, and they shared the same political philosophy. They
sometimes carpooled from northern Virginia to Capitol Hill to-
gether and their wives, Pat and Betty, became friends. Both women
were accustomed to their husbands’ long absences on the campaign
trail. In 1972 Ford went to some two hundred campaign events
for Republicans around the country and was away from home 258
days. He and his wife, Betty, were raising four children together,
and his frequent absences were taking a toll on her health. Ford
agreed he would run once more in 1974 and then retire. He had it
all planned out—he thought.
On August 4, 1973, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird traveled
with Ford and about twenty other House members to Groton,
Connecticut, to attend the laying of the keel for a nuclear subma-
rine. After the ceremony and luncheon, on the flight back to Wash-
ington, Laird took a seat next to Ford and swore Ford to secrecy
before he spoke. Watergate was consuming the White House, but
Agnew’s troubles were also becoming an issue that needed to be
dealt with. “We got a problem. It’s going to break. It involves the
Vice President.” Laird added ominously, “You think things are bad
now. They’re going to get worse.”
After Agnew’s resignation Nixon became the first president to
use the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution (which was
ratified in February 1967, just over three years after President Ken-
nedy’s assassination) to choose a vice president. Nixon made the
decision as he made many decisions, alone at Camp David. Ford
was on a list with three others, all of whom were current or former

156 first in line
governors: Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California; Nel-

son Rockefeller, who was governor of New York; and John Con-
nally, who had been governor of Texas and who served as Nixon’s
treasury secretary. Ford was Nixon’s “oldest and closest friend” of
the four, and his ability to be quickly confirmed by Congress “gave
him an edge which the others could not match,” the president later
said. Nixon knew that when he picked Ford there was at least a 50
percent chance that Ford could become president because Water-
gate was threatening to destroy his presidency.
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in 1913
in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was abusive and his parents sep-
arated when he was a baby. His mother moved to Grand Rapids,
Michigan, where she married Gerald R. Ford, a salesman who
raised Ford and made him his namesake (Ford’s name was legally
changed in 1935). He played football at the University of Michi-
gan and graduated from Yale Law School near the top of his class.
He served in the navy in World War II, and when he returned to
Michigan he ran and won a seat in the House in 1948; he was re-
elected twelve times. He was incredibly down-to-earth. When he
was vice president–designate, waiting to be confirmed, Ford went
to a luncheon in Cedar Springs, Michigan, with a group of women
who had supported him in his earliest campaigns for Congress.
“He stood in line, got a paper-plate lunch from the good people of
Cedar Springs,” recalled Ford aide Robert Hartmann. “He had to
fish in his pocket and pay for it; it was 75 cents, but he didn’t have
any money.” Hartmann loaned him some.
Although Nixon picked Ford in part because he thought he was
easily confirmable—the Twenty-fifth Amendment required con-
firmation by both houses of Congress—Watergate and partisanship
took hold. A group of liberal Democratic members of the House
thought that if they could stall Ford’s confirmation hearings and
impeach Nixon, Speaker of the House Carl Albert, a Democrat,
who was then next in the line of succession, would become presi-
dent. They used parliamentary tactics to delay and divert the pro-

ceedings. “We had books, loose-leaf books a yard thick of answers

to questions that they were going to ask,” Hartmann recalled.
There were about fifteen hundred pages of raw material the House
was reviewing. The hearings got ugly. It was pointed out that the
IRS said Ford owed a few hundred dollars because of two summer
suits he bought and wrote off as a business expense when he was
chairman of the Republican National Convention. But their ef-
forts were unsuccessful. The final votes to confirm Ford were 92–3
in the Senate and 387–35 in the House. He took the oath of office
on December 6, 1973.
Nixon took great pains to put Ford in his place, as he had done
to Agnew. He even told Ford that in 1976, when it would be possi-
ble for Ford to run for president, he was planning to support Texas
governor John Connally instead. “Connally was the only man I’d
ever seen Nixon around who he looked up to,” said Rumsfeld,
who was a Nixon aide. “Nixon was just taken by him.” Ford, it
seemed, was almost relieved. “That doesn’t bother me at all,” Ford
told Nixon. “I think John Connally would be a first-class candi-
date.”
As vice president, Ford walked a fine line serving a president
who was under investigation and working under a cloud of deep
suspicion. “I was always very hesitant to get involved in any public
discussions of the charges [against Nixon] because it could have
been, and I think it would have been, misconstrued by people that
I was trying to undercut him so I would get the office,” Ford said
later. But Ford and his staff did not think that Nixon would resign.
As Hartmann put it, “When Ford became vice president, I don’t
think we thought that Nixon was doomed. I think we thought that
he’d been badly wounded.” Nixon had won reelection in 1972 in a
landslide, and Ford assumed that Nixon would finish his term and
back Connally in 1976.
As with his selection of Agnew five years earlier, part of Nixon’s
reasoning for selecting Ford was that he did not think he posed a
real threat—he had never run for national office and had no interest

158 first in line
in being president. Ronald Reagan or Nelson Rockefeller might

have outshined him, he reasoned, but not Gerald Ford. Moreover,
Ford’s lack of gravitas, Nixon thought, might make his own im-
peachment less likely. While he was competent, Ford was not con-
sidered presidential material. Nixon was looking for a “silent, loyal
party supporter,” said William Seidman, a Ford aide. “A confirm-
able guy who was center of the road and was not known for his
speaking ability or his brilliance in one particular area.” Seidman
said, “We were told not to talk with the White House. Really the
only ones who talked to the White House were [Philip Buchen,
Ford’s counsel] and Hartmann, and they did very little of it. I mean
it was almost like zero communication.” Ford’s vice presidential
staff had to eat in a separate cafeteria because Nixon’s West Wing
aides did not want them in the White House mess, composed of
three small dining rooms run by the U.S. Navy and located next
to the Situation Room in the White House basement. The only
person they’d let in was Hartmann, and he said if no one else was
allowed then he would not go either.
Ford’s home phone number at 514 Crown View Drive in Alex-
andria, Virginia, was still listed in the phone book when he was vice
president (he only canceled it when he assumed the presidency).
As Watergate raged on, Nixon’s aides were always asking Ford to
defend the president in the press, and it was easier to decline when
he was not in Washington. “I will have to confess it was easier to
be out of Washington than to be in,” Ford said years after leaving
office. “If you were in Washington, you were pestered hour after
hour for some comment on this revelation or that exposure.”
Ford felt more comfortable with his former colleagues on the
Hill and campaigning around the country for Republicans run-
ning for reelection. It was difficult to maintain his personal integ-
rity without looking like he was trying to undercut his boss. “I
was really not much involved in the legislative program or policy
area,” Ford recalled. “I think the White House by design kept me
out of it, and to be honest with you, I really was glad to do so.

Because the minute I got involved with Haldeman or Ehrlichman

or any of those people, I was uncomfortable.” Nixon’s secretary of
state Henry Kissinger and aide Brent Scowcroft briefed Ford for a
couple of hours once a week. “He [Kissinger] and Brent were about
the only people in the White House that paid much attention to
me,” Ford recalled.
Less than a year after being confirmed as vice president, Ford
became president when he took the oath of office on August 9,
1974, three minutes after he and his wife, Betty, escorted the Nix-
ons to their waiting helicopter on the South Lawn. It marked the
third time in a little more than ten years that a sitting or former
vice president became president. Ford recalled the moment, just
the day before, when Nixon told him he was resigning. “There
was no gushing, there was no dramatic embrace,” he said. “There
was just the recognition on the part of both of us that the time
had come, and his choice had been made and my fate had been
decided.” Ford’s aides felt it was important that Ford’s old con-
gressional colleagues stop calling him “Jerry” when they came to
the White House, so they made a point of telling them things had
changed, that Ford would now be called “Mr. President.”
“It was part of trying to restore the presidency and people’s loss
of confidence in the presidency,” Dick Cheney, a top Ford aide,
said. “He was Mr. President the day he put his hand on the Bible.”
The Fords’ youngest son, Steve, was about to begin his fresh-
man year at Duke University when his father suddenly assumed
the presidency after less than a year of being vice president. “As an
eighteen-year-old kid all of a sudden we all got ten Secret Service
agents and life changed,” he said. “Trust me, at eighteen that’s
not really the group you’re hoping to hang out with.” The Secret
Service had to track down the Fords’ other sons—M ike, who was
newly married and attending a theological school in Boston, and
Jack, who was a park ranger at Yellowstone. Jack was out on patrol
and got a radio communication to get back to camp. A friend of
the Fords arranged for a private plane to fly Jack to Salt Lake City,

160 first in line
where he caught a commercial flight to Washington for his father’s

swearing-in. (Their daughter, Susan, was still in high school and
lived with them in their home on Crown View Drive.)
Because the Observatory was not opened as the official vice
presidential residence until 1975, the Fords remained in their mod-
est, four-bedroom colonial house for ten days after Ford was sworn
in as president so that the Nixons would have time to move their
things out of the White House. Bulletproof glass was installed in
the Fords’ master bedroom, steel rods were put in underneath the
driveway to support the heavy armored presidential limousine, and
the press crowded the suburban neighborhood. “Our poor neigh-
bors went through hell,” Ford recalled.
The new president commuted every day on I-395 for the fifteen-
minute ride north to the White House. According to a Time mag-
azine story published shortly after he took office, “Many motorists
waved a cheerful if somewhat bemused good-morning as the Chief
Executive, immersed in his morning newspapers, sailed past them
in the lane reserved for buses and car pools.” Betty Ford was now
first lady, but she was still making dinner. One night, as she was
standing over the stove, she turned to her husband and said, “Jerry,
something’s wrong here, you just became president of the United
States and I’m still cooking.” When the family moved into the
White House they were much more casual than the Nixons had
been. Steve Ford would park his yellow Jeep on the circular drive-
way on the South Lawn, but the Jeep would always be moved by
a member of the residence staff to a less conspicuous spot. “It was
a running joke that my Jeep didn’t look proper out in front of the
White House.”
When he assumed the presidency, Ford told chief of staff Al
Haig to make sure that the Oval Office was swept and that all of
Nixon’s recording devices were removed. Donald Rumsfeld, who
quickly replaced Haig, double-checked. When Ford named Rums-
feld as his chief of staff, Rumsfeld presented him with a schedule
for the resignations or retirements of “the people that we felt had

to go.” Rumsfeld said he had “a precise day-by-day, month-by-

month schedule in that regard.” By December 31, 1974, the ones
that needed to go were gone.
Nelson Rockefeller, a four-term governor of New York and a de-

scendant of the country’s most famous wealthy family, was sworn
in as Ford’s vice president on December 19, 1974, the second person
appointed to that office. And he is also the only modern vice pres-
ident to be dumped from the ticket. (There was a time, when vice
presidents were decidedly less powerful, when they were dumped
quite often: Abraham Lincoln dumped Hannibal Hamlin for An-
drew Johnson in 1864; FDR dumped John Nance Garner in 1940
and Henry Wallace in 1944.) Apart from his humiliating dismissal,
Rockefeller is perhaps best remembered for the mysterious disap-
pearance of his son Michael, who vanished off the coast of New
Guinea in 1961 and is thought to have been killed by cannibals,
and the decidedly undignified way in which he died in 1979, two
years after leaving office, alone and with a much younger woman
who was rumored to be his mistress.
Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was born in 1908. On his father’s
side he was the grandson of the nation’s wealthiest man, John D.
Rockefeller Sr., the founder of Standard Oil and the world’s most
famous robber baron; on his mother’s side he was the grandson
of Rhode Island senator Nelson Aldrich, who had been the Sen-
ate’s most powerful member at the turn of the century. Rockefeller
was one of five boys, and, like most vice presidents, he had always
wanted to be president. He was dyslexic but graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1930. He worked in the family
business and was a passionate art collector and served as treasurer of
the Museum of Modern Art, eventually becoming the president of
the museum in 1939. A moderate Republican, he worked in FDR’s
and Eisenhower’s administrations. In 1958, he beat incumbent
Averell Harriman to be elected governor of New York by running

162 first in line
as a man of the people—ironic given his great wealth. Gregari-

ous and with seemingly boundless energy, Rockefeller sought the
Republican nomination for president in 1960, 1964, and in 1968.
When asked how long he had wanted to be president, he replied,
“Ever since I was a kid, after all, when you think of what I had,
what else is there to aspire to?” But the presidency eluded him. In
1964 he lost to Barry Goldwater, in part because of his scandal-
ous affair with the much younger Happy, who became his second
wife, and because he was considered too liberal. He campaigned
for Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and Nixon appointed him to a gov-
ernment board overseeing CIA activities.
After Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, George H. W.
Bush and Rockefeller were on Ford’s short list of vice presiden-
tial prospects. He picked Rockefeller, making the announcement
eleven days after Nixon’s resignation, in part because he thought it
was important to have someone from a different part of the coun-
try and because he thought Rockefeller could make a good presi-
dent. Rockefeller had been offered that position in 1968 by Hubert
Humphrey but turned it down insisting he was “just not built for
standby equipment.” This time, however, he relented because he
thought it was his moral obligation. “It was entirely a question of
there being a Constitutional crisis and a crisis of confidence on the
part of the American people,” Rockefeller said.
The first president ever not elected to national office, and nick-
named the “accidental president,” Ford got high marks for naming
a strong seasoned politician as his number two. “Ford didn’t pay
a lot of attention to politics,” said Rumsfeld. “Gerald Ford was
not a political person, he was a public servant.” But because of
Rockefeller’s great wealth and questions about campaign contribu-
tions he’d made to government officials, his confirmation hearings
dragged on for months. Rockefeller grew nervous that his fami-
ly’s vast assets might be put under a spotlight. He even considered
withdrawing his name because he was worried the scrutiny might
destroy the family. He and his brothers, it turns out, had left differ-

ent amounts of money to different children in trust funds and wills,

and he was concerned it might come to light and tear the family
apart. There was even talk of delaying a vote on his confirmation
until a new Congress convened in January. “You just can’t do that
to the country,” Ford pleaded with House Speaker Carl Albert
and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. “You can’t do it to
Nelson Rockefeller, and you can’t do it to me. It’s in the national
interest that you confirm Rockefeller, and I’m asking you to move
as soon as possible.” Eventually, on December 10, the Senate con-
firmed Rockefeller and the House followed suit on December 19.
While Rockefeller was fighting for his confirmation, top Ford
aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were solidifying power
in the West Wing. Ford originally promised Rockefeller chair-
manship of the Domestic Policy Council, but he was cut off at
every turn and the council’s budget was eventually cut. He and
Ford met once a week, but he was left out of key policy discussions.
When Ford proposed spending cuts, Rockefeller lamented, “This
is the most important move the president has made, and I wasn’t
even consulted.” As vice president, he complained he had a simple,
soul-deadening job: “I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes.” He
got the message quickly that his main job was to do what he was
told. “I am not in a leadership position,” he said. “I am supporting
the president. He can exert the leadership and I can support him.”
He listed the creation of a new vice presidential seal as one of his
greatest accomplishments in the office.
Rockefeller had a bad relationship with the powerful duo of
Cheney and Rumsfeld and it left him vulnerable. Cheney said that
Rockefeller’s expensive proposals were not in sync with Republican
Party principles. “That led to a very hostile relationship between
myself and the vice president,” he said. “The president maintained
a good relationship with the vice president and I was the bad guy,
but that was my role.” (It is a role Cheney never seemed to mind.)
Rockefeller used the Observatory to entertain, even though he
didn’t live there, and Cheney was always left off the guest list. “Just

164 first in line
about everybody in town who was anybody [was invited]—except

me,” Cheney recalled. “I never got invited to the vice president’s
residence until Walter Mondale was vice president in the Carter
years.”
Rockefeller abused his power in the Senate, Rumsfeld said. “I
wasn’t a fan,” he declared. “He had a tendency to be a little bullyish,
he was used to having people agree with him, or he hired them,
or he rolled over them.” Once, as presiding officer, Rockefeller
tried to break a filibuster by refusing to recognize two senators and
ordering the roll call over their objections. Ford began planning
his reelection campaign in the fall of 1975 and Cheney and others
started making the argument that Rockefeller represented the New
England liberal elite and was too eager to spend taxpayer dollars,
and some aides argued that he was too old (he was not yet seventy).
Once the charismatic former California governor Ronald Reagan
declared his decision to challenge Ford for the Republican nom-
ination, it was clear to Ford that his aides were right: Rockefeller
had to go. “I was convinced with Reagan in the race, and given
the makeup of the party, there wasn’t any way we could win the
nomination unless we captured conservative votes,” Cheney said.
“We would never get those conservative votes if the guy we had
running with us on the ticket was Nelson Rockefeller.”
Ford asked Cheney to run a search for Rockefeller’s replace-
ment. There were about twelve names on the list and the campaign
ran a national poll to see which would most strengthen the ticket.
On the list was Anne Armstrong, the first woman named to the
Cabinet-level position of counselor when Nixon appointed her to
the post in 1973 and who later worked as an adviser to Ford (“noth-
ing critical of Anne,” Cheney said, “but the country wasn’t there,
she cost us twelve points”), and the usual suspects John Connally
and Howard Baker. Cheney added a question to the poll asking
specifically about Reagan; it seemed to him that Reagan was the
logical choice. Poll results showed overwhelmingly that Reagan
was the best possible pick. Cheney and Republican pollster Bob

Teeter went to make their pitch to Ford, who was at Camp David.
“I tried hard,” Cheney recalled.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Ford said, disgusted with Reagan for
challenging him for the nomination. “It’s not going to happen.”
On November 2, 1976, dark horse candidate Jimmy Carter and
his running mate, Walter Mondale, narrowly defeated Ford and his
running mate, Kansas senator Bob Dole. In the end, Ford deeply
regretted dumping Rockefeller, in part because he lost and also
because he felt guilty about the decision. Using Rockefeller’s nick-
name, Ford told friends that “Rocky took himself out,” but every-
one knew he was forced out. “It was the biggest political mistake of
my life,” Ford later confessed. “And it was one of the few cowardly
things I did in my life.”

IX
Getting to Know You . . . or Not:

Mondale/Carter, Bush/Reagan, and
Quayle/Bush
I know I have to do something about the speaking

thing. I don’t know how he does it.
— G EORGE H. W. BUSH ON RONA LD R EAGA N
W
alter Mondale was having lunch with his friend and
adviser Richard Moe and Hubert Humphrey, who
had served as Johnson’s besieged vice president, in the
Senate Dining Room in May 1976. Mondale was weighing Jimmy
Carter’s offer to be on his list of possible running mates and Hum-
phrey, who was Mondale’s close friend and Minnesota mentor, was
there for a specific reason. The lunch was an orchestrated attempt by
Moe to get Mondale to accept the vice president spot on the ticket.
“I tried to persuade him to be interested. And he was not interested.
He loved the Senate, he wanted to stick with the Senate,” Moe said.
“He saw what had happened to Hubert under Johnson, he saw what
was then happening to Nelson Rockefeller under Ford. They were
very unhappy experiences.” At the beginning of lunch Mondale
was “kind of hangdog,” Moe said. “I don’t want to do it,” Mondale
told Humphrey. “You didn’t have a happy experience.”

168 first in line
Humphrey made his opinion clear: “If you have the chance to
be vice president, you do it. It’s the best thing that ever happened
to me. I learned more in that time than I learned since. You can
get more done down there in one day than you can get done up in
the Senate in a year if you care about public policy, and I know you
do.” Humphrey was getting worked up and said, “Fritz [Mondale’s
nickname], you’d be a fool not to do this.”
“I saw Mondale’s eyes open as Humphrey was talking and I
murmured under my breath, ‘Thank you Hubert,’ ” Moe recalled.
“I’m absolutely convinced that that was his epiphany moment. He
came out of there and instructed us to find out everything we
could on Carter and on the vice presidency.”
“As soon as we knew we were getting the nomination [Carter

aide] Hamilton Jordan started to put together a plan for vetting
the vice president,” said Jerry Rafshoon, who later became Car-
ter’s communications director. One thing was clear, it couldn’t
be a Southerner—Carter had been governor of Georgia—and it
couldn’t be a Washington outsider—Carter had no Washington
experience. Among the finalists was Maine senator Ed Muskie
and world-famous astronaut John Glenn, who was a senator from
Ohio. “I had the printer make campaign buttons and bumper stick-
ers for all six. Once Carter told me in a meeting that it was [Wal-
ter] Mondale, the guy was standing outside the door, and I said,
“ ‘Print Mondale!’ ” (The Carters’ eight-year-old daughter, Amy,
cried over her father’s decision not to name Glenn as his running
mate. “I wanted an astronaut to be the Vice President,” she said.)
After they were elected, Jimmy Carter gathered his West Wing
staff and his Cabinet together and made one thing clear: disrespect-
ing his vice president was the surest way to get fired. “I want you
to respond to a request from the vice president as if it came from
me,” he told them. “If I hear any of you mucking around with the
vice president, undercutting him, you’re outta here.” Carter even

getting to know you . . . or not 169
personally called reporters at their desks and told them to Kill the
story! when he heard they were about to publish a piece that was
unfair to Mondale.
The effectiveness of any vice president depends on his relation-
ship with the president. Mondale and Carter reached an agreement
before taking office that changed the vice presidency forever. Dick
Cheney and Al Gore, two successors with very different politi-
cal ideologies, credit Carter and Mondale with modernizing and
strengthening the role. The personal relationship forged between
the two men is considered the gold standard. Carter describes their
years together as a “family environment.” “I think the genius of
this and the reason for its success was Carter’s commitment,” Mon-
dale said. “We both had seen how poorly some vice presidents had
been treated and underutilized in the past and both felt it was a
waste of talent,” Carter said. Vice presidents need to have complete
access, Carter argued, pointing to the danger of Harry Truman
being kept in the dark by FDR about the atomic bomb.
Walter Frederick “Fritz” Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minne-
sota, in 1928, the son of a local preacher and a music teacher. As a
student he campaigned for Hubert Humphrey, also from Minne-
sota, and the two developed a lifelong friendship. Mondale gradu-
ated cum laude from the University of Minnesota and received his
law degree from the same school in 1956. He was soon appointed
state attorney general, and a high-profile case garnered him na-
tional attention. In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson picked Humphrey
as his running mate, Mondale was appointed to fill his friend’s
Senate seat, where he served until he was tapped by Carter to be
his running mate in 1976.
Mondale had flirted with running for president himself in 1976.
As a member of Congress, he was a vocal critic of Nixon’s con-
troversial position on the Vietnam War. For two years he traveled
some 200,000 miles and visited thirty states, but he realized that
he did not have the stomach for a presidential campaign. He’d had
enough nights sleeping in Holiday Inns, he said wryly. But Carter’s

170 first in line
offer of the vice presidency was hard to refuse, and when he was
asked why he decided to accept, which would surely mean more
nights in Holidays Inns, he replied, “I’ve checked and found out
they’ve all been redecorated.” The media took to calling Carter,
the former governor of Georgia, and his liberal Minnesota running
mate “Fritz and Grits.”
Mondale helped balance the ticket geographically, and although
both he and Carter grew up in different parts of the country, they
both hailed from small towns and were both devout Christians.
Mondale was considered more liberal than Carter and had better
contacts with labor and the more liberal wing of the Democratic
Party. In June 1976, when Carter was interviewing vice presiden-
tial candidates, he invited Mondale to his home in Plains, Georgia
(where he still lives). The two men expressed aligning views about
the vice presidency, and both considered it a wasted asset. Mondale
did not want to be standby equipment. “I’m in the Senate, I love
the Senate, I can help you there,” Mondale told Carter. “I want to
work out a deal where I’m in the White House helping you, advis-
ing you, representing you, and taking on the tough ones that really
break the back of a president up on the Hill.”
Mondale and his top aides drew up an eleven-page document
that formalized his approach to the relationship. Carter signed off
on it with no amendments and no deletions. The deal included
Mondale’s three major requirements: unimpeded access to the
president; the same access to classified material as the president;
and unimpeded institutional responsibilities. He also wanted a
West Wing office, which he got. (The office is just seventeen steps
from the Oval, next to the chief of staff ’s office.) And he wanted
a weekly lunch with the president. In the document Mondale tells
Carter, “I believe the most important contribution I can make is
to serve as a general adviser to you. The biggest single problem of
our recent administrations has been the failure of the president to
be exposed to independent analysis not conditioned by what it is
thought he wants to hear or often what others want him to hear.”

But even Mondale, the first truly powerful vice president, sheep-
ishly wrote in the memo that “we could of course” cancel any
meetings if it did not fit with Carter’s schedule.
Mondale made key decisions that kept him in the loop from the
very beginning. When faced with the option to run his campaign
office out of Washington, Minneapolis, or Atlanta, where Carter
and his team were based, he picked Atlanta. He worked as a sort
of shuttle service after the election and escorted Cabinet nomi-
nees back and forth from Washington to Plains to meet Carter.
Mondale was both an adviser and a loyal lieutenant. “I could trust
him to give me candid advice on a variety of subjects, but once a
policy decision was made I could also trust that he would represent
my decision accurately and with enthusiasm,” Carter recalled. “I
think the key thing is for a vice president to feel that his advice is
heeded and that he has unfettered access to give it.” Christine Lim-
erick, who worked in the White House from 1979 to 2008 as the
head housekeeper, said the vice president she saw most often in the
private second-floor residence at the White House was Mondale,
whom she also saw in the residence with his wife, Joan, several
times having dinner with the Carters.
But of course there were disagreements. Mondale sometimes
urged Carter to take a more forceful position on issues, and he was
particularly upset by the president’s so-called malaise speech and told
him he did not think he should deliver it. Mondale cringed when,
in the nationally televised 1979 address, Carter chastised the Amer-
ican people as the nation was seized by double-digit inflation and
soaring gasoline prices. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-
indulgence and consumption,” Carter said from the Oval Office.
He decried a “growing disrespect for government” and “fragmen-
tation and self-interest” that prevented Americans from responding
to the energy crisis sparked by an overreliance on fossil fuels. He
said Americans faced a “crisis of confidence.” Mondale thought the
speech would eventually backfire and it did—it is considered one of
the most politically tone-deaf speeches in American history. “There

172 first in line
was a good-natured assumption by some people around the presi-

dent that our political problems were basically emotional problems
that the American people had,” Mondale said, “so I couldn’t go
for that.” He even considered resigning because of it. But Mondale
never made his dissent public. There were times when Mondale put
his foot down privately. Jerry Rafshoon, Carter’s communications
director, recalls a time when he suggested Mondale take on an issue
that he thought was too liberal for Carter. But Mondale wanted to
be president one day, so he and his staff were insulted at the sugges-
tion that he would consider putting himself on shaky ground with
moderate voters.
In 1980 Carter and Mondale lost their reelection bid after one
term in office. Four years later Mondale ran for president against
Ronald Reagan and lost. His campaign chairman, Joe Trippi, said
no matter how much he told Mondale that he needed to distance
himself from Carter, he would not do it. “Mondale was very re-
spectful about keeping the confidence of those conversations with
Carter private,” Trippi recalled. “Even when it was in his best in-
terest as a candidate to divulge when he privately disagreed with
the president, it was not in his character to throw Carter under the
bus for his own political gain.”
George H. W. Bush never wanted to look like he was trying to

take the spotlight (as if one could) from Ronald Reagan. In pic-
tures and on TV he took great pains to make sure he didn’t look
like he was trying to get in the camera shot. He told his staff:
“Nobody is to start putting tape down on the colonnade to make
sure I’m in the picture. If somebody gets caught doing that, they’re
gone.” He was deferential and had a very clear sense of what was
proper for a vice president to do. “He honestly took a literal step
back,” one Bush aide said.
There was a reason for his reticence. Bush almost didn’t get to
be vice president, which, in retrospect, meant that he almost did

not get to be president either. Reagan initially wanted Gerald Ford

as his running mate, but when, at the very last moment, it became
clear just how deeply flawed and unworkable the power-sharing
arrangement with Ford would have been, Bush became Reagan’s
second-best choice. The two men had run against each other for
the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 and had barely
spoken since the primaries. Bush stayed in the race until right be-
fore the California primary in June, even after being defeated by
Reagan in twenty-n ine of thirty-three primaries. The partnership
between Reagan and Bush is remarkable not because of how it
worked during their eight years in office, but because of what it
led to—Bush was the first sitting vice president since Martin Van
Buren in 1836 to be elected president.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born in 1924 in Milton, Mas-
sachusetts, the son of wealthy Connecticut senator Prescott Bush.
After graduating from the prestigious Phillips Academy he enlisted
in the navy, flew combat missions during World War II, and was
shot down in the Pacific by Japanese antiaircraft fire. He returned
home, graduated from Yale University, and served two terms as
a Texas congressman. He ran for the Senate twice and lost, but
his career is marked by several high-level appointments, including
ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China, and director of the Central Intelligence
Agency.
As vice president, Bush had walk-in privileges for any meeting
that he wanted to attend in the Oval Office, and he and Reagan
had a weekly lunch, but theirs was mostly a respectful working
relationship and not a close personal friendship. “He went up to
the residence a handful of times, including after the assassination
attempt,” recalled Tom Collamore, who worked for Bush when
he was vice president. “But were they cocktail buddies upstairs in
the residence? No, they weren’t.” Reagan would often go to the
residence after work and make calls to Congress and take copious

174 first in line
notes about whatever legislative program they were trying to push

through. The next morning a copy was always given to Bush’s
chief of staff so that he would be kept in the loop.
Bush had a phone on his desk with a red button that was a di-
rect line to the Oval Office. A former Bush aide recalled sitting in
the vice president’s office on more than one occasion when the red
button started flashing. “George, I have this interesting fellow down
here,” Reagan would say, “would you mind coming down and saying
hello?” That was Reagan’s way of telling Bush to escort a guest who
had overstayed their welcome out, and Bush was happy to oblige.
In many ways Bush idolized Reagan, and it was not easy being
number two to the man known as “the great communicator.” “I
know I have to do something about the speaking thing,” Bush
told Craig Fuller, his chief of staff. “I don’t know how he does it,”
referring to Reagan’s seemingly effortless ability to captivate an
audience. Reagan tried to help Bush. Once, he picked up a copy
of Time magazine and offered an impromptu lesson. “Let me show
you what you do,” he said, and then he began to read an article
aloud to Bush as though he were reading a speech to a crowd. Rea-
gan glanced down at the story once or twice but was able to keep
eye contact, reading the story as though he had written it himself.
Bush could never come close, and he knew it. Fuller began study-
ing Bush’s speeches, and over dinner one night told Bush that 10
percent of his speeches were good. “Gosh, thanks,” Bush replied
sarcastically. They brought in Republican communications guru
Roger Ailes and started putting a videographer in the back of the
room during speeches so that Ailes could later study the tapes. The
end goal for Bush was simple. He knew he needed to improve so
that one day he could be president. He was never as comfortable as
Reagan in front of a crowd, but over time, and with lots of coach-
ing from Ailes, he got better.
Bush was often out on the road, campaigning for Republican
members of Congress and later running for president. He was able
to stay mostly above the fray during the Iran-Contra affair because

of his travels. He maintained he knew little of the plan to illegally

send money from covert arms deals with Iran to buy weapons for
the U.S.-backed Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The biggest political
scandal since Watergate brought down two high-ranking officials
in the Reagan administration but Bush was relatively unscathed.
Like his predecessors, Bush sometimes had trouble defining him-
self apart from the larger-than-life man he worked for. In 1988, at
the height of his campaign for president, Bush wanted Reagan to
know that he was going to publicly break with the White House,
something no vice president wants to do. At the time the admin-
istration was in negotiations with Panamanian dictator General
Manuel Antonio Noriega, who had been indicted by two grand
juries in Florida on charges of drug smuggling. The White House
was working on a deal to drop the charges if he would resign.
Critics argued that Bush, who had been director of the Central
Intelligence Agency when Noriega was rising to power in Panama,
should have done more to stop Noriega’s influence on drug traf-
ficking. During the campaign, Bush needed to make his opposition
clear. Bush said that if he was elected he would not “bargain with
drug dealers . . . whether they’re on U.S. or foreign soil.” Reagan
understood that Bush had no choice but to come out against the
administration.
Bush and Reagan had genuine respect for one another. Bush
delivered Reagan’s eulogy in 2004, and said, “As his vice pres-
ident for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than
from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life. I learned
kindness; we all did. I also learned courage; the nation did.” In the
great tradition of outgoing presidents leaving notes for their succes-
sors, Reagan’s note to Bush shows a sense of humor and empathy:
“Don’t let the turkeys get you down,” it read.
Dan Quayle is best known for being a gaffe-prone vice president

who became the butt of jokes delivered by late-n ight comedians,

176 first in line
but to hear him tell it, his vice presidency was marked by one
important factor: the decency of the president he served. Because
George H. W. Bush had been vice president for eight years, he was
sympathetic to the specific challenges of the sometimes awkward
job—unlike Johnson, who used his years in the humbling role as
justification for treating his own vice president poorly. “I’m not
sure that any other vice president had the kind of experience I
had or the kind of working relationship and partnership we had,”
Quayle said. “And that is because of who George H. W. Bush is.”
James Danforth Quayle was born in Indianapolis in 1947. His
father was a conservative publisher who owned newspapers across
the country and his grandfather was so well connected that Quayle
recalled once walking behind him and his golfing partner, who
happened to be Dwight Eisenhower. After graduating from De-
Pauw University, and knowing that his draft deferment would be
over after graduation, Quayle joined the Indiana National Guard.
It was a decision countless other men made at the time, but it was
viewed by some as a cowardly way to get out of serving in Viet-
nam. When it came up during the campaign, Bush aides asked
Quayle privately if he had any regrets about not going to Vietnam.
“I did not know in 1969 that I would be in this room today, I’ll
confess,” he said. After serving in the National Guard, he gradu-
ated from Indiana University Law School and started a law prac-
tice with his wife, Marilyn. In 1976 he was drafted to run for the
U.S. House of Representatives and won, but he was dissatisfied
and had his eye on his next move. Colleagues nicknamed him
“wet head” because he spent so much time in the House gym
that he often came to the floor to vote with his hair still wet after
taking a shower.
In 1980 he was elected to the Senate, where he worked alongside
Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy to introduce the Quayle-
Kennedy bill, a rare bipartisan effort to help create jobs that got his
name in the press. When Bush was searching for a running mate,
Quayle frequently dropped by Bush’s Capitol Hill office and wrote

op-eds and delivered more speeches on high-profile topics so that

Bush would notice him.
But it shocked everyone when sixty-four-year-old Bush picked
forty-one-year-old Quayle, the first baby boomer on a national
ticket. During the campaign Bush had a yellow legal pad in his
briefcase, and he would take the pad out and ask governors and
members of Congress traveling with him, “Who should I pick?”
“Flattering, isn’t it? That he would care what they thought,” said
Collamore, who was a top aide to Bush. “On one level it’s politics
by flattery and on the other hand he picks up little snippets. You
still learn something even if you’re not fully taking seriously what
you’re hearing.” Bush decided on Quayle because he wanted to
appeal to younger voters and Quayle balanced the ticket regionally,
hailing from the Midwest, while Bush had ties to Texas and New
England. After the disastrous vice presidential debate with Dem-
ocratic senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, when Bentsen attacked
Quayle for comparing himself to Kennedy, Bush told Quayle:
“That’s just so cheap. You did a great job. You hung in there, you
were professional.” Before he joined the ticket, Quayle had been
reelected in 1986 and was among the country’s youngest senators.
“The world was mine,” he recalled wistfully. He soon learned how
difficult his life would become.
All the criticism of Quayle had an unexpected upside for Bush’s
campaign; any attack coming Bush’s way was redirected at Quayle
and not at Bush. Bush strategist Lee Atwater told Quayle, “Don’t
worry. You’re the best rabbit we got going. Because the press is
chasing you.” Quayle understood Atwater’s logic. “I’ve always had
this theory, which I talked to Nixon about,” Quayle said. “The press
always has to attack either the president or vice president, this is the
way it is.” As a former vice president, Bush could sympathize with
Quayle. He knew that sometimes being the butt of jokes comes with
the job description. Barbara Bush’s position, an aide to her husband
says, was unapologetic: No whining allowed. You’re forty something and
you’re vice president of the United States, thanks to my husband.

178 first in line
When they took office, the two met early each morning and had
lunch every week. Bush encouraged Quayle to travel and to talk to
religious and conservative groups he was not as comfortable with.
(Collamore says Bush had to be “dragged kicking and screaming”
to meet with evangelical Southern leaders. “He had strong faith
but he didn’t wear it on his sleeve.”) Quayle enlisted a bigger staff
than his predecessors in the hope of reintroducing himself to the
American people. But nothing worked. Quayle said that he was
being unfairly targeted by both the press and by Bush’s own advis-
ers. One of Quayle’s biggest detractors was Secretary of State James
Baker, who had known Bush for more than three decades. Baker
called Quayle’s chief of staff Bill Kristol early on in the adminis-
tration and told him: “Look, we don’t know each other that well
and I know Quayle doesn’t like me that much and vice versa, but
we have to try and win this thing.” Winning “this thing” meant
governing successfully. The unmistakable message was clear: You
stay out of my hair; I’ll stay out of yours.
In May 1992, just months before the presidential general elec-
tion, Quayle delivered a speech on family values and criticized
the blockbuster TV show Murphy Brown and its main character
for “mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone.”
Quayle called Bush afterward and warned him, “Be prepared on
this thing. The press is in a meltdown about this.” Bush replied,
“I’ve never watched Murphy Brown.” Quayle had not seen the show
either, but an aide told him that using the character as an example
was the only way to get the speech any attention. The Bushes’
daughter Dorothy was divorced and a single mother at the time,
and Quayle wanted to make sure Bush did not think he was attack-
ing all single mothers, so they had a long discussion about the re-
marks. Family values were not a major issue for Bush, but Quayle’s
remarks brought them front and center. The press mocked Quayle
for denigrating women and for being out of touch, and the speech
launched a cultural discussion. Again, Quayle unwittingly pro-
vided late-n ight TV hosts with more fodder.

