our distinguished guest this evening is one of the most prominent journalists working in the field today. peter baker, who's been working as a journalist for over 30 years, starting out with the washington times and then moving to the washington post to cover local stories in virginia. he then began to cover the white house during the presidencies of bill clinton and george w bush during his career. peter has covered everything from elections, economic crises, foreign policy, natural disasters, legislative battles, eight supreme court nominations, six presidential inauguration

ins, three impeachments, and countless state of union addresses. along with his wife, susan glasser, he would spend four years living in russia, serving as the washington post's moscow bureau chief, chronicling the rise of vladimir putin, the chechen war, beslan and the moscow theater attack. he was also the very first journalist to report from rebel held northern afghanistan. and following the september 11th attacks in 2003, he was embedded with the united states marine corps during the invasion of iraq. his very first book was the new york times bestseller the breach inside the impeachment and trial of william jefferson clinton. he followed his second book in 2005 with kremlin rising, vladimir putin's russia and the end of revolution.

peter would join the new york times in 2008 after 20 years at the washington post. he also currently serves as an msnbc, msnbc analyst. peter is also the recipient. the juror for ford foundation's journalism prize for distinguished reporting on the presidency, receiving it not once but twice. first in 2007 for his work on george w bush's presidency. and then again. in 2015, a 2013, he published his third major work days of fire, bush and cheney in the white house. his fourth book, obama the call of history, was published in 2017. his latest books, both co-written with his wife, provided the first biography of secretary of state james baker, the man who ran washington. and they followed that up with their latest book on the trump presidency, the divider. trump in the white house 2017 to

2021. however, despite all of his qualifications to speak about the american presidency tonight, he is here to mainly talk about what one historian called the resting place for mediocrity, lies, in which the first person on the job stated, my country has in its wisdom, contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived, the vice presidency. ladies and gentlemen. peter baker. making. all right. och, great. thank you, guys. thank you all for coming. what a great crowd. really excited. i'm really glad to be here. you guys are terrific to take out a beautiful evening like this and hang out with with me here on such an interesting subject. but it means a lot to me.

thank you for having me. and thank you, gleaves and brooke and jill. i couldn't be more delighted to be here. i think this is maybe my third time speaking here. and clearly i enjoy it because i keep coming back. so i hope you do too, as joe. mitch, i've been asked to talk tonight about a part of our constitutional leadership that doesn't often get it much attention. of course, the vice presidency of the united states. and it's obviously part and parcel of the history documented here in this building because of george gerald ford's time in office. and you all know he was the first point, as you all know, he was the first person ever appointed vice president under the 25th a memo without having ever been elected to the office and the first vice president to succeed of the presidency without having been elected in either office. he was also the last president to dump a vice president and the only former president, at least in modern times, to think about going back to be vice president

again after he left office. fortunately for him, he decided not to do that. but now there's roger's surprising because being vice president, it was not always a happy experience for ford. in fact, he used to say that it was the worst nine months of his life. according to -- cheney, who was the second chief of staff and also a vice president himself later on. and, you know, ford wasn't the only one who thought also i mean, being vice president sounds glamorous. you get the cars and the plane and the helicopter and all that. but most of the people, i think, who served in that position ultimately found it very frustrating and unsatisfying. i've had the privilege of covering or interviewing nine vice presidents, which is nearly one out of every five in our history, which makes me older than i think i am, but one of them summed it up rather pithily. this vice president told me, it's a -- job. except the word wasn't --. the somewhat earthier version of

that four letter word, you know. i mean, one of them actually my favorite description of of the vice presidency comes from thomas marshall, who was woodrow wilson's vice president. nobody remembers him. he seemed to anticipate that. he used to say that there were once two brothers. one ran away to see the other became vice president. nothing was ever heard from either him again. and then another vice president put this way, being vice president is like being declawed, defanged, neutered, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine under two miles of human --. there's that word again. also not the original word. it's a fate worse than death. that was vice president selina meyer. okay. all right. she wasn't really a vice president, but i think veep actually captured in some ways a lot of the dynamics of the job. we'll talk a little bit about

that tonight. so why are we spending so we're talking about a job that seems so insignificant as as john adams put it, because, in fact, it's actually been historically a pretty important stepping stone to the oval office of the 49 people who have served as vice president, 15 of them, 15 of them went on to become president. think about that. eight of them succeeded to the office because of the death of a president. six ran for the office later and one and one. our good friend jerry ford, of course, succeeded upon the resignation of president, even our current president, of course, joe biden spent eight years as vice president before winning in 2020. and so that means one out of every three of our vice presidents has become one. every three of our presidents was vice president for a supreme important steppingstone. there. and i think they all see themselves that way. of course, they all think they're going to be now the 16th one to do so. i remember al gore used to have this joke. he would he would get up there.

