Memo to Harris: Brush up on your Nixon

Vice Presidents rarely get dropped from the ticket when re-election time comes. It’s only happened twice since the twentieth century rolled around. Even Veeps who either were disliked by the boss or palpable drags on the ticket like Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle dodged the pink slip. After all, the last thing a president ever wants to do is admit a mistake.

In 1944 it was common wisdom that FDR was knock, knock, knocking on heaven’s door and the big city pols all prevailed on him to dump Vice President Henry Wallace. It wasn’t just that Wallace was a woolly-headed pro-Soviet sap. He got caught corresponding with a mystic in code, didn’t like dirty jokes, and his favorite drink was warm water. He just didn’t fit in at the political tree house. So the job of the soon to be next president went to Harry Truman.

In 1976, Gerald Ford dumped Nelson Rockefeller because he was genuinely hated by the right wing of the Republican party that was tempted to back a Ronald Reagan insurgency in the primaries. Had Rocky remained on the ticket Ford might very well have carried New York’s 41 electoral votes and been re-elected.

The historical scenario that looms over Kamala Harris’ renomination is young Richard Nixon’s predicament in 1956. On Sept. 24, 1955 President Eisenhower had a heart attack golfing at the Cherry Hills Country Club just south of Denver. The only thing that invites scrutiny of a Vice Presidential nominee more than a presidential bum ticker is an octogenarian incumbent whose favorite adjective is uhm.

Ambitious pols are always looking five years down the road and in 1955 one of them was Harold Stassen. Though he became a joke in later life, Stassen was a young man in a hurry when he was elected Governor of Minnesota at thirty-two. He resigned that job to serve in the Navy in World War II and then built a diplomatic resume as the chief drafter of the United Nations Charter. Stassen came in second to Thomas E. Dewey at the 1948 Republican convention. In 1952 he deftly advised the Minnesota delegation to switch its favorite son votes to Ike, initiating a third ballot stampede. The Minnesota delegate who announced the switch on the floor was a Saint Paul lawyer named Warren Burger.

Stassen commissioned a poll showing that given Ike’s precarious health Nixon would cost the ticket eight points. Then he circulated it through the republican grapevine. Stassen’s goal was not the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956: it was the presidency in 1960. He suggested that Ike cashier Nixon in favor of career diplomat and then Massachusetts governor Christian Herter, who would be too old and too dull to vie for the nomination four years hence. Nixon was genuinely fearful that he would be dumped and that his career would be ended. At a meeting on the day after Christmas Eisenhower mentioned the poll and suggested that Secretary of Defense might better prepare Nixon for the top job. Nixon confided in Leonard Hall, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee that “He’s never wanted me. He’s never liked me. He’s always been against me.”

Then along came a noxious, evil Senator from New Hampshire named Styles Bridges to save Nixon’s bacon. Bridges arranged for thousands of New Hampshire primary voters to cast write-in votes for “Eisenhower and Nixon.” Ike was impressed by Nixon’s legerdemain and the show of popular support. The dump-Nixon boomlet busted, and the rest, as they say, is history.