Quayle’s famous misspelling of the word “potato” fueled the

cartoonish image of him as a young pretty boy unqualified for
the job. It is the one thing most people remember about Quayle,
and it has been impossible for him to shake off. At a 1992 spelling
bee for sixth-g rade students at a New Jersey school, Quayle was
handed a flash card with an “e” tacked onto “potato.” He sat on a
stool as a twelve-year-old student spelled “potato” correctly on the
blackboard. “Add a little bit to the end there,” he said, watching
as the student incorrectly added an unnecessary “e.” It launched a
relentless assault by the media. In a recent interview, well over two
decades later, Quayle wanted to make the point that the teacher
handed him a flash card with the word misspelled. “You think
that was fair?” he asked rhetorically. “Not even close.” He likened
it to Gerald Ford being unfairly mocked for being clumsy. “We
probably didn’t do as good a job as we should have pushing back
right away, getting the teacher out there to say that she had given
him the card,” Kristol said. “We were flying back and we didn’t
think of it. We probably didn’t take it quite seriously enough.”
Bush thought that Quayle paid too high a price in the media for
the gaffe.
As an economic recession dragged on and news emerged that
Bush suffered heart fibrillations, people began taking a good look
at the young vice president and whether he was fit to be president
in a crisis. T-shirts were made with the famous Edvard Munch
painting of The Scream, with the caption: President Quayle? Accord-
ing to some polls, Quayle was less popular than Spiro Agnew. Bush
seriously considered dumping Quayle from the ticket in 1992.
Bush’s son, George W., was the biggest advocate for replacing him
with then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney. Cheney said he found
out years later that the younger Bush had urged his father to replace
Quayle with him. “I like Dan, he’s a good guy,” Cheney said. “I
think Bush subsequently was embarrassed by the troubles Dan en-
countered. When 43 [George W. Bush] said to 41 [George H. W.
Bush] that he should replace Quayle, it implied criticism of a major

180 first in line
decision he made.” In a remarkable twist, Donald Trump, then a

Manhattan real estate tycoon, let Bush aide Lee Atwater know he
was available to replace Quayle. Bush wrote in his diary at the time
that he found the offer “strange and unbelievable.” Trump insists
that Atwater approached him: “I said, ‘I don’t know, Lee, you can
check it out if you want, but it doesn’t sound right,’ because at that
time, I had no political aspirations.” Either way, Quayle’s job was
on the line.
Quayle’s chief of staff, Bill Kristol, who had many friends in
the media, was not amused by the speculation and secretly worked
against it. During the reelection campaign, Kristol had a conversa-
tion with Bush campaign strategist Robert Teeter. “I’m not going
to mobilize any of these people against Bush if he decides to drop
Quayle. It’s his call.” But, Kristol added, “if you guys start leak-
ing on the other hand to try and nudge Quayle off, I get a chance
to fight back.” When Kristol saw stories that were obvious leaks
from Bush’s team suggesting that Quayle would be knocked off
the ticket, he called a friend at the Washington Post and the paper
ran a story confirming that Quayle would remain on the ticket.
“It was a little exaggerated I would say because I had not been in
those meetings,” Kristol recalled. “They were annoyed about that,
but then they couldn’t do anything about it.” Ultimately, Bush de-
cided against dropping Quayle because he would have looked dis-
loyal and it would have given the impression, as it had when Ford
dumped Rockefeller, that he was questioning his own judgment.
Bush used to say, “Loyalty is not a character flaw,” and the question
about Quayle was the ultimate test of loyalty.
Quayle had some successes as vice president, though they were
largely overlooked. When the administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency, William Reilly, disagreed with Quayle about
an issue and tried to maneuver around him, Quayle took it straight
to the president before Reilly could. Bush sided with his vice pres-
ident. For Quayle it was an important test of a vice president’s
leverage. “You’ve got to support me because if you start letting

one Cabinet secretary come to you and you side with him, I’m
finished,” Quayle told the president. “I won’t be effective.”
On Election Day in 1992, Quayle went home to vote in Indi-
ana and ran into the man he had beaten for Congress sixteen years
before. It was a sign that his political life had come full circle. That
night, the Bush-Quayle ticket lost to Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
Quayle says he does not regret how his political career ended. He
is unshakably loyal to Bush, no matter how painful those four years
were. “I had a good run, I came close,” he sighed. “I didn’t get the
brass ring.”

X
From Friendship to Betrayal:

The Breakup of Al Gore and Bill Clinton
For almost all those eight years the relationship was one
between brothers—that may be a cliché and I run the risk of
overstatement, but really we became extremely close.
—A L GOR E ON HIS R EL AT IONSHIP W ITH BILL CLINTON IN THE W HITE HOUSE
Forgiveness means surrendering your anger.

—A L GOR E AT A SEP TEMBER 1998 MEET ING W ITH CA BINET
MEMBER S IN THE W HITE HOUSE R ESIDENCE A F TER BILL
CLINTON A DMIT TED HIS A F FA IR W ITH MONICA LEW INSK Y
He had mixed feelings about running for president.

It was a monkey off his back that he lost.
—A FR IEND OF A L GOR E’S ON HIS 2000 LOSS
A
couple of days after the shocking results of the 2016
presidential election, a reeling Hillary Clinton received
a phone call. It was from her husband’s former vice pres-
ident, Al Gore. She and Gore, once rivals for power and influence
inside the Clinton White House, were now in a small club of los-
ers. They are among a handful of seemingly cursed presidential
candidates who won the popular vote but lost the Electoral Col-
lege. Gore said he called Clinton to empathize. “She doesn’t need

184 first in line
any advice from me,” he said. “It was commiserating and reaching
out to say, in her husband’s famous phrase, ‘I feel your pain.’ ”
Gore and Clinton share a peculiar fate: Clinton beat Donald
Trump in the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes and Trump
won the Electoral College with 304 votes compared to Clinton’s
227 votes. Gore won the popular vote more narrowly, with 50.9
million votes compared to Bush’s 50.4 million, but it is still up
for debate whether he won the Electoral College. After the Su-
preme Court decision halting the thirty-six-day recount of votes
in Florida, which, if allowed to continue, might have given Gore
the lead, Florida went narrowly to George W. Bush, giving him
271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266. Clinton and Gore are the only
living examples of candidates who won the popular vote and lost
the election, but it happened three times before: in 1824 Andrew
Jackson won the popular vote and lost the electoral college to John
Quincy Adams; in 1876 Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but
lost to Rutherford B. Hayes; and in 1888 Grover Cleveland was
defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison, who lost the popular
vote but won more votes in the Electoral College.
Ron Klain, who has the distinction of serving as chief of staff for
two vice presidents, Al Gore and Joe Biden, described the Clinton
call as “nice” and “courteous,” but added, “I don’t think there’s
been deep bonding.” Gore’s 2000 loss has been compared to a
death in the family, and for years afterward Gore disappeared from
public view. Karenna Gore, the eldest of his four children, called
her father’s loss “the heartbreak of a lifetime,” and aides to Gore
say they’ve argued among themselves which was worse—Gore
won fewer popular votes than Hillary Clinton did, but he arguably
won the Electoral College in the closest presidential election in the
country’s history. Gore often says now that the years have softened
the blow: “You know the old saying, ‘You win some, you lose
some’—and then there’s that little-k nown third category.” During
the 2016 campaign Gore told Carter Eskew, who ran the adver-
tising and messaging team for his 2000 campaign, that he thought

from friendship to betrayal 185
Trump could defeat Clinton. “I don’t think he was shocked by his

[Trump’s] victory,” Eskew said. “But he’s not sitting around cri-
tiquing her campaign.” Gore did not attend the 2016 Democratic
National Convention, and aides say there is no closure between
Gore and Hillary. “Having the second-h ighest leader in the party
in the United States not being there for the convention seems like
a signal,” said Ann Walker Marchant, who worked on the Hillary
Clinton campaign and in the Bill Clinton White House.
Walter Mondale expressed surprise that Al Gore did not make
an appearance at the 2016 Democratic convention. “There’s some-
thing going on there,” Mondale mused. “I went to the convention,
vice presidents usually do . . . I expected him to be there.” Clinton
allies were starting to get angry, and Gore’s friends were beginning
to get embarrassed, that it was taking Gore so long to endorse
Hillary. According to hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, top
Hillary aide Huma Abedin wrote, “Hard to put on email but there
is no love lost in this relationship.” Abedin warned campaign chair
John Podesta and aide Cheryl Mills that Gore had told the team in
2015 that Hillary would not get his endorsement. He did not en-
dorse her in 2008, when she ran in the primaries, either, and when
Mills suggested Gore might change his mind Abedin replied: “No.
[It’s] bad.” Gore finally endorsed her in a July 2016 tweet. The two
had a long and complicated history that was not easy to get over.
Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is the St. Albans- and Harvard-educated
son of the distinguished longtime Democratic Tennessee senator
Albert Gore Sr. and Pauline LaFon Gore, who was a tireless cam-
paigner and one of the first female lawyers to graduate from Van-
derbilt University. He was born in 1948, in Washington, D.C., and
spent most of his childhood shuttling between an elegant suite atop
the Fairfax Hotel along Washington’s Embassy Row and his fam-
ily’s large farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where he spent his sum-
mers. From childhood he was told the presidency was his destiny.
Before he was born his father instructed editors at the Tennessean
that if he had a son he did not want to see it buried in the paper.

186 first in line
When Gore was born the headline on the front page read, “Well,
Mr. Gore, here he is, on page 1.” Harvard was the only college
he applied to. He was close with his only sibling, Nancy, who was
ten years older and died of lung cancer in 1984. Gore was a disci-
plined and competitive student; under his photo in his St. Albans
yearbook classmates wrote, “It probably won’t be long before Al
reaches the top.” At Harvard he earned a degree with high honors
in government after writing a senior thesis titled “The Impact of
Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947–1969.”
Even though he opposed the Vietnam War, Gore enlisted in
the army and served in Vietnam as a military journalist. When he
returned he worked as an investigative reporter at the Tennessean
and went to Vanderbilt University Law School before dropping out
to run for his father’s former seat in the House in 1976. He won
the next three elections and eventually ran for and won a Senate
seat in 1984. In 1988, at what he describes as the “hubristic” age
of thirty-n ine, he ran for president and lost his party’s nomination
to Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. He was four years
younger than John F. Kennedy when he ran. He has spent his en-
tire life trying to fulfill the impossibly high hopes his parents had
for him. Weeks before the 2000 election, Gore’s mother told him
she was going to Nashville to select her election night dress. “I am
so proud of you,” she said.
From the early heady days of the 1992 campaign, when Bill Clin-
ton defied the traditional strategy of balancing the ticket and picked
a moderate Southern baby boomer as his running mate and kicked
off a bus tour with the image of two young couples on a double
date set to a soundtrack provided by Fleetwood Mac, to the devas-
tating 2000 loss, the relationship between Bill Clinton and Al Gore
was nothing short of Shakespearean. After the election, and before
the Clintons moved into the White House, Gore was among a
handful of key advisers, including Hillary, who huddled around

a table at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock and helped pick

Cabinet appointees.
But there were signs of trouble to come from the beginning.
The bonds that were forged were strong but not unbreakable. They
went through a lot together, and the highs were very high and
the disappointment incredibly difficult. Unlike Biden and Obama,
who grew closer over time, Gore and Clinton’s relationship grew
more strained as the years went by.
In 1992, when the young couples took off on the campaign bus
trip from New York to the heartland, Hillary’s close friend and
campaign scheduler Susan Thomases tried to get the Gores off the
bus. “She was dismissive of then-senator Gore during a conference
call, basically calling Al’s idea to continue the bus trip ‘stupid,’ ”
said Roy Neel, who was Gore’s chief of staff in the Senate and later
as vice president. “You just don’t do that.” On that conference call
with Clinton aides in the War Room in Little Rock on the very
first day of the trip, Gore made it clear that would not be happen-
ing. He and Clinton were a team on an almost equal footing, and
he would not be subservient. In a Los Angeles Times poll conducted
less than three months before Clinton announced Gore as his run-
ning mate, Clinton came behind then-president George H. W.
Bush and Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who ran as an independent.
When he picked Gore as his running mate that changed. Gore had
an attitude that they won the White House together, and while
it was not a 50/50 relationship, he thought he should be given 20
percent of the picks for Cabinet secretaries and 10 percent of the
seats at state dinners. His attitude was, I helped build this, I’m a co-
owner, a minority owner, but a co-owner, and so I should get some share of
what we’re building.
When a rumor circulated that Thomases was making the case
that Hillary should have what had become the traditional vice
president’s office in the West Wing, Gore and his team were furi-
ous and the rumor was quickly quashed. (Hillary eventually settled
for another office, though one still in the West Wing.) Gore had

188 first in line
to wait until Clinton picked Mack McLarty as his chief of staff to

come to a formal understanding of what his role would be in the ad-
ministration. Neel sat down with McLarty and used the Mondale-
Carter memo as their basic understanding and rewrote parts of it.
Gore and Neel were called to a 7:30 p.m. meeting with Clinton to
discuss the memo at the Governor’s Mansion. The meeting didn’t
begin until 10:00 p.m., with Clinton ticking through each point.
He stopped when he read that Gore’s vice presidential chief of staff
would also be an assistant to the president. “This is very impressive,
has this ever happened?” he asked. Neel said that Mondale’s chief
of staff had been an assistant to Carter, and Clinton nodded, “Well,
that sounds fine.” Gore would have a weekly lunch with Clinton,
and be part of every major national security debate in the White
House. At the first Cabinet meeting the day after the inauguration,
Clinton told his team that a call from Gore should be treated like
a call from Clinton.
Much of the relationship between Clinton and Gore was
negotiated—it was about give-and-take. “Gore regarded it as a
contractual obligation that they have a weekly lunch,” said Ron
Klain, who was Gore’s chief of staff after Neel left. Clinton’s chief
of staff dreaded having to call Klain to tell him when Clinton had
to reschedule. And there was always a negotiation: if Clinton could
not do their weekly lunch one week—maybe because he had to
travel or his schedule was too jammed—he would have to make it
up to Gore and meet with him at eight o’clock at night, or when-
ever he could find the time. “The meeting happened every single
week no matter what,” Klain recalled. “Clinton knew it, his chief
of staff knew it. It had to happen.” Clinton’s staff was annoyed at
having a weekly lunch locked in, but they also admired Gore for
getting so many concessions from the president.
Before Gore’s lunches with Clinton, his aides would send
memos to Klain, who religiously collected questions and notes
and handed them to the vice president before lunch. During their
lunches, Gore would update Clinton on the most important issues

he was working on and sometimes act as a conduit, carrying mes-

sages, including requests for the president to come to certain events
that his West Wing staff had turned down but that Gore thought
were important. “Please reconsider” would be the message. Gore
would diligently work through his list, and when lunch was over
he would return to his office and take out a pair of scissors. Sitting
at his desk, he’d cut out different requests or areas of discussion
and write a little note with the president’s response. Klain would
collect the shards of paper and deliver them to the aides who had
suggested a question or topic. Gore remembers the lunches as a
mutually beneficial ritual. “If the relationship between the two
principals is a really good one, those weekly lunches become a kind
of oasis for the president to really let his or her hair down and talk
about issues and problems of all varieties, including relationship
issues, including personal chemistry affecting the interactions of
different members of the White House staff and the Cabinet.”
But there is a reason why there are former staffers who to this
day still identify themselves as “Clinton people” or “Gore peo-
ple,” and much of that is tied up in the complicated relationship
between Gore and both Clintons. Gore thought he was the heir
apparent and had served as a dutiful vice president for eight years,
only to have his presidential ambitions quashed by the president’s
affair with twenty-two-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky. The
affair began in November 1995 and Clinton and Lewinsky had
almost a dozen sexual encounters over the next year and a half,
most of them in the Oval Office. The affair became public more
than two years after it started and the media firestorm consumed
the rest of Clinton’s presidency. “The Lewinsky revelation basically
froze the presidential campaign,” Neel said. Gore, Neel recalled,
“had to come to the aid and defense of the President at that point.
That really knocked us for a loop for a long time.” Maybe, some
in Gore’s camp speculated, Clinton did not want Gore to succeed.
“One of the things about being vice president is that it is infan-
tilizing,” said Carter Eskew. “Gore refused to be infantilized and

190 first in line
yet in the public’s mind he was always the one standing at attention
behind Clinton . . . The idea that Al wasn’t strong enough and he
needed Bill to push him over the finish line would send a very bad
message to voters.” Even without the challenges presented by the
scandals that engulfed the Clinton White House, vice presidents
win their party’s nomination but are faced with the question: How,
after eight years of one presidency, can a sitting vice president con-
vince the American people that there will be change? In American
politics, “change” is a very powerful word.
Rewind almost a decade. In June 1992 Gore was at the Ashby Inn
in rural Virginia, about sixty miles outside of Washington, with his
friend Carter Eskew. At the time, Eskew said that Gore “was just a
senator from Tennessee and not somebody you would recognize.”
The waitresses knew Eskew, who was a frequent guest, and asked
him who he thought Clinton would pick as his running mate—
none of them recognized Gore. “I remember distinctly him saying
to me, ‘I believe Clinton’s going to choose me,’ ” Eskew recalled.
“I was locked in the old-school way of thinking, ‘Why in the hell
would he pick a clone? Someone who’s the same age; neighboring
state; new Democrat. I literally thought he was delusional and I
said, ‘What makes you think that?’ And Al’s best reason was that
in his meetings with Clinton he had really connected with him.
Of course everyone felt they connected with Clinton. That was
Clinton’s great gift. I thought, this poor bastard is really going to
be disappointed. And just days later, in the middle of the night, Al
called me and he said, ‘I’ve been picked.’ ”
Gore got the call at his Carthage, Tennessee, home just before
midnight on July 8. His nearly three-hour meeting days before
with Clinton was exceptionally important. Roy Neel recalled the
excitement of the night. Dozens of television satellite trucks and
reporters gathered at the bottom of the hill at the Gore family’s
home. “At one point we have binoculars looking at reporters and

seeing that they had binoculars looking at us,” Neel said. Early
the next morning the Clinton campaign sent a jet to Nashville,
and Clinton and Gore began a whirlwind partnership that spanned
almost a decade.
But once he made it to the White House as vice president, Gore
was in the unenviable position of often facing off against the most
powerful first lady in American history. There can only be one
second-most-important person in the White House, and there were
two strong contenders for that title—and, for the first time since
Edith Bolling Galt Wilson took over the presidency after her hus-
band’s stroke, it was the first lady and not a member of the president’s
senior staff challenging the vice president’s position.
One of the reasons why Clinton picked Gore was because he
reminded him of Hillary: strong, organized, smart, and loyal. But
the White House is surprisingly small. The two fought over turf
almost like a brother and sister fighting over their father’s attention.
“It was a team of rivals,” said one former Gore aide. Hillary had
her own team in the White House, the so-called Hillaryland, a
group of mostly female advisers. She was so often surrounded by
adoring staffers vying for her attention that Hillary would joke and
say “Mommy, am I pretty?” mocking their desperate attempts for
her approval.
“The relationship between presidents and their vice presidents
is like a marriage,” said Steve Ricchetti, who was Bill Clinton’s
deputy chief of staff and later Joe Biden’s chief of staff. “You
have to work at it and you have to be intentional about it.” And
no one could compete against the president’s wife. “She was at
the table,” says Ann Marchant, who worked for Bill Clinton as
director of research in the White House. “If anyone was rankled
by it they were not there for long!” When asked in an interview
for this book what it was like working in an administration with
the most active family member since Robert Kennedy, Gore de-
clined to answer and said facetiously he thought the interview
might have to be cut short.

192 first in line
The Clinton administration developed a theory it called sequenc-

ing, with big initiatives like healthcare reform, welfare reform, and
reinventing government competing against each other because the
administration wanted to tackle only one large issue at a time. There
was a lot of arm wrestling between Gore and Hillary over whether
or not reinventing government, which was his assignment, would go
before or after healthcare reform, which was hers. Hillary won out.
Within the structure of the White House, they were some-
times pitted against each other because they both had assignments
they wanted to succeed at, and there’s only so much oxygen to go
around. In 1994 Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black
president and his inauguration was an important political event,
so important that two of the highest-ranking Clinton officials at-
tended it: Hillary went on one plane with her staff and Al Gore
went on another. Who was going to represent the United States
at Mandela’s inauguration? Neither were heads of state. It struck
Gore staffers as strange that they did not go together, as one delega-
tion. Hillary’s West Wing office was close to Gore’s, but they were
rarely seen talking casually with each other. Soon Gore’s staff came
to the realization that the vice president and the first lady were just
too much alike: “Of course they don’t like each other, because they
are each other,” said a Gore aide. “They’re exactly the same person:
wooden on the stump; come off as cold and phony and preachy;
nobody likes them because they’re the smartest kid in the class. But
in fact they were also both very organized, linear, conscientious
thinkers.” After every campaign stop Gore would walk back on
the plane or bus and yell, to no one in particular, “Wires!,” and
staffers would scurry to get him the latest from the AP and Reuters
so he would have the most up-to-date information at his disposal.
And Gore sprinkled so many facts into his remarks and in debate
prep that Clinton adviser James Carville offered some unsolicited
advice: “One fact! One message! One theme! Say it three times!”
Sarah Bianchi, who was a policy adviser to Gore and later to
Biden, said of Hillary Clinton and Gore: “They’re both very ana-

lytical. They don’t have the connectivity. Both of them were likely
to answer your heartfelt question with a policy answer.” Gore’s
speeches could be so dry that even low-ranking aides felt the need
to chime in with advice. During the 2000 campaign, one Clin-
ton aide sent Gore an email suggesting that he keep ceremonial
speeches to less than a thousand words and major policy speeches
to less than two thousand. “The Gettysburg Address, of course,
was about 266 words,” the aide pointed out. “One other thing
I think your speechwriters ought to keep in mind: perhaps they
could avoid the word ‘acknowledged’ altogether. I think people
feel much better about being thanked rather than acknowledged.”
No one could have predicted how much Gore’s relationship
with Bill Clinton would deteriorate, but there were signs at the
beginning that set the stage for rivalry. In 1992 most members
of Clinton’s campaign team opposed the choice of Gore because
they thought Gore would never want to play second fiddle. But
Clinton ultimately decided on Gore because he had a strong set of
strengths to balance his, including foreign policy experience in the
Senate. In Gore, Clinton saw a loyal soldier. Bruce Reed was Al
Gore’s speechwriter during the Clinton-Gore 1992 campaign and
worked with Gore on his convention speech. “There was a line in
the speech with Gore saying, ‘I don’t know what it’s like to lose a
father, but I know what it’s like to lose a sister and almost lose a son,’
and Clinton in his acceptance speech after that had a line about los-
ing his father,” Reed said. “The campaign staff fought and fought
and fought to try to get us not to use that line . . . We ended up
keeping it.” (The line humanized Gore but did draw some crit-
icism for using his son’s pain to win political points.) Clinton’s
campaign staff wanted to save the best material for Clinton; the
presidential candidate gets the first choice on everything. Clinton
was not pleased with Gore’s performance in a fall debate with Vice
President Dan Quayle, who said Clinton lacked the moral author-
ity to be president. Gore, Clinton said, should have come to his
defense more stridently. Hillary agreed.

194 first in line
During the first term Gore had a good relationship with Clin-
ton, despite his turf battles with Hillary. “For almost all those eight
years the relationship was one between brothers—that may be a
cliché and I run the risk of overstatement, but really we became
extremely close,” Gore said. Gore, who is often lampooned for
being unbearably dull, actually has a dry sense of humor and used
to make Clinton laugh. Like Clinton, Gore’s weight was always
an issue and he often requested workout equipment in his hotel
rooms when he traveled. The navy stewards would put a plate of
doughnuts in the middle of the table during Cabinet meetings, and
“you couldn’t get at the doughnuts for Clinton and Gore stuffing
their faces,” said Elaine Kamarck, who worked in the White House
from 1993 to 1997. “They both were like little porkers who ate too
much and then tried to jog to get rid of the pounds.”
Gore was good at getting Clinton, who is famously easily dis-
tracted and disorganized, to focus. He pushed Clinton to act deci-
sively and swiftly in the Balkans and Haiti. Clinton was wrestling
with how to balance the risks and benefits of U.S. intervention in
Bosnia when Gore pushed for intervention to respond to the Serbian
slaughter of Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia. Gore sat in the Oval
Office in the chair on the president’s right that’s used by visiting
heads of state, along with Clinton’s secretary of defense, secretary of
state, national security adviser, and Gore’s national security adviser
Leon Fuerth. He told them about a conversation he had with his old-
est daughter, Karenna, who was in her early twenties. At breakfast in
the Naval Observatory that morning she showed him a front-page
story in the newspaper about a woman from Srebrenica—where
thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian
Serbs—who hanged herself after being gang raped. The horrific
story stuck with Gore. “Is it really true that the United States cannot
do anything about this?” Karenna asked her father. “I recounted the
conversation that I had had over breakfast,” Gore recalled. “And I
said, ‘What is the answer to her question?’ And our policy changed
in that moment and he [President Clinton] directed the team to

draw up plans.” In the summer of 1995 the United States took a

leadership role to stop the war in Bosnia.
For Gore, the more briefings, the better. Aides worried that
he was consumed with impressing Clinton, showing up at every
meeting and essentially “staffing” the president. But Gore brought
a steadiness to the White House that Clinton, who was almost al-
ways running hours late and operated on what both political and
residence staff referred to as “Clinton standard time,” was sorely
lacking. When Clinton was waffling on his 1993 economic plan,
Gore told him, “You can get with the goddamn program!” Gore
aide Elaine Kamarck said, “One of the other tragedies of this
White House is that they were a terrific team in the first term.” As
Gore remembers it, there were few instances when they disagreed.
“There were one or two times in the eight years where he had a
different view and I was unable to argue him out of it, only one or
two or maybe two or three.”
Gore’s similarities to Clinton both in age and Southern roots
made him think that if he just tweaked a few things—became
more affable, loosened up a bit—then he, too, could be president.
Gore had been training his memory for decades, taking speed-
reading courses and reading about methods to help him remember
names and faces quickly—something Clinton did effortlessly. All
those times Gore had to stand behind Clinton during formal re-
marks only added to the impression that he was a wooden creature
of Washington.
Jamal Simmons, who worked for Gore when he was vice pres-
ident and was deputy communications director for Gore’s 2000
campaign, said there was the feeling inside the Gore campaign that
the attention of White House aides was divided between Gore’s
presidential run and Hillary’s run for the U.S. Senate in 2000.
Gore and his advisers struggled with whether to take on all the
weight of Bill Clinton’s presidency and take Clinton, an impeached
president embroiled in scandal, up on his offers to campaign for
Gore, or to distance themselves from him.

196 first in line
There were also deep problems with Gore as a campaigner.

Sarah Bianchi recalled how nervous Gore was campaigning in
New Hampshire in 2000 and how he would want to be briefed on
exactly who he was talking to at every turn. He was more com-
fortable talking about global warming or the budget—he needed
index cards in case he forgot what he was going to say in a send-off
to a loyal aide who was resigning. A staff member remembered
how he would stand in front of a voter after a rally and say some-
thing stilted like, “So I understand that you’re suffering from can-
cer.” Aides would try to loosen him up by telling him jokes before
he went onstage. Once when his speechwriter found a funny story
to include in one of his speeches, Gore asked him, “Where did you
get this anecdote?” Then he pressed him, “Did you get the author’s
approval?” Gore seemed so uncomfortable reciting the humorous
lines that he bungled them. Gore rarely thanked his staff. “Gore is
an intellectual,” Bianchi said. “You’re a staff person, you’re part of
the process.” He is a policy wonk who enjoyed conversations that
might start out with, What was the most impactful thing that’s happened
in healthcare ever—immunizations or hygiene? Not a resounding cam-
paign rallying cry.
In the end, Gore’s reaction to, and specifically Tipper Gore’s
disgust with, Clinton’s affair and his repeated denials drove Gore
away from running on the Clinton record in 2000 and he strug-
gled to find balance between his past and his future. Clinton had
told his vice president as he was standing in the entryway of the
Oval Office that he did not have sex with Lewinsky. Gore looked
unconvinced and spent the following months of 1998 complaining
to aides about how difficult the scandal was making it to get policy
done, without directly weighing in on his own feelings of personal
betrayal. When he asked an adviser one day, with the door to his
office closed, whether he believed Clinton was telling the truth,
the aide said flatly, “No.” Gore was silent. Clinton only came clean
about the affair to Gore a week before he admitted the truth to the
public and after he had denied the allegations for seven months.

On August 10, 1998, in the back of a limousine in Chicago,

Gore finally asked Clinton whether it was true. When Clinton
simply expressed how disappointed he was with himself Gore re-
plied: “Well, this is the first time you have apologized to me per-
sonally.” After his confession, Clinton was in good spirits but Gore
emerged from the car upset, offended, and conflicted about what
it all would mean for his own presidential ambitions. Seven days
later, on August 17, 1998, Clinton became the first president to
testify as the subject of a grand jury investigation. After a marathon
four-and-a-half-hour testimony conducted via closed-circuit tele-
vision from the historic Map Room of the White House, Clinton
confessed on national television later that evening to the “inap-
propriate relationship” with Lewinsky. A month later, Clinton in-
vited members of his Cabinet to a meeting in the private residence
to apologize for his affair with Lewinsky and for lying to them
about it. The president talked about his policy accomplishments
and admitted to his bad behavior. He said that he owed them an
apology, much as he did his own family, saying he had “work”
to do to mend the broken relationships there. Health and Human
Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala was less forgiving than some
of her colleagues, telling Clinton that he had an obligation to be
a moral leader. Clinton told her that if personal morality was so
important, then Nixon would have been elected president in 1960
instead of Kennedy, who was a known philanderer. Clinton said
he had been furious for four and a half years, when Independent
Counsel Kenneth Starr began looking into charges, including the
Whitewater land deal and the firing of several longtime White
House employees in the Travel Office, a scandal known as Travel
gate. The revelation of Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky stemmed
from Starr’s investigation and Clinton considered the whole thing
to be a witch hunt. Some Cabinet members quoted Scripture in the
meeting, as did Clinton, but Gore had a specific message: Clinton
had made mistakes but now must understand that receiving “for-
giveness means surrendering your anger.”

198 first in line
Clinton’s impeachment cast a permanent shadow on their joint

accomplishments. After Clinton’s grand jury testimony, Gore did
not publicly defend him. He released a brief statement that in-
cluded the sentence, “I am proud of him, not only because he is
a friend, but because he is a person who has had the courage to
acknowledge mistakes.” Privately, Clinton bristled at his vice pres-
ident’s judgment and moralizing. Gore watched part of the House
impeachment vote with Clinton in the private study off of the
Oval Office. “It’s not fair, what they’ve done to you,” Gore told
Clinton. But he was deeply worried about the damage Clinton’s
indiscretions would have on his own future.
In an interview with ABC News’s Diane Sawyer at the beginning

of his 2000 campaign, when he wanted to talk about almost any-
thing else, Sawyer asked Gore what he thought when he heard the
truth about Clinton and Lewinsky. “You can imagine how I felt,”
he said. “What he did was inexcusable, and particularly as a father
I felt that it was terribly wrong.” Gore was not entirely free from
scandal himself. He made multiple fund-raising phone calls from
his West Wing office during the 1996 reelection campaign and he
was criticized for his aggressive fund-raising role even by some
Democrats.
Gore knew what he had to do in order to win, but creating
his own identity while celebrating the administration’s successes
and downplaying the scandals that consumed the Clinton White
House would prove too difficult. “You’re number two,” Gore said,
“and whether it’s in politics or business or other professions, you
have to make a transition from being number two to number one.”
Gore pollster Stan Greenberg made the case that Gore should
not run on the Clinton-Gore record and should distance himself
from Clinton. In a memo ten days before the November general
election, Greenberg urged the Gore campaign team to use Gore’s
running mate, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, to do so, largely

because of his previous moral denunciations of Clinton: “Lieber-

man will have to take the lead in attacking Bush not being up to
the task of extending our prosperity, but he will need to show that
Gore-Lieberman is consumed with restoring the moral force of the
family.” Gore chose to follow Greenberg’s advice. They needed to
capture the under-fifty non-college-educated white women who
questioned Gore’s morality because of his association with Clinton,
Greenberg said.
Former Clinton aides maintain that not using Bill Clinton to
campaign for him was the single biggest mistake Gore made. But,
according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released eight
months before the election, half the public believed at the time
that Gore was tainted by his association with Clinton. Responding
to the statement “Al Gore is too close to Bill Clinton to provide
the fresh start the country needs,” 49 percent of those polled agreed
and 49 percent disagreed. When Gore’s campaign was not going
well his aides laid the blame on Clinton. “There are only really
three possibilities,” says Ron Klain. “One is, It’s going quite fine and
just tune out all this noise, which is what I said. The other option is,
It’s not going well because you Mr. Vice President are not performing well as
a candidate, and the third is, It’s not going well because this other guy over
here is totally screwing you up. And obviously the third is appealing
advice to give to someone. It’s not your fault, it’s the other guy’s fault.
And so resentment of the president became a big thing and my po-
sition was, I would not indulge that.” In the end, Klain said, it was
tempting for the vice president to believe that none of it was his fault.
“Those of us who were telling him no, it’s not all Clinton’s fault,
became unpopular, and one by one we all got fired, Bob Squier [a
close friend and adviser to Gore] first, Mark Penn [Gore’s pollster]
second, and myself third.”
Carter Eskew ran the message and advertising team for Gore’s
presidential campaign and said that the decision not to use Clin-
ton was made for purely political reasons and not emotional ones.
But it was impossible to separate the personal from the political.

200 first in line
Although Hillary and Gore were horrified by Bill’s affair with

Lewinsky, it stuck with Tipper most. “She was furious at him,”
said Elaine Kamarck. “She was much madder than Al, but he was
mad, too.” In the end, he was mad because he was betrayed, but
Hillary had been through this before. She knew who she was mar-
ried to—Gore thought they were genuine friends. The election
was a fight over undecided voters who made up a very narrow slice
of the electorate—half of whom thought Clinton was a pariah. Es-
kew said the idea of Gore relying on his boss to carry his message
would have been foolish and would not only have not helped him
but would have arguably hurt him. And there was no way to use
Clinton in some states and not in others; it had to be all or nothing.
“You can’t hide the president of the United States—if he goes out
on the road he doesn’t just speak to one population, he speaks to
all populations.”
Clinton thought Gore needed to get over the scandal, as Hil-
lary had. Ten days after his acquittal by the Senate on February
12, 1999, Clinton told his friend historian Taylor Branch that a
Gore-Clinton (as in Hillary Clinton) ticket could not be beat in
2000. “Hands down,” he said, “but I don’t think Al would ever
do it.” His own wife, Clinton said, had been quicker to forgive
him than his vice president. “I thought he was in Neverland,”
Clinton said of Gore. Clinton was incredulous: Hillary ran on the
Clinton-Gore record and went on to win her New York Senate
race in 2000 by double digits, marking the first time a first lady
had ever been elected to public office. If she could get over it, why
couldn’t he?
The two men who had once been friends and partners met alone
for a two-hour conversation after Gore lost the election, a meeting
that was deliberately kept off their public schedules. The discussion
was a political autopsy of what went wrong, and there was plenty of
blame to go around. Clinton said he understood why Gore wanted
to run on his own, but at the end of the day, Clinton argued, he
could have been helpful in some key states, particularly his home

state of Arkansas, which Gore lost by less than 5 percentage points.

In New Hampshire, Clinton said, Bush won by a slim margin,
and Clinton had approval ratings over 60 percent there. If he had
gone there, Clinton argued, Gore would be president. “I think you
made a mistake not to use me more in the last ten days,” Clinton
told him.
Throughout the tortured five-week period between the No-
vember 7 election and the Supreme Court’s December 12 ruling,
Democrats argued that the vote in Florida was rigged, that Florida
governor Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, was unfairly tilting
the recount. Gore reluctantly conceded and on December 13, he
told the American public that he was giving up his quest for the
presidency “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of
our democracy.” Weeks later, when the Bushes moved in on Inau-
guration Day 2001, it was hard to ignore Gore’s obvious annoyance
when the incoming president, George W. Bush, walked into the
Blue Room as coffee was being served. Bush, in a buoyant mood,
said to the butlers, many of whom he knew from his father’s four
years in the White House: “Told you I’d be back!”
When Gore lost it was understood that the Clintons were in
charge. “The Democratic Party was in the hands of the Clinton
machine and when Gore lost it meant that the party stayed loyal to
Clinton,” said Donna Brazile, who was Gore’s campaign manager
in 2000. “They blamed Gore for not embracing Clinton, the fact
that Gore lost was a validation that he should have run with Clin-
ton and not away from Clinton.”
Clinton and Gore did not stay in touch in the months following
Gore’s defeat. But tragedy brought them together. On 9/11 Gore
was in Austria and his second call was to Bill Clinton (his first
was to Tipper). Gore flew to Toronto and, because flights were
canceled, he rented a car and was planning to drive, with an aide,
all night to Washington, D.C., where President George W. Bush
had scheduled a prayer service at the National Cathedral for the
next day. But he got a call from Clinton around 11:00 a.m. “Why

202 first in line
don’t you stop off in Chappaqua and spend the night with me?”
he asked, freshly returned from his own trip. Gore arrived after
3:00 a.m. and the two stayed up talking and drinking all night.
“It’s hard to say we were having a good time in the midst of that
terrible tragedy—we were not—but it was great to be with him
again,” Gore recalled.
Al Gore and Hillary Clinton share a sense of historical irony,
having both lost close contests in part because of their association
with Bill Clinton. Since his 2000 defeat, Gore has won the No-
bel Peace Prize for his work on climate change and an Academy
Award for An Inconvenient Truth, his 2007 documentary on global
warming. In 2017 he released An Inconvenient Sequel. He has be-
come better known for his activism than for his eight years as vice
president. He told Klain that he regretted not spending more time
in the 2000 campaign talking about climate change and pushing
environmental issues. Aides recognized the issue was among the
few things that made him come alive on the campaign trail, but, at
the time, it had not yet captured the public’s attention.
According to a friend of Gore’s, losing the election was devastat-
ing for him but, in the end, it was a blessing. For a politician who
had spent his career positioning himself for the presidency, “it was
a relief that he had gotten that far,” the friend said. “He had mixed
feelings about running for president. It was a monkey off his back
that he lost.”