he would say, you know, i like the vice presidential seal. he says, if you cover your left, i say it becomes even better. but it's also true that aside from being next in line to the presidency, the office of the vice presidency has evolved a lot in the modern times. it's evolved a lot in the last few decades into a much more substantive and significant role. our favorite, thomas marshall, we just talked about it, call it call himself the spare tire of the white house. but in fact, as these date has become more of a partner riding shotgun for a president heading into into a political administration, you have much more responsibility and sometimes even more visibility than in the past. and if that's not important enough to understand the vice presidency, then all we have to do is turn our attention back three years to january six, 2021, when we had a sitting president, united states effectively try to seize power

after losing an election by strong arming who his vice president into claiming authority that he did not have to overturn the results during the counting of the electoral college. no vice president has ever done that before. and this vice president, mike pence, of course, refused to do it. but you don't have to look very long to see how important it was. no. who was in that job at that time, had there been somebody else in that job other than mike pence who might have gone along with it? we would have been a very different world today, so don't write off the job. the job is still pretty important and this year's election, i think, only reinforced his even more. so how important is going to be just the reality of this election is that we have the two oldest candidates ever running for president right? if trump wins, he will be 82 at the end of the second term. and if biden wins, he'll be 86. so the chances are a vice president has a decent chance of becoming president in the next four years. we don't wish that on anybody, of course.

but reality is that whoever is picked this fall as vice president statistically has a significant chance of serving in the office and therefore, we need to pay attention to who is running and what they what they offer. so how do we get here in the first place? it wasn't even a given that we would get a vice president in the first place. if you go back to the founding days, the framers added the position, the constitution kind of as an afterthought. they really didn't give a whole lot to consideration. they didn't exactly load up the job with a lot of responsibilities under the constitution. of course, the vice president basically has two jobs right? preside over the senate and break ties and show up in the oval office every morning saying, how are you feeling. it was such a useless appendage. according to benjamin franklin, the he said we should address the vice president as your superfluous excellency. you've heard, of course, john adams is quote, the joel cited.

but the other one, he said captains were all or nothing nature of the job. he said, i am the vice president. he said, in this, i am nothing, but i may be everything. now, george washington didn't actually know what to do with john adams. he was the first president to have a vice president to figure out what to do. and because the vice president wasn't was formerly the president, the senate, washington didn't even really think of him as part of the executive team, didn't invite him to the cabinet meetings, didn't consult with him for big decisions. it didn't really even get many important jobs to take on. and so adams spent his days in the senate presiding over the debate, actually even participating in the debate, which is kind of interesting today. no vice president would do that. adams decided he wanted to get in there, mix it up, because the only way else to do that now, our second vice president was thomas jefferson. of course he was. which is odd because he actually was running for president and got the job. as a consolation prize. what a lot of people forget is it constitution? originally gave us a pretty

convoluted way of electing our vice presidents. they were essentially the runner up to whoever became president and the electoral college, which meant that we had often often we only had this once a president and a vice president from different parties, different philosophies. i know that may have even been rivals, as adams and jefferson were running against each other. needless to say, jefferson wasn't invited to a lot of cabinet meetings either. after that, of course, they amended the constitution to create the system that we have today in which the vice president is on a ticket with the president. so they are, at least in theory, on the same team. but that doesn't make the job that much more appealing. the first vice president to succeed to the presidency after the death of a president was john tyler. he's not much remembered today and probably for good reason, but john tyler was part of the ticket with william henry harrison. you probably remember the slogan, right? tippecanoe and tyler, too. well, tyler was the tyler of that. and when harrison failed to wear a coat, his inauguration and

