The Worst Vice Presidents of the United States Before Kamala Harris

Biden’s Veep Part of a Long-Line of Duds, Dummies, Traitors & Misfires

“Once there were two brothers. One went away to sea; the other was elected vice president. And nothing was heard of either of them again.”

— Thomas R. Marshall, 28th Vice President of the United States

The Vice Presidency was described by the first man to hold the office, John Adams, as “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived”. Originally, the runner-up in the presidential vote — to be carried out by the decidedly un-democratic Electoral College — was to be named Vice President. Electors were given two votes, and the candidate for President with the most votes became the First Magistrate of the United States, while the runner-up became Vice President, whose only job was to serve as the President of the Senate, a post which entailed, ironically, the overseeing of the counting of the Electoral College ballots. The Vice Presidency originally was envisioned as an office that would devolved onto a distinguished politician, someone fully capably of assuming the office of the Presidency, should the need arise, and not as the booby prize that it became after the ratification of the XIIth Amendment, or as a jumping off point to a bid for the Presidency (the position of Secretary of State typically yielded future Presidents in the early days of the Republic).

The whole process was not well thought out, as the Vice President proved to be a political capon. Furthermore, the federal government of the United States had been conceived of as a monolithic, one-party state, and when there was a fracturing of the edifice into two parties during the John Adams administration, competing parties arose, the Federalists under Adams and the Republicans under his Vice President, Thomas Jefferson. It was just a matter of time, and that time was the election of 1800, that one party would order its electors to vote for a preferred candidate for President and cast their second ballot for another member of the party, to ensure that the Presidency and the Vice Presidency were held by the same party.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party ran the great man himself for President as well as former U.S. Senator Aaron Burr, who they hoped to see become the Vice President through the above-described gentlemen’s conspiracy. However, one of the Republican electors forget to not vote for Burr, with the result that he wound up tied with Jefferson for the Presidency. The deadlocked vote and was thrown into the House of Representatives, as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. The XIIth Amendment changed the process to one in which the Elector cast one vote for President and another vote for Vice-President, so there would never be a repetition of the tie.

The idea of a distinguished politician being Vice President waned for nearly two hundred years, and a series of hacks and non-entities occupying the Vice Presidency became the norm, rather than the exception. This, then, is the worst of an undistinguished breed, that ironically, contains one man the likes of which the original Constitution intended to honor, who went on to become one of the greatest presidents of the United States.

With such rich pickings, we are forced to limit the list of The Worst Vice Presidents of the United States to ten. (The ten are listed in alphabetical order.)

Spiro Agnew

Spiro Agnew was a political mediocrity who was Richard Nixon’s surprise choice as a running mate in 1968. A master at extorting kickbacks from contractors while serving the state of Maryland as a county executive and then as governor, Spiro Agnew is only the second vice president to resign from the office, and the only one forced to do so by a plea bargain with the Justice Department for corruption. (John C. Calhoun resigned in order to take a seat in the U.S. Senate.)

Richard Nixon had picked Spiro Agnew partly for his reputation for being a moderate, “modern” Republican who had adapted to the 20th Century and was supportive of such projects as urban renewal, in contrast to such antediluvian types as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Why Agnew supported urban renewal was because the razing and rebuilding of the slums and other infrastructure projects gave him a great opportunity to extort contractors for boodle.

During his time as Veep, Agnew served as Nixon’s “bad cop,” delivering purple speeches denouncing hippies, lefties and egg-heads while thumping the tub for the law + order that his own political life had made a mockery of. The living embodiment of the putrid and rancid nothingness of the post-war American political establishment. He later brokered arms deals for cash and tried to cheat the state of California out of income taxes he owed. An all-around déclassé act, who was loathed even by the equally déclassé Nixon.

Aaron Burr

The greatest bad boy of American politics. Unlike Bill Clinton, Burr did not just want to seize and possess a naive young intern, he wanted to conquer his own empire. The man who came closest to the U.S. Presidency without actual winning the Big Brass Ring of American politics, Burr had tied Thomas Jefferson in the Electoral College vote of 1800 due to a fluke in the Constitution that later was remedied by constitutional amendment. It took 36 ballots in the House before Jefferson was elected President, making Burr — the runner-up — Vice President, and Burr’s president never forgave him for not doing more to eschew the office during the run-up to the House balloting. The result was that Jefferson froze Burr out, and even engineered his de facto expulsion from Jefferson’s Republican Party.