XI
The Shadow President:

Cheney and His Sidekick Bush
They’ve leaned on him [Cheney] a bunch, probably Pence the

most. They want to know how OVP [the office of the vice
president] runs, what’s its role and how you structure it.
— C HENEY A IDE NEIL PATEL ON TRU MP A DMINISTR AT ION
OF F ICI A LS ASK ING HIS OLD BOSS FOR A DV ICE
He was marginalized so much that it didn’t really matter. He

was the grouchy uncle yelling at everyone to get off the grass.
—F OR MER A MBASSA DOR CHR ISTOPHER HILL ON
CHENEY ’S ROLE IN BUSH’S SECOND TER M
Without question it was the most tense element of the relationship

between myself and the president . . . It’s a travesty.
—D ICK CHENEY ON GEORGE W. BUSH’S R EF USA L TO PA R DON HIS
FR IEND A ND FOR MER CHIEF OF STA F F SCOOTER LIBBY
D
ick Cheney splits his time between his ranch in Wyo-
ming and his elegant home in McLean, Virginia, across
the street from Bobby Kennedy’s old estate, Hickory Hill,
and a stone’s throw from CIA headquarters. He hosts the occasional
journalist, usually offering cups of coffee and making small talk in
his cozy office lined with books and a bust of Winston Churchill

204 first in line
that stands in the corner. He does not have a huge security detail,
but a couple of aides who worked for his family in the Observatory
have left their jobs to work for him now. Mike Pence has asked
Cheney, his most recent Republican predecessor, for advice, which
he is happy to provide. Pence has an office on the Senate side of
Capitol Hill—where vice presidents traditionally have an office
and where they technically preside as president of the Senate—and
one on the House side, too. Cheney said his example of having two
offices on Capitol Hill inspired Pence to do the same.
But Cheney, like most establishment Republicans, is worried
about President Trump. “I think Cheney’s just as lost as most of
us,” said a former aide who is still close to Cheney. “I don’t think
he really gets it and I don’t think most Republicans get it. Their
voters abandoned them for this crazy guy and I think they’re either
in denial or they don’t want to think about it.” Another former
senior Cheney aide said wryly, “I love that his legacy looks better
and better every day.”
As vice president, Cheney rather enjoyed his image as one of
the most polarizing figures in recent American history. Cheney’s
former chief policy adviser Neil Patel said that, during the second
term, he bought Cheney a Darth Vader costume complete with the
iconic mask, and he wore it into the Oval Office one day and posed
for a picture with aides. After leaving the White House, Cheney
drove a black pickup truck with a Darth Vader hitch cover.
His relationship with George W. Bush was all business. They
were never especially close to begin with—they watched election
night returns in 2000 and 2004 separately at the beginning of the
night and only gathered together when it looked like they would
win. The two did not socialize, but there was more give-and-take
than the satirical image of a mastermind pulling the levers of power
behind the scenes. Once Cheney joked, “Am I the evil genius in
the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole? It’s a nice
way to operate, actually.” Former Vice President Dan Quayle went
to visit Cheney around Inauguration Day 2001 and delivered a

the shadow president 205
bleak message: “Dick, you know, you’re going to be doing a lot

of this international traveling, you’re going to be doing all this
political fund-raising . . . you’ll be going to the funerals. I mean,
this is what vice presidents do. We’ve all done it.” With a sly grin
Cheney replied, “I have a different understanding with the presi-
dent.” Cheney’s dark image was a mutually beneficial part of their
dynamic: Bush did not mind being underestimated. If Cheney was
Darth Vader in the White House, ruthlessly seeking power and
using American military forces to upend the sovereignty of foreign
nations, that was fine with Bush.
After one debate prep at the vice presidential residence during
the 2004 campaign, Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby and Patel
took Cheney aside. “Sir, have you looked at your numbers?” Libby
asked him. His approval rating had fallen dangerously low as he be-
came the face of the Iraq War and the botched prewar intelligence
about Iraq’s chemical and nuclear weapons program used to justify
it. (On March 16, 2003, four days before the U.S.-led invasion of
Iraq, Cheney famously told Meet the Press host Tim Russert, “I
really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators . . . The read
we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they
want [is to] get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as
liberators the United States when we come to do that.”)
Cheney was not interested in poll numbers. “No, not really,” he
replied.
“You might want to take a look,” said Libby, “they’re pretty bad.”
Cheney asked for the numbers. “Should we get out and do more
press with you?” Libby asked.
Cheney laughed and replied, “You’ve got to remember, no one
is voting for vice president. I really don’t care.”
And he did not particularly care how he was viewed in Con-
gress, especially among Democrats. During the Senate class photo
in 2004 Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, and
Cheney got into a heated exchange on the Senate floor, where
swearing is against the rules. (The Senate was technically not in

206 first in line
session at the time.) Cheney, as president of the Senate, was there

for picture day and scolded Leahy over his criticism of Cheney’s
ties with Halliburton, one of the largest oil extraction companies
in the world. Democrats at the time were suggesting that he helped
Halliburton—where he was CEO from 1995 to 2000—win lucra-
tive contracts to rebuild Iraq. “Fuck off,” Cheney told Leahy.
Cheney is just five years older than Bush, but he had the kind
of Washington gravitas and influence that Bush was sorely lacking.
Cheney’s assistant Lucy Tutwiler recalls sitting at her desk outside
of Cheney’s West Wing office one day when the vice president was
traveling. Her desk faced the hallway and she watched in surprise
and amusement as Bush rode a bike down the hall in her direction.
He stopped at her desk and asked, “Where’s the vice president?”
He wanted to show off the bike, which she said was probably a gift,
to Cheney. When she told him Cheney was out, Bush took a lap
down to the Oval.
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska,
and has a long history in government rivaling George H. W. Bush’s.
He served as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff and President
George H. W. Bush’s defense secretary, with six terms as a Wyo-
ming congressman in between, including a stint as House minority
whip. In December 2008, after Barack Obama won the election,
Cheney attended a private breakfast with incoming White House
chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Cheney had been invited by then–
White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, who gathered together
thirteen of the living sixteen men who had served as chiefs of staff.
Emanuel went around the room seeking advice, and Cheney told
him, with a mischievious grin, “Whatever you do, make sure
you’ve got the vice president under control.” The room exploded
into laughter. (Trump’s former chief of staff Reince Priebus also
reached out to Dick Cheney for advice.)
Cheney firmly believes in the example Richard Nixon set on the
campaign trail when he was Eisenhower’s vice president. “I found
the best way to help was always to campaign for the President and

never for myself,” Nixon wrote to Bob Dole, when Dole was Ger-
ald Ford’s running mate. “Also remember that you should always
attack up and never horizontally.” That was precisely the strategy
Bush and Cheney used in the 2004 campaign when Cheney was
sent out to hammer Democratic challenger John Kerry—an as-
signment he thoroughly enjoyed. The Bush campaign tried to cre-
ate a Cheney-Kerry debate so that Bush could hover above the fray.
“On a daily basis we would tweak Kerry and Kerry would always
reply because Cheney has this gravitas,” said Patel. “We thought it
was hilarious. It’s hard to ignore it if Cheney is coming after you.”
A week after Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, were
nominated in 2004, Cheney gleefully taunted Kerry (not Edwards)
at a campaign event in Dayton, Ohio. Cheney used Kerry’s own
words against him and mocked him for saying he would wage a
“more sensitive” war on terror as the crowd roared with laugh-
ter. Great presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roos-
evelt “did not wage sensitive warfare,” Cheney said. “Those who
threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be
treated more sensitively. They need to be destroyed.”
Cheney’s vice presidency was like none before. He received the
top-secret President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, a ten-to fifteen-page
intelligence summary compiled by the CIA, in the early morning
hours at the Observatory, typically before the president himself saw
it. The PDB has been referred to as a newspaper with the smallest
circulation in the world. His chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was usu-
ally with him when he got the briefing. Vice presidents, Cheney
argues, should be playing an active role in national security issues,
if for no other reason than to prepare them to step into the presi-
dency in case of an emergency.
“I can see other vice presidents who didn’t have that background
or that interest. My personal view is that they need to develop that,
that that’s a key part of being president.” Cheney sometimes even
reshaped the PDB, telling intelligence briefers to present certain ma-
terial up front to the president. When he received the book, there

208 first in line
would be a tab, he said, and “behind the tab” would be things he

had specifically asked about. Cheney said he had more time to study
the briefing book than Bush did, given that the president was often
preoccupied with other official, and sometimes mundane, respon-
sibilities. According to his successor, Joe Biden, Cheney had a steel
door put on a room in the Observatory that he used as a sort of vice
presidential Situation Room so that he could participate in classified
meetings at any time. He had an insatiable appetite for work and was
up at 4:30 a.m. reading, and received a private intelligence briefing
between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. An hour later, he would be in the Oval
Office for the president’s daily briefing. When he was traveling,
Cheney had with him a solar-powered battery station that linked
him by satellite secure line to the Situation Room so he could go over
the PDB. No matter where he was, he had a CIA briefer with him,
including when he went on fishing trips at the remote south fork of the
Snake River along the Wyoming-Idaho border. President Trump, it
turns out, rarely reads the PDB and instead relies on the oral briefings.
Vice President Pence, however, receives the PDB daily.
Much of Cheney’s influence as vice president came from his
stewardship in the administration’s earliest days after 9/11. As a
young, ambitious Republican congressman, Cheney had taken part
in the Reagan administration’s clandestine exercises to prepare for
a global nuclear war with the Soviet Union. At least once a year
Cheney and his friend Donald Rumsfeld, who was a business exec-
utive at the time, would be ferried away to an undisclosed location
where they helped plan for a worst-case scenario where the presi-
dent, vice president, and Speaker of the House were dead or inca-
pacitated. The annual doomsday operations helped prepare Cheney
for his role as a wartime vice president. After the second plane hit
the World Trade Center, one of Cheney’s Secret Service agents
grabbed him by his belt and moved him to the Presidential Emer-
gency Operations Center (PEOC) in the basement of the White
House, where other senior aides were gathering. Another plane,
Flight 77, was believed to have been hijacked and was heading to-

ward Crown, the code word for the White House. In the basement
Cheney recalled lockers being opened and weapons being passed
out among the agents. Once in the basement tunnel, Cheney called
Bush, who was on Air Force One after leaving an event at a Florida
school, and advised him not to return to the White House. “He
didn’t like that at all,” Cheney said. “In the end he agreed to do it.”
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice; her deputy, Ste-
phen J. Hadley; economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey; White
House aide Mary Matalin; Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby;
and the vice president’s wife, Lynne, were gathered around the
television watching in horror. When the first tower fell there was
a collective groan in the room, but Cheney was quiet, his eyes
closed, saying nothing. Eventually the Secret Service asked sev-
eral staff members to leave the PEOC because they were putting a
strain on the air-conditioning and the piped-in oxygen supply in
the relatively small space.
That day came to define Cheney’s relationship with Bush. The
night of September 11, the Cheneys were evacuated to the se-
cluded Camp David, where they watched replays of the day’s hor-
rific events in the presidential cabin, Aspen Lodge. It was while at
Camp David that Cheney made notes to relentlessly go after the
terrorists and those who support terrorism. His remarks on NBC’s
Meet the Press on Sunday, September 16, 2001, began to define
what would become the “war on terror.” “We have to work the
dark side, if you will,” he said. “Spend time in the shadows of the
intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have
to be done quietly.” Bush and Cheney even sat down together for
more than three hours with members of the independent commis-
sion investigating the 9/11 attacks. Bush said it was important to
him that they appear together so that members of the commission
could “see our body language . . . how we work together.”
“It was the president’s suggestion,” Cheney said. “I thought it was
a good one. That our actions together on that day were as part of a
team.”

210 first in line
When the chairmen and ranking members of the House and

Senate Intelligence Committees arrived at the White House for
a briefing on surveillance shortly after September 11, they were
surprised to learn that they would be meeting with Cheney and
not the president. The president pointedly told then-senator Bob
Graham of Florida, who chaired the intelligence committee, that
the vice president would be the main point of contact on intelli-
gence matters.
“Prior to 9/11 we treated terrorism as a law enforcement prob-
lem,” Cheney said, pointing to the 1993 World Trade Center bomb-
ing and the conviction in federal court of the four men responsible
for the bombing that killed six people. “If you bought my view of
the world, 9/11 justified a far more robust response and that it was
an act of war. If you compare it to Pearl Harbor it was worse than
Pearl Harbor, worse in a sense that we lost 3,000 people compared
to 2,400 people. Pearl Harbor was a territory of the United States,
this had been a strike at the homeland,” Cheney reflected. “This
was an act of war and that meant in my mind tough aggressive
measures designed to go after those who were responsible and to
operate more aggressively than we ever have before.”
Cheney installed his top staff as members of the president’s staff
as well: Mary Matalin was both his communications director and
an assistant to the president; Scooter Libby was an adviser to both
Cheney and to the president. Cheney’s approach to the vice presi-
dency was in part shaped by his training as Ford’s chief of staff. He
rarely spoke during meetings and often was disconcertingly quiet,
offering other aides and Cabinet members little sense of where
he actually stood on an issue. This was done entirely on purpose.
When Cheney was alone with the president, he had tremendous
influence. “As chief of staff I felt the need to be an honest broker,
not to be the guy advocating cutting the defense budget publicly,
because if I’m doing that then the secretary of defense is going to
find some way to get around me to get to the president and then

you lose control of the process.” He had spent decades studying the
West Wing. Cheney jokes about being the oldest guy in the West
Wing and the only person the president could not fire.
Cheney attended weekly Senate Republican policy lunches on
the Hill but was as inscrutable in those as he was in West Wing
meetings. The Republican leader would open the lunch up and ask
the vice president to speak. “Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t,”
Cheney said, with a Cheshire-cat-like grin. “Cheney was very
disciplined about the nature of his relationship with the president
and how he interacted with the president in front of others,” said
Cheney aide Patel. “He wouldn’t weigh in at meetings very often,
he didn’t want people to know if there was daylight between him
and the president on issues. Even with his staff he didn’t come back
to us with a big readout on how the president reacted to something
in a private conversation. Cheney thought that would have been
improper.” He withheld his personal opinion often until he was
alone with the president, and the president was free to take it or not.
Cheney developed and pushed for the policy of trying foreign
terrorism suspects in closed military tribunals, thereby stripping
them of access to civilian courts. Attorney General John Ashcroft,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State
Colin Powell all disagreed, but Cheney used his stature and his
relationship with the president to circumvent them all. “In the
aftermath especially of 9/11, we needed to get things done, and
on occasion I would use the position I had, and the relationship
with the president I had, to short-circuit the system. No question
about it,” says Cheney. As Ford’s chief of staff he knew the system
well and knew exactly how to maneuver around it. Ashcroft was
especially angered by the fact that the Justice Department would
have no role in choosing which alleged terrorists would be tried in
military commissions. When Ashcroft went to the White House to
voice his concerns, he could not get an audience with the president
and instead found Cheney seated in the Roosevelt Room. As the
top law enforcement officer in the country he was incensed and

212 first in line
told Cheney and others in the room that he would need a role in
the tribunal process. On November 14, 2001, the day after Bush
signed the order creating the military tribunals, Cheney told the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce that terrorists do not “deserve to be
treated as prisoners of war.” The president did not yet support that
position, but after more than two months he decided in Cheney’s
favor: the Geneva Conventions should not be applied to Taliban
and al-Qaeda fighters who were captured in battle. (The Geneva
Conventions protect civilians and soldiers in war zones and have
been in place since 1949.)
Halfway through preparations for the reelection campaign in
2004, Cheney recalls making the president an unusual offer. “Look,
one of the things you can do to try and change the landscape out
there, maybe gain a few points, is to get yourself a new running
mate,” Cheney said. “I want you to know I’m prepared to step down
in a minute if you decide you want to do that—it’s fine with me, love
the job and am happy to proceed but you really need to have the op-
tion.” Cheney said he approached Bush three times and the first two
times Bush “just sort of blew it off,” but the third time he went away
and thought about it for a couple of days. Bush came back and told
him, “You’re my guy, Dick.” Cheney still wasn’t sure. “I watched
the situation in ’92 with his dad [and his decision to keep his vice
president, Dan Quayle, on the ticket during his reelection campaign]
where I think there was merit to the argument that if he had been
willing to change, not for me necessarily, but if he had gotten new
talent that might have helped his dad.”
There were occasions when Cheney found it “convenient” to
use his constitutional authority and be a member of both the ex-
ecutive and legislative branches. He tested the limits of vice pres-
idential power when he intentionally contradicted the president
in 2008, at the tail end of their tenure. Cheney expressed his dis-
pleasure with a Justice Department brief that he thought was not
strong enough in protecting the Second Amendment right to bear
arms in a case before the Supreme Court, District of Columbia v.

Heller. Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison asked Cheney whether

he wanted to add his name to a pro-g un friend-of-the-court brief
signed by 250 pro-g un House members and 55 senators who were
dissatisfied with the administration’s position. He asked his coun-
sel, David Addington, who told him that he was legally allowed to
do so. Without telling anyone in the West Wing, Cheney signed
on, using his position as president of the Senate to take on a purely
legislative role. In a 5–4 ruling, the Supreme Court struck down
the District of Columbia’s thirty-two-year-old ban on handguns.
The West Wing was caught entirely off guard when Hutchison
released the brief bearing the vice president’s name.
“The immediate reaction downtown—the president never said
a word about it, I think he agreed with me substantively because
we campaigned on that—but Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, wanted
to call a process foul . . . They had it in their minds I’m part of
the administration et cetera and they hadn’t really studied beyond
that,” Cheney said, more amused than angry. Bolten told Cheney
he planned to talk with Addington. Addington was not intimi-
dated, and when Bolten made clear his displeasure with the vice
president coming out against the president’s position, Addington
reminded him that he worked for the vice president and that his
paycheck came from the Senate, not the White House.
“Understood,” Bolten said, “but if we have another episode like
this, I will make sure that all of your belongings and your mail are
forwarded to your tiny office in the Senate and you won’t be wel-
come back inside the gates of the White House.”
Addington and his boss were not worried. “Dave made it clear
to them that I had two hats,” Cheney said, “half my salary and
budget came from the Hill and half from the executive branch.”
In the late afternoon of Saturday, February 11, 2006, Cheney, an

experienced hunter, used a 28-gauge Italian- made shotgun to
shoot at a covey of quail at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas.

214 first in line
He shot some two hundred lead birdshot pellets before he noticed

someone in a bright orange vest with only his torso visible stand-
ing in a gully about thirty yards away. It was seventy-eight-year-
old Harry Whittington, a prominent Austin lawyer and campaign
contributor who was part of the small party hunting quail that
weekend. Some of Cheney’s pellets hit Whittington in the chest
and face. Cheney ran to Whittington’s side as he lay bleeding but
still conscious on the ground. Before he passed out, Whittington
remembered smelling gunpowder. Cheney always travels with a
medical team, and they administered first aid. “I said, ‘Harry, I had
no idea you were there,’ ” Cheney recalled. “He didn’t respond.”
Patel was the most senior Cheney aide on the trip. He was at a
nearby hotel when he got the call from the vice president’s photo
grapher, David Bohrer. “We have a problem,” Bohrer told him.
“The boss shot somebody.” A piece of birdshot lodged near Whit-
tington’s heart muscle and triggered a mild heart attack in the hos-
pital. Whittington did not look good when Cheney went to visit
him there. “We were trying to track his kids down so they didn’t
think their dad was dying and the White House guys were just
pissed that we weren’t getting in front of the story press-w ise,”
Patel recalled. “Our view was that this was a hunting accident, this
was not a political story, we’re not going to deal with the White
House press corps, it’s a local hunting accident.”
News of the shooting did not emerge until Sunday when the
Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported the incident and said that
Whittington had broken away from the group of hunters with-
out announcing himself. Blaming the victim caused outrage, and
the whole incident became comic fodder for late-night comedi-
ans. When Whittington was released from the hospital, he actually
apologized to Cheney. “My family and I are deeply sorry for all
that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through
this past week,” he said. Whittington, who still has pellets in his
neck and right cheek, did not pick up a shotgun again for a decade
afterward.

But because of Cheney’s dangerous obsession with secrecy—he

declined to disclose the names or the size of his staff and usually
had no public calendar—the White House spent days grappling
with questions about the accident and why it was not revealed
immediately. The only information provided was that there had
been a hunting accident and that Cheney was fine. Cheney’s aides
left out the key detail that it was Cheney who was the person
responsible. First Lady Laura Bush, who rarely weighed in on
politics and was in Italy for the Winter Olympics, was angry that
the White House was not getting the news out sooner, telling her
chief of staff Anita McBride to call her husband’s chief of staff
Andy Card and tell him to get the story out as soon as possible.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan and Bush counselor
Dan Bartlett kept calling Patel Sunday morning but, remarkably,
their calls were not immediately returned. Patel said the decision
to call the local paper was a reflection of Cheney’s disdain for
the White House press corps, and he described West Wing staff
as being “enraged” by Cheney’s decision to break the story to a
local paper.
Bartlett finally got on the phone with Cheney that Sunday,
February 12, and told him they needed to gather a so-called pool
of reporters in Texas so that it would not look like they were trying
to bury the story by giving it to a small newspaper. Cheney was
silent, then said, “This is how we’re going to handle it.” Finally,
on February 15, four days after the accident, Cheney did an inter-
view with Fox News’s Brit Hume. In it, he was uncharacteristically
emotional and said, “It’s not Harry’s fault. You can’t blame any-
body else. I’m the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend.”
He added, “The image of him falling is something I will never
be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling.
And it was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life, at that
moment.”
In retrospect, Cheney said, it was not the smartest way to handle
the situation, but there were not many options: “There’s no good

216 first in line
way to handle a sitting vice president shooting someone,” Patel

reflected. “And there’s no way to make it not be a giant, national
story.”
The embarrassing hunting episode was the beginning of the end

of Cheney’s outsize influence on Bush. He was starting to feel like
some of the less powerful vice presidents who preceded him. Bush
adviser Karl Rove used to call Cheney the “Management”—as in,
“Better check with Management”—but by the second term Cheney
was no longer the font of wisdom he had been in the beginning, in
the days following 9/11, when Bush relied on his foreign policy and
government experience. He admits his waning influence himself.
“By the time you get to the second term he’s [Bush is] an expert,”
Cheney said. “I think he was more assertive himself and had more
confidence in the second term, and I don’t find that surprising.”
The hunting accident was humiliating for the vice president,
even though he made light of it, telling an aide, “Now that was a
good one!” when he noticed a graduate wearing a bull’s-eye on
his mortarboard when Cheney gave the commencement address at
Louisiana State University in May, less than four months after the
shooting. Less than six months later, Cheney gathered with Trea-
sury Department officials, Bush’s counsel Harriet Miers, Rove, and
Press Secretary Tony Snow in Chief of Staff Josh Bolten’s office to
discuss how to handle a story the New York Times was about to pub-
lish on a secret U.S. program to monitor terrorist financing shortly
after September 11. Reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the Los
Angeles Times were chasing the story but were behind the New York
Times on their reporting. Bush administration officials were decid-
ing whether to work with the Times or to work with a “friendly”
reporter who would not sensationalize the story, as they thought
the Times would. When this was suggested, Cheney, who as usual
was sitting quietly and watching, chimed in with perfect timing
and a half-smile, “You mean like the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.”

The room erupted in laughter as even Cheney acknowledged that

he had made a mistake.
During his first week on the job in Bush’s second term, deputy
press secretary Tony Fratto recalled working on a statement that,
like all statements, had to be sent to other departments for review
and editing before it could be emailed widely. He was new to the
process and was surprised when two changes came back rewrit-
ing a sentence in the second paragraph—one from Rove and one
from the vice president’s office. Both sentences were rewritten in
entirely different ways. Fratto called senior Bush aide Dan Bartlett
and asked, “Who big foots who?” Bartlett told him, “You big foot.”
Fratto did his best to reconcile the two but remembers how strik-
ing it was that Bartlett did not tell him to come down on either
side, a small indicator of Cheney’s waning influence.
During the last couple of years of the Bush administration,
Cheney seemed drained, in part because of his heart issues. A nod
of the head at a meeting or a rare pointed question—a ll things aides
used to look for to indicate where he stood on an issue—became
almost irrelevant. Now Bush’s aides were occasionally mocking
him. After one meeting in which Cheney dozed off, Bush himself
laughed. “Did you see?” Bartlett asked Bush. “Yes,” Bush replied.
“I couldn’t look at him.” Ambassador Christopher Hill recalled
another meeting when Cheney fell asleep in the Oval Office. Sec-
retary of State Condoleezza Rice took Hill aside afterward and
said, “Did you notice that? That happens a lot these days.” She
was speaking about Cheney’s health but she was also speaking
metaphorically—he did not matter as much as he used to.
During Bush’s second term Rice replaced Cheney as Bush’s clos-
est adviser, sidelining the vice president. On June 17, 2007, Bush
gathered his national security staff for an evening meeting in the
second-floor Yellow Oval Room in the White House. The meeting
was to discuss the al-K ibar nuclear reactor in Syria; since the end
of 2006 Israel had been telling U.S. officials about possible nuclear
activity in Syria. There was evidence from intelligence agencies that

218 first in line
North Korea was helping the Syrians build the reactor. Israeli intel-
ligence operatives had managed to get photographs taken inside the
top-secret plutonium reactor, and of North Korean workers at the
site. The reactor’s only purpose, Israel concluded, was to build an
atomic bomb.
Deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams argued for Israel
to bomb the plant. Cheney was alone in his ardent support for the
United States to bomb the plant. He insisted that Bush had im-
posed a red line on North Korea in October 2006 when it tested
an atomic bomb, and this was clearly a case of nuclear prolifera-
tion. No one raised their hand when Bush canvassed the room and
asked, “Does anyone here agree with the vice president?” Cheney
recalled, “I was a voice in the wilderness at that point.” He had
long urged the intelligence community to look into a link between
North Korea and Syria, and here was evidence that he was correct.
“They [Bush and his advisers] were snake bit because of the war in
Iraq,” Cheney said. “I really believe the history books would show
that would have been the right call.” At a later meeting, Secretary
of Defense Bob Gates said, half in jest, “Every administration gets
one preemptive war against a Muslim country, and this adminis-
tration has already done one.”
Christopher Hill, who was then head of the U.S. delegation
to the six-party talks aimed at peacefully resolving North Korea’s
nuclear weapons program, says that Cheney was not influential on
North Korea during the second term. “Cheney was a critic and
obviously very negative in his approach to the issues that were es-
sentially being run by Condi Rice and the president. It was a little
odd having a vice president being so critical. He was very negative
about everything without any real role with it.” Hill and other
Cheney detractors argue that Cheney’s fatal flaw inside the White
House was his condescension toward Bush. He viewed Bush as a
politician, whereas he had far more foreign policy experience. But
in the second term Bush did not seek his advice nearly as often.

Hill, who would be named U.S. ambassador to Iraq during

President Obama’s first term, said the body language between Bush
and Cheney was far different from that between Obama and Biden.
“Bush would say things, and I’d look over at Cheney and he just
had his head down. He didn’t seem impressed. There was no ef-
fort to reinforce the president’s point,” Hill recalled. “I never saw
him reinforce a point that the president had made. I felt it was ‘I
know best, I don’t need to reinforce his point, he needs to reinforce
my point,’ whereas Biden, I think, was just far more overtly re-
spectful of his boss.” But Cheney’s penchant for being quiet during
meetings does not mean he did not respect Bush or the office he
held. Bush called Cheney “Dick” while Cheney always called Bush
“Mr. President.”
Part of Cheney’s waning influence was the absence of his long-
time friend and mentor Donald Rumsfeld, the man Bush person-
ally asked Cheney to fire as secretary of defense in 2006 (most
presidents avoid doing the actual firing themselves). One aide said,
“Rumsfeld and Cheney together were one plus one equals three.”
They were a powerful duo, and without Rumsfeld, Cheney truly
was “a voice in the wilderness.”
Hill says that former secretary of state Henry Kissinger told
him that after meeting with Bush, Kissinger walked out, saw
Cheney, and without any appointment sat down with Cheney
and talked for an hour. Kissinger’s take on this, Hill said, was that
it was shocking to sit down with a vice president with no appoint-
ment, no notice, and to have an hour with him. It suggested that
maybe Cheney wasn’t very busy during the second term. It stood
in stark contrast to the early days of the administration, like in
2003 when Bush asked to be alone with Cheney before launching
the first strike that started the Iraq War. “He was marginalized
so much [during Bush’s second term] that it didn’t really matter,”
said Hill. “He was the grouchy uncle yelling at everyone to get
off the grass.”

220 first in line
Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby spent years over-

seeing a mini fiefdom in the West Wing with Cheney as its leader.
Libby had an unprecedented triple title: Cheney’s chief of staff and
national security adviser as well as assistant to the president. In
2007, he was found guilty of lying about his role in the leak of
undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name to the press and
was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. Though Bush
commuted the sentence, which meant Libby did not have to serve
thirty months in prison, Cheney insisted that Bush should have
granted Libby a full presidential pardon. Friends said they did not
think anything bothered Cheney more than what he described as
leaving a man on the battlefield. President Trump granted Cheney’s
wishes and pardoned Libby in April 2018.
“I did everything I could [to convince Bush to pardon him].
Without question it was the most tense element of the relationship
between myself and the president,” Cheney said in an interview
eight years after leaving the White House and before Trump issued
the pardon. “I still think he made a major mistake when he didn’t
pardon Scooter . . . I still want to see a pardon, that’s the only thing
that I think is justified by the circumstances . . . It’s a travesty . . .”
Cheney continued, “We had a very, very heated exchange the last
time we had lunch in the White House the week of the inaugu-
ral [Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration]. It’s a subject we don’t dis-
cuss.” But the decision to not pardon Libby clearly weighed on Bush.
Riding together in the motorcade to the Capitol with his successor,
Barack Obama, Bush advised him to come up with a pardon policy
early on in his administration and to stick to it, no matter what. After
Obama’s inauguration, Cheney and Libby, his longtime right-hand
man, did not see each other for more than a year.
On Inauguration Day 2009, Cheney was in a wheelchair because
he said he had thrown his back out packing boxes at the Observa-
tory. Cheney joked to Biden, his successor, “Joe, this is how you’re
liable to look when your term is up.” The relationship between

Cheney and Bush did what those of most of their predecessors’

have done: it deteriorated over time. They had been through hell
together and they respected one another, but friends say they do
not see each other often and they are not close. Since leaving the
White House, Bush has described their relationship as “cordial.”
“But he lives in Washington and we live in Dallas.”
Their partnership was never a warm friendship—it was a busi-
ness relationship that was strengthened by their unity in the after-
math of 9/11 and it soured by the end. Since leaving office, Bush
has become livid at the suggestion that Cheney had an outsize role
in his White House. In a recent book, Bush said that Cheney and
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “didn’t make one f–ing de-
cision” while he was president. “The fact that there was any doubt
in anyone’s mind about who the president was, blows my mind,”
he said. But there was a time not that long ago when Bush would
have given his vice president more credit. In 2004, at a stop in
Raleigh, North Carolina, after Kerry announced John Edwards as
his running mate, a reporter asked Bush what he thought of him.
“He’s being described today as charming, engaging, a nimble cam-
paigner, a populist and even sexy,” the reporter said. “How does he
stack up against Dick Cheney?”
“Dick Cheney can be president,” Bush answered, sounding an-
noyed by the question. The answer seemed so obvious. “Next,” he
said, pointing to another reporter.

XII
Fanboy:
The Love Story of Joe and Barack
He was kind of a fanboy, honestly.

—A FOR MER TOP BIDEN A IDE ON V ICE PR ESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S
R EL AT IONSHIP W ITH PR ESIDENT BA R ACK OBA M A
That’s the job of the vice president, you’re supposed to throw yourself in front
of the train. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to do it in the beginning.
—J OE BIDEN ON HIS R ECOM MENDAT ION AGA INST SENDING
IN NAV Y SEA LS TO K ILL OSA M A BIN L A DEN
He is fearless about emotion . . . He understands real pain.

—VA LER IE JA R R ET T, BA R ACK OBA M A’S SENIOR W HITE HOUSE A DV ISER
A ND CLOSE FR IEND OF BA R ACK A ND MICHELLE OBA M A’S
J oe Biden was up very late the night before he made his Octo-
ber 21, 2015, Rose Garden announcement that he would not
be seeking the presidency. He was on the phone with a close
friend, South Carolina state representative James Smith—South
Carolina would be a linchpin for Biden if he decided to run. Biden
and Smith would speak on the phone four times in forty-eight
hours before the decision was made, ending months of intense me-
dia speculation. Starting at about 11:00 p.m., Smith said, he talked
with Biden for thirty minutes, and Biden read him his speech in

224 first in line
the emotional call from the vice president’s residence. Smith was in
Fort Worth, Texas, sitting on the curb in front of his hotel. “There
was all this pent-up—I lost my cool, I said, ‘Dammit, Joe Biden,
you have to run because no one else is saying these things.’ ” Smith
was convinced that Biden was the one person who could bring the
country together. Biden told him that he was going to sleep on it.
“He had not made up his mind as of 11:30 p.m. the night before,”
Smith recalled.
Biden and his close aides, Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti,
had been far enough along in their plans for his presidential run
that they were thinking about possible running mates. In late Au-
gust, Biden invited Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren for an
unannounced Saturday lunch at the Naval Observatory, an indi-
cation that she was being seriously considered as a running mate.
Biden wanted to run a Bernie Sanders–type campaign, aides say,
with free college tuition being one of its major appeals to working-
class voters. But, in the end, Biden decided he could not do it—h is
family needed him after the death of his eldest son, Beau, from
brain cancer less than six months earlier. Beau was just forty-six
years old and a talented politician who Biden joked had more in
common with Obama’s calm temperament on the political stage
than his own. When Biden’s speechwriters needed him to keep a
speech short they would tell him to imagine the disciplined Beau
standing at the teleprompter. More than anything Biden wanted
Beau to be proud of him.
When Beau did television interviews as Delaware’s attorney
general, Biden’s staff always made sure to send him a transcript
afterward. He would stop whatever he was working on, read what
his son had said on his smartphone, and summon his nearest aide.
“Look how good this kid is,” he would say, showing them his
phone. Beau’s loss was deeply felt by the Obamas, too. The day
after he passed away, the Obamas canceled a reception for Ford’s
Theatre so they could visit the Bidens at the Naval Observatory.
Biden saw Beau as his heir apparent. Biden’s former chief speech-

fanboy 225
writer Dylan Loewe said, “If Joe Biden runs in 2020, in some ways
it would be because his son couldn’t.”
Beau’s death came after years of illness and worry. In May 2010
Beau, then forty-one, had a stroke that is thought to have been
a precursor to the brain cancer that would take his life. Obama’s
senior strategist David Axelrod recalled the day of Beau’s stroke.
During private meetings with his staff, Axelrod said, Obama was
almost always fully prepared and engaged in the discussion. On
that particular day, after hearing the news, the president stared out
the window, clearly distracted, as his advisers discussed policy. Fi-
nally, Obama said quietly, “I don’t know how Joe’s going to go on
if something happens to Beau.” Later, when Biden was back in his
West Wing office, Axelrod saw Obama sprint down the corridor.
“I poked my head out and I saw the two of them embrace out-
side the vice president’s office.” Obama, in shirtsleeves, grabbed
Biden by the shoulders, and asked him, “Joe, Joe, is he OK? Is he
OK?” Axelrod said, “I think that says everything about their rela-
tionship.” Three years later Beau was admitted to MD Anderson
Cancer Center in Houston and was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Obama told a key aide: Handle this. It was as if he was talking about
his own brother; he wanted to make sure Beau and his family were
given as much privacy as possible and had the best care possible.
Beau’s death on May 30, 2015, was the dominant factor in Biden’s
decision not to run. When Beau was near the end of his life, the
Bidens wore blue bracelets—blue was Beau’s favorite color—w ith
“WWBD” engraved on them—W hat Would Beau Do. Biden was
distracted by his grief. He did not tell most of his staff that Beau’s
diagnosis was terminal, but they noticed that as Beau was being
treated for cancer Biden lost weight and often looked exhausted.
Before he passed away, Beau made one request of his father: “You’ve
got to promise me, Dad, that no matter what happens, you’re go-
ing to be all right.” Biden began wearing Beau’s rosary around his
wrist after he died, as a way of reminding himself of that promise.
After the music was selected for Beau’s funeral, Biden went alone

226 first in line
into his office, shut the door, and played the songs on full volume
over and over again so that he could numb himself and not break
down crying in the church. At the funeral, Biden stood next to his
son’s casket at the front of St. Anthony of Padua Church in Wilm-
ington. When one staffer hugged Biden and told him how much
he loved Beau, the vice president replied, “Beau loved you too,
buddy.” It seemed to the staffer like Biden was on autopilot and was
just getting through what he thought he owed his son. Another
former Biden aide compared Biden to the godfather of a large Irish
Catholic family holding everyone together. He mourned openly,
and that public expression helped him manage his grief.
Two months after Beau’s death, an aide carefully orchestrated a
call from Biden to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. In
the resulting op-ed, Dowd described Beau, near the end of his life
and with his face partially paralyzed, begging his father to run and
“arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons
and that the country would be better off with Biden values.” But
Biden’s friends, an aide said, “were trying to get the guy up in the
morning so he could keep the family together, so he didn’t put
a bullet in his head.” Still, it was important to Biden that people
saw him as someone who could have been president and that, had
he chosen to run, he just might have won. The fact that so many
people were rooting for him at the worst moment in his life, when
he needed it the most, provided some small relief. Even former
Republican senator Bob Dole took Biden aside and said, “Joe, you
better get in this race.”
One aide described Biden’s philosophy: “In politics and life you’re
either on your way up or on your way down.” And he never wanted
to be on his way down. By putting his name out there, he was
showing he was still powerful and that reporters would still write
about him. “If you’ve been a politician for forty years,” a former
Biden aide said, “that’s part of your ego, and you measure your-
self in part by the number of inches you get in the newspaper ev-
ery day.” Biden’s family members were furious that he was getting

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slighted in the conversation about who should run for president in

2016, chief among them Beau. Members of his close-knit and loyal
staff were frustrated, too. “I thought the remedy for Obama was
twenty steps down the hall,” said one longtime Biden adviser. It was
Biden, they believed, who could best reach out to members of the
white working and middle classes, not Hillary Clinton. Even top
Democratic Party officials were frustrated by the Clintons’ hold on
the party. At one point during the campaign, when Clinton had a
fainting spell brought on by pneumonia, then–Democratic National
Committee chair Donna Brazile considered initiating a process that
would have replaced Clinton and her running mate, Tim Kaine,
with Biden and New Jersey senator Cory Booker.
Biden’s sons, Beau and Hunter, were his strongest and most loyal
champions. They always stuck by their father’s side—in 1988, when
Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race, Beau urged him
not to give up. “Dad, if you leave, you’ll never be the same.”
In 2016 President Obama made the unusual decision not to en-

dorse Biden, his own vice president, for the presidency. The deck
was stacked against Biden with top Democratic donors already
firmly in Clinton’s corner. Still, senior advisers to Obama now say
that Biden could have defeated Donald Trump if he had gotten
past Clinton in the Democratic primaries. But Clinton’s nomi-
nation was a fait accompli that even the president could not stop.
Obama thought Biden had been through too much personally and
needed to give up on running, but he did not directly make that
case to him. Instead he cautioned Biden to remember the rigors of
the campaign and the deep grief that he and his family were go-
ing through. Privately, Biden thanked White House press secretary
Josh Earnest for not directly answering reporters when they asked,
almost daily at one point, whether he would be a candidate in
2016. He was grateful for the breathing room to make the decision.
Obama saw the significance of passing on the presidency from

