Oliphant's Veeps

"Promises, Promises" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, April 1968

How many vice presidents do you count in the above cartoon?

I recently mused that since "Oliphant's Presidents" has already been done (you can buy the book at amazon), I could have commemorated Pat Oliphant's passing by collecting his Vice Presidents. Well, his career spanned several of them, so here they are.

"Click" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, October, 1968

Lyndon Johnson picked Hubert Humphrey as his running mate in 1964 to shore up his support with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. To Baby Boomers too young to remember the Minnesotan speaking out on behalf of Black Americans' civil rights in 1948, however, Humphrey came to be seen as errand boy for the man sending that generation to fight and die in a far away forever war in southeast Asia.

Running for president in LBJ's place after Johnson withdrew from the race, Humphrey found it difficult to distance himself from the administration's unpopular war while promising to continue advancing its Great Society ideals.

Of course, Johnson qualifies as a former Vice President in this cartoon, too. I suppose it is possible that Aussie Oliphant penned a cartoon of LBJ sometime before November of 1963; John Kennedy's Vice President could well have said or done something to catch the attention of the Adelaide editorial pages.

"Our Earth Contact, Spiro, Is Pushing for a Landing Here by 1986" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September 1969

Humphrey lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, whose first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, served as the new administration's attack dog, speaking out against the media, liberals, antiwar activists, and the nattering nabobs of negativism.

Oliphant has some fun with one of Agnew's less controversial pronouncements in this cartoon, just two months after the first manned landing on the moon.

There has not, in case anybody is wondering, been a manned mission to Mars as of this writing; but NASA landed a craft on the Red Planet ten years before Mr. Agnew predicted.

Agnew was easily the most caricaturable of the Veeps we're looking at today — at least of the ones who never got promoted to the top job — so five versions of him show up in Oliphant's single-panel cartoon.

Did you remember to count Nixon as a former Veep at the top of this post?

"The Lone Ranger" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, May 1974

Of course you did.

Less than nine months into Richard Nixon's second term, Agnew pled no contest to charges of bribery  and resigned the Vice Presidency, bringing about the first exercise of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Passed and ratified after JFK's assassination, it provided a mechanism to fill a vice presidential vacancy.

Gerald Ford was quickly named and confirmed as Agnew's replacement at a time when the President had some legal problems of his own. Yet, while Agnew cartoons were instantly recognizable, six months into Ford's vice presidency Oliphant still found it necessary to write Ford's name on his chest.

"I'd Like You to Meet Our New Vice-President" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, December 1974

No such problem with Nelson Rockefeller, the former Governor of New York who had run for the presidency in 1960, 1964, and 1968.

He did not make a lasting impression as Ford's second in command, however. Not long ago, contestants on Jeopardy! needed to come up with the name of the vice president who followed Gerald Ford, and none of the three knew who it was.

I'm sure my very intelligent readership had no problem spotting him in the cartoon at the top of today's post.

"Ah Plan a Highly Important Staff Role" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, January 1977

The vice presidency is notoriously a thankless make-work job. John Nance Garner likened it to a bucket of warm spit, or something that rhymed with it. Thomas Marshall joked about two brothers, one of whom went to sea while the other was elected Vice President, and neither was heard from again. Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Selina Meyers in Veep was a character study in constant frustration and humiliation.

Jimmy Carter actually followed through with his promise to give Walter Mondale a substantial policy role in his administration. Mondale, the first vice president to have an office inside the White House, was Carter's adviser and trouble-shooter, the Georgian's conduit to Capitol Hill Democrats.

"There Is No Truth Whatever in the Rumor" by Pat Oliphant, October 10, 1988

There was nothing fair about that purse Oliphant always drew with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush — Oliphant went further than almost any other mainstream editorial cartoonist in exploiting Bush's so-called Wimp Factor.

Having criticized Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics" when Bush was a rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Bush served as a major cheerleader for Reaganomics and the rest of that administration's policies. Behind the scenes, Bush continued the Mondale model of the vice presidency: an experienced advisor who didn't seek credit for administration successes. By the same token, he also avoided the limelight during the Iran-Contra scandal.

The purse, and the Wimp Factor, disappeared once Bush as President dispatched troops to overthrow the government of Panama.

"How Come Is It" by Pat Oliphant, January 9, 1992

Young and handsome J. Danforth Quayle presented cartoonists with a real caricaturing challenge, which Oliphant answered by drawing him as a child. The vice presidency didn't lend Quayle much opportunity to dispel the cartoonists' depiction of him as a callow, inexperienced goofball; attempting to correct a schoolboy's flawless spelling of "potato" didn't help him.