Aaron Burr performed ably as the President of the Senate, the sole constitutionally prescribed job of the Veep, but in the last year of his first and only term, he put a bullet through another legendary Founding Father — Alexander Hamilton — whose visage graces the sawbuck and other denominations of U.S. currency for over 100 years. If Aaron Burr had had his way, it would have been Burr’s visage on the coinage and currency of his very own country.

His rupture with Jefferson having denied him a second term as Vice President, Burr ran in the 1804 New York gubernatorial race but was defeated due to Jefferson’s machinations against him. That same year, he shot Hamilton in their famous duel. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, Burr apparently began plotting to carve his own country out of the Spanish possessions of North America, either in Florida or Mexico. There were also rumors that Burr planned a coup d’etat in Washington, D.C., or — as an abolitionist — that he planned to have the Northern States secede and stop being tethered to the Slavocracy. Burr went so far as to raise his own private army for the enterprise, but he was betrayed by one of his co-conspirators. Jefferson had him tried for treason. Burr was acquitted, but his political career was over.

Many American pols have been ambitious — Bill Clinton, with a love of technicalities ever bit as pronounced as his love of power, even has claimed — while sounding out the possibility of his being returned to the Oval Office after his second term expired — that the XXII Amendment limiting a president to two terms didn’t necessarily mean two terms, but two consecutive terms (“Sometimes ‘is’ doesn’t mean ‘is’”), before putting his money and his ambitions on his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton; and some have accused Lyndon Johnson with having engineered the assassination of his president, John F. Kennedy, out of an insatiable lust for the Oval Office, but Aaron Burr out did them all! He wanted his own country! He also was a better shot than Dick Cheney. A true American original!

John C. Calhoun

One of only two men to serve as Vice President under two different presidents (George Clinton was the other), Calhoun has the dubious distinction of having betrayed both! Hailing from South Carolina, Calhoun originally had decided to run for President in 1824, but withdrew because of the strength of William Crawford, a fellow southerner, in what essentially devolved into a battle of favorite sons from different regions of the United States. Calhoun instead threw his hat in the ring for the Vice Presidency, and wound up as the running mate of all four Presidential candidates on various state tickets! unlike the four candidates for President, none of whom won a majority of the Electoral College, Calhoun won a landslide, racking up 182 of the 260 total votes (131 being needed to win), for 70% of the total.

The Presidential election was thrown to the House of Representatives for the first — and last — time since the passage of the XII Amendment. Andrew Jackson won a plurality of both the popular vote (not a factor in Presidential contests at that time) and the Electoral College, but John Adams, the runner-up, was elected president by the House on the first ballot.

Although John C. Calhoun would later in his career be associated with sectionalism, for the first 18 years of his political career he was a staunch nationalist. He didn’t approve of the election of Adams, and fell out with Adams over his policies, which he thought were too selfish and sectional. Thus, he decided to thwart John Adams’ reelection and became Jackson’s running mate in the election of 1828, in which Jackson trounced Adams. Relations between Calhoun and Jackson were soon to deteriorate. By the last year of the Jackson Administration, they had fully ruptured.

Calhoun was opposed to the Tariff of 1828 and became he leading philosophical and political proponent of nullification, wherein a state could veto federal legislation not to its liking. Leaving his former nationalism far behind, Calhoun also laid the philosophical groundwork for secession, claiming that a state had a right to secede from the Union. Both ideas were anathema to Andrew Jackson. When, in 1832, South Carolina nullified a federal tariff law and threatened to secede, Jackson prepared to use force lest against South Carolina in what was called the Nullification Crisis.

Now a proponent of state’s rights, John C. Calhoun formed the Nullifier Party, which later became part of the new Whig Party, as the political party that coalesced from anti-Jacksonian forces came to be known. (Ironically, many Whigs — such as Abraham Lincoln — would form the basis of the New Republican Party that fought Calhoun’s nullification and secession philosophy a generation later. Calhoun was honored by a one-cent stamp printed by the Confederate States of America that never was put into circulation. ) With no chance at defeating the extremely popular Jackson for the Presidency in 1832, and already dropped as Jackson’s running mate in factor of Martin Van Buren, Calhoun resigned the office to accept election to the U.S. Senate by the South Carolina legislature, where he became one of the leading proponents of the Slavocracy. American History knows him as one of two men to serve two First Magistrates in the office of Vice President, but the only Veep to betray two Presidents, and to be dropped from the ticket as running mate by both men he had so poorly served.