228 first in line
the first black president to the first female president. Former White
House deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco said Obama never
lost sight of one important fact: “He knew he was surrounded by
people whose dream he was living, with Hillary Clinton on one
side of him and Joe Biden on the other.” That thought, she said,
“never escaped him.” Everyone inside the White House assumed
Biden would run. “He was our guy. If he was going to do it we
were going to be there for him,” said Mastromonaco. “There was
a deep abiding Biden loyalty.” Biden thought he should have been
consulted before Hillary ran. After all, they had known each other
for years—Biden admired Bill Clinton in particular and recog-
nized him as the only national politician better than he was at
connecting with people—and he had encouraged Obama to name
her secretary of state. Biden viewed Obama on a higher plane that
was out of his league, but Hillary and Bill Clinton he felt competi-
tive with. Still, he and Hillary often had lunch together in the vice
presidential residence and had developed a rapport.
Obama was a friend to Biden and listened to his deliberations but
did not forcefully weigh in, said Valerie Jarrett, who was a senior
adviser and remains a close confidante to the Obamas. “President
Obama knew that if he made the decision [to run for president]
because someone else told him to, that that is not the right way to
make that decision. The only person who could have talked Presi-
dent Obama out of running for president was Mrs. Obama. He had
to decide whether the fire was in his belly.”
Beau’s loss was, understandably, all-consuming. “The family was
broken, and I was more broken than I thought I was,” Biden has said.
In a speech at Colgate University four months after the 2016 elec-
tion, Biden said, “Do I regret not being president? Yes. Do I regret
not running for president, in light of what was going on in my life
at the time? No.”
Being upstaged by Hillary Clinton was nothing new for Biden.
His chief of staff Ron Klain, who had been Al Gore’s chief of
staff, says he aggressively encouraged Biden to make his intentions

fanboy 229
known early, to be his own man and cultivate his own relationship
with donors—K lain knew firsthand just how tricky positioning a
vice president for the presidency could be. But in 2012, while on a
fund-raising trip to California for Obama’s reelection, when word
got back to David Plouffe and Jim Messina, who were running
Obama’s reelection campaign, that Biden was trying to add meet-
ings with donors from Hollywood and Silicon Valley for his own
purposes, he was summarily told to stop it—immediately. Plouffe
took Alan Hoffman, Biden’s deputy chief of staff, into his office
and made it clear that everyone had to have a singular goal in
mind: getting Obama reelected. “They came down hard on him
[Biden],” said a former top Biden staffer. Messina and Plouffe in-
terpreted Biden’s efforts as setting himself up for 2016 instead of
focusing on the race at hand. Messina was particularly enraged by
it, two members of Biden’s staff said. “Messina’s a kamikaze,” one
staffer said. “He’s either furious or invisible.” It was a missed op-
portunity. Klain, who went on to work for Hillary Clinton’s pres-
idential campaign, said that he wanted Biden to start positioning
himself to run for president as early as 2010.
But Biden’s position was more precarious than he knew. To add
insult to injury, Biden did not find out that the Obama campaign
was conducting polling in late 2011 to see if he should be replaced
as vice president with Hillary Clinton until he saw reports in the
press (the poll results showed she would not be much help and the
switch was ruled out). The president dismissed the polling and said
it was something the staff did on their own. But it hurt Biden, who
had left a job he loved in the Senate to be Obama’s vice president
and thought he was doing a good job. Christopher Hill, who had
served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, said he talked with Biden at the
time and Biden was furious. Biden told him: “This idea that she
would help the ticket if Barack replaced me with her, we looked
at all this in 2008 and there were a lot of focus groups and polling
data about this and it showed consistently that she could not carry
Pennsylvania, Ohio, or even Michigan.” The campaign could have

230 first in line
done a better job of pouring cold water on the story, said Biden’s
former chief of staff Bruce Reed. He added, “I’m sure the only
person less interested in that scenario than Joe Biden was Hillary
Clinton.” Hillary, everyone knew, wanted to be president, not vice
president.
When he considered seeking the presidency for a third time in
2015, he was well aware that he had not run in a competitive race
since 1972, when he beat Republican senator Cale Boggs by a slim
margin (Boggs had not lost a race since 1946) and replaced him as
senator. He recognized that it would be an uphill battle. But when
he tried to get Wall Street financiers such as Robert Wolf, who
had been a strong supporter of Obama’s and a friend of Biden’s,
he found out he was too late: Clinton had already locked Wolf
down. Although he was friendly with Clinton, Biden knew that
her campaign operation would come after him if he decided to
run. Hacked emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta
show that when Biden was weighing a White House run there was
panic inside the campaign. Steve Elmendorf, a longtime Clinton
supporter, emailed the campaign to make sure it was aware of the
anxiety within the party about a potential Biden run. “I get multi-
ple freak-out calls every morning and I try to talk everyone off the
ledge and not bug u all,” Elmendorf wrote.
Then the attacks began. The New York Times published a story—
“Joe Biden’s Role in ’90s Crime Law Could Haunt Any Presi-
dential Bid”—on August 21, 2015, citing controversial anticrime
legislation Biden helped pass in the 1990s that critics argue led to
mass incarceration. One close Biden ally questioned the timing of
the article’s publication and the source of the story. “I’ll bet you
ten to one it was somebody on the Hill who worked on the crime
bill and worked for Hillary’s campaign.” Another Democrat who
is close to Biden and Obama said, “The Clintons can be a little bit
heavy-handed when it comes to making sure that competition goes
away.” Biden was hurt by the headlines. “He has these old-school
Marquess of Queensberry rules [a code of rules in boxing used

fanboy 231
to refer to fair play] that Democrats don’t do that to each other,”

said Tony Blinken, who was Biden’s national security adviser and
who later worked for Obama. “I think there was an element of
being personally offended by it.” The Clintons had an enormous
campaign apparatus already in place, and a Biden challenge, some
Clinton allies later argued, could have led to Vermont senator Ber-
nie Sanders winning the nomination.
One top Biden aide said that his staff “worked hard to reposition
him in the moment as opposed to the past.” The aviator glasses and
the “Uncle Joe” nickname did not bother him. “In fact,” the aide
said, “seeing him as a cool older guy who wears a bomber jacket is
much better than being a gasbag in the Anita Hill hearing.” Biden
has faced long-standing criticism for his role in the 1991 confirma-
tion hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas,
which he helped conduct as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee at the time. Biden was one of fourteen white men on
the judiciary panel and has since apologized for not doing more to
defend Hill during the hearing where she was asked deeply per-
sonal questions about her sex life. If Biden had jumped into the race
in 2015, it would have been hardball and he could not have avoided
addressing it. He has since said he owes Hill an apology.
But Beau’s illness and passing was the biggest influence. Time
for Biden to jump in had simply run out, so he turned his attention
to helping Clinton’s campaign. Biden used his working-class roots
on the stump as he traveled around the country to support Clinton.
He would get briefings from Clinton campaign manager Robby
Mook and from Podesta. But while everyone around her thought
she would win given the polling, Biden was not as optimistic about
her chances of beating Donald Trump, the Republican nominee.
He never thought people were excited about her, and he told senior
campaign staffers that Clinton should focus on what she could do
to help the middle class and not just criticize Trump.
Blinken was on the phone with Biden five or six times the night
of the 2016 election. Biden was watching the results in the Observa-

232 first in line
tory. “It was starting to go south and when I first called, Biden said,
‘It’s OK, we’ll be fine,’ ” Blinken recalled. “Then a little later he said,
‘There’s still a path.’ And then, ultimately, it was, ‘I can’t talk.’ ”
Biden was immediately worried about the foreign policy impli-
cations of Trump’s victory. National security, he thought, would
no longer be in safe hands. After the election Biden was consumed
with guilt, according to friends. He thought that if he had run, he
would have won. And if he had been able to convince Clinton’s
campaign to focus more on what she could do to help the middle
class rather than focusing on attacks against Trump, maybe Clinton
could have won.
Since leaving the White House, Biden is working for both the
University of Pennsylvania and the University of Delaware. At
Penn he heads a center that focuses on diplomacy and national se-
curity and at the University of Delaware he leads an institute that
centers around public policy solutions to issues including criminal
justice and women’s rights. And he is slowly and methodically lay-
ing the groundwork for a 2020 presidential run. He is surrounded
by his longtime political aides Ted Kaufman, Steve Ricchetti, and
Mike Donilon, and he has set up a PAC—the American Possi-
bilities Political Action Committee. He has survived two life-
threatening brain aneurysms, and if he runs in 2020 he will be
seventy-seven years old on Election Day—that’s seven years older
than Donald Trump was when he became the oldest president to
take office. Because of his health history and his age, Biden is con-
sidering making an unprecedented campaign promise: he might
run for one term only.
Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born in 1942 in blue-collar Scran-

ton, Pennsylvania, the son of a car salesman and a homemaker. He
was one of four children raised in a loving Irish-Catholic fam-
ily (he later became the first Catholic vice president). When he
was ten years old his family moved to the Wilmington, Delaware,

fanboy 233
area, where his father found work after struggling to find a job in
Scranton. Biden often talks about his roots in Scranton and sitting
in his “Grandpop Finnegan’s” kitchen listening to relatives argue
about President Dwight Eisenhower. As a kid he had a stutter and
was nicknamed “Joe Impedimenta” by his classmates. One class-
mate called him “Dash” for “J-J-J-Joe Biden.” His mother, Jean,
encouraged him to stand up to bullies and told all her children:
“You’re not better than anybody, but nobody is better than you.”
Biden’s uncle Ed stuttered, too, but was never able to conquer it.
He never married, never got a good job, and he drank a lot. Biden
never wanted to end up like Uncle Ed, so he never had a drink
and he never stopped working to get over his stutter, memorizing
poems and practicing speeches endlessly.
He graduated from the University of Delaware and got his
law degree from Syracuse University. In 1966 he married Neilia
Hunter, and they had three children. Inspired by the civil rights
movement of the 1960s, Biden got involved in local Democratic
politics in Delaware. “I wasn’t at the bridge at Selma, but the strug-
gle for civil rights was the animating political element of my life,”
he said. When he ran for Senate in 1972, Biden campaigned on his
support for integration.
He became the fifth-youngest senator in U.S. history when he
was elected in 1972 at the age of twenty-nine. He seemed to have a
charmed life until, one week before Christmas and days before he
was set to be sworn in, Neilia and their thirteen-month-old daugh-
ter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash when their station wagon
was hit by a tractor trailer. Neilia was on her way to buy a Christ-
mas tree with their young children and Biden was in Washington
setting up his office and hiring staff when he got the call. “You
knew when the call came. You knew,” Biden told families of fallen
soldiers in a moving 2012 speech at a TAPS National Military Sur-
vivor Seminar. “You just felt it in your bones something bad hap-
pened.” His two sons, Beau, then three, and Hunter, then two,
were also in the car and were critically injured. They spent weeks

234 first in line
recuperating in the hospital, and eighteen days after the accident

that killed his wife and daughter Biden was sworn in at his sons’
bedsides. “For the first time in my life,” Biden said, “I understood
how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide, not be-
cause they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they
had been to the top of the mountain and they just knew in their
heart they would never get there again, that it was never going to
be that way ever again.”
He considered suicide in those earliest and darkest days, but he
couldn’t leave his two young sons. His sister, Val, who Biden calls
his best friend, moved in to help take care of the boys, and the Sen-
ate became a second family to him. He began a near daily three-
hour round- trip, thirty-
six-
year- long ritual, taking an Amtrak
train between Washington, D.C., and his home in Wilmington so
that he could be home with his sons. They became his salvation.
“Looking back on it, the truth be told, the real reason I went home
every night was that I needed my children more than they needed
me,” he said, noting that some commentators said his weekend
absences from Washington—he is nicknamed Amtrak Joe—would
damage his career.
“If you ask me who’s the unluckiest person I know personally,
who’s had just terrible things happen to him, I’d say Joe Biden,”
said Ted Kaufman, who, next to his sister Val, is Biden’s closest
friend and was his chief of staff in the Senate for nineteen years. “If
you asked me who is the luckiest person I know personally, who’s
had things happen to him that are just absolutely incredible, I’d say
Joe Biden.”
Biden spent thirty-six years in the Senate and has served as chair
of the judiciary committee and the foreign relations committee.
In 2008, one of those “incredible” things happened when Obama
picked Biden as his running mate. Biden thought it was like join-
ing a team about to go into the Super Bowl as its running back.
His job was to just carry the ball and not be engaged in strategy.
“Can you imagine how hard that was? At his age?” Kaufman said.

fanboy 235
Biden walked into Obama’s campaign office in Chicago, where

hundreds of people were working for Obama, with just about a
dozen aides. “It’s kind of awkward,” said Alyssa Mastromonaco,
who was the director of scheduling and advance on Obama’s cam-
paign. Biden’s first exposure to Obama’s always-on-message aides
during those early days on the campaign, and in the White House,
proved difficult.
After the 2008 election, Biden spoke with Delaware’s Demo-
cratic governor Ruth Ann Minner about who would fill his Sen-
ate seat during the last two years of his term, a post he’d held
since Obama was just eleven years old. Biden was pushing for
Kaufman, his former chief of staff and a Delaware resident, to take
his seat. “Have you talked to the president about this?” an Obama
staff member asked Biden. “Why the hell do I have to talk to the
president about this? It’s my state, it’s my friend,” Biden replied
incensed. But he was in a new position now, he had a boss and
everything a vice president does reflects on the president and all
the power a vice president has is derived from the president. The
president-elect probably wouldn’t care, but he needed to be noti-
fied. Kaufman was eventually appointed to fill Biden’s Senate seat.
It was the beginning of an education for Biden, who was ini-
tially uncomfortable working for someone after more than three
decades in the Senate. And it was a reality for his entire eight years
as vice president: when he wanted to bring in Kevin Sheekey, who
was New York mayor Mike Bloomberg’s top political adviser, as
his chief of staff after Ron Klain left, Obama advisers Plouffe and
Axelrod said no—they did not think Sheekey would be a good
fit. Even Obama said he did not think Sheekey would work out.
He did not pass their all-important loyalty test and Biden had no
choice in the matter.
When Obama, who is almost two decades younger than Biden,
came to the Senate in 2005 he was already a superstar, having
given a rousing speech as an Illinois legislator at the Democratic
National Convention in 2004. “To people who had been around a

236 first in line
long time, that rubbed some of them the wrong way because they
had been there for years and paid their dues and here’s this person
who’s being talked about for the presidency,” said Blinken, who
was Biden’s staff director on the foreign relations committee before
following him into the administration. Obama, Biden thought,
was in too much of a hurry.
When Biden was running for president against Obama in the
2008 primaries, he would sometimes say, “There’s no way that
the Democratic Party is ever going to nominate someone who is a
first-term senator, after 9/11, his name is Barack Hussein Obama,
it’s not going to happen.” There was an arrogance there that both-
ered Biden. “We used to be on the tarmac for campaign events
and Biden and [Connecticut senator Chris Dodd, who also ran
in 2008] were sharing a plane from Iowa to go back in time to
vote and they were looking at each other, ‘What’s wrong with this
picture? We’re carrying our own bags.’ ” Biden is in many ways
the opposite of Obama—he thrives on interaction with people,
while Obama is self-contained and happy to be on his own. Aides
sometimes had to remind Obama to try to remember the names of
people’s dogs and grandchildren, something that comes as second
nature to Biden.
Biden and Obama did not know each other well in the Senate,
even though Obama was on the foreign relations committee when
Biden was its chairman. In 2007, on the same day that he an-
nounced he was running for president, Biden found himself de-
fending remarks he made to the New York Observer in which he
weighed in on his rivals for the Democratic nomination. “I mean,
you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate
and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean,
that’s a storybook, man.” Biden did not immediately understand
what all the fuss was about—an aide had to call and tell him why
the remark was a problem.
A few days later, Biden was chairing a foreign relations commit-
tee hearing and Obama was running late. Obama wanted to ask a

fanboy 237
question and his staffer kept asking Biden’s staff to keep the hearing
going. A note was passed to Biden imploring him to not end the
hearing before Obama arrived, so Biden stalled by asking more
questions. When Obama walked in, he turned to Biden’s aide and
said with a smile, “Boy, Joe’s being awful nice to me lately.” Just
two years earlier, at his first meeting of the Senate foreign relations
committee in 2005, which happened to be a confirmation hearing
for Condoleezza Rice, Obama passed an aide a note in the middle
of one of Biden’s long monologues. It read: “shoot. me. now.”
Once he decided to sign on as Obama’s running mate, Biden had
to come to terms with Obama as “the chosen one,” and Obama
had to come to terms with his own lack of experience. “Both of
them ate a certain amount of shit to see the virtue in the other per-
son,” said a former Obama administration official. Obama, always
analytical, recognized that Biden’s deep experience on foreign pol-
icy and national security issues and his relationships with world
leaders and with members of Congress would augment Obama’s
own strengths and would fill in some of his gaps.
The Obama campaign said Biden could not have any of his own
aides on the campaign plane when he was traveling, but Biden
shot back and said, “If Mike Donilon or Ted Kaufman aren’t on
the plane, I’m not getting on the plane.” The campaign relented.
Every morning Biden, who is so loquacious that aides were con-
stantly worried that he would put his foot in his mouth and who
they sometimes treated like a rambunctious child, would get on
a conference call with Axelrod and Plouffe, who would tell him:
“Here’s where you’re going and here’s what you’re saying.”
During the campaign, Biden made several gaffes, including one
at a Seattle fund-raiser when he told a room full of donors, “Watch,
we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test
the mettle of this guy. Mark my words. It will not be six months
before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Ken-
nedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant forty-
seven-year-old senator president of the United States of America.”

238 first in line
Fund-raising events are generally closed to the media, but Biden

apparently forgot that that night’s fund-raiser was open to report-
ers. He declared, “I probably shouldn’t have said all this because it
dawned on me that the press is here.” Moments later, Biden ended
his remarks. “Obama was irritated about that,” Axelrod said. Biden
is still unapologetic about the slips. “I would say some things that
were obvious, like he’s going to be challenged in the first year, like
that was a big goddamn secret—every president’s challenged in the
first year,” he said, still surprised that it upset anyone.
During a meeting in September 2008, Biden told Obama that
he would need to have access to all the information Obama had.
Biden was on his way to Minnesota to campaign for Senate can-
didate Al Franken, and he told Obama, according to an internal
memo, that he “would need to have known what BO and the cam-
paign had communicated to and about Franken” so that he would
know what to say. If everything was going to be so carefully cali-
brated, and if all his words were going to be parsed, then he would
have to be included in everything. “All presidents pick vice presi-
dents for political reasons, but these relationships are not sometimes
what they appear to be,” said one Biden aide. “Early on it was not a
very good relationship between the VP and the president.” Obama
and his close cadre of advisers saw it as their game and they had
worked hard to win the nomination. Biden was along for the ride.
Obama told Biden he had veto rights over anybody in his Cab-
inet. “A number of the Cabinet members I knew better than the
president knew them because I’d worked with them for a long
time,” Biden said. He likes to point out that his aides, Klain and
Kaufman, sat with the Obama team and made decisions together.
“At least half of the president’s staff were my former staff mem-
bers,” Biden said. “It [the relationship] rests on one thing: defining
what it is you want to do and determining whether or not the
president-elect agrees with you.”
Biden told Obama he wanted two things: “To be able to com-
pletely be level with you and argue with you if we disagree pri-

fanboy 239
vately, and secondly I want to be the last person in the room on

every major decision. I didn’t mean it figuratively, I meant liter-
ally.” Obama agreed to the terms and said, “I want to make clear
that when I have a disagreement with you I’m going to flat out tell
you and I want you to do the same with me and do it in private.”
Biden agreed and said he would resign before he disagreed publicly
with Obama: “If we ever get to a place where I have a fundamental
moral disagreement with you,” Biden said, “I’ll develop [tell peo-
ple I have] prostate cancer and resign. I will not publicly take issue
with you on anything.” He saved disagreements for their lunches,
or he would stay in the Oval Office after other advisers left to talk
to Obama in private.
Biden has called the Bush-Cheney relationship more “codepen-
dent” than his relationship with Obama. Biden recommended re-
tired Marine Corps general Jim Jones to be Obama’s first national
security adviser. Jones was initially concerned that Biden would
want to have a shadow national security council, like Cheney had,
because of his years on the Senate foreign relations committee. Biden
told Jones, “I’m not going to keep that staff at all on one condition,
and you should talk to the president about this: I have total access to
the national security council.” Jones replied, “Thank God.”
Biden said he spent four to seven hours a day, every single day,
with the president, and he was in every major meeting, at Obama’s
request. At 7:40 every morning his senior staff would meet with
Obama’s senior staff to set the day’s agenda. Biden said when he
was assigned a job, like overseeing the 2009 Recovery Act, a nearly
$1 trillion stimulus package meant to revive the economy after the
financial crisis, he had complete authority over it. One Cabinet
member disagreed with him in an early meeting and Biden said he
replied with a not-so-veiled threat: “Look, it’s simple. Do exactly
what the hell I tell you, or go see the president. I don’t mind. Well,
son of a bitch, we had no problems after that.”
Even toward the end of their time together, there were moments
when Obama grew exasperated with Biden. During one meeting

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about Iran, Biden started to discuss the Sunni/Shia divide and Obama
cut him off in front of everyone in the room. But, ultimately, they
had a partnership that did something no other modern president
and vice president have managed to do—it grew stronger over time,
personally and professionally. “That ‘bromance’ thing is real, man,”
Biden says. And there was mutual reverence and respect between
them—Biden often tears up when he talks about his relationship
with Obama and Obama speaks affectionately about their friendship.
“I’m grateful every day that you’ve got such a big heart, and a big
soul, and those broad shoulders,” Obama told Biden at Beau Biden’s
funeral. “I couldn’t admire you more.”
“In the way a good friendship is, they were honest with each
other, sometimes they had disagreements that could get to the
point of being intense,” said Biden’s former chief of staff Steve
Ricchetti. “They were close enough that they could say things
strongly to each other and still were brothers afterward . . . They
willed it to work.”
At the Democratic National Convention in 2008 Biden’s grand-
daughter Finnegan asked if she and her sister Maisy could have a
sleepover at the hotel with the Obamas’ daughters Sasha and Malia
and their cousins. “And so I went to Jill and Jill called Michelle
and Michelle was already on it,” Biden said. The hotel prepared a
room next to theirs for the girls. Like any kids they slept on futons,
watched TV, and ate popcorn. “I remember walking out to go to the
floor [of the convention] and opening the door and seeing all these
little black and white faces lying down with each other, some in the
same sleeping bag, and I knew, I knew this was going to work.”
About a year into the administration, as they were grappling with
the economic crisis and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden called Da-
vid Axelrod into his office and shut the door. “Do you remember that
conversation we had when you came out to see me in Wilmington?”
“Sure I do,” Axelrod replied.
“Remember when I said I thought I’d be the better president?”
“Yeah.”

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“I was wrong about that,” Biden said. “I’m so proud of this guy
and I’m so proud to be his partner, and I just wanted you to know
that.”
Biden was the first person in his family to go to college. He has

always been defensive about not having attended an Ivy League
school, like so many of his Senate colleagues. Before Senator Russ
Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin who happened to graduate
from Harvard Law School, showed up for his first hearing as a
member of the Senate judiciary committee, he asked an aide to
fill him in on the chair of the committee, Joe Biden. “One thing
you need to know about Joe Biden is he has a chip on his shoulder
about where he went to school,” the staffer told Feingold, who was
surprised that after so many years in the Senate Biden would still
harbor those feelings. After Biden gaveled the hearing into ses-
sion, he turned to Feingold and said, “Welcome to the committee.
While I don’t have the pedigree and didn’t go to the schools you
went to . . .” Feingold looked at his aide and smiled. Biden knew
the jokes about him and that some of his critics thought he was not
sophisticated enough. Dick Cheney confirmed Biden’s paranoia.
When asked for his take on his successor he called him “a good
guy, a nice guy,” but he added: “Personally we always got along
fine . . . I don’t see him as a heavyweight.” (Biden for his part
called Cheney “the most dangerous vice president in U.S. history,”
but since Trump’s election he has been far less critical. “Give me
back the neocons,” he said. “Cheney was really smart and really
informed. I think he was wrong, but not because he wasn’t in-
formed.”)
Obama’s campaign team would worry about “Joe Bombs,” as
they called them, especially in the early days. “Uncle Joe” was gaffe-
prone but lovable. “It [speaking off the cuff ] has held him back in
his career,” said one former aide. “He was a goofball, his reputation
among reporters was terrible.” During one particularly cringe-worthy

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moment in the 2008 campaign at a televised event he said: “Stand

up, Chuck! Let ’em see you!” to Missouri state senator Chuck Gra-
ham before realizing he was confined to a wheelchair. In Febru-
ary 2009, after the Inauguration, Biden told an audience that there
was a “thirty-percent chance we’re going to get it wrong” on the
economy. When a reporter asked Obama about it he said, “I don’t
remember exactly what Joe was referring to. Not surprisingly.” In
March 2010, when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in the
packed East Room of the White House, marking what Democrats
consider to be the biggest legislative accomplishment of his presi-
dency, Biden famously whispered into the president’s ear that it was a
“big fucking deal.” The off-the-cuff remark was picked up by a live
mic and created a distracting story line for the West Wing.
The “Uncle Joe” memes and GIFs, the most famous being a
shirtless Biden washing a Trans Am parked in the White House
driveway by the satirical Onion, have made Biden into something
of a sensation. And his Ray-Ban aviators and leather bomber jacket
added to his allure. He was perfectly happy running around the
lawn of the Naval Observatory for an annual summer beach party
with White House reporters with a Super Soaker spraying everyone
in sight. Yet his public persona masked a surprisingly sharp temper
that he quickly turned on members of his staff. Aides refer to this
informal hazing as being “Bidened” or “Bidenized.” “He’d blow
up at you,” said one staffer. “It was terrifying the first time,” said
another former staffer who has a good relationship with Biden and
overall enjoyed working for him. “He’d grit his teeth and say, ‘Why
the fuck do I have to do this trip?’ ” He has been known to make
the uninitiated cry, and it can be difficult for speechwriters to work
for him. Sometimes he barely read their work before rewriting it.
Being a speechwriter for Biden, aides joked, was the worst job in the
White House. But Biden speechwriter Dylan Loewe marveled at
Biden’s Socratic approach. In meetings Biden drilled down tirelessly
on an issue, and in some ways he was more demanding to work for
than Obama. Biden, his aides said, expected briefings that were

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worthy of the office he occupied. “You only got yelled at,” Loewe
said, “if you didn’t meet the mark.” The job of working for the vice
president, Loewe pointed out, “is not supposed to be easy.”
Loewe worked for Biden during his final two years in office and
says that Biden never completely overcame his stutter. “You never
totally overcome a stutter. There were times when his stutter would
appear in meetings.” On the way to a speaking event, even though
he was going to read the speech on the teleprompter, Biden would
look it over and do what he had done as a kid and divide the words
into musical beats. “Almost like he was a guitarist about to go out
and sing a new song,” Loewe recalled. “He wanted to make sure he
had the rhythm right.” What Biden’s speechwriters were trying to
do, Loewe said, “was more than just write a speech, we were trying
to get the words right so that they wouldn’t cause the muscles in his
mouth to spasm.” The irony was not lost on Loewe: “Here’s a guy
that most people think of as loquacious, and he is, but words are not
always easy to get out of his mouth.”
Halfway through speech prep in Biden’s West Wing office one
day, his secretary came in with a note. Biden interrupted the dis-
cussion and went to the anteroom and brought in a mother and her
young elementary-school-age son. Biden had met them a couple of
months earlier in a photo line, and the woman had told him how
inspiring he was to her son, who also has a stutter. Biden had given
her his phone number and told her to visit if she was ever in Wash-
ington. “You’re way smarter than I was when I was your age and I’m
vice president now,” he told the young boy. “I want you to watch
our speechwriting so you can see, if I can do this, you can do this.”
At a rally in New Hampshire during the 2012 campaign, Biden
was to introduce the governor, and the governor would introduce
President Obama. Loewe wrote a three-minute speech. When it
was over, Biden had not changed a single word and kept to the time
limit. Offstage, Loewe and another staffer high-fived each other—
they were so amazed. President Obama, who was seated nearby,
looked bemused. “Wait,” he said, “Joe’s done already?”

244 first in line
On December 14, 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire

with a military-style assault rifle at Sandy Hook Elementary School
in Newtown, Connecticut, killing twenty first-g raders and six
adults. Obama called it “one of the worst days of my presidency,”
a tragedy that brought tears to the eyes of normally stone-faced
Secret Service agents. Obama tapped Biden to lead the push for
gun control legislation and to engage with the Newtown families.
Biden was able to talk to the grief-stricken parents in a way that
others could not. Having lost his wife and daughter, he was able to
empathize. “It doesn’t come as naturally to the president,” Biden’s
chief of staff Bruce Reed said. “With victims Biden has a special
rapport because he knows personally what it’s like, and he’s also a
guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve.”
Shortly after the tragedy, some of the parents went to the vice
president’s large, high-ceilinged ceremonial office in the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building. They sat at the long table clutching
framed photographs of their children, some holding their child’s fa-
vorite stuffed animal; others wore the names of their children on
wristbands. Some parents brought the siblings of their murdered
children, most not more than ten years old themselves. They went
around the long oval table in the ornately decorated room with ma-
hogany floors, chandeliers, and two fireplaces. As parents told stories
about their children, other parents and White House aides reached
for the boxes of tissues lining the table. “I’ve been to a lot of sessions
where the president or vice president had to deliver bad news or
grieve with families, and this was the most genuine heart-wrenching
one I’ve ever seen,” said Biden adviser Sarah Bianchi. The meeting
was so emotional, Reed said, that he told other staffers they could
leave if they needed to. Biden, with tears in his eyes, told the gath-
ered parents how much he admired them, how brave they were to
try to do what they were doing to change gun laws and turn their
personal suffering into something positive.
Biden confessed to the families that he had always felt like a

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coward after the accident that killed his wife and daughter, how a
tractor trailer was involved and how he had an opportunity to push
for tougher regulation on tractor trailers, which he did not do in
the Senate. “You have more courage than I did,” he said, as tears
welled in the eyes of many people sitting at the table. He told the
family members how devastated he had been after the accident. He
said the best advice he got then was to keep a calendar and ask at
the end of each day whether that day was better than the day be-
fore. For a long time, he told them, it will not be better, but after a
while they would start having more OK days than bad days.
The most gut-w renching meeting came when the Senate voted
down a bill that would have extended background checks for fire-
arms purchases and family members came to the White House for
a Rose Garden statement. During one meeting with members of
the NRA, Biden was angry and arguing, his voiced shaking with
indignation. “The vice president knew from the moment he got
the assignment to shepherd the legislation that we weren’t going to
be able to get anything done apart from what we could do with ex-
ecutive action,” Reed said. Before the event in April 2013 Obama
and Biden gathered in the Roosevelt Room with family members
and that meeting, Reed said, was even harder than the first because
now the only thing the families had left to do was grieve.
After the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in the
summer of 2016, when forty-n ine people were killed and dozens
more injured in a terrorist attack, Biden insisted on accompanying
Obama to a memorial service there, even though some Obama
aides thought it was best for the president to go alone. Biden was
adamant about going to meet with the families because he could
relate to their pain, having recently lost his son. Obama and Biden
stood about twenty feet apart as they greeted the victims’ families.
Valerie Jarrett stood closer to Biden, and she could hear him tell
family members about the loss of his son Beau and the loss of his
wife and daughter. “I know what you’re going through,” he told
them. “I just want to assure you that it does get better. Your tears

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of sorrow will turn to tears of joy [when you remember your loved
one], but it takes time.”
Jarrett marveled at how emotionally vulnerable he was and how
that allowed them to confide their grief to him. “It allows people
to open up to him with a level of intimacy that I’ve rarely observed
with strangers,” she said. Biden is very physical, he will grab you
and hug you and pull you close to him. Jarrett said that physicality
is “motivated by his desire to connect.” People, she said, “feel it, it’s
palpable, it’s uncomfortable sometimes because most people aren’t
that comfortable showing their emotions.” Biden, she said with
admiration, is “fearless about emotion.”
Biden says he helped Obama be more demonstrative with his own

emotions and trust his instincts. Biden said that every decision in
the White House went through a rigorous process before it ever
got to Obama. Before a national security issue ever reached his
desk it went to deputies at the National Security Council, then to
top aides, and finally to Obama. “I used to say, ‘Mr. President no
matter how hard you work, no matter what you do, no president is
ever going to have more than sixty to seventy percent of the facts
upon which to make a critical decision. Never. Does not exist. So
your instinct really matters.” Obama, Biden said, “was constantly
looking for more information, more data.” Biden saw it as his job
to get him to listen to his gut.
The best example of that dynamic is the May 2, 2011, Navy
SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader be-
hind the 9/11 terror attacks, who was hiding in a compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan. “He knew his presidency was on the line
with bin Laden,” Biden said. “Think about if that had failed, his
presidency would have come to practically a screeching end.” On
the night of April 28, Obama gathered top members of his national
security team, including Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
CIA director Leon Panetta, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff

fanboy 247
Admiral Mike Mullen, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in

the Situation Room and essentially did a roll call around the ta-
ble, asking each whether they thought he should give the order to
send the SEALs in to kill the fugitive al-Qaeda leader. Biden came
down against going in—w ithout being absolutely sure that bin
Laden was in the compound, Biden argued, more time was needed
to get a positive identification. Most people were hedging their
bets, saying they were 49/51 whether he should authorize the raid
or not. “Only three people said unequivocally go or don’t go: two
that said unequivocally go were the chairman of the joint chiefs
and Panetta. One who said unequivocally don’t go was the secre-
tary of defense. I’m the last guy in the room and it comes to me. I
turned to everybody and said, ‘You’ve got seventeen one-handed
economists in here [Harry Truman famously complained, “All my
economists say, ‘on the one hand . . . on the other’ ”]. That’s wrong,
you have fourteen [three people actually gave firm opinions]. Mr.
President, I think you should choose option two [not to go].”
During the 2016 election, Clinton, who was “51/49 to go in”
according to someone in the room, said she was unequivocally
for the raid. In January 2016 she told an audience at Iowa State
University: “I was one of those who recommended the president
launch what was a very risky raid . . . because if all we had done
was launch a missile and dropped a bomb we never would have
known [if bin Laden was dead].” Obama’s top strategist David
Axelrod said, “My sense is that she was not sold on the idea either.”
Biden clearly resents the way Clinton mischaracterized her posi-
tion. One aide said: “The ass covering, opportunistic version really
rattled him.” Biden advised against the raid, he said, “to give room,
because then I walked out with him [Obama], which I always did,
and walked to the office. I said, ‘Follow your instinct. I think you
should go, follow your instinct.’ I could tell that was his instinct.”
Biden said he fell on his sword so that Obama would look like he
made the call on his own. “I wanted people to know what a chance
this guy took. If I had said that I said to go [at the time] then it

248 first in line
would make me look like I was ratting out everybody else.” Press
reports made it seem like Biden was one of the lone voices against
what ended up being a successful raid that won Obama widespread
praise. “That’s the job of the vice president,” Biden said. “You’re
supposed to throw yourself in front of the train. That’s one of the
reasons I didn’t want to do it [become vice president] in the be-
ginning.”
Biden was reminded again and again that his legacy is attached
to the president’s. “In order to be a really successful vice president,
you have to subvert your own interests,” Biden’s former communi-
cations director Shailagh Murray said. “The most important thing
was being the best vice president you could possibly be and some-
times that was going to require eating shit.” That was the case when
Biden appeared on Meet the Press during the reelection campaign in
May 2012, and he declared his support for same-sex marriage. “I
am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men,
women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women mar-
rying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil
rights, all the civil liberties,” Biden told host David Gregory. “And
quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.” Biden
had recently met with a group of gay Democrats in Los Angeles
and the subject had been on his mind. He knew that the president’s
hedging—Obama said his opinion on the matter was “evolving”—
was hurting the party. He did not think he had gotten in front of
the president until he read the interview transcript himself.
Before appearing on Sunday shows Biden would get briefed on
foreign and domestic policy—sometimes the domestic policy brief-
ings could last more than an hour. He was relentless about these
briefings, sometimes agonizingly so for his staff. But gay marriage
had not come up. Biden adviser Sarah Bianchi stood in the studio
during the interview but could not clearly hear his answer on gay
marriage.
When he came off the set he asked, “I got all the economic stuff
right, right?”

fanboy 249
“Yeah, you did great. What was that you said on gay marriage?”
“I said the president makes policy on love.” But that was, of course,
not what he said.
“I’m confident it was not strategic,” said Murray, who was also
with him at the interview. “But once he did realize what he had
said, his attitude was: might as well embrace it. He thought he
could be the guy who could throw himself on the hand grenade
and let the chips fall where they may.”
Obama’s top campaign aides were furious—this was not part of
the long-term plan and they thought Biden was being disloyal. And
it got the White House off what was supposed to be its key message
that week: economic issues and student loans. Biden speaking out
on same-sex marriage made the president look weak, and it forced
Obama to confront the controversial subject head-on.
Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina, in particular, was
extremely upset and called Biden aides screaming about the vice
president overstepping and forcing Obama into a corner during
a hard-fought election. “They were the control freaks, and that’s
the way campaigns are supposed to be,” said one Biden staffer. “It
took something away from the president which Biden was cogni-
zant of so he reached out to him and apologized for putting him
in that position. He regretted that but he did not regret what he
said.” The situation was handled clumsily, and aides say that was
solely Biden’s fault. But Biden’s aides thought the vitriol coming
from campaign headquarters in Chicago was out of proportion to
the crime. “I knew exactly what they were doing,” said one Biden
aide. “I told those guys—Messina in particular—to shut the fuck
up and stop talking to reporters. That we would end the story with
an apology.”
Obama was blindsided by Biden’s remarks, but he was the least
upset, and once Biden personally apologized to Obama everything
was forgiven. But Biden’s staff was shaken. Obama said at a staff
meeting the next day that Biden was “speaking from the heart”
and it was fine. Obama told Axelrod, “I can’t punish Joe for being

250 first in line
bighearted. I’ll talk to him about discipline, but I know where that
came from, I know why he answered the way he did. He wasn’t
trying to upstage me.” On May 9, three days after Biden’s inter-
view, Obama sat for an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts. Ac-
cording to one account, Michelle Obama considered it a blessing
in disguise and told her husband before his interview: “Enjoy the
day. You are free.”
Obama told Roberts, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally
it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex
couples should be able to get married.”
But the lead-up to the ABC interview was difficult for Biden’s
top advisers, who were in the firing line. “The West Wing staff
was just horrible about the whole thing and spent the two days
torturing us and resenting that they had to deal with it now,” said
a former Biden aide. “It’s not always direct abuse. Sometimes it’s
leaking to the press, trash talking. It was a classic example of the
clash between the no drama control freaks and the ‘Look mom, no
hands!’ approach.” The campaign insisted that the president had
had a plan to address the issue and Biden had forced them to come
out with it sooner than they would have liked. It was one of several
periods when Biden and his team were put on probation. Though
it was a major setback for him internally, it won him lots of support
from people who praised him for speaking from the heart, even
when it was not politically expedient.
Less than six months later, Biden redeemed himself during the
October 11, 2012, debate with Republican nominee Mitt Rom-
ney’s running mate, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan. The de-
bate came at a precarious time for Obama after his listless first
presidential debate with Romney eight days earlier. There was a
lot of hand wringing inside the White House and a sigh of relief
when it was over. Even critics agreed Biden had won the debate.
Obama watched it on board Air Force One, and when it was over
he called Biden to congratulate him on his performance. Though
there was no plan to speak to reporters when he arrived in Wash-