It was a case of peaking too soon; he might have been taken more seriously after a few more years gave him a face fit for presidential central casting. I wouldn't have recognized him in the second pew at Dick Cheney's funeral over three decades later if he hadn't been sitting next to his wife.

"Where Do We Put Mr. Gore" by Pat Oliphant, November 8, 1993

Oliphant leaned into Al Gore's wooden reputation here, a product of the Vice President's extremely careful, measured, parsed, and deliberate speaking style. If Dan Quayle came off as a not-too-bright schoolboy skating by on his looks, Al Gore could have been the guidance counselor patiently explaining the importance of responsible life choices to a school assembly full of Quayles.

"The Energy Show" by Pat Oliphant, May 1, 2001

Dick Cheney was a completely different animal than any previous Vice President. Oliphant consistently portrayed him as the real power behind a frat boy President who got the job on the strength of having been a legacy student who made it to graduation because Dad's name was on a wing of the administration building.

Chief of Staff for President Ford, Congressman from Wyoming, and Defense Secretary under Bush the Elder, Cheney was more recently Chair of the Halliburton Corporation, a multinational oil service conglomerate. Tapped to find Bush the Younger a running mate in 2000, he found one in the mirror.

"I'm Smilin' Joe Biden and I'm Running for President" by Pat Oliphant, January 23, 2013

A commenter at Daily Cartoonist regretted that Pat Oliphant had never drawn Joe Biden. True, Oliphant's eyesight had failed him by the time Biden won the presidency; but he had drawn Biden as Vice President (and as Senator).

Which is where this Graphical History Tour must wrap things up. I know of no Oliphant cartoons of Mike Pence or Kamala Harris, and it's highly unlikely that he ever drew J.D. Vance.

On the other hand, I could have included cartoons he drew of former Vice Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman, and there is probably one of Teddy Roosevelt somewhere along the line. But this post is already long enough.

And I could never be certain that I hadn't missed a cartoon featuring William Rufus Devane King or Charles Curtis.

The Whole World Was Watching

Last week, Selective Serviceback Saturday shared cartoons from 150 years ago about the first presidential election held after the 15th Amendment extended the right to vote to African-American citizens of the U.S. Today, against my better judgment, we step ahead 100 years from 1868 to the last presidential election held before the 26th Amendment extended the right to vote to 18- to 20-year-old citizens of the U.S.

Others in the cartoon-rehashing game have a much better recollection of the 1968 presidential election than I, so this won't be a comprehensive retrospective by any means. So much of what I do remember is actually Frank Gorshin's and David Frye's impressions of the candidates. Here goes anyway.

"I Think We Can Start Bringing Them Home Soon" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September, 1968

The #1 issue of interest to those 18- to 20-year-olds had to be the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. They couldn't vote for president, but they did have to answer to their draft board.

President Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had won his party's presidential nomination. His long liberal record, at the 1948 Democratic Convention and as lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was overshadowed by his association with Johnson and the war. He tried to promise to bring an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, only to be publicly contradicted by Johnson and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. (Laird in Oliphant's cartoon is Wisconsin Congressman Melvin Laird, who would become Richard Nixon's first Secretary of Defense.)

"Anchored" by Tom "Obadiah" Curtis in National Review, October 22, 1968

An eleventh-hour announcement that the Johnson was halting bombing raids over North Vietnam would fail to give enough lift to the Humphrey campaign. Perhaps today we'd call it Johnson Fatigue; liberals who ought to have agreed with Humphrey on civil rights and other issues remained disenchanted; Michigan's New Democratic Coalition and the California Young Democrats withheld their endorsements, and even Norman Mailer mused that Nixon wouldn't be all that bad.

"Making Like a Dove" by Roy Justus in Minneapolis Star, August, 1968

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon's anti-communist record should have indicated that he would continue the war in Vietnam, but he claimed to have a secret plan to end the war within 90 days. What he didn't tell America was that he meant within 90 days of his re-election to a second term, and that the plan involved spreading the war to Laos, Cambodia, and Kent State.

"The Newer Than New Nixon" by Robert Zschiesche in Greensboro Daily News, October, 1968

On domestic issues, Nixon's promises to bring Law and Order appealed to what he called the "Silent Majority" horrified by political assassinations and by riots in America's inner cities, universities, and at the Democratic National Convention. (Not to mention promiscuous sex and drug use. But there, I mentioned them anyway.) Consistently leading in the polls, Nixon offered mostly pablum, and — still smarting from his experience in 1960 — refused to meet Humphrey in any debates.

"The Fraidycat" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 24, 1968

Nixon's campaign themes included promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse the decisions of the Earl Warren court (Johnson would withdraw his filibustered nominations of Abe Fortas and Homer Thornberry in October), to fight inflation, and to replace the draft with an all-volunteer military. Behind the scenes, he urged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to refuse peace talks until Nixon could take office.