Schuyler Colfax

Disgraced due to political corruption and was dropped from the ticket by President Ulysses S. Grant, who ran the most corrupt administration until Warren G. Harding’s own doozey in the early Twenties, when seemingly half of Harding’s cabinet was under indictment or in jail for fraud. To be disgraced while serving one of the most disgraceful administrations in American history is testimony to Colfax’s sheer awfulness. A real crook!

Schuyler Colfax was implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal, the Scandal of the Century if your century had the Roman numerals XIX appended to it. Credit Mobilier, the company that built the Union Pacific branch of the transcontinental railroad, did so with heavy government subsidies guaranteed by a for-then unprecedented level of graft. It liberally bribed Congressmen, including Colfax, who — as Speaker of the House — was one of the most powerful men in America. The company wound up grafting more than half of the $94 million spent on the infrastructure cost, skimming off $50 million of the total (approximately $800 million in 2008 dollars). Colfax would have given Spiro Agnew a run for the money when it came to shaking the money tree! One can speculate that Mrs. Grant must have checked the silverware after Colfax and the missus came over to the White House for supper.

John Nance Garner

The former Speaker of the House of Representatives gave up his power in Congress when he chose to accept Franklin D. Roosevelt’s offer to be his vice president, John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner found out that the vice presidency wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss (euphemized to “spit” by the press). During his second term as Vice President, Garner turned against his president and began marshaling forces hostile to FDR’s New Deal. Considering Roosevelt a lame duck under the unofficial “two term” limit that was just a gentleman’s agreement until the XXII Amendment to the Constitution, he fancied himself the standard bearer of the Democratic Party in 1940. After winning the nomination for an unprecedented third term at the 1940 Democratic Convention, Roosevelt dumped the disloyal Garner from the ticket and went on to win in the November election, sending him back to Texas after FDR’s 1940 running mate, Henry A. Wallace, was inaugurated Vice President. For the rest of his long life (he died one year and a fortnight shy of reaching his 100th birthday), Cactus Jack Garner sit on a hard chair in a sweltering sun, telling tall tales to reporters and dreaming about what might have been.

Thomas Jefferson

The Founding Father whose face still graces the $2 bill, Thomas Jefferson proved hostile to his president, John Adams, the only man not from Virginia, that is, the Slavocracy (the slave-holding South), to hold the office of First Magistrate in the first 32 years of the Republic. In 28 of those 32 years, Virginians — who, incidentally, refused to cede their territory that had been promised for the District of Columbia — held the Presidency. Adams and Jefferson had been friends before they became political enemies, and would once again become friends in their dotage. (Both lived to ripe old ages, far past their presidencies and the times in which they had political clout, and died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.)

The Constitution, as envisioned by men like Jefferson, was a compromise vehicle to provide a stronger union while simultaneously preserving “state’s rights” (a phrase that eventually would mean slavery and then segregation & Jim Crow laws). The President was selected by an Electoral College based on a census in which African American slaves were considered 3/5th of a “person” for reasons of apportioning the Congressional representation that the Electoral College was rooted in. Thus, the delegations in the House of Representatives hailing from the Southern States were boosted by their slave-holdings, with each slave being counted for 3/5ths of a person, despite the fact they could not vote and were held as chattel. It was a system designed to ensure the maintenance of the status quo and to leave the South unthreatened by the North, whose power it could check in Congress by this virtual veto of added representation.

This, then, was the “democracy” of Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. Owing to the clout given to the South in the Electoral College by their slave-holdings, Jefferson was dubbed the “Negro President” after beating John Adams in the 1800 Election.

Thomas Jefferson proved that the original Constitution’s imagining of the vice presidency as a “runner up” office for a distinguished also-ran was untenable. He was a greater man — politically, intellectually, and philosophically — than his president, which lead to friction and a fracturing of the Founding Father’s vision of the United States as a One Party State enthralled to the Slavocracy of the South from which Jefferson hailed. By besting John Adams in the Election of 1800, Jefferson proved that the U.S. could be a functioning two-party system that still was in enthralled to the Slavocracy, a concept that, unfortunately, continues to thrive 208 years later, with the racist South continuing to hold the Electoral College in a headlock that guarantees the reactionary candidate 80% of the electoral votes they need to win the Presidency.