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ington, Obama felt compelled to talk to the press gathered on the

tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. “I’m going to make a spe-
cial point of saying that I thought Joe Biden was terrific tonight,”
Obama said. “I could not be prouder of him. I thought he made a
very strong case. I really think that his passion for making sure that
the economy grows for the middle class came through. So I’m very
proud of him.” It was a critical moment for Biden, who had been in
hot water months before. “It was important to the President that he
show publicly and privately that he had the Vice President’s back,”
recalled Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest.
Biden’s last chief of staff, Bruce Reed, said the West Wing al-
ways worried about Biden breaking new ground, but that was what
made Biden a good teammate for an unusually reserved president.
“We worried more about Biden getting his dates mixed up, there
are all kinds of mistakes you can make in an interview,” Reed said.
“A lot of politicians who are very careful in what they say are less
likely to make mistakes, but they’re also less likely to say anything
great.” But in Biden’s case there was an effort to make sure he did
not say anything that ran counter to the administration’s message,
especially after Meet the Press.
During the 2012 reelection campaign Obama expanded his
tight inner circle to include Biden and his aide Mike Donilon. He
wanted more voices at the table, but expanding the circle came at
a price. During their first strategy meeting in the White House’s
State Dining Room, Obama was very candid about what he had
failed to get done in his first term, including his promise to close
the U.S. military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba.
When details of the meeting emerged, Obama, who notoriously
hated leaks, was furious. He called in all the attendees of that first
meeting and chastised the entire group: “I expanded the circle, I
put my faith in this group and someone let me down. I expect that
person to come and tell me about it.” He walked to the Oval Of-
fice and no one followed him. Biden stood up and said: “This guy
would do anything for you. He trusted you.” Then Biden left the

252 first in line
room. But Biden and his team came under suspicion for being the
source of the leak, so Biden and Donilon were cast out of the fold
and no longer invited to strategy meetings.
Still, Biden was a useful asset for the West Wing. At the end of
2012, after Obama won reelection, the Bush-era tax cuts were set
to expire. The administration wanted to extend the middle-class
tax cuts and end the tax cuts for the wealthy. But congressional Re-
publicans threatened to shut down the government if deep budget
cuts were not enacted to pay for the middle-class tax cuts. If no
deal was reached there would have been a massive tax increase on
the middle class. Biden wanted to help but the West Wing did not
want to let him anywhere near the issue and disinvited Reed and
Bianchi from meetings at different junctures. Obama had prom-
ised Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that he would not involve
Biden in negotiations with the Senate’s top Republican, Mitch
McConnell, because Biden had a reputation among Democrats for
giving away too much in negotiations.
Eventually it was McConnell and Biden, however, who would
reach a deal. During one near-crisis, McConnell called Biden and
asked rhetorically, “Does anyone down there know how to make
a deal?” In negotiations, Biden’s first question is What do we agree
on?—leaving the hardest thing for last. During negotiations Biden
would have McConnell on speakerphone and put it on mute and
yell to a member of his staff: “Can we give that to him?” For
Obama, dealing with Congress was an intellectual exercise and not
about personal relationships. “It was like being a cook if you don’t
like food,” one Biden aide said.
Obama’s disdain for Congress was his Achilles’ heel. The Obama
West Wing put such a premium on control, on no drama, that it
often failed to see the strengths in Biden’s improvisational approach.
Eventually the West Wing stopped letting him go anywhere near
Congress because, Biden aides argue, they were afraid he was going
to get something done. “They should have used him a lot more, it
was such a gift,” said Biden adviser Sarah Bianchi. “I don’t think the

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administration ever understood that all politics is personal.” Bianchi

said Biden and Obama look at deal-making differently. “For Biden,
it’s you give me something that makes you want to throw up and
I’ll give you something that makes me want to throw up and we’ll
get it done. Obama’s view of a legislative compromise is, ‘My thing
is intellectually correct but if you want to scale it back a little, OK.’ ”
Biden revered the Senate (in his memoir, Promises to Keep, Biden
wrote, “Thirty-five years later I still get goose bumps when I come
out of Union Station and see the Capitol dome”). He especially
enjoyed being president of the Senate and swearing in new sena-
tors, taking selfies with them, kissing babies and telling sons and
grandsons of senators to “keep the boys away from your sister.’ ”
It’s all part of the pomp and ceremony and collegiality he so loved
about being in the Senate. It became a running joke, when Biden
would come back from the Hill and would be waxing on about a
meeting with a senator, Obama would laugh, roll his eyes, and say,
“Joe, you just love those guys, don’t you?”
Biden had a bad feeling about the healthcare website’s rollout.
Denis McDonough, then White House chief of staff, came in to
brief Biden and his staff on the Healthcare.gov website before it
was launched in October 2013. McDonough told the vice presi-
dent confidently, “It’s going to be like Amazon.com, like buying
diapers.” When he left, Biden turned to a staffer and said, “Some-
thing’s wrong, right?” It seemed too easy. The staffer agreed and
asked, “Are you going to do something?” Biden mentioned his
concerns to the president and the president told him, “We have
a process.” Biden decided he was not going to pick that battle.
Healthcare, it turned out, was much more complicated than buy-
ing diapers and Biden’s instincts were correct. The website, a $630
million online insurance marketplace, met with disastrous results
as people were unable to log in and sign up for healthcare coverage,
a crisis that helped fuel the backlash to Obama’s major domestic
policy accomplishment.
Obama relied on Biden for foreign policy advice. Obama also

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used Biden’s long relationships with foreign leaders and his easy
rapport with many of them to help mask some of his own aloof-
ness. Early on in the administration Obama had a lunch with the
emir of Kuwait that was stilted and uncomfortable. Then the emir
met with Biden, who talked about his grandkids, and at the end the
emir was beaming. Biden likes the human give-and-take, while
Obama, West Wing staffers say, is probably the least needy person
and as a result he does not really understand that most other human
beings are essentially needy.
Inside the White House Obama was nicknamed “Mr. Spock,”
after the human-a lien philosopher on Star Trek. “This guy is re-
ally smart. I’ve worked with eight presidents and he is by far the
smartest,” Biden marveled, “just pure gray matter [the part of the
brain that processes information].” Sometimes, though, Biden said,
Obama needed to be reminded to connect more with his emotions.
Biden was the administration’s point person on Iraq from the
beginning of Obama’s first term. Like other important assign-
ments, he did not find out it was his until Obama announced it
during a morning briefing in the Oval Office. “Without saying
anything to me, he said, ‘Joe will do Iraq. He knows more about
it than you guys do. Joe will do it.’ At first I thought it was a joke
and they did, too,” Biden said. “From that point on, everything
on Iraq went through me. That surprised me, five weeks in.” In
2003 Biden had voted in favor of the Bush administration’s U.S.-
led invasion of Iraq. The invasion toppled Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein’s authoritarian regime but it left a vacuum that sparked a
massive sectarian civil war. When he was a senator, Biden argued
that much of the resulting turmoil was because of ancient hatreds
between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, and in a 2006 New York Times
op-ed he presented a plan with Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of
the Council on Foreign Relations, to divide the country along sec-
tarian lines. The plan went nowhere and was sharply criticized at
the time for encouraging a splintering of the country along ethnic
lines. But some of Biden’s aides still argue for it.

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Biden became skeptical about Iraq ever finding peace, and he

was critical of the notion of imperial America. There are some
places, he argued, the United States cannot save. The United States
withdrew its combat forces from Iraq in 2011, and since 2014 the
Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, a violent group claiming
religious authority over all Muslims, has emerged and seized large
parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria. Critics argue that the United
States should have forced then–prime minister Nouri al-Maliki,
head of a religious Shiite party, out of the government when he
began consolidating power and failed to stop ISIS fighters from
taking over large parts of the country. Biden wanted to keep Ma-
liki as prime minister because, as his national security adviser Tony
Blinken put it, Maliki was the best option. As Maliki’s second
term unfolded after his reelection in 2010, tensions began building.
“The vice president spent endless hours and time trying to prevail
on the leadership, starting with the prime minister, to govern . . .
in a truly inclusive manner,” Blinken said.
Biden’s influence on U.S. policy in Iraq is indisputable. He told
Christopher Hill, who was U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2009 to
2010: “My deal with Barack was that I don’t have to prevail but I
need to be in the room when important decisions are being made.”
Hill said Hillary Clinton came to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and
“never came again” when he was serving as ambassador. There was
criticism inside the White House that Clinton was distancing her-
self from the quagmire. “From the point of view of a presidential
candidate, and everybody knew she was a presidential candidate
from the get go, I think she just didn’t want to touch Iraq,” Hill
said.
When Obama came into office he began a review of the war
in Afghanistan, which started in 2001, when U.S. and British
forces launched airstrikes after the 9/11 terror attacks. By the time
Obama took office there were 36,000 U.S. troops in Afghani-
stan and 32,000 NATO forces. He began to rely on Biden to play
the “bad cop” to his “good cop” during talks with generals who

256 first in line
pushed for more troops than Biden thought was necessary. The
strategy enabled Obama to stay above the fray. Biden was cautious
about committing more troops and aides say people would not rec-
ognize him in some of these meetings with the defense secretary
and other national security leaders—he was exacting, contrarian,
and nothing like the affable “Uncle Joe” depicted on the internet.
“Obama would start the meeting and it would get to a certain
point and Obama would lean back and Joe would lean in,” Biden’s
best friend and Senate successor Ted Kaufman said. “Joe was the
devil’s advocate.” Eventually it got to the point where Obama and
Biden would talk in the Oval Office to discuss their joint strategy
going into a meeting, and Biden would often have written a note
to the president pointing out top concerns to bring up in a meet-
ing, or Obama would say to Biden, “We really have to press on
this, you take the lead.” That way people, particularly the military
brass who were pushing for more troops, did not know which way
Obama was leaning. “He’s a master at asking questions in a way
that you think you know which way he’s leaning and then you
realize you don’t,” said Blinken, who was a foreign policy adviser
to both Biden and Obama. “Biden was his guy pushing, prodding,
challenging. By the last month of the review it was very much a
deliberate thing.”
But Biden ultimately lost the argument. Before the review was
even completed in December 2010, Obama accepted the Penta-
gon’s recommendation to send 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
(He eventually agreed to send 30,000 additional troops but insti-
tuted a timetable for a drawdown in July 2011.) By August 2010,
amid escalating violence, the United States had 100,000 troops in
Afghanistan. Biden never thought more troops was the answer,
and during an August 2015 National Security Council meeting
he argued that Afghanistan would revert to chaos no matter how
long U.S. troops stayed. “It doesn’t matter if we leave tomorrow or
10 years from now,” he said. He admitted that he was a “broken
record” on this issue. Biden told Hill he was overruled on doubling

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down in Afghanistan. “He didn’t see Afghanistan as something

that was going to result in a victory parade down Pennsylvania
Avenue.”
In the late summer of 2013, Obama called his top aides, includ-
ing Biden, into the Oval Office after a forty-five-m inute walk
around the South Lawn with his chief of staff Denis McDonough.
The two men had been discussing the use of force in the Syrian
civil war, which was originally rooted in the 2011 Arab Spring,
when revolts toppled Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Syrian president Bashar
al-A ssad responded to protests by killing and imprisoning dem-
onstrators and igniting a civil war that has killed hundreds of
thousands of Syrians. A few days earlier more than fourteen hun-
dred Syrians had been killed with sarin gas outside of Damas-
cus and photographs of the evidence revealed that Assad’s forces
had used chemical weapons to kill innocent civilians, including
children. Even though the use of such weapons was something
Obama had said would cross a so-called red line that would re-
quire a U.S. military response, on that walk with McDonough
Obama decided to pull back from such a response. Obama told
his aides that support from Congress would be necessary to order
a military strike in Syria.
Biden was skeptical and says Obama should never have threat-
ened Syria if he did not intend to follow through. Biden, who likes
to say “Big nations can’t bluff,” told Obama, “No more red lines
with me, man.” One Biden aide described Obama’s decision as the
starkest disagreement between the vice president and the president
in their eight years in office. Biden said he met with 158 members
of Congress and spent at least two hours with each of them—either
in groups as large as twenty-five or as few as three—to try to con-
vince them, particularly Republicans, to vote for authorization to
use force against Assad. The bill to authorize force never received

258 first in line
a floor vote in the House or Senate. “He [Obama] did intend to

keep the red line, but he really does believe in the separation of
powers, and he questioned whether he had the authority to do it,”
Biden said. “I didn’t think it was good to announce [the red line]
ahead of time.”
At times Biden bristled at the notion that he was being muz-
zled by the president’s West Wing staff, and his aides took great
pains to make it look as though he was never being told what to
do. But when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in-
vited by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner to speak
before a joint session of Congress in March 2015, it was clear that
Biden would not get to do what he wanted. Biden had known Ne-
tanyahu for years and was adamant that, as president of the Senate,
he should follow tradition and sit next to the House Speaker be-
hind Netanyahu during the address. But when it became clear that
Netanyahu would use the speech to criticize the deal the admin-
istration had reached with five other countries and Iran to place
limits on Iran’s nuclear program, it was decided Biden should not
attend the session. What would he do, West Wing staff asked, sit
on his hands and not clap when Netanyahu attacked the controver-
sial deal? The White House had not been consulted before then–
House Speaker Boehner invited Netanyahu to give the speech and
considered that a breach of protocol. Obama would not meet with
Netanyahu when he came to address Congress, and no matter how
much Biden wanted to, neither would he. It was decided then that
when Netanyahu spoke, Biden would be more than fifteen hun-
dred miles away in Guatemala on a two-day visit, meeting with
the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and the
president of the Inter-A merican Development Bank.
By the end of their eight years together, and especially after Biden
leaned on Obama for support during his son’s illness, it was clear
that the two men had become close. Valerie Jarrett says there was

fanboy 259
an immediate connection between Jill Biden and the first lady.

“Their families clicked instantly. Michelle Obama and Jill Biden,
after that first hug, were soul mates. Their children and grandchil-
dren connected.” The Obamas even flew to Delaware for the fu-
neral for Biden’s mother, Jean, and the president and vice president
would go together to the Chevy Chase Community Center, where
Obama’s daughter, Sasha, and Biden’s granddaughter, Maisy, who
are close friends, played basketball, and sometimes the president
would coach. Biden joked, “I warned the president when he got
me he got the whole family.”
During their weekly lunches Obama and Biden talked about
Beau’s illness. Biden felt a responsibility to the president to make
sure he understood what was going on. It helped to strengthen
their relationship in an unprecedented way. “He’s the only per-
son outside of my family I ever told about Beau,” Biden said,
his eyes filling with tears. “I’d sit there and talk about Beau at
lunch, and I stopped talking about it as much because he would
start to cry.”
After Beau’s death, about ten staffers gathered at the Observatory
to help the vice president and his wife plan Beau’s funeral. Biden
told the group that during one of their weekly lunches, Obama
had offered to pay off his mortgage when Biden told him that he
and Jill were considering selling their house to help support Beau’s
wife, Hallie, and their two children. “It seemed cathartic for him to
talk so no one interrupted him. Not that you would interrupt him
anyway,” said one Biden aide, who did not want to be identified
because of how intimate that moment was. Biden later recalled the
conversation he had with Obama in a television interview: “But I
worked it out,” he said he told Obama at one of their lunches. “Jill
and I will sell the house and be in good shape.”
“Don’t sell that house. Promise me you won’t sell the house,”
Obama pleaded with Biden. “I’ll give you the money. What-
ever you need, I’ll give you the money. Don’t, Joe—promise me.
Promise me.” The house is one of the only things Biden owns, so

260 first in line
Obama’s offer to help him was especially meaningful. (In the end,
Biden said, he did not need to take Obama up on it.)
At Beau’s funeral Obama said, “Michelle and I and Sasha and
Malia, we’ve become part of the Biden clan. We’re honorary mem-
bers now. And the Biden family rule applies. We’re always here
for you, we always will be—my word as a Biden.” In Biden’s big
Irish Catholic family, Obama found what he never had growing up
without a father at home. “Family has been central for us—that’s
our baseline,” Obama said of Biden. “We both feel freer to do what
we think is right because if it doesn’t work out, our families will
still love us.”
President Obama’s decision to include Biden’s Cancer Moon-
shot, a national effort to end the disease by increasing research
funding in his final State of the Union Address was a sign of their
strong partnership. Biden’s chief of staff at the time, Steve Ric-
chetti, said it meant a lot to Biden because the effort “was a de-
fining part of what he intended to do, not just in the remainder of
his time in the vice presidency, but for the rest of his life.” But the
most dramatic example of their friendship came days before they
left office, when Obama surprised Biden with the Medal of Free-
dom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, created by President John
F. Kennedy in 1963. Biden is the third vice president to receive the
medal—the others are Nelson Rockefeller and Hubert Humphrey,
who received his posthumously.
Obama had been planning the surprise for months; he and his
staff had considered including it as part of a bigger ceremony at the
White House in November 2016, and then again at a bill-signing
event in December, but ultimately it was decided that it should be
a stand-a lone event. Only Biden’s wife, Jill, and Ricchetti knew
in advance. It was treated like a national security secret. The in-
vitation billed the event as a “toast to the Bidens,” and the event
programs printed with the “Medal of Freedom” title and citation
were closely guarded and transported from the printing office to
the White House with an escort. Two versions of the president’s

fanboy 261
remarks were circulated and put into different briefing books for
the president and senior staff, with only a very small group given
the books that included Obama’s Medal of Freedom remarks.
“This is the kind of family that built this country,” Obama said
at the White House ceremony honoring his vice president. “That’s
why my family is honored to call ourselves honorary Bidens.” The
medal came with an extra level of significance because it was the
only time in Obama’s presidency that he awarded it with a level of
distinction, a designation most recently given to Pope John Paul II,
President Ronald Reagan, and General Colin Powell. “He was a
brother in arms and a valued counselor and a troubleshooter who
the president could turn to,” Axelrod said of Biden. Both the pres-
ident and the vice president had tears in their eyes at the medal
ceremony. “You kind of fall in love with him [Biden],” an aide
said, “and I think Obama did.”

XIII
Man on a Wire:
Mike Pence’s Tightrope Act
When we were first talking about whether he should be

Trump’s running mate, he said Trump reminded him
of our dad’s personality. That surprised me.
—M IK E PENCE’S OLDER BROTHER, GR EG
If you look at a corporation, the number two person is the one most
people report to. And you ignore him or her, or are not deferential to
him or her, at your peril . . . Not the case with Trump and Pence.
—A PER SON W ITH INT I M ATE K NOW LEDGE OF THE R EL AT IONSHIP
BET W EEN PR ESIDENT TRU MP A ND V ICE PR ESIDENT PENCE
“He’s a huge value added for us. We all know him. He has, I think
we’ ll all stipulate, a very different kind of personality from the
president and he’s in the middle of everything and it’s been great.”
—S ENATE M AJOR IT Y LEA DER MITCH MCCONNELL
A
re you married?” a top White House aide asked rhetori-
cally. “I spent the first couple years of my marriage think-
ing I needed to change my wife. After a while, friends
said, ‘You fell in love with her and you knew she had all those flaws,
all those characteristics, and it’s not your job to change her.’ ” That,

264 first in line
the person says, is how Mike Pence feels about Donald Trump.
“These are old guys. They’re not going to change.”
Vice presidents are usually the attack dogs during campaign sea-
son. It is a role they tend to relish, from Nixon to Cheney to Biden.
But Trump and Pence reversed these roles, with Pence serving as
the voice of restraint and Trump the voice of outrage. But in this
case the outrage is extreme. One former vice president, who did
not want to go on the record, pointed out the unusual dynamic
between the bombastic Trump and his understated vice president:
“What would be unacceptable would be if the roles were reversed
and Pence was the guy sending tweets all the time and going after
people. The role of being the attack dog when you’re vice presi-
dent, it’s a useful role to play; somehow this is reversed, at least for
now.” The suggestion that Pence is a “peer” of Trump’s is disin-
genuous, said a member of Trump’s Cabinet. “All vice presidents
have a secondary role and the role is to support to the very best of
their ability the president they serve and to reinforce the president’s
positions.”
For his first trip abroad as vice president, Pence was given a par-
ticularly challenging assignment. He was dispatched to attend an
international security conference in Munich, Germany, to reassure
nervous NATO allies that the United States had no plans to aban-
don them, even as his boss railed against members of the powerful
alliance and accused them of not paying their fair share of the cost
of mutual defense. Pence knew he had to choose his words very,
very carefully. A draft of his remarks was run by President Trump’s
national security team and it was approved. But Pence was still
worried. Would any of it upset his boss? He insisted on running the
speech by Trump himself. After they landed in Munich and had
made their way to the hotel, Pence’s aides got the president on the
phone at 1:00 a.m. Munich time. Pence read through the speech
line by line, and they edited it together. Pence’s nickname inside
the West Wing is “on-message Mike” for a reason.
He is unfailingly polite and deferential and has made an art form

man on a wire 265
out of avoiding the spotlight, knowing how angry Trump gets

when others take credit for his success. Even though his press staff-
ers have a Google alert set up so that they see whenever their boss is
mentioned, Pence will often read stories about himself before any-
one else sees them. He does not want to be the center of attention,
at least not right now, but, like his boss, he is an avid media con-
sumer. Pence is uniquely suited to working for a boss like Trump,
who demands absolute loyalty. Early on election night, when things
were not going well for the Trump/Pence ticket, Pence texted a
“Dewey Defeats Truman” cover to some of his pessimistic friends.
When he stands beside the president he has a look of pure devo-
tion and, with that, subservience. “Mike wouldn’t want it printed
in a book that he’s a steady hand because that might be viewed by
the president in a way it shouldn’t be,” said a member of Trump’s
Cabinet. “He might think it would make it look like the president
doesn’t know what he’s doing so he has to turn to Mike. But per-
sonally, I think Mike is a steady hand and a calming force.”
Before he left for a week-long trip to South and Central America
last year there was a sudden ramping up of tension with Venezuela.
Days before the trip, Trump said he was considering a “possible
military option” in the country to stem the turmoil there. “Pres-
ident Trump is a leader who says what he means and means what
he says,” Pence said at a joint news conference with Colombian
president Juan Manuel Santos. But privately Pence made it clear
that that is not always the case. U.S. allies in South America were
practically begging for reassurance from Pence that Trump was not
serious about military intervention. “What do you think an oil
embargo is?” Pence told them, seeking to calm their nerves. “You
don’t do a naval blockade with commercial ships. That’s what he
could mean by military intervention.” Trump did not tell Pence to
do this, no one inside the West Wing seemed to care particularly
about allies panicking, but Pence views his role as vice president to
act in part as Trump’s translator. At the White House, Pence sum-
marizes meetings for Trump. According to a senior Trump official,

266 first in line
Pence will cut in after an hour of debate and say, “Mr. President,
this is how I see where the group thinks we ought to go.”
Pence canceled a previously scheduled interview for this book
after he flew to Texas in August 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane
Harvey. When Pence went to visit victims two days after Trump’s
visit, he was emotional and connected with their grief in a way that
the president had not. Headlines screamed “pence shows trump
how to sweat it out with texas victims” and “mike pence’s
2020 run got off to a great start in texas.” He had earlier
released a statement calling an August 2017 New York Times story
suggesting he was positioning himself for 2020 “disgraceful and
offensive.” The statement had an audience of one: Donald Trump.
He tells aides, “stay in your lane,” meaning do not step on the presi-
dent’s message. When Pence helped push the Republican-controlled
House to pass its own version of a healthcare bill in the summer
of 2017 (it later failed to pass in the Senate), Pence aides asked
lawmakers and outside groups to downplay his role. When Trump
ordered him to leave an October 2017 NFL game because some
players took a knee to protest police brutality and racial injustice
during the playing of the national anthem, Pence and his wife,
Karen, did as they’d been told by the president: they walked out.
“His job is defined by one person, and the most important thing is
to protect that relationship,” said Pence’s first vice presidential chief
of staff Josh Pitcock, who worked for Pence for twelve years and
left after six months on the job. Pitcock was replaced by political
operative Nick Ayers.
Ayers works out of a glorified closet in the West Wing. The hall
ways of the West Wing are decorated with heavy mahogany furni-
ture, Asian lamps, and large photos, known as “jumbos,” of Trump
taken by the White House photographer (which is a long-standing
tradition). Ayers is unfailingly loyal to both Pence and the presi-
dent he serves—nothing gets him angrier than stories that make the
case that Pence is plotting his own political future. When Trump
and Pence have lunch they are accompanied by Trump’s chief of

man on a wire 267
staff John Kelly and by Ayers, who act as chaperones—it is a highly

unusual setup. Those weekly lunches between presidents and their
vice presidents are so important to modern vice presidents precisely
because they offer precious time when they can be alone and talk
candidly with the president. But Trump and Pence need the con-
versation to be steered by Kelly and Ayers so that it does not get off
track, and sometimes Ayers will interpret remarks Trump makes for
Pence later on after lunch.
Trump never holds back on taking digs, and Pence is no excep-
tion. One Pence aide recounted a Situation Room meeting: “The
president made a comment, ‘I know Mike wouldn’t say it this way,’
and he said it the way Donald Trump says things, and then he
said, ‘But Mike, how would you say it?’ Pence rephrased the same
statement in a more politically correct way and Trump turned to
the larger group and said, ‘See, that’s what I love about him.’ ” Ac-
cording to a profile of the vice president in the New Yorker, during
a private meeting with an unnamed legal scholar, when the topic
of conversation turned to gay rights Trump motioned to Pence and
allegedly joked, “Don’t ask that guy—he wants to hang them all!”
Trump was once fascinated by the Pences’ piety and now mocks it
in the White House asking visitors to the West Wing, “Did Mike
make you pray?” According to former chief Trump strategist Steve
Bannon, it’s Trump’s way of letting “Pence know who’s boss.” A
good friend of the Pences’ said she would not be surprised if Trump
nicknamed his vice president “the deacon.” The teasing, not sur-
prisingly, is not mutual. Pence never jokes back and every time he
leaves the Oval Office he thanks the president for his time. No
matter how difficult their conversation was or how inappropriate
the joke.
A Republican lobbyist described attending a meeting in the
White House’s Roosevelt Room after Trump nominated Neil
Gorsuch to a seat on the Supreme Court. Pence walked into the
room a little late and stood in the back as the president spoke, look-
ing unsure about whether he should go to his seat. When Trump

268 first in line
asked him where he’d been, Pence said, “I took your nominee up
to the Hill and here I am.” The president thanked him and said he
could not have won the election without Pence and referenced a
couple of specific rallies where Pence had done well. Pence then
sheepishly took his seat. Pence and Trump talk at least once a day,
said Pence’s first White House spokesman, Marc Lotter, who re-
signed after less than a year on the job. Lotter said the two have
grown close, but he could not offer a single specific example of
their personal or professional camaraderie.
Even though the president’s tweets upset some inside the White
House, Pence does not weigh in on them, though he might be more
supportive of them than most people suspect. When asked what the
vice president’s reaction was to a particularly vicious tweet about
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one aide said Pence’s
thinking is: If you do what we say, then there will be no more tweets. Joe
Biden, who has been offering Pence advice, said he does not think
Pence necessarily disagrees much with the president. “I think it’s
the real him not taking on the president . . . when I saw Mike and
his wife walk out of the NFL game, it may have been planned,
but Mike probably thought they [the players] shouldn’t have been
kneeling.”
Pence seems resigned to the president’s behavior and a willing
accomplice to it. “I do know that many people who are very close
to the president have asked him back through the campaign to to-
day to, if not refrain [from tweeting], at least be more disciplined,”
said Bill Smith, who was Pence’s chief of staff when he was gover-
nor of Indiana and who remains extremely close to the vice presi-
dent. “But the president will do what he will do.”
Pence also reaches out to Dick Cheney for advice, but Pence
aides say their boss is more closely modeling his vice presidency on
that of George H. W. Bush. Pence’s ability to tame the president, or
to define himself amid the chaotic administration, has fallen short.
Trump did not give Pence a specific portfolio, they did not “divide
up the world” as one Pence aide put it. Instead, the vice president’s

man on a wire 269
portfolio is far-reaching yet amorphous and unclear. “Everybody

appreciates that he [Pence] has the president’s ear,” said Brendan
Buck, the top communications aide to Speaker of the House Paul
Ryan, “and that he’s an enduring and respected part of his opera-
tion, an operation that is somewhat in flux.” When Trump attacks
Republican allies on the Hill, including Ryan and McConnell,
Pence’s role as intermediary is made more complicated.
“When we were first talking about whether he should be Trump’s
running mate, he said Trump reminded him of our dad’s personal-
ity,” recalled Pence’s older brother Greg. “That surprised me.” But,
Greg explained, after he thought about it for a while it began to
make sense: “You always knew where you stood with my dad, he
was very direct. He just said what he thought, period.” Pence’s fa-
ther, Edward Pence Jr., was a decorated Korean War veteran whom
Pence idolized—he keeps his father’s Bronze Star in his office. But
he was something of a bully and was a strict disciplinarian, who
used a belt to hit his children when they misbehaved. At dinner,
the six Pence children were not allowed to speak, and if they forgot
to stand when an adult entered the room, he would grab them and
force them up onto their feet.
Trump is thirteen years older than Pence and, as it was with
Pence’s father, Trump does most of the talking during their pri-
vate meetings. Pence and Trump have a relationship more like the
domination-subordination that characterized the alliance between
Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey than the friendship that
evolved between Obama and Biden, or the professional partnership
during the Bush-Cheney years. Pence even occasionally gives les-
sons to other members of the administration on how best to han-
dle Trump. When then–secretary of state Rex Tillerson was on the
brink of resigning in the summer of 2017 because of frequent clashes
with Trump, it was Pence, according to an aide, who coached him
on how to handle his relationship with the president: air concerns in
private, he said, and be respectful in meetings. So Tillerson, the for-
mer CEO of ExxonMobil, who was fourth in line to the presidency,

270 first in line
was getting a pep talk from the man who is first in line and who has
had lots of experience dealing with domineering personalities.
Even top aides admit that Pence is loyal to a fault, sometimes
standing by and defending Trump even when it jeopardizes his
own reputation. Typically, vice presidents do not sit in the au-
dience at presidential news conferences, but Pence is a perennial
presence in the front row. Pence believes in what he calls “servant
leadership” and tells his staff to follow the three keys to leading
successfully: humility, self-control, and orientation to authority.
Indeed, it is his unwavering loyalty to the president he serves that
has been a main point of criticism. As a member of Congress from
2001 to 2013, Pence established himself as a solid conservative who
backed free-trade deals—in 2001, he praised the North American
Free Trade Agreement, a deal that Trump has vowed to “termi-
nate” if it cannot be renegotiated. Pence was not in Congress when
NAFTA was passed in 1993, but he did vote for the Central Amer-
ican Free Trade Agreement in 2005 and he also voted for free trade
agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea in 2011. As
with his speech to NATO allies, he faces a particularly difficult
assignment: how to stay true to himself and his values while being
loyal to Trump. He saves most of his advice and counsel for one-
on-one meetings with Trump in the Oval Office. His aides work
hard to keep Pence out of the high-stakes drama that unfolds daily
in the White House. There are too many leakers in the White
House, they say, and if the president makes a different decision
than the one Pence recommends, and that gets out in the me-
dia, it would make Pence look weak and undermine his influence.
“He does not accept palace intrigue,” said Lotter, before he left the
White House. “It’s cultural, and it stops those types of distractions
from consuming our office. No one in our office looks around and
thinks rumors are coming from the person sitting next to them.”
At a 2017 commencement address for graduates of Pennsylva-
nia’s Grove City College, a Christian school, Pence declared, “Ser-
vant leadership, not selfish ambition, must be the animating force

man on a wire 271
of the career that lies before you.” He continued: “Don’t fear crit-
icism. Have the humility to listen to it. Learn from it. And most
importantly, push through it. Persistence is the key.”
Michael Richard Pence was born in 1959 in Columbus, Indiana.

He was one of six children raised in a devout Irish Catholic fam-
ily. His father ran a chain of convenience stores and his mother
was a homemaker. Pence was an altar boy and went to parochial
school. “Our life revolved around the church,” his brother Greg
says. He developed a love for public speaking early on and did not
hide his political ambition. His high school speech coach, Debbie
Shoultz, said, “Even when he was a senior, he talked to his class-
mates about one day being president.” His grandfather, who im-
migrated to the United States from Ireland in 1923, taught Pence
to revere legendary Democratic presidents such as FDR and JFK.
Pence’s first vote in a presidential election was for Democrat Jimmy
Carter, who ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980. Pence voted for
Carter, he explained, because Carter “was a good Christian.” In a
now-ironic follow-up he added, “Beyond that, there was a sense of
‘Why would you elect a movie star?’ ”
He went to Hanover College, a small liberal arts school in Indi-
ana, with an interest in broadcast journalism, but the most notable
part of his time there was his spiritual awakening. “Mike became
deeply religious during that time,” his mother, Nancy, recalled. “At
one point he was seriously considering entering the priesthood.”
But he felt a void in his life and strained against the ceremony-
laden Catholic Church. “I began to meet young men and women
who talked about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,”
he said. “That had not been a part of my experience.” He admired
the gold cross on the neck of his fraternity “big brother,” who told
him, “Remember, Mike, you have got to wear it in your heart be-
fore you wear it around your neck.” At a Christian music festival in
Kentucky in the spring of 1978, Pence made the decision to leave

272 first in line
the Catholic Church and become a born-again Christian. “I gave

my life to Jesus Christ,” he recalled years later about that pivotal
concert, “and that’s changed everything.” It was the beginning of
a difficult transition, though, one that would take years and cause
strain in his family.
After graduating from Hanover, Pence entered law school at
Indiana University, where he met Karen Sue Batten’s sister, who
would connect them. Even though he had converted to evangeli-
cal Christianity in college, the Pences were married in a Catholic
church in 1985. He referred to himself as an “evangelical Catho-
lic” until the mid-1990s. Pence received his law degree in 1986
and went into private practice, around the same time he became
a Reagan Republican. A year later, in 1987, he made a decision
that surprised even his own family: he ran for a seat in the U.S.
House of Representatives—he was twenty-n ine. Pence’s father was
so against it that he even asked one of Pence’s brothers to help con-
vince him not to run. Eventually, though, Pence won his father’s
support. He perfected his aw-shucks, folksy modesty during that
early campaign and rode a single-speed bicycle around his district
in shorts and sneakers striking up conversations with anyone he
could find. He won the Republican Party’s nomination but lost
the general election by a slim margin to Democratic challenger
Phil Sharp. He ran again in 1990, and it was a vicious campaign
on both sides: the Sharp campaign seized on Pence’s use of cam-
paign funds to pay for living expenses, and Pence upped the ante
by running a television ad showing a man dressed as a cartoonish
version of an Arab in a robe and headdress and standing in front
of a fake backdrop meant to look like the desert. The actor praised
Sharp, who was chairman of a subcommittee dealing with energy
issues, for being the “best friend” of Arab oil-producing nations.
The ad was roundly criticized. The Indianapolis News said the ac-
tor had used “perhaps the worst Omar Sharif impersonation ever
recorded” and called it “insulting and derogatory . . . appealing to
racist sentiments.”

man on a wire 273
Pence lost to Sharp again, this time by nineteen points, and a

year after his defeat he wrote an essay, “Confessions of a Negative
Campaigner,” published in the Indiana Policy Review. Pence began
the essay with a passage from the Bible: It is a trustworthy statement,
deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came to save sinners, among
whom I am foremost of all.—1 Timothy 1:15. “Negative campaigning
is wrong,” he wrote. “It would be ludicrous to argue that negative
campaigning is wrong merely because it is ‘unfair,’ or because it
works better for one side than the other, or because it breaks some
tactical rule. The wrongness is not of rule violated but of oppor-
tunity lost. It is wrong, quite simply, because he or she could have
brought critical issues before the citizenry.” He still regrets going
against his own moral principles in the 1990 campaign. But, Sharp
said in a recent interview, he cannot recall ever receiving a personal
apology from Pence. “He’s what I call ‘Midwest nice.’ You don’t
treat people meanly or nastily to their face. But that doesn’t mean
you aren’t mean and nasty. It’s a veneer of niceness.”
After losing both congressional races, Pence turned his attention
to radio, where he became a talk-show host and built a name brand
in Indiana. He would also host a Sunday-morning political televi-
sion show. One of his earliest radio endeavors was at a small local
FM station in Rushville, Indiana, where he cohosted a once-a-
week dinnertime political radio show called Washington Update. At
the end of the broadcast Pence would sign off with: “Good night,
Rush County, and good night, Washington. Are you listening?”
On air, he was known for his polite demeanor and began call-
ing himself “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.” “We’ll just have to agree
to disagree,” he would say soothingly during political arguments.
Pence eventually left the small station and worked his way up to
Indianapolis-based WIBC, a bigger network with affiliates that
spanned the entire state. “He could not be a more directable talent,”
said Kent Sterling, who was an assistant program director for The
Mike Pence Show. When Pence first started out in radio, Sterling
asked him to try not to be too long-w inded. “He nodded when I

274 first in line
asked him and I wondered if he got it. The next day he was spot
on. He was perfect and he never deviated.” That same determina-
tion, ambition, and attention to detail has made him a successful
politician. “He is perfect for Donald Trump,” Sterling reflected.
“As this administration operates in this chaotic space, he is not go-
ing to be chaotic. Mike always understands what his role is.” He is
a hard worker, said Greg Garrison, who has known Pence for more
than twenty years and worked with him in radio. “That’s how he
sold that show. He went all heartland on them.” Pence eventually
expanded the show to eighteen markets.
Steve Simpson, a former Pence colleague and Indiana news an-
chor, said he thought Pence made a brilliant career move by using
his radio show to rehabilitate his image. “He ran such a dirty awful
campaign and he knew it,” Simpson said. “The radio show was
a mea culpa.” Clips from the show that have been salvaged re-
veal Pence’s prescient early criticism of the mainstream media and
adoption of the anti-Washington sentiment that helped get Donald
Trump elected. He could be sharp-tongued from time to time.
When news broke in 1996 that a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by
Paula Jones against President Clinton would be moving forward,
Pence said it would “make the O.J. Simpson trial look like traffic
court.”
In an August 1997 column posted to his radio show’s website,
Pence supported a House GOP effort to remove Newt Gingrich as
Speaker of the House for ethics violations. “Whether Republicans
want to admit it or not, House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been
knocked off his horse and been wounded badly, maybe mortally,”
Pence wrote of the man who would become his main competition
for the vice presidency. “If the G.O.P. is to find its way back in
time for the next election, it is time for new leadership, either a
new Speaker or a revived Speaker. I’ll take either one.” His anti-
establishment streak went off the rails when, in a 2000 op-ed, he
made the nonsensical claim that cigarettes are not lethal. “Time
for a quick reality check,” Pence wrote. “Despite the hysteria from

man on a wire 275
the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, two
out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related
illness and nine out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.”
In 2000, Pence received more than $10,000 in contributions from
the political action committees of major tobacco companies, in-
cluding Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. Over his twelve years in
Congress, he received $39,000 from R.J. Reynolds, the maker of
Newport and Camel cigarettes. When he ran for governor in 2012
and 2016 (he dropped out of the race to become Trump’s running
mate) he received more than $70,000 from the tobacco industry.
His radio show was clearly a stepping-stone, a way of keeping
his name before the public. No one at WIBC, said former col-
league Steve Simpson, thought he would be there for long. “His
political ambitions were never more than an inch away from that
microphone.” One small sign of this, Simpson said, was that Pence
“didn’t dress like the rest of us.” Radio talk-show hosts typically
dress very casually, but not Pence, who wore button-down shirts
and carried a briefcase to work. “He was looking down the field
when he decided to go on the radio.” Like most of Pence’s friends
from Indiana, Simpson thinks Pence is “perfect” for Trump: even-
keeled and patiently waiting for his chance to be president. “He is
calmly and methodically doing what he’s doing. I keep thinking to
myself, Is this like the radio show? Is this marking time as vice president
to the next obvious step?”
Now well known in Indiana, Pence was finally elected to Con-

gress in 2000, where he would serve for six terms. His platform
included a vow to oppose “any effort to recognize homosexuals as
a discrete and insular minority entitled to the protection of anti-
discrimination laws.” He won by twelve points. “We felt that 2000
was an opportunity to do it the right way,” Karen said. Never far
from the medium that got him elected, Pence installed a special
digital phone system in his congressional office so that when he