"Measuring Up" by Ranan Lurie in Life, October, 1968

Henry Luce's Life magazine endorsed Nixon in the election, but its cartoonist Ranan Lurie clearly was more ambivalent about the voters' choices. So were a number of others who put themselves forward as third party candidates. Most notably, Alabama Governor George Wallace ran at the head of the American Independent Party on a segregationist platform, declaring that "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats."

"Foreign and Domestic" by Herblock in Washington Post, October, 1968

He chose as his running mate retired Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had advocated bombing North Vietnam "back to the stone age," using "anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons." Yet while LeMay was more hawkish on the war than Wallace, the general stood to the left of him on Wallace's signature issue.

"There Seems to Be More Than a Dime's Worth of Difference..." by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 25, 1968

On the left, the most notable third-party candidates were comedian Dick Gregory and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver heading rival wings of the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Communist Party USA's Charlene Mitchell. Gregory made a tour of college campuses, where he promised to paint the White House black, then bring the troops home from Vietnam and "send LBJ with nothing but a barbecue gun." His counterfeit dollar bills won him considerable attention, not least from the Secret Service.

Mitchell's running mate wouldn't be old enough to serve as Vice President until 1980, and Cleaver (also not yet 35 years old) fled the country after a shoot-out between police and Black Panthers in Oakland, California. But then, getting elected was never really the point of their candidacies.

"Out of the Running," unsigned (perhaps Ted Shearer), in The Afro American, Baltimore MD, October 19, 1968

The Afro American, in an editorial accompanied by the above cartoon, counseled its readers against casting their vote for any of the three African-American candidates:

"Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver and Mrs. Charlene Mitchell are all doomed to defeat this year, and all of them know it. Their exercises in futility would be more tolerable as means of protests against ills in the society in some other election year. ...
"The danger is that some voters, frustrated with conditions as they are or wishing to make an individual protest also, may throw away valuable votes."

As it was, their campaigns, even lumped in with votes for comedian Pat Paulsen and comic strip characters Pogo and Snoopy, were not enough to throw any state from one of the front runners to another.

"Remind Me to Get That Fixed" by Dan Dowling, Kansas City Star,

Wallace, on the other hand, carried Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, the last third-party candidate to win electoral votes by getting a plurality of any state's votes. But it was not enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives; even in the unlikely event that Humphrey had won Wallace's five states in a two-candidate race, he would still have fallen well short of a majority in the electoral college.

But since fewer than 500,000 votes separated Humphrey and Nixon, who can say how Wallace's 9.9 million would have divided up without him?

And yet, 50 years later, with one election decided by the Supreme Court, and two awarded to the second-place candidate, we still haven't fixed our cuckoo electoral vote system.

Two More McGovern Cartoons

I finally located the folders with my cartoons from 1983 and before, and found George McGovern in two more cartoons about the early race for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.

Fair warning: both cartoons reference death, so I hope people don't find them in bad taste today. The first cartoon is from September, 1983, imagining Democrats' response to the announcement of McGovern's third try for the presidency:

The state of the race at the time was that former Vice President Walter Mondale was the front runner with the support of organized labor and a number of other interest groups. Ohio Senator John Glenn was a more centrist alternative, while California Senator Alan Cranston and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson were competing for the party's far left. Some of the party faithful held out hope that Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy would change his mind and run a second time, and there were Senators from Colorado, and South Carolina and a former Governor of Florida (Gary Hart, Fritz Hollings, and Reuben Askew) who were trying to get some attention.

McGovern's bid for the 1984 nomination was doomed from the start. In recent history, Democrats have shunned any of their candidates for president who had previously run and lost (although Teddy Kennedy could have easily been an exception had he tried in '84).

It hasn't always been this way: Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland for a third time in 1892 after he had been thrown out of office in 1888; and Williams Jennings Bryan won three out of the next four Democratic nominations. Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson for a rematch against Eisenhower in 1956; and if it weren't for the McGovern rule changes of 1968, Hubert Humphrey might have been a shoo-in for the nomination in 1972 or 1976.

As the nominating process stands since -- and even including -- 1968, the only way for a failed Democratic candidate to win the Democratic nomination is to have served as Vice President in the meantime. The examples of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore do not bode well for Joe Biden.

Back to George McGovern. He is only an extra in the cartoon below, but it might have some resonance for Republicans today. Democrats felt they had an opening to unseat President Ronald Reagan because the economy had been in recession since 1981. By December of 1983, however, all reports indicated that the recession was over.

If you missed the cartoon from December, 1983 (published in January), my earlier blog post is here.