The last thing I wanted was to be struggling to think of ideas of something to draw in the middle of the night. I needed to do a series, I thought. So after some debate, I decided to do portraits of all 47 vice presidents of the United States. Why? I don’t know.
I’ve always been quietly obsessed with the vice presidency. It is, after all, the fifth wheel of the Executive Branch. The constitution has little to say about the actual duties of the veep aside from presiding over the Senate and wondering about the president’s health. The wording of the Constitution was so vague that when William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia after a lengthy and ill-advised inaugural speech, it wasn’t immediately clear that his veep, John Tyler, would ascend to the presidency or serve under the title of “acting president.” The ambiguity wasn’t cleared up until 1967 with the ratification of the 25th Amendment.
Vice presidents were all ambitious men who could see the pinnacle of power but, save for a few, never quite got there. Instead, for much of American history, they were political afterthoughts -- ignored and forgotten. Woodrow Wilson’s wife and close advisors kept Thomas Marshall in the dark for 18 months about the president’s incapacitating stroke, thus denying him the presidency. FDR only met with Truman once before he died in the middle of WWII. And LBJ so relentlessly teased Hubert Humphrey during cabinet meetings that the veep reportedly broke down and cried. No wonder then that John Nance Garner, FDR’s first VP, said that the job wasn’t worth a “warm bucket of piss.”