276 first in line
called into radio shows across the country—which he did often—

the sound quality was so good that it seemed like he was in the
studio with the host of the show.
In the House, Pence became an early voice of the Tea Party
movement. He likes to say of himself, “I’m a Christian, a conser-
vative, and a Republican, in that order.” He was a dedicated rep-
resentative of the most conservative Republicans in the House and
started climbing the ranks as deputy whip and then as leader of the
Republican Study Committee, an influential group of conservative
House members. After Republicans lost control of the House in
the midterm elections in 2006, he challenged John Boehner for the
position of minority leader but lost by an embarrassing vote of 168
to 27. In 2008 he went after his party’s third most powerful posi-
tion in the House, that of Republican conference chairman, and
won. His job was to reshape the Republican party’s messaging after
widespread losses. On the wall of the conference’s main meeting
room he hung his personal credo:
MIK E PENCE’S CONFER ENCE RULES:
• Glorify God
• Have a Servant’s Attitude
• Promote Ideas
• Promote House Republicans
• Have Fun
“He is a relationship guy and finds great pleasure in having re-

lationships with people and investing in people,” said Republican
congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who has known
Pence since 2002. “The vice president would always use a phrase
with us in the RSC [Republican Study Committee] and then with
the conference: iron sharpens iron, the biblical reference. And you
come to that by having robust debate and conversation among
yourselves and bringing your A game.”

man on a wire 277
Unlike the families of most members of Congress, when Pence

first took his seat in the House his wife and three children moved
with him to a Washington suburb in Virginia instead of staying
home in their congressional district. It was Karen’s first time living
outside of Indiana. Karen said she asked Dan and Marilyn Quayle
for their advice, and they told her that if Mike went to Washington
alone and she stayed with their three children in Indiana, when-
ever he came to a soccer game, constituents would be angling to
speak with him. “In D.C., you’re no big deal,” Karen said. “That
appealed to us. We didn’t want our kids to grow up thinking they
were celebrities. Our priority was our family.” Senator Roy Blunt,
a Republican from Missouri, remembers dropping Pence off at his
house after work and seeing his son playing out in the street with
other kids in the neighborhood. Pence, he said, is a family man.
“He always said he grew up in a house with a cornfield in the back-
yard. He never suggested it was their cornfield.”
After twelve years in Congress, and after losing his leadership bid,
Pence thought he needed executive experience as governor in or-
der to one day run for president. He was elected governor of Indi-
ana with less than 50 percent of the vote in 2012. While he used
to enjoy a couple of beers with friends back when he was president
of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity in college and in law school
and when he was a local radio host, that stopped once he became a
member of Congress. His friend and former chief of staff when he
was Indiana’s governor, Jim Atterholt, said Pence’s decision to stop
drinking is because he wants “to have his wits about him” in case
something happens. Pence only grew more disciplined as governor:
“There was no drinking period in the governor’s office,” Atterholt
said. And having a meal alone with a woman or attending events
where alcohol is served when his wife is not there has been strictly
off limits since he was elected to public office. “He was mindful
of appearances,” Atterholt says. Friends say his strict rule against

278 first in line
dining alone with women was largely at his wife’s request, and that
the decision to follow what is known as the Billy Graham rule was
made out of respect for her and their marriage. Christy Denault,
who was Pence’s communications director when he was governor,
said she completely understands his rationale. Pence wants to pro-
tect himself from any suggestion that he is having an affair. “Pence
with Mystery Woman” was the headline he and his staff were wor-
ried about. Rumors of infidelity, they reasoned, could derail his
career. “It’s not about morality,” said his friend Bill Smith, “it’s
about his relationship with his wife.” Denault said that as governor
Pence “did not have closed door meetings with a woman unless
there was a third party present.” Occasionally he would go into her
glass-walled office to have a private conversation.
As governor, Pence kept his Bible open on his desk every day.
He still often makes references to scripture; friends say he is not
passionate about any one particular issue, but he is passionate about
his Christianity. As governor he insisted that meetings be opened
with a prayer—he would go around the table and randomly pick
a staff member and ask them to lead the prayer. One day a staffer
who was not outwardly religious joked, “How come you never
pick me to pray?” For the next five meetings Pence called on him.
“He’d talk about his Bible study that morning and how that in-
formed him about an issue that he was having to decide on later
that day,” Atterholt recalled. Pence would cite specific passages and
say how a reading could be applied to a policy decision. “His Bible
study informed him throughout his day, every day. He has tremen-
dous discipline.” As vice president he hosts a lunchtime Bible study,
led by an evangelical pastor, with members of the Cabinet at the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where his ceremonial of-
fice is located. Bill Smith said that friends often ask him how Pence
finds the time now that he’s vice president, and Smith tells them,
“If there’s a [policy] meeting he has to say no to, OK, he has to say
no to many meetings.” Trump begins most Cabinet meetings with
a prayer and usually asks Pence to lead it.

man on a wire 279
Pence often tells younger staffers: “Don’t be a slave to the of-

fice. If you spend 20 hours a day in here that says to me that you’re
not going to be investing yourself in your families.” On the rare
occasion when he does raise his voice, he usually apologizes for it,
and when he is in a bad mood he laughs it off and calls it a “bad
hair day.” Scott Pelath, who was Democratic minority leader in
the Indiana House, said Pence has a sense of humor that he tries to
hide in formal settings. One time when Pelath was at the gover-
nor’s mansion for dinner, Pence told him that a guest had to bow
out at the last minute. As a joke, Pelath said, “I always wanted to
meet Jim Nabors [referring to the late gay actor who played Gomer
Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show and who used to sing “Back Home
Again in Indiana” at the Indianapolis 500].” An openly gay actor
would have been an unexpected guest at the Pences’. Pence wanted
to laugh, Pelath said. He knew it was intended to be funny, but he
just could not do it. “He has such a rigid sense of what’s appropriate
in his worldview.”
Pence, Pelath says, is a man who values the trappings of office,
the pomp and the spectacle. He said when he went to Pence’s of-
fice the chairs were always carefully aligned; the photographer was
always in the room to take pictures and record every important
event. This fits into Pence’s calculated approach to political life.
“To Mike Pence, it doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as
you’re standing in the right spot when you’re saying it,” Pelath said.
“I’ve never questioned Mike Pence’s convictions with respect to his
faith,” he continued. “He’s gotten exactly what he’s wanted in his
life of faith. I’m worried that it’s made him even more resolute in
his belief that he’s been sent on a holy mission. And that is danger-
ous for the country. It’s untenable.”
Pence’s job approval rating in Indiana dipped below 50 percent
shortly before he was picked as Trump’s running mate in 2016.
Pence has regretted how he handled some issues in his state, includ-
ing a plan to launch a state-run news agency that prompted the head-
line “pravda on the plains.” The single biggest controversy was his

280 first in line
signing of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA. It

became a defining part of his tenure as governor of Indiana. When
Pence initially signed the bill in 2015, it sparked national opposi-
tion from business leaders and the LGBTQ community, which said
the measure would allow businesses to discriminate against gay
people. Pence never anticipated the backlash.
At the private bill signing in his office Pence was surrounded
by monks and nuns in habits and highly controversial figures from
Indiana’s most conservative groups, including Indiana Family In-
stitute’s Curt Smith, who has said homosexuality is outlawed in
the Bible. “I don’t know if you want to call it a defect, but that
element of his personality is what caused the entire debacle because
an ordinary Indiana governor would take a bill like RFRA, have a
sense it was controversial, wait till the legislature went home, and
quietly sign it amid a stack of fifty other bills,” said Pelath. “But he
couldn’t resist. He had to have the photo.” Indiana state represen-
tative Ed DeLaney, a Democrat, was accused of Photoshopping the
photo when it was circulated because his colleagues thought it was
so outrageous.
As with Trump, it is not always clear how Pence makes deci-
sions. Most of his staff was with him late one night before a disas-
trous interview on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos in
which he tried to defend RFRA. He and his staff had reached a
consensus the night before that he would not be doing the inter-
view. But Pence called aides early the next morning to tell them
he had changed his mind and would indeed be going on the show.
(Advisers speculated that Karen Pence had changed his mind.)
When Stephanopoulos pressed him on whether the law allowed
discrimination against gays and lesbians, he could not answer.
As businesses threatened to leave the state, the law was eventually
rewritten, prompting a backlash from some religious conservatives
who accused Pence of flip-flopping on the issue. But conservatives
would have trouble questioning Pence’s bona fides. He supported
“personhood” legislation that would ban abortion under all cir-

man on a wire 281
cumstances, including rape and incest, unless a woman’s life was at

risk. A year later, in 2016, he signed a bill that made Indiana the
second state to ban abortions sought because the fetus had a disabil-
ity, and that required the remains of aborted or miscarried fetuses
to be interred or cremated. It was blocked from going into effect by
a federal judge who ruled that it was likely unconstitutional.
Pence’s critics are quick to point out his obvious ambition. “The-
matically everything is ideologically based but individual decisions
at any given time are weighed very specifically against how is this
going to get me closer to being president of the United States,” said
Bill Oesterle, who managed Republican Mitch Daniels’s campaign
for governor in 2004 and supported Pence’s gubernatorial run in
2012.
Before the 2012 presidential campaign, a group of influential
conservatives who were dissatisfied with likely Republican nomi-
nee Mitt Romney met with Pence in his Capitol Hill office when
he was still a member of Congress and had not yet decided to
run for governor. In that meeting, according to former Indiana
congressman David McIntosh, Pence “acknowledged that he had
always wanted to be president.” And for a couple of months he con-
sidered their efforts to recruit him. But he ultimately decided he
needed executive experience before running for president. He was
concerned that first-term Alaska governor Sarah Palin had lacked
sufficient executive experience when she was John McCain’s run-
ning mate in 2008 so he decided to run for governor instead.
In Pence’s first year as vice president it was unclear whether he saw
himself facing a dilemma as the right-hand man to such a combative
and deeply divisive president. Based on dozens of conversations with
his friends and detractors, it seems that he saw Trump’s offer as a
lifeline and not as a moral dilemma. “No unblinkered observer still
can cling to the hope that Pence has the inclination, never mind the
capacity, to restrain, never mind educate, the man who elevated him

282 first in line
to his current glory,” conservative columnist and unabashed Trump

critic George Will wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Pence
is a reminder that no one can have sustained transactions with Trump
without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.”
But it was a deal Pence was all too willing to make. Shortly after
Trump’s election, Pence was named head of the transition team.
He asked his staff for every detail they could provide on so-called
continuity of government, the procedures that dictate how the
government would operate in case of a catastrophe that took out
the president. My job, Pence often tells aides, is to be prepared. His
most obvious influence on the Trump administration was in staff-
ing top positions in the government. He personally picked and ad-
vocated for former Indiana senator Dan Coats to become director
of national intelligence (Coats says he delayed retirement for the
job and would not be working in the White House if it were not
for Mike Pence); for former Georgia congressman Tom Price to be
Health and Human Services secretary (Price texted Pence to tell
him he wanted the job, but he was fired in 2017 because of his use
of private jets at taxpayer expense); for Kansas congressman Mike
Pompeo to head the CIA (Trump later picked Pompeo to replace
Rex Tillerson as secretary of state); for longtime friend and former
chief of staff at the House Republican Conference Marc Short to
be Trump’s director of legislative affairs; and for Indiana consultant
Seema Verma to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services. Pence has friends across the federal government.
Lobbyists and lawmakers know Pence’s value and influence and
they will wait for hours to have a ten-m inute talk with the vice
president, knowing that he might get called into a last-m inute
meeting with the president. They bide their time on red couches
in the White House lobby or they sit on the gold and blue chairs in
Pence’s West Wing suite.
Pence’s approach to the vice presidency mirrors his advice to
U.S. Naval Academy graduates. In his May 2017 commencement
address at the academy he talked about “orientation to authority”

man on a wire 283
as a key part of leadership. “Follow the chain of command without

exception. Submit yourselves, as the saying goes, to the authorities
that have been placed above you,” he said. “Trust your superiors,
trust your orders, and you’ll serve and lead well.” And revere your
superiors: Pence often talks about Trump’s “broad shoulders” and
praises his “strength.”
Pence is keeping his nose down and staying out of Washington
as much as he can. Much like Gerald Ford, who was vice president
during a tumultuous time, Pence has packed his schedule with for-
eign travel and fund-raisers for congressional candidates. As for-
mer FBI director James Comey testified in Congress—charging
that the president lied and tried to stop investigations into former
Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and his business
dealings with foreign countries during the presidential campaign—
Pence was telling a group of governors and state officials about
the administration’s commitment to building new infrastructure.
“Folks,” Pence proclaimed, “it’s already been a banner week for
infrastructure.” Pence has hired a personal attorney to represent
him in inquiries relating to the federal investigation into possi-
ble ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Pence’s older
brother Greg said, “My brother does not believe there is any truth
to the Russia allegations.” The two have discussed it and, he added,
speaking candidly for himself, “If it’s true, then we need to find
out.” But one former high-ranking Republican official said Pence’s
absence from a meeting with the then–Russian ambassador to the
United States Sergey Kislyak—a meeting that Trump invited Dina
Powell, who was his deputy national security adviser, to attend—
had a flip side: “The question is, I hope he was either on the Hill or
out of town. Otherwise, he should have been there.” If he is a top
presidential adviser, he should have attended the meeting.
Pence’s unprecedented decision to form his own political action
committee within the administration’s first six months suggests he
is preoccupied with his own future. He is not yet sixty, and aides
and the party elite believe he could one day be president. His PAC,

284 first in line
the Great America Committee, can support candidates, including

himself and Trump, in 2018 and 2020. Pence raised an astonishing
$1 million for his leadership PAC during a single evening cocktail
party in July 2017. Before the July event, Pence’s PAC disclosed
raising $540,071 in the first six weeks of its creation in May 2017.
Dozens of corporate PACs, including AT&T and Boeing, have
given to Pence’s group, hoping that he will grant them access to the
West Wing. The process in the West Wing of getting information
to the president is chaotic, and Pence and his team are not viewed
as a competing power center, though they should be. An argument
could be made that with every misguided tweet, Trump is bring-
ing his vice president a step closer to the presidency. Dan Quayle,
who is a friend of Pence’s from Indiana, has advised Pence to make
sure that his staff is integrated with the president’s West Wing staff.
“He [Pence] is very focused, you don’t see a lot of emotion. He’s a
very matter-of-fact, get-the-job-done kind of guy,” Quayle said. “I
think that’s probably one of the reasons Trump picked him.” At his
first Cabinet meeting Trump looked around the room and asked,
“Where is our vice president?” Pence, ever the happy warrior, was
seated right in front of him. Pence then testified to Trump’s superi-
ority, telling the assembled Cabinet secretaries (and the reporters in
the room): “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as the vice
president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American
people and assembling a team that’s bringing real change, real pros-
perity, real strength back to our nation.”
Trump’s legislative director, Marc Short, had worked for the
powerful political network overseen by billionaire Charles G.
Koch. Charles and his brother David are known for their support
of conservative causes and their billionaire-led network of donors
and they are Pence allies. Short said that during efforts to repeal
and replace the Affordable Care Act, Pence was expected to per-
suade his old friends in Congress to vote for repeal. “We’re leaning
on him heavily here right now,” Short said. But there is a limit to
how much Pence can do on the Hill since the man he serves has

man on a wire 285
alienated so many members of Congress. After Trump attacked

individual Freedom Caucus members and in several tweets called
for their defeat in 2018 after they refused to vote for a new health-
care bill, Pence had to face his former congressional colleagues.
They asked him to stop the president from targeting them. The
conservative members hoped Pence would be sympathetic since he
was once a conservative congressman who did not always support
President George W. Bush. “I’ll pass that along to the president,”
he told them, offering no apology or explanation. Notably, the
tweets targeting individual members stopped for a while.
Pence needs his old friends in Congress as much as they need
him. He leaned heavily on Republican allies, including House
Speaker Paul Ryan and Texas congressman Jeb Hensarling. “He sat
where we sit and he understands how the slog works over here. He
knows the realities of legislating,” said Brendan Buck, who works
for Speaker Ryan. “What matters is whether there’s someone who
can understand what we’re saying and clearly communicate that to
the president.” Pence and Ryan served together for twelve years in
the House, and they went to Bible study together. When they meet
now it’s often last minute, when Pence is on the Hill and he drops
by Ryan’s office. Republican congressional leaders view Pence as
an ally, presidential tweets aside. Friends on the Hill describe Pence
as “thoughtful” and “serious,” and one senior aide to a top Re-
publican member of Congress said Pence is their greatest hope to
stabilize the Trump White House and get legislation passed.
Pence has let it be known that he’s interested in running for pres-
ident in 2020 if Trump decides not to run again, though that seems
unlikely. The key for Pence will be fund-raising. Pence is comfort-
able with the megarich and he is not intimidated by money, even
though he has very little of it himself. He once gave a friend running
for office advice: “They’ve all got big egos and they’re rich. You’ve
just got to go tell them they don’t need those thousands of dollars,
but you do.” He has hosted several dinners with big donors at the
Naval Observatory, and during the 2016 campaign he won Trump

286 first in line
the support of billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, who did not

support Trump during the campaign and sidelined his organization’s
enormous political machine in protest. (Koch once said the choice
between Trump and Hillary Clinton was like choosing between can-
cer and a heart attack.) The Koch brothers co-own almost all of Koch
Industries, the second-largest private company in the United States.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon had cutting words
to say about the influence Charles and David Koch would have over
Pence if he ever became president. “I’m concerned he’d be a president
that the Kochs would own,” he said. As vice president, Pence has
been courting scores of the country’s most influential donors, corpo-
rate executives, and conservative political leaders in a series of private
gatherings and one-on-one conversations, among them brokerage
firm founder Charles Schwab and hedge fund titan Kenneth C. Grif-
fin. During dinners at the Observatory, Pence usually hosts a cocktail
hour (though he does not drink). Nursing an Arnold Palmer or a
glass of water, he tells the assembled group about the history of the
residence, recounts the administration’s successes, and takes questions.
Guests sit at a few small tables and Pence comes to each table to chat
with each guest for a few minutes. At larger events he keeps a chair
empty at every table so that he can make his way around the room.
During the campaign, Trump called Republican politicians com-
peting with him for the nomination “puppets” for attending the
Kochs’ so-called seminars, what the brothers call their secretive
fund-raising meetings for the wealthiest conservative donors. One
member of the Koch brothers’ inner circle said that Pence is “aligned
with our network.” Texas businessman and influential Republican
donor Doug Deason is a Koch ally who has been to those dinners
at the Observatory. Even though Pence has fallen out of touch with
some of his best friends in Indiana, he has made sure to stay close
to donors like Deason, who wield enormous power because of their
wealth (Deason’s father, Darwin, sold the data-processing company
he founded to Xerox in 2010 for $6.4 billion.)
Deason recalled the incongruous sight on election night of bil-

man on a wire 287
lionaire donors, himself included, at a reception for VIPs upstairs at

the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, while downstairs Trump
delivered an acceptance speech to his populist supporters. “The
forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no
longer,” Trump said. The donors celebrating upstairs, including
corporate investor Carl Icahn and David Koch, who is the wealth-
iest resident of New York City, were hopeful that Trump’s victory
would bring less government regulation and lower tax rates. Many
of them would not have been there if it were not for Mike Pence.
Deason says he has no doubt that Pence is positioning himself
to run for president, and even though he praises Trump he clearly
favors Pence. “Mike is that voice that whispers in the president’s
ear that keeps him focused and calm,” Deason said. “If Mike wasn’t
there, it would be a lot more caustic.” Deason said that even Don-
ald Trump Jr. wishes his father would hold back on some of his
tweets. “He says something presidential and then he comes back
with a tweet that goes too far.”
Trump White House aides like to say that Pence is the yin to
Trump’s yang—one Pence aide likened Pence to Felix and Trump
to Oscar (referring to the 1970s television show The Odd Couple
about a mismatched pair of lovable roommates, one a neat freak
and the other a slob). “You need to keep your arms and legs in
the ride at all times,” Pence told a group of students at Ameri-
can University last year. “Put the roll bar down, because you just
got to hang on.” And hanging on is precisely what Pence intends
to do at all costs. One Pence staffer admitted the obvious: “Of
course he’s looking ahead, but he knows he needs this adminis-
tration to succeed.” Where Trump threatens, Pence cajoles, where
Trump issues dire warnings about “American carnage,” Pence de-
livers a more inspirational message. He recognizes that he does not
have the same charisma as Trump, nor can he fill stadiums like
Trump can—but he also does not crave adoration from crowds
like Trump does. Unlike Cheney, who had no interest in the pres-
idency when he was vice president, when Pence goes to the Hill to

288 first in line
“touch gloves,” as he says, on a weekly basis, he insists on walking

through the Capitol Rotunda so that tourists can get their photos
taken with him.
Greg Pence, who is about three years older than his brother and
looks so much like him that he sometimes gets mistaken for him,
said his brother likes the privacy of the Naval Observatory. But he
sounded worried about his little brother. “He looks tired,” he said,
“he looks very tired all the time.” Other family members are wor-
ried he is losing weight. The strain of working ninety to a hundred
hours a week is showing. “I went out there [to Washington] and
we watched the NCAA tournament and he fell asleep in the chair
while we’re watching it because he’s so tired.”
Pence must be exhausted. He is in the unusual and unenviable
position of defending and toning down his boss’s words rather than
going on the offense, as vice presidents have traditionally done.
The vice president’s calm demeanor is reassuring to Republicans
who worry that Trump is doing major damage to the party. They
fear that Trump makes a lot of decisions very quickly and with
very little information. Aides have been instructed to keep Trump’s
briefing papers to one or two pages because he does not have the
attention span, or the desire, to read through the vast briefing books
given to his predecessors. “He listens,” said one very well-known
former Republican politician who knows Trump. “I don’t know if
he absorbs, but he does listen.”
They also worry that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who is
a White House confidant and intensely loyal to Trump, has a loose
grasp of how government works and is not interested in learning.
One Republican who has worked in the White House and knows
Kushner described his understanding of Washington and political
realities as “childish,” and said that in private meetings Kushner is
brimming with a false sense of confidence. (In the early days of the
administration, when asked who his father-in-law was bringing in
to lead top government agencies—some of which Kushner himself
couldn’t name or explain—he said, “Don’t worry, we’re bringing

man on a wire 289
in billionaires.”) When Dan Coats, the director of national intelli-

gence who has nearly two decades of service in the House and the
Senate, brought up a highly sensitive national security issue with
the president, Trump told him to “go talk to Jared about that.” It
was a little jarring to Coats to be told to talk to a thirty-six-year-
old with no government experience, according to a person familiar
with the discussion. Kushner and Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka,
who also has an official title and office in the White House, occa-
sionally stop by Pence’s West Wing office to ask for advice.
Bill Smith, Pence’s former chief of staff, said: “There’s no doubt
that he’s brought in on the inner circle, but the question is there are
several inner circles. He was obviously informed of certain things,
but when he found out that he was not being leveled with, you
found out a little bit of Mike Pence’s strength.” Smith was referring
to Pence’s assertions that he did not know about meetings between
Russian officials and Trump’s first national security adviser, Mi-
chael Flynn. Pence said on television that Flynn had not discussed
with then–Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak the sanctions Presi-
dent Obama had imposed on Russia after its meddling in the 2016
election. Even though people in the Trump administration knew
Flynn was under FBI scrutiny, he only resigned when Pence dis-
covered Flynn had lied to him.
Former Indiana attorney general Greg Zoeller wonders how
his old friend can square his deeply held Christian beliefs with a
president who weaponizes his Twitter account on an almost daily
basis. Zoeller said Pence “went into the foxhole with someone he
might not be aligned with philosophically or morally” out of a
sense of duty. But it is obvious that he was also motivated by his
deep and abiding ambition. Often Pence first sees the president’s
tweets when they appear in the daily news summary his staff puts
together. And when he reads them, aides insist, he quickly moves
on to the task at hand, keeps his head down, and seeks to be the
calm in the storm.

epilogue : a heartbeat away
O
f the thirteen men in this book who’ve served as vice
president, four became president, three received the
highest civilian award the country has to offer, and one
has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Being vice president
does not have to spell the end of a career, or of political influence.
While he went on to become president, George H. W. Bush is
still engaged in politics and has talked privately with a member of
Trump’s Cabinet about the nuclear threat posed by North Korea.
Most became wealthy after leaving office, including Dan Quayle,
who is chairman of the global investment group at Cerberus, a
private equity and hedge fund firm that manages more than $20
billion. When Al Gore lost the 2000 election his net worth was
well below $2 million, but now a series of lucrative business deals
and affiliations has netted him tens of millions. In 2007, he was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change.
Modern presidents have picked their vice presidents to help them
govern, not just to get elected. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and
Barack Obama have asked their vice presidents to be far more than
“standby equipment.” Like most presidents, these men each had
enormous egos, but Bill Clinton listened when Al Gore pushed
for humanitarian action in Bosnia; George W. Bush wanted Dick
Cheney to play a decisive role in America’s response to 9/11; and

292 first in line
Barack Obama leaned on Joe Biden for gut checks on key issues.
Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all born after World War II and
Obama was born in 1961, three years off from the “Generation X”
label generally applied to those born between 1964 and 1980. They
allowed their vice presidents to have more power in part because
the job of the president has become infinitely more difficult in
the post–World War II era with growing national security threats
and looming economic concerns. Unlike Eisenhower, Kennedy,
and Johnson, whose relationships with their vice presidents were
marked by contempt, or Nixon and Bush, whose relationships with
their vice presidents were ones of indifference or annoyance, Clin-
ton, Bush, and Obama were less concerned about outward sta-
tus and more interested in using their vice presidents effectively.
Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale deserve credit for this shift
from a marriage of convenience to a true partnership.
Donald Trump, however, has turned back the clock, and his
relationship with Mike Pence is more like Lyndon Johnson’s dy-
namic with Hubert Humphrey. Johnson, like Trump, was also a
larger-than-life and deeply polarizing personality. Trump would
prefer his VP be seen and not heard and Pence’s frequent rejections
of interview requests echo Johnson’s edict that Humphrey travel
with no press: both men knew well the risks of getting more pub-
licity than the presidents they served. While Pence is dispatched to
Capitol Hill weekly to try to get legislative issues passed, he has not
been handed clear authority over any particular issue, his chief of
staff insists that’s the way they want it, but it leaves Pence with no
job description and no single area that he can take credit for, should
he run for president himself one day.
A vice president can exercise enormous power while in office, as

Dick Cheney did in the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency,
and as Al Gore and Joe Biden did in Bill Clinton’s and Barack
Obama’s administrations, but they have to establish parameters

epilogue: a heartbeat away 293
privately with the presidents they serve. “In meetings President

Obama would tend not to put his thumb on the scale because he
knew if he said what he thought, everybody else would clam up,”
says Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior adviser and close friend. “He’s
a good listener so he will let people state their positions, and Vice
President Biden was never shy about stating his. He stated it with-
out knowing where President Obama stood.” That kind of honesty
can be difficult, but it is important—being counselor in chief is the
best way to exercise real power as vice president.
When I covered the White House for Bloomberg News during
the Obama administration, I traveled with Biden from time to time.
These trips were nothing like trips on Air Force One, where every
press seat was full and access to the president was limited. Traveling
with the vice president was a much more relaxed affair, and some-
times only one or two reporters tagged along. There was usually
a chance to chat with the VP, who almost always seemed up for
it. “Anyway, I talk too much,” Biden said once, after a long chat,
giving a sideways glance to his press aide. “These guys are going to
get very nervous.”
Biden gets emotional when he talks about his friendship with
Obama. Obama tells people that Biden is like his older brother,
he can “say things that other people can’t say.” And Biden says
that they made up for each other’s weaknesses, but is quick to add:
Obama “made up for a hell of a lot more of mine than I did his.”
One way Biden helped Obama had nothing to do with politics—he
gave him a family he never had.
Since leaving the vice presidency, Biden spends so much time
traveling that he is rarely in his Washington, D.C., office. His desk
is bare except for a few framed photos of his family. A photo hangs
on the wall from election night ten years ago—it was taken in Chi-
cago’s Grant Park, and in the photo Obama is beaming as Biden’s
mother, Jean, then ninety-one years old, reaches for Obama’s hand
as they walk triumphantly onstage with Biden before an adoring
crowd of an estimated 240,000 people. During our meeting Biden

294 first in line
led me over to the photo hanging on the wall. He pointed to his

mother, who passed away in 2010. “She wasn’t supposed to walk
out,” he said. “And she says, ‘Come on, honey, it’s going to be
OK,’ to Barack.” Think of it, Biden said, his mother was trying to
reassure the newly elected president. Looking at the photo know-
ing this, Obama looks less like a global superstar and more like a
vulnerable man grateful for the reassurance.
“I joke with Michelle [Obama] that her mom, Mrs. Robinson,
could have been my mother. Michelle and I were raised similarly,
my dad was economically a click above, but everything with my
dad was always about everybody else first, like her dad. That’s the
family Barack wanted. He’d ask me questions at lunch that made
it clear that he didn’t have the benefit of some of what Michelle
and I had.” Once, Biden said, when he was vice president, Mi-
chelle asked him to talk with Obama about something personal.
He would not say what it was because it was a private matter.
“I can’t,” Biden told her.
“Look,” Michelle told him, “you’re the only one he completely
trusts.”
“Why?” Biden asked her.
“His experience, Joe, is that everyone who’s been around him
his whole adult life has wanted something from him. And you’ve
not wanted anything. You’ve demonstrated that you would jump
in front of a train for him, people haven’t done that before.”
Biden says he likes to think he helped Obama get in touch with his
emotions. “Barack is not nearly as openly passionate as I am. Either
I’m much more extroverted or he’s much more introverted,” he said,
taking a long pause. “I remember way after the fact, reading how
much his eulogy of my son blew away the press. When he said, ‘I’m a
Biden.’ He meant it,” Biden said, as he slowly wiped away tears.
Dan Quayle was thrown into the vice presidency with little sup-
port and he faced a suspicious West Wing staff. But Quayle told his

epilogue: a heartbeat away 295
old friend former Indiana attorney general Greg Zoeller there was
no reason to feel bad for him, he was vice president of the United
States after all. “I think Pence finds himself in that spot,” Zoeller
said of the other vice president from Indiana who he knows well.
“Even if he just gets beaten to a pulp and never is heard from again
and runs off to Siberia, he was vice president of the United States.
What’s there to be sorry about?”
But when vice presidents try to win the presidency and lose, the
defeat can sting even more. Was there any part of Tipper Gore that
was relieved after her husband lost the 2000 election? “To be honest,
no,” she said. There is a sense that something is owed to the vice
president who spends years in the background, setting aside his own
ambition to serve the president. When Biden said, “Do I regret not
being president? Yes,” he was speaking for virtually every vice presi
dent in history.
Mike Pence models his vice presidency after George H. W. Bush’s,
not Dick Cheney’s—he has tried to position himself as far away from
that image as possible. Like Pence, Bush was always sensitive about
not wanting to look like he was upstaging his boss (as if anyone
could upstage Reagan or Trump). Pence’s aides like to point out that
Bush, like Pence, served a president who was larger than life and also
a Washington outsider. But perhaps there is another, more impor
tant and much more revealing reason behind Pence’s admiration for
Bush: Bush did something that no vice president has managed to do
since—he became president.

acknowledgments
I
’d like to thank the former vice presidents, from both parties,
who spoke with me so candidly about the obvious opportuni-
ties and lesser-k nown daily humiliations that accompany the
vice presidency: Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Al Gore, Dan Quayle,
George H. W. Bush, and Walter Mondale. And Jimmy Carter,
whose appreciation for his own vice president, Walter Mondale,
is sincere and refreshing in an age when sarcasm and cynicism are
pervasive in politics.
The aides, family members, and friends of the vice presidents
and the presidents they served wanted to lift the curtain on this
often overlooked relationship and give credit to the men who are
more often the butt of jokes than the receivers of accolades, among
them were: Tipper Gore, Nick Ayers, Dan Coats, Lynda Pedersen,
Sarah Eaton, Liz Haenle, Neil Patel, Kate Bedingfield, William
Russo, Steve Ricchetti, Ted Kaufman, Mike Donilon, Ron Klain,
Margaret Aitken, Sarah Bianchi, Kalee Kreider, Deb Greenspan,
Michael Feldman, Carter Eskew, Rob Hamilton, Donald Rums-
feld, Bill Kristol, Bruce Reed, Ken Baer, Valerie Jarrett, David
Axelrod, Jay Carney, Josh Earnest, Alyssa Mastromonaco, Jim Mc-
Grath, Tom Collamore, Craig Fuller, James Smith, Bess and Tyler
Abell, Jim Ketchum, Sid Davis, Al Spivak, Gregory Pence, Jim
Atterholt, Jerry Rafshoon, Ed Simcox, Pete Seat, David McIntosh,

298 acknowledgments
Brendan Buck, Kent Sterling, Steve Simpson, Greg Garrison, Jeff

Cardwell, Bill Smith, Marc Short, Josh Pitcock, and Marc Lot-
ter. The friends and advisers to Vice President Mike Pence were
especially helpful because it is always more difficult to examine a
relationship when it is in its earliest stages.
My literary agent, Howard Yoon, is a true partner and he is always
in my corner, no matter what, as is Gail Ross, who came up with
the idea for this book. My editor at HarperCollins, Gail Winston,
cares deeply about the authors she works with and is nurturing, sup-
portive, and talented. Roger Labrie, Sofia Groopman, Emily Taylor,
and Victor Hendrickson kept making this book better and better and
Sofia is a master of organization.
I appreciate the help of the women who work at the Presidential
Materials Division at the National Archives: Stephannie Oriabure,
Jessica Owens, and Anna Yallouris. The staffs at several presidential
libraries helped me cull through thousands of pages of letters and
memos and they include Mary McMurray, Sam Rushay, and David
Clark at Harry Truman’s Library; Liza Talbot at Lyndon Johnson’s
library; Scott Russell and Jonathan Movroydis at Richard Nixon’s
library; and Elaine Didier, John O’Connell, Kate Murray, and Stacy
Davis at Gerald Ford’s library. And thank you to Jamin Goecker,
a student at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at
Texas A&M University, for his excellent research at George H. W.
Bush’s library; Danielle Fowler, a researcher at Ronald Reagan’s
library; and Rhonda Young at Bill Clinton’s library.
This book, like most books, was a family affair. My husband and
best friend, Brooke Brower, is a gifted editor who helped me clarify
and organize my thoughts. He put up with me during the some-
times frustrating process and he served as a lighthouse, helping
to navigate the rocks that inevitably cropped up along the way.
And, perhaps best of all, he never forgets to bring me coffee in
the morning. My parents, Christopher and Valerie Andersen, also
helped every step of the way. My mother is a voracious reader and a
brilliant editor and my father is one of the smartest people I’ve ever

acknowledgments 299
met. Our children, Graham and Charlotte, may not have helped
with editing (they’re four and five years old!) but they did make ev-
ery single day better and they provided some much-needed comic
relief when interviews fell through at the last minute, or when the
writing process felt overwhelming. They have helped me see the
humanity in everyone, and, like most parents I know, having them
has given me a heightened sense of empathy for the personal and
professional struggles faced by everyone—even politicians.
I hope I have managed to provide a glimpse into the relationship
between the two most powerful people in the country. The bonds
between them are, as one aide to Biden put it, “forged in fire,” and
critical to the future of our country.

sources and notes
Note on Reporting
I spent more than two years working on this book, and I interviewed more
than two hundred people, including every living former vice president. My
research for First in Line took me to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I in-
terviewed Walter Mondale in his quiet law firm office; to a bustling private
equity firm in Manhattan, where I sat down with Dan Quayle; to Dick
Cheney’s understated home in leafy McLean, Virginia, and to Joe Biden’s
corner office in downtown Washington, D.C. I also interviewed Al Gore
and George H. W. Bush. The candor of all six men was remarkable. The
former vice presidents described conflicts with the presidents they served
and the touching and deeply personal friendships they sometimes forged
with those presidents.
I talked to dozens of senior White House aides who saw firsthand the
interactions between the most powerful man in the world and his number
two. Many of them recounted events that have not been made public until
now. Jimmy Carter, Valerie Jarrett, Dan Coats, Nick Ayers, Bill Kristol,
Donald Rumsfeld, David Axelrod, and many others offered insight into
the relationship from the president’s point of view. I sat down with people
who candidly described the vetting process, and others who talked about
the inherent tension that comes with the often-infantilizing role of the vice
presidency. Most of these conversations were in person and in some cir-
cumstances, especially when it came to highly personal anecdotes, sources
asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject matter. I have
respected their wishes. Firsthand accounts were supplemented with archi-
val materials, including oral histories from presidential libraries, as well as
memoirs and biographies.

