Vice Presidents of The United States Podcast

Vice Presidents of The United States Podcast approaches American history from the second chair, building its episodes around individual vice presidents and the political storms that shaped them. It is narrative history in a first-person voice, and several episodes close by thanking the listener and asking them to tell others about the show. The openings are where the craft shows. The John C. Calhoun episode sets a 1959 Senate ceremony, where John F. Kennedy unveiled portraits of the Famous Five, against the image of a crane lifting Calhoun's statue out of Charleston after a unanimous city council vote. The Theodore Roosevelt episode starts in a buckboard with no suspension, bouncing through the dark Adirondacks, with a driver who later recalled that Roosevelt never flinched. The George Clinton episode starts with a painting that seats Clinton among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, though he never signed it because he was busy fighting. From those scenes the narration widens into the machinery of politics. Calhoun's break with Andrew Jackson is traced through the Eaton affair, Martin Van Buren's whispering and Jackson's discovery of old attacks from Calhoun's time as Secretary of War, leading to a resignation in 1832 and the Fort Hill Address. Chester Arthur's story runs through the feud between Stalwarts and Half-Breeds, with Blaine and Conkling pulling at Garfield, and it borrows Thomas Reeves's image of Garfield as a weathervane. Roosevelt, presiding over the Senate, is placed inside a fight over Orville Platt's proposal to let a simple majority end debate. Later eras get the same close attention. Nelson Rockefeller's appointment under the 25th Amendment is framed as a collision between two wings of the Republican Party, and his early exit from the New York governorship gets its own scrutiny. Walter Mondale's episode starts on election night 1984, with Reagan's 49 states lit up in blue on NBC's map, before turning to Mondale's own account of a day among the peanut fields with Carter and a well-timed joke about Holiday Inns. What holds the series together is the office itself. Succession keeps coming up: a shooting in a train station makes Arthur president, and Roosevelt's rise follows a president's death. So does the strain between a vice president and the president above him, from Jackson telling Calhoun he had never trusted him to Rockefeller advising Mondale to stay an adviser rather than become a quasi-cabinet member. Memory is another thread, whether it is Calhoun's removal from a Charleston pedestal, Clinton as the nationalists' favorite anti-federalist, or Biden describing Mondale as a mentor who defined the vice presidency as a full partnership. The pacing is conversational, with asides and small digressions. And the details stick, like Arthur, newly president, mailing a letter to himself at the White House that calls the Senate into session to elect a president pro tempore, in case another gunman waited at a train station.