died a month later, suddenly tyler was president. united states the first time a vice president had have succeeded to that job. now, he was a cantankerous man, not typically lovable man, alienated both parties. nobody wanted him to be president, and definitely no one wanted him to run for reelection. four years later, he was also an unreconstructed southern slave holder and defender of racism who sided with the confederacy long after he left office. literally our first and only certified traitor among our presidents. he, in fact, was even elected the confederate congress, although he died before taking his seat. so nobody mourns john tyler today. but what we actually ought to appreciate, john tyler for is defining the modern vice presidency in the sense that he was the first one to become president from that slot. nobody knew what that meant. shouldn't we call him? people said the acting president. acting president tyler, and

maybe in fact, the cabinet should really be running things because they were selected by william henry harrison and tyler can just be a figurehead as the acting for the next almost four years. but tyler actually saw a head and realized that wasn't a good thing, and he refused to call himself acting president. he refused to let anybody else run the government. he said, no, if i'm president, i'm president. full stop, period altogether. and because of that, we now have a much different conception of the succession to the presidency. imagine if we had acting presidents who didn't really have full authority in the eight times we have had a president die in office. that would be unthinkable. it was not very good idea. so john tyler deserves some credit for defining the beginning that vice president becomes president without any caveats whatsoever upon the death of a president. now, over the course of the next 120 years, millard fillmore, andrew johnson, chester arthur,

teddy roosevelt, calvin coolidge, harry truman. and when johnson would all follow tyler's example in succeeding after the death of the presidents they served. but let's face it, when they served healthy presidents, vice presidents didn't have a lot to do. so sometimes they had a little side gig just to kind of keep him busy. martin van buren's vice president ran a tavern serving beer. harry hamlin, who is hannibal hamlin? abraham lincoln's first vice president listed in the army as a private, went off to fight the civil war. ulysses grant's second vice present wrote history books. teddy roosevelt thought about going to law school. harry truman played poker. i mean, there wasn't that much to look. they didn't even have an office in the white house because they were presidents senate. they hung out on capitol hill, in the capitol. they had offices there. no president actually even gave them an office in the white house until lyndon johnson came along. he's the first one to argue to get office in the white house complex. and even then, he didn't get it in the white house itself.

he only got it in the executive office building across the street. so, you know, perhaps not surprisingly, not all of them particularly like the president they were serving for vice president thomas hendricks, for instance, was no fan of grover cleveland. in fact, he tried to get him removed from the ticket on the grounds that cleveland was morally unfit because of a sex scandal. as valerie haider of the library of congress wrote, their relationship improved only when hendricks died. in november 1885, he served as vice president for about a half a year. as valerie writes, six months too long for both men. so no wonder they took such a jaundiced view of the job. here are some of the ways that vice presidents have described their position. teddy roosevelt said it was, quote, not a stepping stone to anything except oblivion. our favorite, thomas marshall. i really like him a lot. he had the joke about the two

brothers. he said i was in the wilson administration. i was the wilson administration's spare tire to be used only in case of emergency. in fact, when he left office, he told somebody, i don't want to work. i don't propose to work. i wouldn't mind being vice president again. john nance garner, cactus jack, as he was called, who was fdr first vice president, probably has the most famous line about the job, i'm sure you've heard of the vice president. he said it's not worth a bucket of warm -- or something. he also said taking the job was the worst -- fool mistake i ever made. truman said, look at all the vice presidents in history where are they? they're about as useful as a kaos 50. think about that one for a while. nelson rockefeller, who of course, served under our friend jerry ford, had a unique job description. he described his job this way. i go to funerals, i go to earthquakes. george h.w. bush. bush was even pythia.