302 sources and notes
Prologue: “Safe Hands”

Interview subjects include A. B. Culvahouse, Dan Coats, Nick Ayers, Jim
Atterholt, Ed Simcox, David McIntosh, and Gary Varvel.
I. You’re a Guest in My House

Interview subjects include Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore,
George H. W. Bush, David Axelrod, Walter Mondale, Ron Klain, Dan
Quayle, Valerie Jarrett, Nick Ayers, Dan Coats, Stuart Spencer, Josh Earnest,
Bruce Reed, Donald Rumsfeld, Mike Donilon, Jim Atterholt, Greg Zoeller,
Adam Frankel, Carter Eskew, Brendan Buck, Jerry Rafshoon, Adam Fran-
kel, Steve Ricchetti, Richard Moe, and Jamal Simmons. Published material
includes: Jules Witcover, “The Dynasty that Almost Wasn’t: Jeb’s Chances
at a family three-peat are slimming, but Bushes were never destined for
the White House,” Politico Magazine, September 15, 2015; Jules Witcover,
Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and
Spiro Agnew (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); Robert A. Caro, The Years
of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012);
Laurence Burd, “Kennedy Picks Johnson to Be Stand-In,” Chicago Tribune,
August 11, 1961; Interview conducted by Yanek Mieczkowski with Stu
Spencer, April 3, 2007, Palm Desert, California, Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; William Doyle, Inside the Oval Office: White House Tapes from FDR
to Clinton (New York: Kosansha USA Inc., 1999); Transcript: Vice President
Cheney on FOX News Sunday, December 22, 2008; Dan Zak, “Nervous
about nukes again? Here’s what you need to know about The Button (There
is no button),” Washington Post, August 3, 2016; David Rutz, “Biden Again
Points Out Military Aide Carrying Nuclear Codes at Clinton Rally,” Free
Beacon, September 1, 2016; Interview conducted by Yanek Mieczkowski
with President Gerald R. Ford, January 24, 2002, Telephone Interview,
President Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Joel Goldstein, The White
House Vice Presidency: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2016); Alvin S. Felzenberg, “The Vice Presi-
dency Grows Up,” Hoover Institution, February 1, 2001; Interview with
Vice President Richard Nixon, Hartmann Papers, Box 33, Gerald R. Ford
Presidential Library; Paul Jones interview with President Gerald R. Ford,
1984, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Richard V. Allen, “George Her-
bert Walker Bush: The Accidental Vice President,” New York Times Maga-
zine, July 30, 2000; Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); Charles O. Jones, The American Presi-
dency: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);

sources and notes 303
Alexander Burns, “Prior VP nominee selection dates,” Politico, August 18,

2008; David S. Broder, “The Triple-H Brand on the Vice-Presidency,”
New York Times, December 6, 1964; “Mrs. Kennedy ‘Reclaims’ Chandelier
from Senate,” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1962; Ed Henry, “Cheney to Eman-
uel: Control your VP,” December 17, 2008, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn
.com/2008/12/17/cheney-to-emanuel-control-your-v p/; Peter Baker, Days
of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Random House,
2013).
II. Two Men, Two Hotel Suites

Interviews include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bess and Tyler Abell,
Bob Dole, Richard Moe, Ron Klain, Craig Fuller, and Stuart Spencer. Pub-
lished material includes: Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The
Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Ben Cosgrove, “Head
to Head: JFK and RFK, Los Angeles, July 1960,” Time, May 24, 2014;
Horace Busby Oral History Interview VIII, 4/2/89, by Michael L. Gil-
lette, LBJ Presidential Library; Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-G o-Round:
The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960–1969 (Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint
of University of Nebraska Press, 2015); James M. Cannon Research Inter-
views and Notes, Box One, Ford-Cannon Interview, Rancho Mirage, CA
4/29/1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Michael Beschloss, “Ken-
nedy, L.B.J. and a Disputed Deer Hunt,” New York Times, August 15, 2014;
Initial Ford-Cannon Interview, Beaver Creek, CO 9/1/1989, Gerald R.
Ford Presidential Library; Initial Ford-Cannon Interview, Rancho Mirage,
CA 4/26/1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Initial Ford-Cannon
Interview, Rancho Mirage, CA 4/27/1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; Thomas Oliphant with Curtis Wilkie, The Road to Camelot: In-
side JFK’s Five-Year Campaign (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017); James
M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, 1989–94, Box Two, Folder
title: Notes on the Ambrister Interviews (pages 601–700), Gerald R. Ford
Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, An
Interview with Robert Hartmann Conducted by James M. Cannon, June
19, 1991, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Research
Interviews and Notes, An Interview with Michael J. “Mike” Mansfield
Conducted by James M. Cannon, May 31 1991, Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, An Interview
with William Seidman, Conducted by James M. Cannon, October 2, 1989,
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, The
Presidents Club (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012); James M. Cannon

Research Interviews and Notes, Interview with Peter Rodino Conducted

by James M. Cannon, September 28, 1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; James Cannon, Time and Chance: Gerald Ford’s Appointment with
History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Jon Meacham,
Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush
(New York: Random House, 2015).
III. The Art of the Vet

Interviews include Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Al Gore, Dan Coats, Don-
ald Rumsfeld, Greg Pence, Dan Quayle, Kent Sterling, Lucy Tutwiler, Jeff
Cardwell, Jim Atterholt, Joe Trippi, Bess and Tyler Abell, Jim Johnson, James
Hamilton, A. B. Culvahouse, Bob Dole, Bill Kristol, Richard Moe, Ron
Klain, Bill Smith, John Weaver, Craig Fuller, Stuart Spencer, Ed Simcox,
and Dylan Loewe. Published material includes: Jacqueline Alemany, “Don-
ald Trump Offered Chris Christie Vice President Role Before Mike Pence,
Sources Say,” CBS News, October 30, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com
/news/donald-t rump- offered-chris-christie-v ice-president-r ole-b efore
-m ike-pence/; Ashley Parker, Alexander Burns, and Maggie Haberman, “A
Grounded Plane and anti-Clinton Passion: How Mike Pence Swayed the
Trumps,” New York Times, July 16, 2016; “Mike Pence on Donald Trump:
‘I Believe in Forgiveness,’ ” CBS News, October 10, 2016, https://www
.cbsnews.com/news/mike-p ence- on- d onald-t rump-p ence-i -b elieve-i n
-forgiveness/; Edward-Isaac Dovere, “The Man Plotting Biden 2016: Steven
Ricchetti is the man behind the vice president and possible late-entry pres-
idential candidate,” Politico, September 2, 2015; Matea Gold and Rosalind
S. Hedlerman, “Gingrich is a vice-presidential finalist and his last campaign
is still millions in debt,” Washington Post, July 13, 2016; Marisa M. Kashino,
“A.B. Culvahouse: The Man Who Vetted Sarah Palin,” Washingtonian, April
21, 2011; Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy & Johnson (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1968); Judy Klemesrud, “Amy, a Glenn Supporter, Cheers Up
in Zoo Visit,” New York Times, July 16, 1976; Jason Zengerle, “Wanna Be
Veep? Okay, but This Is Going to Hurt,” GQ, July 18, 2012; Peter Baker,
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Random House,
2013); Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President Pence,” The New Yorker, Oc-
tober 23, 2017; Ryan Lizza, “Biden’s Brief,” The New Yorker, October 20,
2008; Matthew Rees, “Al Gore, Midnight Toker,” The Weekly Standard,
February 7, 2000; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, Box
One, Nixon responses to Cannon’s questions, Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; David M. Oshinsky, “Fear and Loathing in the White House,”

New York Times, October 26, 1997; Dan Quayle, Standing Firm (New York:
HarperCollins, 1994); Bob Woodward and David S. Broder, The Man Who
Would Be President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Philip Bump,
“Sarah Palin cost John McCain 2 million votes in 2008, according to a
study,” Washington Post, January 19, 2016; Valerie J. Nelson, “Ethel Bradley
dies at 89; wife of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley,” Los Angeles Times,
November 26, 2008; Jonathan Karl, “Dick Cheney: Picking Sarah Palin for
VP Was ‘A Mistake,’ ” ABC News, July 29, 2012; Evan Osnos, “The Biden
Agenda: Reckoning with Ukraine and Iraq, and keeping an eye on 2016,”
The New Yorker, July 28, 2014; Ben Terris, “Sherrod Brown thinks he could
have helped Democrats win in 2016. But what about 2020?,” Washington
Post, July 24, 2017; Joe Biden, Promises to Keep (New York: Random House,
2007); Spiro Agnew, Go Quietly . . . or else (New York: William Mor-
row and Company, Inc., 1980); “Richard Nixon, John D. Ehrlichman, and
H. R. ‘Bob’ Haldeman on 20 July 1971,” Conversation 263–009 (PRDE
Excerpt A), Presidential Recordings Digital Edition [“Vice President Agnew,”
ed. Nicole Hemmer] (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014),
http://prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations/4004759; Nicole Hemmer,
“Why the Vice Presidency Matters,” The Atlantic, July 21, 2016; Jon Mea-
cham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush
(New York: Random House, 2015); Michael Wolff, “Full Bloom: Sexual-
harassment lawsuits have torpedoed plenty of political careers. So why has
the media given Mike Bloomberg a pass on the charges made against him,”
New York Magazine, November 5, 2001; Alan Feuer, “54 More Women Ac-
cuse Bloomberg Firm of Bias,” New York Times, May 2, 2008; Maureen
Dowd, “Biden’s Debate Finale: An Echo From Abroad,” New York Times,
September 12, 1987; Philip Elliot, “The Persistent Passion of Vice President
Mike Pence,” Time, May 25, 2017; Turner Cowles and Michael Barbaro,
“What Mike Pence Brings to Donald Trump’s Campaign,” New York Times,
July 15, 2016; Tom Alberta, “Man on a Wire: Mike Pence’s Tightrope Act,”
Politico, July/August 2017; Rafi Letzter, “Mike Pence, the vice president of
the United States, has said he doesn’t believe that smoking kills,” Business
Insider, January 21, 2017; Nolan D. McCaskill, “Pence shows Trump how to
sweat it out with Texas victims,” Politico, August 31, 2017.
IV. The Observatory

Interview subjects include Joe Biden, Dan Quayle, Tipper Gore, Barbara
Bush, Walter Mondale, Dick Cheney, Paula Trivette, Craig Fuller, Katie
McCormick Lelyveld, Elizabeth Haenle, and Carlos Elizondo. Published

material includes: Lynne Cheney, “This Is Where Many Vice Presidents

Have Lived,” Architectural Digest, December, 2001; Jura Koncius, “As the
Bidens pack up, a look at their mark on the vice president’s residence,”
Washington Post, January 11, 2017; Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President
Pence,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2017; Maureen Groppe, “The secret
history of Mike Pence’s new house,” USA Today, November 24, 2017; Peter
Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Random
House, 2013).
V. The Second Lady

Interview subjects include Tipper Gore, Barbara Bush, Dick Cheney, Laura
Bush, Dan Quayle, Valerie Jarrett, Marguerite Sullivan, Pete Seat, Elizabeth
Haenle, Jamal Simmons, Senator Roy Blunt, Paula Trivette, Carlos Eli-
zondo, Ed Simcox, Trooper Sanders, Neil Patel, Jim Atterholt, and Elaine
Kamarck. Published material includes: Thomas M. DeFrank, Write It When
I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford (New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007); Jeff Horwitz and Julie Bykowicz, “Still
No Charity Money from Leftover Trump Inaugural Funds,” Associated
Press, September 15, 2017; Ashley Parker, “Karen Pence is the vice pres-
ident’s ‘prayer warrior,’ gut check and shield,” Washington Post, March 28,
2017; Barbara Bush, Barbara Bush: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 1994);
John M. Broder, “Clinton’s Affair Took a Toll on Relationship with Gore,”
Washington Post, March 3, 2000; Laura Bush, Spoken from the Heart (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2010); Marjorie Williams, “The Marilyn Quayle
Factor,” Washington Post, October 20, 1988; Danielle Gay, “Let’s talk about
Melania Trump’s 25 carat White House portrait diamond,” Vogue, April 4,
2017; Emma Kate Fittes, “Karen Pence has BSY grad make inauguration
gowns,” Indianapolis Star, January 19, 2017; Miller Center, “Interview with
Elaine Kamarck,” University of Virginia, May 7–8, 2008, February 13, 2017,
http://millercenter.org/oralhistory/interview/elaine- kamarck; Ceci Con-
nolly, “Tipper Gore Details Depression Treatment,” Washington Post, May 8,
1999; Lloyd Grove, “Tipper Gore, Al Gore Separation: Why They Split,”
The Daily Beast, June 2, 2010; “Lynne Cheney novel churns controversy in
Senate race,” CNN, October 30, 2006; Karen Gullo, “Vice President’s Wife
Back at Work,” Associated Press, January 22, 2001; Shari Rudavsky, “Karen
Pence is right at home,” Indianapolis Star, December 12, 2013; Melissa Lang-
sam Braunstein, “Second Lady Karen Pence Opens Up About Her Struggles
with Infertility,” thefederalist.com; Alexandra Macon, “Joe and Jill Biden’s
Love Story Will Pull at Your Heartstrings,” Vogue, November 17, 2016;

Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President Pence,” The New Yorker, October 23,
2017; Virginia Coyne, “The Vice President’s Residence,” Washington Life,
December 2017; Melinda Henneberger, “This Second Lady Is Keeping Her
Day Job,” New York Times, February 6, 2001; James Rosen, Cheney One on
One: A Candid Conversation with America’s Most Controversial Statesman (New
York: Regnery, 2015); David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima, The Prince of
Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
VI. Tragedy and Trauma

Interviews include George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Bess and Tyler Abell,
Luci Baines Johnson, Steve Ford, Connie Stuart, Sid Davis, Susan Ford, and
Al Spivak. Published material includes: Harry Truman, 1945: Year of Deci-
sions: Memoirs, Volume 1 (New York: New Word City, 2014); A. J. Baime,
The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed
the World (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); Robert A. Caro,
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2012); Jan Jarboe Russell, “Lady Bird Looks Back,” Texas Monthly,
December 1994; Jack Valenti, “The President Is Dead, You Know,” Texas
Monthly, June 2007; Stewart Alsop, The Center: People and Power in Political
Washington (New York: Popular Library, 1968); Jules Witcover, Very Strange
Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew
(New York: Public Affairs, 2007); Adam Clymer, “Thomas F. Eagleton,
77, a Running Mate for 18 Days, Dies,” New York Times, March 5, 2007;
Initial Ford-Cannon Interview, Beaver Creek, CO 9/1/1989, Gerald R.
Ford Presidential Library; Initial Ford-Cannon Interview, Rancho Mirage,
CA 4/26/1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Initial Ford-Cannon
Interview, Rancho Mirage, CA 4/27/1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, 1989–94, Box
two, Folder title: Notes on the Ambrister Interviews (pages 601–700), Ger-
ald R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews
and Notes, An Interview with Robert Hartmann Conducted by James M.
Cannon, June 19, 1991, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Can-
non Research Interviews and Notes, An Interview with Michael J. “Mike”
Mansfield Conducted by James M. Cannon, May 31, 1991, Gerald R. Ford
Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, An
Interview with William Seidman, Conducted by James M. Cannon, Oc-
tober 2, 1989, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Re-
search Interviews and Notes, An Interview with Peter Rodino Conducted
by James M. Cannon, September 28, 1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential

Library; James Cannon, Time and Chance: Gerald Ford’s Appointment with
History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Spiro Agnew, Go
Quietly . . . or else (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980);
“Richard Nixon, John D. Ehrlichman, and H. R. ‘Bob’ Haldeman on 20
July 1971,” Conversation 263–009 (PRDE Excerpt A), Presidential Recordings
Digital Edition [“Vice President Agnew,” ed. Nicole Hemmer] (Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), http://prde.upress.virginia.edu
/conversations/4004759; Nicole Hemmer, “Why the Vice Presidency Mat-
ters,” The Atlantic, July 21, 2016; Television Report, November 27, 1969,
11/26 Telecasts, President’s Office Files, Box 31, Richard Nixon Presiden-
tial Library; Talking Points for Agnew, July 21, 1972, President’s Personal
File, Box 5, Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Letter from President
Richard Nixon to Spiro Agnew, October 29, 1972, President’s Personal File,
Box 5, Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon
Johnson and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); Chris
Jones, “The Flight from Dallas,” Esquire, September 16, 2013; Chris Jones,
“The Most Incredible Documents from JFK’s Assassination,” Esquire, No-
vember 22, 2013; Frank Carlucci Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library;
Briefing for the Press by Secretary Haig, March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan
Presidential Library; Richard V. Allen Papers, Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library; Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George
Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015).
VII. From Senator to Subordinate: The Story of Nixon/

Eisenhower, Johnson/Kennedy, and Humphrey/Johnson
Interview subjects include Jimmy Carter, Richard Moe, Ron Klain, Tyler
and Bess Abell, Adam Frankel, Joe Califano, and Walter Mondale. Published
material includes: President’s Personal File, Box 47, March 1969, Nixon’s
handwritten notes re: Ike Meetings, Richard Nixon Presidential Library;
Vice-Presidential Collection-PPS 325-Box 3, June 16, 1953, Memorandum
on the duties of the vice president, Richard Nixon Presidential Library;
Thomas Mallon, “Wag the Dog,” The New Yorker, February 4, 2013; Vice-
Presidential Collection-PPS 324-Box 1, October 1, 1955, Memorandum on
the duties of the vice president, Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Pre-
Presidential Papers, Series 320, Box 237, Eisenhower, Dwight D., Richard
Nixon Presidential Library; Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-G o-Round:
The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960–1969 (Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint
of University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Transcript: Vice President Cheney
on FOX News Sunday, December 22, 2008; Robert A. Caro, “The Tran-

sition: Lyndon Johnson and the events in Dallas,” The New Yorker, April
2, 2012; Dan Zak, “Nervous about nukes again? Here’s what you need to
know about The Button (There is no button),” Washington Post, August 3,
2016; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon John-
son and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976); Barron
J. Lerner, “An M.D.’s Guide to Ike’s Heart and Hearth,” New York Times,
January 13, 2004; “Lyndon Johnson And Everett Dirksen On 31 October
1968,” http://prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations/4006113/Notes_Open,
Presidential Recordings Digital Edition [Chasing Shadows, ed. Ken Hughes]
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014); “Lyndon Johnson and
Hubert Humphrey on 31 October 1968,” http://prde.upress.virginia.edu
/conversations/4006117, Presidential Recordings Digital Edition [Chasing Shad-
ows, ed. Ken Hughes] (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014);
Thomas Oliphant with Curtis Wilkie, The Road To Camelot: Inside JFK’s
Five-Year Campaign (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017); Jeffrey Frank, Ike
and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 2013); Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York: Borealis
Books, 1984).
VIII. Confusion, Conflict, and Musical Chairs: The Rocky

Road of Agnew/Nixon, Ford/Nixon, and Rockefeller/Ford
Interview subjects include Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney, Bob Dole, Donald
Rumsfeld, Richard Moe, Susan Ford, Steve Ford, Ron Klain, and Wal-
ter Mondale. Published material includes: President’s Personal File, Box 47,
March 1969, Nixon’s handwritten notes re: Ike Meetings, Richard Nixon
Presidential Library; Vice-Presidential Collection-PPS 325-Box 3, June 16,
1953, Memorandum on the duties of the vice president, Richard Nixon
Presidential Library; Vice-Presidential Collection-PPS 324-Box 1, October
1, 1955, Memorandum on the duties of the vice president, Richard Nixon
Presidential Library; Pre-Presidential Papers, Series 320, Box 237, Eisen-
hower, Dwight D., Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Drew Pearson,
Washington Merry-G o-Round: The Drew Pearson Diaries, 1960–1969 (Lincoln:
Potomac Books, an imprint of University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Tran-
script: Vice President Cheney on FOX News Sunday, December 22, 2008;
Dan Zak, “Nervous about nukes again? Here’s what you need to know
about The Button (There is no button),” Washington Post, August 3, 2016;
Barron J. Lerner, “An M.D.’s Guide to Ike’s Heart and Hearth,” New York
Times, January 13, 2004; Jules Witcover, Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short

and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (New York: Public
Affairs, 2007); Adam Clymer, “Thomas F. Eagleton, 77, a Running Mate
for 18 Days, Dies,” New York Times, March 5, 2007; Initial Ford-Cannon In-
terview, Beaver Creek, CO 9/1/1989, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library;
Initial Ford-Cannon Interview, Rancho Mirage, CA 4/26/1990, Gerald
R. Ford Presidential Library; Initial Ford-Cannon Interview, Rancho Mi-
rage, CA 4/27/1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Can-
non Research Interviews and Notes, 1989–94, Box two, Folder title: Notes
on the Ambrister Interviews (pages 601–700), Gerald R. Ford Presidential
Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, An Interview
with Robert Hartmann Conducted by James M. Cannon, June 19, 1991,
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews
and Notes, An Interview with Michael J. “Mike” Mansfield Conducted
by James M. Cannon, May 31 1991, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library;
James M. Cannon Research Interviews and Notes, An Interview with Wil-
liam Seidman, Conducted by James M. Cannon, October 2, 1989, Gerald
R. Ford Presidential Library; James M. Cannon Research Interviews and
Notes, An Interview with Peter Rodino, Conducted by James M. Can-
non, September 28, 1990, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; James Can-
non, Time and Chance: Gerald Ford’s Appointment with History (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998); Spiro Agnew, Go Quietly . . . or else
(New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980); “Richard Nixon,
John D. Ehrlichman, and H. R. ‘Bob’ Haldeman on 20 July 1971,” Con-
versation 263–009 (PRDE Excerpt A), Presidential Recordings Digital Edition
[“Vice President Agnew,” ed. Nicole Hemmer] (Charlottesville: Univer-
sity of Virginia Press, 2014), http://prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations
/4004759; Nicole Hemmer, “Why the Vice Presidency Matters,” The At-
lantic, July 21, 2016; Television Report, November 27, 1969, 11/26 Tele-
casts, President’s Office Files, Box 31, Richard Nixon Presidential Library;
Talking Points for Agnew, July 21, 1972, President’s Personal File, Box 5,
Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Letter from President Richard Nixon
to Spiro Agnew, October 29, 1972, President’s Personal File, Box 5, Richard
Nixon Presidential Library.
IX. Getting to Know You . . . or Not: Mondale/Carter, Bush/

Reagan, and Quayle/Bush
Interview subjects include Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Wal-
ter Mondale, Stuart Spencer, Dan Quayle, Craig Fuller, Greg Zoeller, Joe
Trippi, Richard Moe, Christine Limerick, Tom Collamore, and Ron Klain.

Published material includes: Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American
Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015);
Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir (New York: Harper
Collins, 1994); Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York: Harper-
Collins, 2007); Joel Goldstein, The White House Vice Presidency: The Path to
Significance, Mondale to Biden (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016);
An Oral History with Walter Mondale, Interviewer: Anita Hecht, Record-
ing Date: May 13, 2009, Wisconsin Historical Society; David Hoffman,
“Bush Splits with Reagan on Handling of Noriega,” Washington Post, May
19, 1988; Richard V. Allen, “George Herbert Walker Bush: The Accidental
Vice President,” New York Times Magazine, July 30, 2000.
X. From Friendship to Betrayal: The Breakup of Al Gore and

Bill Clinton
Interview subjects include Al Gore, Ron Klain, Carter Eskew, Michael Feld-
man, Tipper Gore, Sarah Bianchi, Bruce Reed, Elaine Kamarck, Ken Baer,
and Jamal Simmons. Published material includes: Thomas M. DeFrank,
Write It When I’m Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald
R. Ford (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007); Robert G. Kaiser and John
F. Harris, “Shalala’s Remarks Irk President,” Washington Post, September 11,
1998; Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); David Remnick, “The Wilderness
Campaign: Al Gore lives on a street in Nashville,” The New Yorker, Septem-
ber 13, 2004; Ronald Brownstein, “The Times Poll: Bush, Perot in Near Tie
with California Voters,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1992; David Maraniss
and Ellen Nakashima, The Prince of Tennessee: The Rise of Al Gore (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2000); David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima, “Al Gore,
Growing Up in Two Worlds,” Washington Post, October 10, 1999; John M.
Broder, “Clinton’s Affair Took a Toll on Relationship with Gore,” Wash-
ington Post, March 3, 2000; “Huma Abedin on Clinton-Gore relations: ‘No
love lost,’ ” Politico, October 21, 2016; Miller Center, “Interview with Elaine
Kamarck,” University of Virginia, May 7–8, 2008 http://millercenter.org
/oralhistory/interview/elaine-kamarck; Presidential Daily Diary, 12/13/00,
Clinton Presidential Library; Carter Eskew, “Gore knew how to lose grace-
fully,” Washington Post, October 23, 2016; John Heilemann, “The Come-
back Kid,” New York Magazine, May 29, 2006; Jodi O’Connell, “Where
are they now: What’s keeping past presidents and vice presidents wealthy?,”
AOL, January 17, 2017; Memo from Stan Greenberg to the Gore/Lieberman
Team, Greenberg Quinlan Research Inc., October 29, 2000; Miller Center,

“Interview with Roy Neel,” University of Virginia, November 14, 2002;

William Schneider, “Elián González Defeated Al Gore,” The Atlantic, May
2, 2001; David Barstow and Katharine Q. Seelye, “The 2000 Campaign:
The Selection; In Selecting a No. 2, No Detail Too Small,” New York Times,
August 9, 2000; Email from Lowell A. Weiss to Al Gore June 3, 1999,
Bill Clinton Presidential Library, White House communication concern-
ing Vice President Gore’s campaign for office; Alexander C. Kaufman, “Al
Gore’s Stupendous Wealth Complicated his Climate Change Message. That
Can Change,” Huffington Post, August 18, 2017; John Judis, “Al Gore and the
Temple of Doom,” The American Prospect, December 19, 2001; Email from
Pauline LaFon Gore to her son, Al Gore, Bill Clinton Presidential Library,
White House communication concerning Vice President Gore’s campaign
for office.
XI. The Shadow President: Cheney and His Sidekick Bush

Interview subjects include Dick Cheney, Laura Bush, Neil Patel, Chris
Hill, Donald Rumsfeld, Lucy Tutwiler, Richard Moe, and Tony Fratto.
Published material includes: Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A
Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011); “Bush,
Cheney meet with 9/11 panel,” CNN Politics, April 30, 2004, http://
www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/29/bush.911.commission/;
Frontline, “The Secret History of ISIS,” PBS; Ron Suskind, The One Per-
cent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11 (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney
in the White House (New York: Random House, 2013); Collections at
the Dole Archives, University of Kansas, http://dolearchivecollections
.ku.edu/collections/vip_letters/c020_010_000_057.pdf; Rebecca Savran-
sky, “Dick Cheney has yet to apologize to the man he shot in the face,”
The Hill, February 11, 2016; James Mann, “The Armageddon Plan,” The
Atlantic, March 2004; Dana Bash, “Cheney accidentally shoots fellow
hunter,” CNN, February 13, 2006; Sanjay Gupta, “Dick Cheney’s Heart,”
60 Minutes, CBS, October 20, 2013; James Rosen, Cheney One on One: A
Candid Conversation with America’s Most Controversial Statesman (New York:
Regnery, 2015); David Makovsky, “The Silent Strike: How Israel bombed
a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret,” The New Yorker, September
17, 2012; Mark Updegrove, The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary
Relationship Between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush (New York:
Harper, 2017); Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, “A Different Understand-
ing with the President,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007; Carol D. Leoning,

Shane Harris, and Greg Jaffe, “Breaking with tradition, Trump skips Pres-
ident’s written intelligence report and relies on oral briefings,” Washington
Post, February 9, 2018.
XII. Fanboy: The Love Story of Joe and Barack

Interview subjects include Joe Biden, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Josh
Earnest, Tony Blinken, Steve Ricchetti, Shailagh Murray, Ted Kaufman,
Jay Carney, Alyssa Mastromonaco, Bob Dole, Ron Klain, Chris Hill, Sarah
Bianchi, Bruce Reed, Mike Donilon, Adam Frankel, Dylan Loewe, and
Tony Fratto. Published material includes: Evan Osnos, “The Biden Agenda:
Reckoning with Ukraine and Iraq, and keeping an eye on 2016,” The New
Yorker, July 28, 2014; Joe Biden, Promises to Keep (New York: Random
House, 2007); Jonathan Alter, “I Wish to Hell I’d Just Kept Saying the Exact
Same Thing,” New York Times Magazine, January 17, 2017; Maureen Dowd,
“Joe Biden in 2016: What Would Beau Do?,” New York Times, August 1,
2015; Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose (New
York: Flatiron Books, 2017); Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: In-
side Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017); Nicholas
Fandos, “Joe Biden’s Role in ’90s Crime Law Could Haunt Any Presidential
Bid,” New York Times, August 21, 2015; Samantha Cooney, “Joe Biden Says
He Owes Anita Hill an Apology,” Time, December 14, 2017; Jordan Fabian
and Amie Parnes, “Biden contradicts Clinton’s account of bin Laden raid
decision,” The Hill, October 20, 2015; Glenn Thrush, “Clinton Revamps
Stump Speech to Tout Her Role in Bin Laden Raid,” Politico, January 1,
2016; John M. Broder, “Biden’s Record on Race Is Scuffed by 3 Episodes,”
New York Times, September 17, 2008; C-SPAN, “Evolution of the Vice
Presidency, October 20, 2015, https://www.c-span.org/video/?328827–1
/walter-mondale-joe-biden-reflections-office-v ice-president; The Situation
Room Transcript, November 13, 2008, CNN, http://www.cnn.com/TRAN
SCRIPTS/0811/13/sitroom.02.html; Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane, “The week
John McCain shook the Senate,” Washington Post, July 28, 2017; Roxanne
Roberts, “Joe Biden still wants to be president, can his family endure one last
campaign?,” Washington Post, July 30, 2017; Mark Landler, “The Afghan War
and the Evolution of Obama,” New York Times, January 1, 2017; Vice Pres-
ident Biden Discusses Grief at TAPS, May 25, 2012, https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=GwZ6Uf Xm410; Josh Gerstein, “Was Biden Right?,” Po-
litico, June 6, 2013; Katherine Skiba, “Sasha Obama, Biden’s granddaughter
forge friendship,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 2015; Joe Biden, “We Are Living
Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation,” The Atlantic, August 27, 2017;

Hillary Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017); Da-
vid Rutz, “Biden Again Points Out Military Aide Carrying Nuclear Codes
at Clinton Rally,” Free Beacon, September 1, 2016; Amy Davidson Sorkin,
“Why Joe Biden Should Run,” The New Yorker, June 12, 2015; Jeanne Ma-
rie Laskas, “Have You Heard the One About President Joe Biden?” GQ,
July 18, 2013; Alexander Marquardt, “Biden predicts early crisis will test
Obama,” CNN Political Tracker, October 20, 2008; Richard Socarides,
“Forcing Obama’s Hand on Gay Marriage,” The New Yorker, April 15, 2014;
Philip Rucker, “Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden
as 2016 Democratic Nominee,” Washington Post, November 4, 2017.
XIII. Man on a Wire: Mike Pence’s Tightrope Act

Interview subjects include Greg Pence, Nick Ayers, Dan Coats, Josh Pitcock,
Marc Lotter, Dan Quayle, A. B. Culvahouse, Bill Smith, Bill Oesterle, Jim
Atterholt, Ed Simcox, Joe Biden, Representative Marsha Blackburn, Greg
Garrison, Gary Varvel, Jeff Cardwell, Kent Sterling, Steve Simpson, Phil
Sharp, Bill Kristol, Senator Roy Blunt, David McIntosh, Brendan Buck, and
Christy Denault. Published material includes: Darren Samuelsohn, “The old
cassettes that explain Mike Pence,” Politico, July 20, 2016; Harry McCawley,
“The Mike Pence story: From a youth in Columbus to candidate for vice
president,” The Republic, July 17, 2016; Noah Bierman, “Vice President Mike
Pence stays loyal to Trump, but it could come at a cost,” Los Angeles Times, July
3, 2017; Jonathan Mahler and Dirk Johnson, “Mike Pence’s Journey: Cath-
olic Democrat to Evangelical Republican,” New York Times, July 20, 2016;
Maureen Groppe and Tony Cook, “How Vice President Pence is weathering
the Donald Trump Jr. Russia revelations,” Indianapolis Star, July 12, 2017;
McKay Coppins, “God’s Plan for Mike Pence: Will the vice president—and
the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?” The
Atlantic, January/February 2018; “Karen Pence’s 1991 letter to the editor,”
Washington Post, March 28, 2017; Shari Rudavsky, “Karen Pence is right at
home,” Indianapolis Star, December 12, 2013; Derek Hawkins, “Trump re-
portedly mocked Pence, joked about him wanting to ‘hang’ gays,” Washing-
ton Post, October 17, 2017; Melissa Langsam Braunstein, “Second Lady Karen
Pence Opens Up About Her Struggles with Infertility,” thefederalist.com;
Philip Elliot, “The Persistent Passion of Vice President Mike Pence,” Time,
May 25, 217; Stephen Rodrick, “The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence,” Roll-
ing Stone, January 23, 2017; Maggie Severns, Matthew Nussbaum, and Ben
LeFebvre, “Pence groups rakes in corporate PAC money,” Politico, Septem-
ber 26, 2017; Craig Fehrman, “Where Is Mike Pence’s Faith?,” Slate, July 16,

2016; Lesley Stahl, “The Republican Ticket: Trump and Pence,” 60 Minutes,
CBS, July 17, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes- trump
-pence-republican-ticket/; Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President Pence,”
The New Yorker, October 23, 2017; Rep. Mike Pence, Indiana, Contributors
1989–2014, https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors
?cycle=Career&type=I&cid=N00003765&newMem=N&recs=20; Carol
E. Lee, Kristen Welker, Stephanie Ruhle, and Dafna Linzer, “Tillerson’s
Fury at Trump Required an Intervention from Pence,” October 4, 2017,
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/tillerson-s -f ury-t rump
-required-intervention-pence-n806451; Chelsea Schneider and Tony Cook,
“Pence signs new abortion restrictions into law with a prayer,” Indianapolis
Star, March 25, 2016; Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Republican
Shadow Campaign for 2020 Takes Shape as Trump Doubts Grow,” New York
Times, August 6, 2017.
Epilogue: A Heartbeat Away

Interviews include Joe Biden, Al Gore, Tipper Gore, Dan Quayle, Dick
Cheney, Valerie Jarrett, Bill Kristol, and Greg Zoeller.
Photo Insert Sources and Credits

INSERT ONE : National Park Service photo, courtesy Eisenhower Presiden-
tial Library & Museum; National Park Service photo, courtesy Eisenhower
Presidential Library & Museum; courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum, Boston; Robert Knudsen/White House, courtesy
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; City News
Bureau, courtesy John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Bos-
ton; courtesy Lyndon B. Johnson Library; Robert Knudsen/White House,
courtesy Richard Nixon Presidential Library; William Parish/White
House, courtesy Richard Nixon Presidential Library; Oliver Atkins/
White House, courtesy, Richard Nixon Presidential Library; courtesy Ger-
ald R. Ford Presidential Library; David Hume Kennerly/White House,
courtesy Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; David Hume Kennerly/
White House, courtesy Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library; Robert Mc-
Neely, courtesy Minnesota History Center; Getty Images/Mark Wilson;
courtesy George Bush Presidential Library and Museum; courtesy George
Bush Presidential Library and Museum; courtesy George Bush Presidential
Library and Museum; Getty Images.
INSERT TWO : Associated Press/Stephan Savoia; Associated Press/Doug
Mills; William Vasta, courtesy National Archives and Records Administration;

Presidential Materials Division, National Archives and Records Administration/

Molly Bingham; courtesy National Archives and Records Administration;
courtesy National Archives and Records Administration; courtesy Na-
tional Archives and Records Administration, Collection: Vice Presiden-
tial Records of the Photography Office (George W. Bush Administration),
1/20/2001–1/20/2009; courtesy National Archives and Records Admin-
istration, Collection: Vice Presidential Records of the Photography Office
(George W. Bush Administration), 1/20/2001–1/20/2009; David Bohrer/
White House, courtesy National Archives and Records Administration; As-
sociated Press/Morry Gash; Getty Images/Charles Ommanney; Pete Souza/
White House, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Pete Souza/White House,
Barack Obama Presidential Library; Pete Souza/White House, Barack Obama
Presidential Library; Pete Souza/White House, Barack Obama Presiden-
tial Library; Pete Souza/White House, Barack Obama Presidential Library;
Lawrence Jackson/White House, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Pete
Souza/White House, Barack Obama Presidential Library; Associated Press/
Mary Altaffer; Getty Images/Mark Wilson; Bao N. Huynh/White House;
Shealah Craighead/White House; Official White House Photo/Office of the
Vice President; Myles Cullen/White House.