The system created by the Founding Fathers did break down for almost a generation beginning in 1860, when the burgeoning population of the free states overwhelmed the “bonus” the South received in the Electoral College from African American slaves being counted towards apportioning representation. The abolitionist candidate Abraham Lincoln managed to win a majority of the vote in the Electoral College, but the system got back on track after the end of Reconstruction and has been flourishing ever since, with the exception that the “Solid South” that was solidly Democratic for over 100 years after the Civil War is now as solidly Republican, the Party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, ironically having become the party of racism and Jim Crow.

When historians talk about the “genius” of the American system as created by the Founding Fathers, that can be boiled down to the creation of a system in which race (and its corollary, class) are used to bulwark the idea of suppressing democracy in the name of political stability and economic prosperity.

Which brings us to our next member of the Vice Presidential Hall of Infamy:

Andrew Johnson

Drunk at his inauguration on March 4, 1864, Andrew Johnson proved himself a base betrayer of African American freedmen and of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. After his boozed-up debut, Andy Johnson served as vice president — with and without several snootfuls of corn likker to steady his nerves — a little over a month, but the War Democrat’s almost four years as President of the United States were an unmitigated disaster.

The country would have been better off if Lincoln had kept his original vice president, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, an honorable man and a staunch abolitionist. Unbelievably, Johnson was portrayed for over a century as some kind of martyr to state’s rights, which is a euphemism for segregation & Jim Crow laws.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Famed as the most effective Majority Leader in the history of the U.S. Senate (until Mitch McConnell came along), Lyndon Johnson, the “Master of the Senate.” — who had been given many task by his president and performed them well — in all likelihood would have been dropped from the ticket in 1964 for his links to political corruption. Johnson’s bag man, Bobby Baker — a fixer with heavy links to the Chicago “Outfit” (or Mob) — was being investigated on Friday, November 23, 1963, the very day that John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, with “Landslide Lyndon” in the car behind him. Once Johnson took the oath of office, Congress deep-sixed the Bobby Baker investigation, which could have revealed what later was revealed after LBJ’s death: That as Majority Leader and as Veep, he took millions of dollars in payoffs/ (LBJ was accepting envelopes of cash in the Vice President’s office!) Many conspiracy theorists point a finger at The Outfit as being behind a conspiracy to ice JFK. Whatever the truth, JFK’s death likely saved LBJ’s career.

Richard Mentor Johnson

The third Johnson to make the list! Vice President for one term under Martin Van Buren, Richard Mentor Johnson’s effectiveness as a politician was hamstrung by his relationship with a mixed-raced woman who was his common-law wife. (Could this be the next musical project for the Hamilton team?)

So outraged were the racist electors of Virginia, a state won by the Van Buren-Johnson ticket in the 1836 election, by Johnson’s indiscretion, they refused to cast their vote for Johnson. Thus, the Vice Presidential contest was thrown in to the Senate, Johnson having failed to pile up enough electoral votes to win the job outright. The Senate elected Johnson vice president, but he was doomed politically thereafter, even in such a powerless and relatively meaningless office.

When Martin Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840, he ran alone, without Johnson on the ticket. Without anyone! Richard Mentor Johnson remains the sole running mate in history to be replaced by — no one! Interestingly, issues such as the racial makeup of a candidate or their spouse still have bearing on politics 170 years later. (The next thing we’ll be hearing about are questions about someone’s church or religion, but that went out with John F Kennedy half-a-century ago, didn’t it?)

Richard M. Nixon

“Tricky Dicky” was the first vice president in half-a-century to distinguish himself in the office, since the death of Garrett Hobart, William McKinley’s first vice president, who was considered an “Assistant President” but perished during his first term. Nixon was a pioneer when it came to using the office of the Vice Presidency for attempting to nurture grass-roots, local party organizations, for whom he toiled tirelessly. However, his president, Dwight David Eisenhower, despised him and actually told the press, when asked for anything positive that Nixon had done in his seven plus years as Vice President, “If you give me a week, maybe I’ll think of something.”

In actuality, Nixon catered to local parties with his eye on the prize of the 1960 Republican Presidential nomination. In fact, according to Theodore White in The Making of the President, the state and local Republican Party organizations decayed dreadfully during the Eisenhower administration (Ike didn’t give a damn for party politics), and were of little help to Nixon in the general election. His defeat by Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy, considered a political lightweight before his Presidency and subsequent martyrdom in Dallas, must be considered a national referendum on the success of Nixon’s political career up to the time, which was mostly the Vice Presidency. He failed the test, as he later would fail as President.