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index
Abbottabad raid, 246–47 al-Qaeda, 57, 212, 246–47

ABC News, 198–99, 250 America: A Patriotic Primer (Cheney), 99
Abedin, Huma, 185 American Enterprise Institute, 99
Abell, Bess, 117, 141 American Possibilities Political Action
Abell, Tyler, 140–41 Committee, 232
abortion, 42, 51, 57, 280–81 Amtrak, 234
Abrams, Elliot, 218 Anderson, Bob, 134
Academy Awards, 202 Anderson, Martin, 126
Access Hollywood tape, 67 Andrews Air Force Base (_later_ Joint
Adams, John, 7, 17, 19, 73 Base Andrews), 12, 115, 126, 137,
Adams, John Quincy, 184 251
Addington, David, 21–22, 213 Andy Griffith Show, The (TV show), 279
Affordable Care Act (2010), 242, 253, Angie’s List, 84
284 Arab Spring, 257
Afghanistan War, 57, 74–75, 240, 255–57 Argentina, 136
African Americans, 151 Armstrong, Anne, 164
Agnew, Spiro, xi, 119, 149–55, 157, 179 Arthur, Chester A., 16
Ahmad, Bashir, 143–44 Arts and Humanities Council, 88
Ailes, Roger, 174 Ashcroft, John, 211
Air Force One, 12, 109, 111–16, 293 Assad, Bashar al-, 257
Air Force Two, 75, 100, 124–26, 144 AT&T, 284
A is for Abigail (Cheney), 99 Atkins, Ollie, 122
Albert, Carl, 156, 163 Atlantic, 13
Aldrich, Nelson, 161 atomic bomb, 107, 169, 218
Al-K ibar nuclear reactor, 217 Atterholt, Jim, 1, 6, 63–65, 80–81,
Allen, George, 99 277–78
Allen, Richard, 124–26 Atwater, Lee, 177, 180

322 index
Atwood, Bishop, 104 Biden, Joseph, Sr., 294

Axelrod, David, 16, 54–55, 225, 235, Biden, Maisy 240, 259
237–38, 240–42, 247, 249–50, 261 Biden, Naomi, 101, 233, 245
Ayers, Nick, 266–67 Biden, Neilia Hunter, 101, 233, 245
Biden, Val, 234
Baker, Bobby, 109 Blackburn, Marsha, 276
Baker, Howard, 126–27, 150, 164 Blinken, Tony, 231–32, 236, 255
Baker, James, 39–40, 89, 126–27, 178 Bloomberg, Mike, 50–51, 56, 235
Baker, Russell, 138 Bloomberg L.P., 50–51
Bannon, Steve, 63, 267 Bloomberg News, 293
Bartlett, Dan, 215, 217 Blunt, Abigail, 87
Batman (TV show), 79 Blunt, Roy, 87, 277
Bayh, Evan, 49, 54 Boehner, John, 258, 276
Beale, Betty, 120 Boeing, 284
Begala, Paul, 46 Boettiger, Anna Roosevelt, 105
Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 257 Boettiger, John, 105
Bentsen, Lloyd, 88–89, 177 Boggs, Cale, 230
Berlin Wall, 144 Bohrer, David, 214
Bianchi, Sarah, 96, 192–93, 196, 244, Bolten, Josh, 97, 206, 213, 216
248, 252–53 Booker, Cory, 227
Bible, 66–67, 77, 273, 278, 280, 285 Bork, Robert, 52
Biden, Beau, 54, 100–101, 224–28, Bosnia, 194–95, 291
233–34 Bradley, Tom, 42
death of, 224–26, 228, 231, 245, Brady, James, 124
258–60 Branch, Taylor, 200
Biden, Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Brazile, Donna, 201, 227
“Jean,” 53–55 Brezhnev, Leonid, 119
Biden, Ed, 233 Bridgegate, 62
Biden, Finnegan, 240 Brinkley, David, 97, 152
Biden, Hallie, 259 Britain, 30
Biden, Hunter, 101, 227, 233–34 British Labour Party, 51
Biden, Jean, 259 Broder, David S., 9
Biden, Jill Jacobs, 52–54, 65, 72–73, Brownell, Herb, 133
76–77, 100–102, 240, 259–60 Buchen, Philip, 121, 158
Biden, Joseph Robinette, Jr. “Joe,” xii, Buck, Brendan, 269, 285
7–8, 11–16, 51–56, 72–74, 76–77, Bundy, McGeorge “Mac,” 112, 115
100–102, 187, 191, 208, 219–20, Busby, Horace “Buzz,” 30, 117
223–61, 264, 268–69, 292–94 Bush, Barbara (daughter of George W.
medal of Freedom, 260–61 Bush), 97

index 323
Bush, Barbara (wife of George H.W. California Republican Party, 130

Bush), 40–41, 71, 86–90, 177 Camp David, 90, 98, 147, 155, 165, 209
Bush, Billy, 67 Cancer Moonshot, 260
Bush, Dorothy, 178 Capitol building, 15, 97, 204
Card, Andy, 215
Bush, George H. W., 71, 162, 206, 291
Cardwell, Jeff, 64
as president, 9, 12, 17, 39–41, 71, 89–
Carpenter, Liz, 116
90, 96, 98, 173, 175–81, 187, 292,
295 Carter, Amy, 168
Carter, Cliff, 116
as vice president, xii, 8, 12, 15, 17–
Carter, Jimmy, 11, 17, 22, 33–36, 55,
18, 25, 33, 37–38, 71, 86–88, 167,
172–75, 268, 295 147, 164–65, 167–72, 271, 292
as vice president, and Reagan as- Carter-Mondale memo and, 169–71,
sassination attempt, 123–27 188
Bush, George W., xii, 15, 21–22, 47–Carter, Rosalynn, 93
48, 59, 75, 97–98, 123–24, 179,Carville, James, 46, 192
Catholic Church, 26, 51, 83, 141, 271–
201–21, 239, 252, 254, 269, 285,
291–92 72
Bush, Jeb, 3 CBS News, 37
Bush, Jenna, 97 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Bush, Laura, 90, 97–98, 215 Services, 282
Bush, Prescott, 173 Central American Free Trade Agree-
Bush, Vannevar, 107 ment (CAFTA), 270
Byrd, Harry, 70 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
Byrd, Robert, 139 173, 175, 203, 207–8, 246, 282
Byrnes, Jimmy, 107 Cerberus, 291
Chamberlain, Neville, 30
Cabinet, 4, 10 Charlottesville white nationalist rally, 13
Agnew and, 151 chemical weapons, 257
Carter and, 171 Cheney, Liz, 96
Clinton and, 183, 187–88, 194, 197 Cheney, Lynne, 22, 47–48, 72–76,
George H. W. Bush and, 127 79, 90, 96–100, 209
George W. Bush and, 210 Cheney, Mary, 48, 96
LBJ and, 112 Cheney, Richard Bruce “Dick,” xii, 10–
Nixon and, 134, 150, 164 13, 15, 17–18, 21–22, 34, 36, 47–48,
Obama and, 238, 239 69, 71–76, 96–100, 108, 150, 159,
Truman and, 105–7 163–65, 169, 179, 203–21, 239, 241,
Trump and, 264, 278, 284, 291 264, 268–69, 287, 291–92
Twenty-fifth Amendment and, 20–21 Chevy Chase Community Center, 259
Califano, Joe, 145 Chicago Tribune, 20

324 index
China, People’s Republic of, 119, 152 Covey, Stephen, 81

U.S. Liaison’s Office, 173 Crist, Charlie, 56
Christie, Chris, 59, 61–64 Cronkite, Walter, 37, 152
Christopher, Warren, 44–45 Crossfire (TV show), 98
Churchill, Winston, 104, 108, 203 Cruz, Ted, 64
civil rights movement, 140, 233 Culvahouse, A. B., 2–5, 56–59, 62
Cleveland, Grover, 184
climate change, 202, 291 Daniel, Clifton Truman, 108
Clinton, Bill, 6, 11–12, 14–15, 45– Daniels, Mitch, 84, 281
47, 52, 63, 88, 91–95, 181, 183, Davis, Rick, 57
185–202, 228, 274, 291–92 Davis, Sid, 113
impeachment and, 195–98, 200, 274 Deason, Darwin, 286
Clinton, Chelsea, 91–92 Deason, Doug, 286–87
Clinton, Hillary, 56, 98 DEFCON, 125
elections of 2016 and, 43, 63, 183– Defense Department, 112–13
85, 202, 227–31, 286 Defense Intelligence Agency, 3
as first lady, 6, 88, 92–93, 186–88, DeLaney, Ed, 280
191–94, 200 democracy, 19
as secretary of state, 12, 247, 255 Democratic National Committee, 31, 118
Senate career of, 195, 200 Democratic National Convention
Club for Growth, 5 of 1960, 30–31
CNN, 98 of 1992, 95
Coats, Dan, 5–6, 282, 289 of 2000, 95
Cold War, 144 of 2004, 235
Collamore, Tom, 173, 177–78 of 2008, 240
Collins, James, 125 of 2016, 185
Colombia, 265, 270 Democratic-Republican Party, 19
Comey, James, 283 Denault, Christy, 278
Committee to Re-Elect the President Desegregation of the South Com-
(CREEP), 119 mittee, 150
“Confessions of a Negative Campaigner” De Toledano, Ralph, 131
(Pence), 273 Dewey, Thomas, 132
Connally, John, 27, 31, 110–11, 156–57, Director of National Intelligence (DNI),
164 6, 282, 289
Coolidge, Calvin, 8, 17, 103 Dirksen, Everett, 147
Corker, Bob, 3, 59, 65 District of Columbia v. Heller, 212–13
Corpus Christi Caller-Times, 214, 216–17 Divine Mercy (documentary film), 61
Council of Economic Advisers, 36 Dodd, Chris, 236
Council on Foreign Relations, 254 Dole, Bob, 39–40, 165, 207, 226

index 325
Domenici, Pete, 39 of 1980, 33–34, 44, 172, 271

Domestic Policy Council, 163 of 1984, 42–43, 172
Donilon, Mike, 7, 224, 232, 237, 251–52 of 1988, 17, 45, 51, 177, 186, 227, 272
Dowd, Maureen, 226 of 1990, 272
Dukakis, Michael, 186 of 1992, 45–46, 93, 178–81, 186–
87, 190–91, 193
Eagleton, Thomas, 43–44 of 1996, 198
Early, Steve, 104–5, 251 of 2000, 17, 21, 47–48, 92–93, 95–
Earnest, Josh, 16, 227 96, 98, 183–86, 189–90, 193–94,
Edwards, John, 49, 98, 207, 221 196, 198–202, 204, 275, 295
Ehrlichman, John, 153, 159 of 2004, 48–49, 96, 98–99, 204,
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 15, 115, 129– 207, 212, 221, 235, 281
39, 150, 161, 176, 206–7, 233, 292 of 2006, 276
Eisenhower Executive Office Build- of 2008, 7, 49–50, 206, 234–39,
ing, 10, 15, 81, 115, 127, 244, 278 242, 293–94
elections of 2012, 59, 61, 228–29, 243, 248,
of 1796, 19 250–52, 275, 281
of 1800, 19 of 2016, 59–68, 183–84, 224–32,
of 1824, 184 247, 275, 283, 285–87, 289
of 1836, 17, 173 of 2018, 285
of 1876, 184 of 2020, 225, 232, 266, 285
of 1888, 184 Electoral College, 19, 183–85
of 1940, 20 Elizondo, Carlos, 76, 101–2
of 1944, 106 Elmendorf, Steve, 230
of 1948, 131 El Salvador, 258
of 1950, 131 Emanuel, Rahm, 51, 206
of 1952, 133–33 Enola Gay (B-29 bomber), 107
of 1954, 135 Environmental Protection Agency
of 1956, 135 (EPA), 180
of 1960, 17, 25–28, 32–33, 137, Ernst, Joni, 59
140–41, 197 Ernst, Max, 72
of 1964, 21, 117, 145, 149, 162 Eskew, Carter, 184–85, 189–90, 199–
of 1968, 17, 70, 137, 146–47, 149– 200
50, 162 evangelical Christianity, 83, 178, 272,
of 1972, 43–44, 155, 157, 162, 230, 278
233 Executive Office Building, 142
of 1974, 44, 155 Exide Corp., 99
of 1976, 34, 44, 157, 164–65, 169– ExxonMobil, 269
70, 171

326 index
Fairbanks, Charles W., 9 Fox News, 61, 215

Family Heritage Garden of the Vice Frankel, Adam, 144
President, 76 Franken, Al, 238
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Franklin, Benjamin, 8
4, 43, 283, 289 Fratto, Tony, 217
Federalist Party, 19 Freedom Caucus, 285
Fehmer, Marie, 112 free trade, 270
Feingold, Russ, 241 Frondizi, Arturo, 136
Feinstein, Dianne, 42 Fuerth, Leon, 194
Ferraro, Geraldine, 42–43 Fuller, Craig, 40, 86, 174
Fielding, Fred, 126
Fillmore, Millard, 16 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 144
Flight 77, 208–9 Gallagher, Mary, 114
Florida, presidential election of 2000 Garfield, James, 16
and, 92, 184, 201 Garner, John Nance, xi, 29, 161
Flynn, Michael, 3–4, 283, 289 Garrison, Greg, 274
Ford, Betty, 35–36, 86–88, 93, 120– Gates, Robert “Bob,” 218, 246
22, 155, 160 Gelb, Leslie, 254
Ford, Gerald R., Jr., 25, 40, 48, 103, Generation X, 292
173, 179 Geneva Conventions, 212
becomes president, on Nixon res- George Washington Bridge, 62
ignation, 121–23 Gergen, David, 126
congressional career of, 44, 118–19, Gettysburg Address, 193
154–57 Gingrich, Callista, 61
as president, 17, 96, 103, 122–23, Gingrich, Newt, 4–5, 14, 59, 61,
161–65, 167, 180, 206–7, 210–11 63–64, 274
Reagan offer of vice presidency Glenn, John, 142–43, 168
and, 25, 34–38, 44, 60, 72, 173 Goldwater, Barry, 149, 162
as vice president, xii, 17, 34, 48, 72, Go Quietly ... Or Else (Agnew), 154
103, 118–23, 149, 154–61, 283 Gore, Albert Arnold, Jr. “Al,” 7,
Ford, Gerald R., Sr., 156 11–12, 15, 17, 45–47, 55–57, 72,
Ford, Jack, 159–60 90–96, 169, 181, 183–202, 228,
Ford, Mike, 159 291–92, 295
Ford, Steve, 123, 159–60 Gore, Albert Arnold, III, 95
Ford, Susan, 160 Gore, Albert Arnold, Sr., 185
Fort Lee, New Jersey, 62 Gore, Karenna, 91–92, 96, 184, 194
Fortune, 146 Gore, Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson “Tip-
Foster, Jodie, 124 per,” 47, 72, 88, 90–96, 100, 196,
Founding Fathers, 18 200–201, 295

index 327
Gore, Nancy, 186 Harvey, Hurricane, 266

Gore, Pauline LaFon, 185 Hatfield, Mark, 149
Gorsuch, Neil, 267 Hayes, Rutherford B., 184
Graeber, George, 120 Health and Human Services Depart-
Graham, Billy, 149, 278 ment, 197, 282
Graham, Bob, 45, 210 healthcare, 192, 266. See also Afford-
Graham, Chuck, 242 able Care Act
Graham, Lindsey, 57 Health Care for the Homeless, 94
Graham, Philip, 32 Healthcare.gov website, 253
Grateful Dead, 91 Hensarling, Jeb, 285
Great America Committee, 284 Hilbert, Steve, 65
Greece, 14 Hill, Anita, 231
Greenberg, Stan, 198–99 Hill, Christopher, 203, 217–19, 229, 255
Gregory, David, 248 Hinckley, John, Jr., 124
Griffin, Kenneth C., 286 Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10, 107
Guantánamo Bay, 251 Hiss, Alger, 131
Guatemala, 258 Hitler, Adolf, 30
Gulf War (1992), 46. See also Iraq War
Hoffman, Alan, 229
Holder, Eric, 49
Hadley, Stephen J., 209 Homeland (TV show), 74
Haenle, Elizabeth, 72–75, 97–98 Honduras, 258
Hagan, Victoria, 76 House of Cards (TV show), 3
Haig, Al, 119–22, 125–26, 153, 160 Hughes, Karen, 97
Haiti, 194 Hughes, Sarah T., 114
Haldeman, H. R. “Bob,” 119–20, 151, Hume, Brit, 215
153, 159 Humphrey, George, 129, 137
Haley, Nikki, 59 Humphrey, Hubert, 26, 70, 129, 134,
Halliburton, 47, 206 145–47, 162, 167–69, 260, 269, 292
Hamilton, Alexander, 18 Hunter, Rielle, 49
Hamilton, Jim, 43–44, 50 Hussein, Saddam, 205, 254
Hamilton, Lee, 45 Hutchison, Kay Bailey, 213
Hamlin, Hannibal, 161
Hannity, Sean, 61 Icahn, Carl, 287
Harding, Warren G., 8, 17, 103 Inconvenient Sequel, An (documentary
Harlow, Bryce, 153 film), 202
Harriman, Averell, 115, 161 Indiana, 81, 83–86, 275, 277, 279–81
Harrison, Benjamin, 184 Indiana Family Institute, 280
Harrison, William Henry, 16 Indiana House of Representatives, 85
Hartmann, Robert, 121, 149, 156–58 Indiana Policy Review, 273

328 index
Indianapolis News, 272 Kaine, Tim, 6, 54, 227

Indianapolis Star, 84 Kamarck, Elaine, 194
Indiana Republican Party, 64, 79 Kasich, John, 59–61, 65
Inter-A merican Development Bank, Katzenbach, Nicholas, 113
258 Kaufman, Ted, 55, 232, 234–35, 237–
Iran, 239, 258 38, 256
Iran-Contra affair, 174–75 Kelly, John, 267
Iraq War (2003–11), 52, 59, 74, 205– Kennedy, Caroline, 49, 116–17, 143
6, 218–19, 240, 254–55. See also Kennedy, Edward M. “Ted,” 92, 176
Gulf War Kennedy, Jacqueline, 33, 110, 112–18,
Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS), 255 143
Israel, 217, 258 Kennedy, John F., 11, 17, 20, 25–33,
49, 89, 108–18, 137–45, 155,
Jackson, Andrew, 184 177, 186, 197, 237, 260, 271, 292
Jarrett, Valerie, 15, 223, 228, 245– assassination of, 20–21, 103, 109–
46, 258–59, 293 18, 145, 155
Jefferson, Thomas, 9, 17, 19 Kennedy, John F., Jr., 27, 116
Jenkins, Walter, 112 Kennedy, Joseph, Sr., 26, 29–30
John Paul II, Pope, 261 Kennedy, Robert F. “Bobby,” 28–33,
Johnson, Andrew, 16, 111, 161 113, 115, 141, 144–45, 191, 203
Johnson, Jim, 39, 41–42, 48–50 Kennedy, Rose, 112
Johnson, Lady Bird, 27, 31–32, 86– Kennedy Library, 144
87, 110–18, 140–42, 144 Kerrey, Bob, 45
Johnson, Luci, 115–16 Kerry, John, 39, 41–43, 48–49, 96,
Johnson, Lynda Bird, 116 98, 207, 221
Johnson, Lyndon B., 45, 149, 292 Kersh, Captain, 94
becomes president, on JFK assassina- King, Martin Luther, Jr., 151
tion, 20–21, 103, 108–18, 145, 155 Kinnock, Glenys, 51
congressional career of, 28–30, Kinnock, Neil, 51
134, 138–40 Kislyak, Sergey, 283, 289
as president, 17, 20–21, 103, 134, Kissinger, Henry, 36–37, 122, 159, 219
145–47, 149, 167, 169, 176, 269, 292 Klain, Ron, 7–8, 12, 15, 23, 184, 188–
as vice president, 9, 11, 17, 20–21, 89, 199, 202, 228–29, 235, 238
25–33, 138–45, 176 Koch, Charles G., 284, 286
Jones, Jim, 239 Koch, David, 284, 286–87
Jones, Paula, 274 Korean War, 269
Jordan, 14 Kristol, Bill, 178–80
Jordan, Hamilton, 36, 168 Kurds, 254
Justice Department, 211–12 Kushner, Charles, 62

index 329
Kushner, Jared, 1–3, 60, 62, 288–89 Maryland, 153

Kuwait, 254 mass shootings, 244–46
Mastromonaco, Alyssa, 228, 235
labor unions, 31, 170 Matalin, Mary, 209–10
Laden, Osama bin, 57, 223, 246–47 maternity leave, 51
Laird, Melvin, 121, 155 McBride, Anita, 215
Lanza, Adam, 244 McCain, Cindy, 58
Leahy, Patrick, 205–6 McCain, John, 2–3, 49, 56–59, 61, 281
Lelyveld, Katie McCormick, 71 McCarthy, Joe, 29–30
Lewinsky, Monica, 91–92, 183, 189, McClellan, Scott, 215
196–98, 200 McConnell, Mitch, 252, 263, 268–
LGBTQ rights, 84, 96, 248–50, 267, 69
279–80 McCormack, John W., 145
Libby, Scooter, 13, 203, 205, 207, McDonough, Denis, 253, 257
209–10, 220 McGovern, George, 43–44
Lieberman, Joe, 39, 56–57, 198–99 McIntosh, David, 5, 66–67, 81, 281
Life, 109 McKinley, William, xi, 17, 103
Limerick, Christine, 171 McLarty, Mack, 188
Lincoln, Abraham, 16, 111, 118, 161, 207 McPherson, Harry, 45–47
Lincoln, Evelyn, 27, 109, 138, 141–43 Medicaid, 282
Lindsey, Lawrence B., 209 Medicare, 282
Lockheed Martin Corp., 99 Meese, Ed, 126
Loewe, Dylan, 225, 242–43 Meet the Press (TV show), 205, 209,
Los Angeles Times, 187, 216 248, 251
Lotter, Marc, 268, 270 Mental Health Parity Act (1996), 93–
Luce, Clare Boothe, 28 95
Messina, Jim, 229, 249
Maliki, Nouri al-, 255 Mesta, Perle, 141
Manafort, Paul, 2, 62 Miers, Harriet, 216
Man and a Woman, A (film), 101 Mike Pence Show, The (radio show),
Manchester, William, 33 273–74
Mandela, Nelson, 192 military tribunals, 211–12
Manhattan Project, 107 Mills, Cheryl, 185
Mansfield, Mike, 28, 119, 139, 151, 163 Minner, Ruth Ann, 235
Marchant, Ann Walker, 185, 191 Minnesota, 26
marijuana, 47 Missouri, 26
Marsh, Jack, 121 Mitchell, John, 149
Marshall, Thomas, xi Moe, Richard, 13, 44–45, 167, 168
Martha’s Table, 94 Mondale, Joan, 72, 73, 88, 171

330 index
Mondale, Walter Frederick “Fritz,” 11, George H. W. Bush and, 126

13, 17, 22, 42–43, 55, 71–72, 147, Pence and, 79–80, 85–86, 285–86, 288
164–65, 167–72, 185, 292 Rockefeller and, 88, 163
Carter-Mondale memo and, 169–71, Tipper Gore and, 93, 94
188 Neel, Roy, 187–91
Monegan, Walt, 58 Nelson, Willie, 91
Mook, Robby, 231 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 258
Moyers, Bill, 116, 143 Neustadt, Richard E., 11
Mubarak, Hosni, 257 New Yorker, 267
Mueller, Robert, 4 New York Observer, 236
Mullen, Mike, 247 New York Post, 131
Munch, Edvard, The Scream, 179 New York Times, 50–52, 62, 98–99,
Munich Security Conference, 83, 264 133, 138, 216, 226, 230, 254, 266
Murphy Brown (TV show), 178 Nicaragua, 175
Murray, Shailagh, 248, 249 Nixon, Julie, 154
Museum of Modern Art, 161 Nixon, Pat, 86–87, 120, 122–23, 132,
Muskie, Ed, 168 136–37, 155
Nixon, Richard M., 8, 32, 96, 164,
Nabors, Jim, 279 177, 197, 264
National Aeronautics and Space Coun- Checkers speech and, 131–33
cil, 142–43 congressional career of, 129–33
National Endowment for the Hu- as president, 17, 37, 96, 147, 164,
manities, 98 169, 292
National Federation of Republican as president, and Agnew, xi, 119,
Women’s Clubs, 131 149–55, 157
National Football League (NFL), 266, as president, and Ford, xii, 34, 103,
268 118–23, 149, 154–61
National Gallery, 76 resignation of, 34, 103, 118–23,
National Governors Association, 58 157, 159–62
National Rifle Association (NRA), 245 as vice president, 15, 129–39, 206–7
National Security Adviser, 4, 97, 239 Nixon, Tricia, 154
National Security Council, 29, 36, Nobel Peace Prize, 202, 291
134, 246, 256 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 175
Native Americans, 73 North American Free Trade Agree-
Naval Observatory (VPR, NAVOBS), ment (NAFTA), 270
6, 69–77, 160, 204 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Biden and, 101–2, 220, 224, 242 (NATO), 255, 264, 270
Cheney and, 208 Northern Virginia Community Col-
Ford and, 121 lege, 100

index 331
North Korea, 218, 291 79–88, 100, 266, 272, 275–77,

nuclear weapons, 10, 217–18, 291 280
Pence, Michael Richard “Mike,” xii,
Obama, Barack, xii, 3, 7–8, 11, 13, 1–6, 8, 13–14, 59, 61–68, 77, 79–
15–16, 39, 42–43, 49–56, 57, 86, 88, 203–4, 263–89, 292, 295
100–101, 144, 187, 206, 219–20, Pence, Michael (son), 82
223–61, 269, 289, 291–94 Pence, Nancy, 271
Obama, Malia, 240, 260 Penn, Mark, 199
Obama, Michelle, 71, 100–101, 223, Pennsylvania, 51
228, 240, 250, 259–60, 294 Pentagon, 97
Obama, Sasha, 240, 259–60 Perkins, Frances, 105
Odd Couple, the (TV show), 287 Perot, Ross, 187
O’Donnell, Ken, 28, 108–9, 111, 114, Peru, 136
118 Philip Morris, 275
Oesterle, Bill, 84–85, 281 Picture This, A Visual Diary (Gore), 95
Office of Scientific Research and Pitcock, Josh, 266
Development, 107 Plame, Valerie, 220
Ohio, 51 Plouffe, David, 54, 229, 235, 237
oil embargo, 265 Podesta, John, 185, 230–31
Orr, Bob, 89 political parties, 19–20
Pollard, Ed, 124
Palin, Bristol, 58 Pompeo, Mike, 282
Palin, Sarah, 56–59, 281 popular vote, 183–85
Panama, 175, 270 Powell, Colin, 211, 261
Panetta, Leon, 246, 247 Powell, Dina, 283
Paredes, Gustavo, 117 pre-K funding, 84–85
Paredes, Providencia, 117 presidency. See also specific elections; pres-
Parental Advisory labels, 91 idents; and vice presidents
Parents Music Resource Center, 91 election and, 18–19
Patel, Neil, 96, 203–5, 207, 211, 214–16 rules of succession and, 16–18, 20,
Pawlenty, Tim, 56 125–26, 145, 156–157
Pearl Harbor attacks, 210 salary and staff of, 9–10
Pearson, Drew, 32, 129, 137 Twelfth Amendment and, 19
Pelath, Scott, 85, 279 Twenty-fifth Amendment and, 20–21
Pence, Audrey, 82 vice president and, 15–16, 23, 121
Pence, Charlotte, 82 Presidential Airlift Group, 12
Pence, Edward, Jr., 269 Presidential Emergency Operations
Pence, Greg, 67, 263, 269, 271, 283, 288 Center (PEOC), 97, 208–9
Pence, Karen Sue, 1, 6, 63, 65–67, 77, President’s Daily Brief (PDB), 207–8

332 index
Press, Bill, 98 of 2000, 47–48

Price, Tom, 282 of 2016, 60–61, 66, 83
Priebus, Reince, 206 Republican Study Committee (RSC),
Prince, 91 276
Promises to Keep (Biden), 253 Reston, James, 133
Pulse nightclub shooting, 245–46 Reuther, Walter, 28
Ricchetti, Steve, 191, 224, 232, 240,
Quayle, James Danforth “Dan,” 9, 260
12, 39–41, 71–72, 75, 79, 88–90, Rice, Condoleezza, 59, 97, 209, 211,
175–81, 193, 204–5, 212, 277, 217–18, 237
284, 291, 294–95 Riddick, Floyd, 151
Quayle, Marilyn, 41, 75, 79, 88–90, R.J. Reynolds, 275
176, 277 Roberts, Robin, 250
Robinson, Marian Shields, 294
Rafshoon, Jerry, 36, 168, 172 Rockefeller, John D., Sr., 161
Rayburn, Sam, 28–29, 31–32, 104 Rockefeller, Margaretta Large
Reagan, Nancy, 35, 86–87, 125, 127 “Happy,” 88, 162
Reagan, Ronald, xii, 3, 8, 15, 17–18, 33– Rockefeller, Michael, 161
42, 52, 60, 86, 98, 129, 156, 158, Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich, 44, 72,
164–65, 167, 172–75, 208, 261, 272 88, 147, 156, 158, 161–65, 167,
assassination attempt, 123–27, 173 180, 260
recession of 1992, 179 Romney, Mitt, 56, 250, 281
Recovery Act (209), 239 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 104–5
Reed, Bruce, 12, 193, 230, 244–45, Roosevelt, Franklin D., xi, 8, 17, 20,
251–52 29, 103–7, 123, 138, 161, 169,
Regan, Donald T., 126 207, 271
Reid, Harry, 252 Roosevelt, Theodore, xi, 8–9, 15, 17,
Reilly, William, 180 103, 108
Religious Freedom Restoration Act Rove, Karl, 216
(Indiana, 2015), 280 Rowe, James, 27–28
Religious Freedom Restoration Act Rubio, Marco, 3
(U.S., 1993), 84 Rumsfeld, Donald, 44, 149–50, 160–
Republican National Committee, 173 64, 208, 219, 221
Republican National Convention, 157 Russell, Richard, 139
of 1956, 135 Russert, Tim, 205
of 1960, 137 Russia, 4, 283, 289. See also Soviet
of 1968, 149–50 Union
of 1980, 33–34, 36 Rutherfurd, Lucy Mercer, 104
of 1988, 40 Ryan, Paul, 250, 269, 285

index 333
Safire, William, 152 Shoultz, Debbie, 271

Salt II, 119 Shriver, Sargent, 115
same-sex marriage, 84, 248–50. See Shultz, George, 150
also LGBTQ rights Simcox, Ed, 83–84
Sanders, Bernie, 224, 231 Simmons, Jamal, 92, 194
Sanders, Trooper, 94–95, 100 Simpson, O.J., 274
Sandy Hook Elementary School Simpson, Steve, 274–75
massacre, 244–45 Sirica, John, 119
Sanford, Terry, 109 Sisters (Cheney), 99
Santos, Juan Manuel, 265 Smith, Bill, 268, 278, 289
Sawyer, Diane, 198 Smith, Curt, 280
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 9 Smith, James, 223–24
Schwab, Charles, 286 Smith, Pete, 80
Scott, Hugh, 119 Snow, Tony, 216
Scowcroft, Brent, 159 Snyder, Rick, 64
Sears, John, 138 Sorensen, Ted, 109, 144
Seat, Pete, 79 South Africa, 192
Second Amendment, 212 South America, 136, 265
second lady, 12, 42–43, 79–102 South Korea, 270
Secret Service, 9, 40, 71, 77, 104, 111– Southwestern Cattlemen’s Association,
13, 115–16, 124–25, 127, 136, 124
142, 159, 208, 244 Soviet Union, 34, 131, 208. See also
Seidman, William, 158 Russia
Senate Spouses Club, 87–88 Spencer, Stuart, 33, 35–38, 41
September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, Spivak, Al, 144
57, 97–99, 201, 208–11, 216, 236, Squier, Bob, 199
246, 255, 291 Stalin, Joseph, 104
sequencing theory, 191–92 Standard Oil, 161
Serbia, 194 Starr, Kenneth, 197
Sessions, Jeff, 59 State Department, 12, 125, 131, 142
7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The St. Clair, James, 120
(Covey), 81 Stephanopoulos, George, 280
sexual harassment, 42 Sterling, Kent, 273–74
Shalala, Donna E., 197 Stettinius, Edward, 105
Sharp, Phil, 272–73 Stimson, Henry, 106–7
Sheekey, Kevin, 235 Stone, Harlan Fiske, 105
Sherman, Roger, 8 Stoughton, Cecil, 114
Shiites, 254–55 Stuart, Connie, 122–23
Short, Marc, 282, 284 Sullivan, Marguerite, 79, 90

334 index
Sunnis, 254 206, 208, 227, 231–32, 241, 263–

Supreme Court, 52, 92, 137, 212–13 70, 274, 278, 281–89, 291–92
elections of 2000 and, 184, 201 Trump, Donald, Jr., 1–2, 60–61, 63, 287
Gorsuch and, 267 Trump, Eric, 1, 62–63
Thomas and, 231 Trump, Ivanka, 1–2, 63, 289
Symington, Stuart, 26 Trump, Melania, 1–2, 63, 65–66, 85
Syria, 217–18, 255, 257 Tsipras, Alexis, 14
Tunisia, 257
Taliban, 212 Tutwiler, Lucy, 206
TAPS National Military Survivor Sem- Twelfth Amendment, 19
inar, 233 Twenty-fifth Amendment, 18, 20–22,
taxes, 252, 287 123–27, 130, 134, 145, 155, 156
Taxi Driver (film), 124 Twenty-second Amendment, 15
Taylor, Zachary, 16 Twitter, 289
Tea Party, 276 Tyler, John, 16
Teeter, Bob, 36, 165, 180
Tennessean, 91, 185–86 Ukraine, 14
terrorism, 209–12, 216 United Nations, 59, 173
Texas, 26, 185–86 U.S. Army National Guard, 100
Texas Democratic Party, 110 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 212
This Week with George Stephanopoulos U.S. Congress, 4, 19, 64, 88, 156
(TV show), 280 Cheney and, 96, 206
Thomas, Albert, 112 Ford and, 156–57
Thomas, Clarence, 231 Gore and, 91
Thomas, George, 109 Naval Observatory and, 70
Thomases, Susan, 187 Netanyahu speech to, 258
Thurmond, Strom, 40–41, 126 Nixon and, 119–20, 130, 133–34
Tilden, Samuel, 184 Obama and, 252
Tillerson, Rex, 4, 269–70 Pence and, 80, 266, 270, 272, 275–
Time, 160, 174 77, 281, 284–85
Treasury Department, 216 Quayle and, 176, 181
Trippi, Joe, 42, 172 Reagan and, 173–74
Trivette, Paula, 87 Rockefeller and, 163
Troopergate, 58 Syria and, 257–58
Truman, Bess, 105, 107–8 Tipper Gore and, 93
Truman, Harry S., 8, 17, 103–8, 115, Twenty-fi fth Amendment and, 21
169, 247 U.S. Constitution, 8, 18–20. See also
Truman, Margaret, 105–6, 108 specific amendments
Trump, Donald, xii, 1–6, 13–14, 56, Article I, Section 3, 18
59–68, 85, 129, 180, 184, 203–4, Article II, Section 1, 18

index 335
U.S. House Intelligence Committee, 210 University of Delaware, 232

U.S. House of Representatives, 19, 119– University of Pennsylvania, 232
20, 130–31, 134, 156–57, 163, 176,
206, 266, 272, 275–77, 282, 285 Valenti, Jack, 112, 115–16
Republican conference, 282 Van Buren, Martin, 17, 173
U.S. House Un-A merican Activities Vatican, 61
Committee (HUAC), 130–31 Veep (TV show), xii, 22–23
U.S. Liaison Office, People’s Repub- Venezuela, 136, 265
lic of China, 173 Verma, Seema, 282
U.S. Naval Academy, 282–83 vice president
U.S. Navy, 155, 156, 158 ascension to presidency, 16–17, 103–
U.S. Navy Seals, 223, 246–47 27, 291, 295
U.S. Senate, 5, 19, 49, 53, 168 attempts to win presidency, 11,
Agnew and, 151 17–18, 173, 295
Biden and, 14, 230, 233–236, 253 awards and, 291
Cheney and, 205–6, 211, 213 busts of, 15
Eisenhower and, 133–34 Cabinet and, 4, 10
Ford and, 157 campaigning by, 11
Gore and, 193 congressional career and, 129–47
Hillary Clinton and, 194 desk drawer signed by, 14–15
Humphrey and, 169 election of, 19–20
LBJ and, 134, 139–40, 145 FBI and, 4
Mondale and, 169–70 JFK assassination and lack of, 21, 145
Obama and, 235–36 library of, 73
Pence and, 204 nuclear football and, 10
president pro tempore, 125–26 Oval Office access and, 10
Quayle and, 176 perks and traditions of, 12–13
Republican policy lunches, 211 president as selector of, 20
Rockefeller and, 163–64 presidential succession and, 18, 20
school shootings and, 245 president’s changing relationship with,
Trump and, 266 7–8, 10–12, 15–16, 23, 169–71, 188
Twenty-fi fth Amendment and, 21 removal of, 4, 15, 21
vice president as president of, 8–9, 18 residence of, 69–77 (see also Naval
U.S. Senate Committee to Investigate Observatory)
the National Defense Program, 106 role and power of, 7–23, 292–93
U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Com- salary and benefits of, 9
mittee, 51, 237, 239 Secret Service and, 9
U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, 210 Senate role of, 8–9, 18
U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, 51–52, spouse and, 12, 42–43, 79–102
241 staff of, 10–11

336 index
vice president (cont.) Oval Office, 10

travel by, 12 PEOC, 208–9
Twelfth Amendment and, 19 private residence, 71, 73
Twenty-fifth Amendment and, 20–21 redecoration and, 85
vetting of, 39–68 staff, 15, 73
West Wing office and, 170, 187–88 Travel Office, 197
Vice President’s Residence Foundation, West Wing office for vice presi-
73 dent in, 170, 187–88
Vietnam War, 46, 49, 70, 119, 146–47, White House Conference on Mental
169, 176, 186 Health, 93
Voorhis, Jerry, 130 Whitewater affair, 197
Whittington, Harry, 214–16
Walker, Scott, 64 WIBC (radio network), 273, 275
Wallace, Henry, 20, 161 WikiLeaks, 185
Wall Street Journal, 216 Will, George, 282
Warren, Earl, 129, 137 Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt, 21, 191
Warren, Elizabeth, 224 Wilson, Woodrow, xi, 21, 191
Warren Commission, 111 Wofford, Harris, 45
Washington, D.C., handgun ban, 213 Wolf, Robert, 230
Washington, George, 7 Wooten, Mike, 58
Washington Goes to War (Brinkley), 97 World Trade Center
Washington Post, 32, 89, 180, 199, 282 9/11 attacks and, 210
Washington Star, 120 bombing of 1993, 210
Washington Update (radio show), 273 World Trade Center, 97
Watergate scandal, 34, 118–23, 153, World War II, 30, 97, 103, 105–7, 121,
155–56, 158 129, 132, 151, 155–56, 173, 292
Weaver, John, 60 Wright, Jim, 125
Webb, Jim, 99 Wright, Zephyr, 118
Webster, Daniel, xi
Weinberger, Caspar, 125 Xerox, 286
welfare reform, 192
Westinghouse Broadcasting, 113 Yalta Conference, 104
Whig Party, xi Yarborough, Ralph, 110
Whitaker, Steve, 81–82 Youngblood, Rufus, 111, 113
White House Yushchenko, Viktor, 14
Children’s Garden, 76
collection and furnishings, 73 Zoeller, Greg, 83, 289, 295
Diplomatic Reception Room, 115 Zumwalt, Elmo, 70

about the author
Kate Andersen Brower is the author of the number one New York
Times bestseller The Residence and the New York Times bestseller
First Women. After working for CBS News in New York and Fox
News in Washington, D.C., she covered the White House for
Bloomberg News during Barack Obama’s administration. Now a
CNN contributor, Brower has written for the New York Times,
Vanity Fair, Time, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg Businessweek.
She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband, their two
young children, and their wheaten terrier.


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First in Line

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For those who have patiently served:

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PROLOGUE: “Safe Hands” • 1

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XI. The Shadow President: Cheney and

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richard m. nixon and dwight d. eisenhower, 1953–1961

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I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin.

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Dick, I don’t know how you ever took the job.

You die, I fly.

Iron sharpens iron.

“Sue, did the president call?

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They felt called to do this. They knew what they were

MIK E A ND K A R EN PENCE’S DECISION TO JOIN DONA LD TRU MP ’S T ICK ET

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team of lawyers about whether Flynn was actually a registered Dem-

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Coats went on to reluctantly accept Trump’s offer to head the in-

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You’re a Guest in My House

I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.

SERV ED U NDER PR ESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON

The vice presidency plays head games with you. You

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by Thomas Jefferson and hanging in the Oval Office, Roosevelt

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twenty-­four hours a day by a military aide who carries a forty-­

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Al Gore remarked, when asked whether he disagreed with Presi-

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presidents do talk with Mike Pence, but they are reluctant to go

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his years in the Senate and as vice president, and he frequently

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Fourteen vice presidents have become president, eight of them as-

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Roosevelt (upon William McKinley’s assassination in 1901), Calvin

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performance, and lost nine to one among those who disapproved.

When the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to

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democracy and their attempts, however vain, to avoid the creation

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In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt only agreed to seek a third

XI. The Shadow President: Cheney and

twenty-four hours a day by a military aide who carries a forty-