Runner-Up:

As is fitting when considering an office that originally was considered a prize for the runner-up for the Presidency, there is a runner-up to our listing of the 10 Worst Vice Presidents. The three leading candidates were Richard “Dick” Cheney, Calvin Coolidge and Henry A. Wallace.

Dick Cheney, in fact, may rank eventually as the worst vice president ever to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, but the fact that he is the most powerful vice president in history, virtually the Assistant President (the first since Garrett Hobart, William McKinley’s “Assistant President,” whose influence Cheney has far surpassed). His excercise of unprecedented power and influence, which has led him to be considered the Virtual President of the United States, took him off of this list.

Calvin Coolidge was typical as a vice president in that he was a do-nothing, as much a do-nothing in the second-slot as he was as President. Therefore, while Coolidge might be the paradigmatic vice president between the time of the rebellious and independent-minded John C. Calhoun and the modern age of active Vice Presidents initiated by Richard Nixon, he doesn’t quite make this list as, doing nothing, he never did anything awful enough to make the grade.

That leaves:

Henry A. Wallace

Henry Agard Wallace actually performed well as Vice President, and was tasked with major responsibilities by his president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, during World War Two, which he performed admirably. However, Wallace was dropped from the ticket in 1944 and replaced by Harry S Truman when Democratic Party leaders realized that Roosevelt would not survive a fourth term. They simply did not trust Wallace, a former Republican whose liberalism was considered extreme by most conservatives and many moderates. Wallace’s steadfast opposition to segregation, and his attempts while serving as Secretary of Agriculture during FDR’s first two administrations to ensure that federal relief efforts reached African Americans, particularly offended leading Democrats from the “Solid South” that was the backbone of the Democratic Party from Reconstruction through the Jimmy Carter Administration.

While most historians concur with this point of view, that Wallace was dropped because he was too liberal and likely would prove soft on the Soviet Union in the post-War world, the fact was that Henry Wallace — a brilliant agronomist — was too much of an egghead to be trusted to behave soberly as a practical politician, as his conduct as boss of the leftist Progressive Party would later show. His spiritual path also raised flags to Establishment pols: Raised Presbyterian, Wallace was a questing soul who had studied other religious faiths and traditions before associating himself with the theosophist Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré whom many thought was a religious charlatan.

Henry Wallace eventually broke with Roerich and became an Episcopalian, which for most of the history of the Republic has been a quasi-official state religion (eleven of the 42 men who have served as President of the United States have been Episcopalians, as have 10 of the 46 Vice Presidents) and might have been seen as some in the Establishment as insincere, a safe choice for a man seeking a safe harbor, in religious terms.

Wallace was seen as a flake, and thus dangerous. He already had “crossed the aisle” and left the Republican Party for the Democrats, something relatively uncommon in American politics in the 20th Century. Wallace eventually broke from the Democratic Party and launched a bid for the Presidency in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket against incumbent Harry Truman, who was facing a tough reelection campaign against the Republican Thomas Dewey. The platform of the Progressive Party, which was infiltrated by many communists and fellow-travelers, was seen as soft on communism and as pro-appeasement as regards the Soviet Union.

Having been a Republican when appointed Secretary of Agriculture by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, Wallace had soon switched his party affiliation to the Democrats, then became the standard bearer of the left-wing Progressive Party fifteen years later. The “flake” would soon switch positions again. After the Korean War broke out in 1950, Wallace came out in support of Truman’s decision to commit U.S. and United Nations forces to fighting the invasion of South Korea by the communist North Korean regime, a Soviet satellite. He published a book in 1952, Where I Was Wrong, a mea culpa in which Wallace admitted that he was wrong about the USSR and was now a committed anti-communist. Wallace endorsed Dwight David Eisenhower for reelection in 1956, and came out for Richard Nixon in the 1960 Presidential contest.

Henry A. Wallace was not a bad vice president per se, and he had been a great Secretary of Agriculture (a position his father Henry Cantwell Wallace also had enjoyed, under the Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge). However, the main if not only job of the Vice President is to serve as president in the event that the President of the United States should die or be incapacitated, and in this respect, he was a failure, being considered unable to fulfill that function by his peers at the seat of government. His 1948 campaign as the standard-bearer of the Progressive Party proved to many Democrats that they had made the right decision in 1944, when he was dumped from the ticket.

In sum: Henry Wallace didn’t have the right-stuff to be president, and thus, should never have been vice president.

NOTE: A version of this article originally appeared on Google’s defunct Knol, it’s answer to Wikipedia.

@2010, 2023 by Jon C. Hopwood