he says, you die. i fly. and walter mondale called it. he said, the vice president over our american history has always been stand by equipment. now, mondale, in some ways was actually one of the most important vice funds. we had who never became president. he saw how marginalized his predecessors had been, particularly lbj, who felt very disconnected from jfk in the white house and then turned around to the exact same thing when he was president to hubert humphrey, who was mondale's mentor. and mondale was determined to avoid that when he became jimmy carter's vice president, he got carter to agree to give him an office, actually, in the white house, in the west wing, just down the hall and around the corner from the oval office. he got to be the first vice president ever to live in an official government residence, which is located on the naval observatory grounds in washington. and most importantly, he drafted

a memo with a very expansive interpretation of how he saw the job, how he could be a useful person to the administration by taking on this task or that task and that memo today in washington is famous. almost every vice president i know ever since then asked for a copy of mondale's memos that they could use it to make their own arguments to their own presidents. so from that time, from mondale to al gore to -- cheney, the role of the vice president has expanded and expanded. now, cheney, of course, is well known here as a board person, has been described as the most powerful vice president in history. but his role has actually been often misunderstood. it. you know, joel mention i wrote a book called days of fire. it's about bush and cheney and their eight year partnership. and what i found in researching that was the story is actually a lot more complicated than the typical mythology of cheney using the dark source. dark force to to manipulate a weak minded president, which is what a lot of people think. i mean, conan o'brien used to joke that cheney once told an

interviewer, i'll really miss being president. and jimmy kimmel told he joke that cheney, quote, doesn't regret any of the decisions he made and if he had to do it all over again, he would order president bush to do the exact same things. but cheney actually didn't seem to mind the ribbing. he actually had a pretty good sense of humor about it when his friend david hume kennerly once greeted him by saying, hi, --, have you been in blown away any small countries today? cheney didn't miss a beat, and he said, you know, that's one of the things i really like about this job. at one point, cheney even tried on a mask of darth vader. darth vader mass and his staff had bought for him. and they took a picture of it. and he later tried to put that his memoir until lynne cheney was smart enough to say, no, don't do that. but the reality is more subtle. no question that cheney was in some ways the most powerful vice president. that's a fair thing to say, but it sort of misunderstood and how he used his power, where he got it from. he knew washington.

he knew its players. he knew how the place work. he seated his allies throughout government. but most importantly, he built a relationship with george w bush who empowered him to be an important vice president. bush gave cheney access to every meeting, every decision. you know, he involved cheney in every aspect of the presidency, in fact, is such a contrast to his predecessors. you know, harry truman was vice president. he only met with fdr alone twice when he was vice president. only twice. cheney was asked once in 2000, two how many times he had met alone with bush. and he reaches into a suit pocket, pulls out a schedule. he says, let me see. three, four, five, six, seven, seven times. he says, today, right. that tells you a lot. but it was true that he successfully pushed for various policies that he favored. he was pushing on an open door. george w bush wanted to go the

places that cheney was taking him to go. he didn't resist that. bush has never, in all the research i've ever done, nobody has ever told me that bush told them that cheney made him do something he didn't want to do by second term. in fact, bush began even moving away from cheney. he began having new thoughts about how he wanted to approach foreign policy and domestic policy. they began disagreeing a whole lot more people don't really recognize that, but in fact, they were heading down different paths. bush was doing something on a course correction from his first term, moving away because of the iraq war and some of the fights with the allies moving away from some of the harder edges of the war on terror that cheney had favored. and so by the end, by the time they left office, bush and cheney were disagreeing all the time. people don't realize that they disagreed on north korea, on gun rights and same sex marriage tax cuts, guantanamo bay interrogation policies, surveillance techniques, iran, the auto industry bailout, climate change, the lebanon war, the supreme court nomination of harriet miers. whether to keep donald rumsfeld at the defense department.

middle east peace. syria, russia. federal spending, all of these things. bush and cheney in the second term were in opposite sides of who wins when a vice president is on the opposite side of a president, the president does now, cheney, of course, was a convenient boogeyman and so when joe biden comes in as the next vice president, i remember he told me an interview, said, i'm going to be less influential than my predecessor. that's a first for me, by the way. i've never had a politician tell me i'm going to be less influential than my predecessor. but of course, he was trying to make a point. he's trying to say, i'm going to stay in my lane. i'm not going to get passed. i'm not going get or too big for my britches. obama is the president. i'm just the vice president. but in fact, actually, obama needed biden in the same way that bush needed cheney. he needed somebody to help him understand washington. he needed somebody who had some gray hair, who had some experience on the hill, who could be an ambassador to the establish ment and to the rest of the world. and the truth is actually that highlights a trend that has been

true ever since the days of gerry ford, really with one exception, jerry ford is the last president, along with george h.w. bush, who was more experienced in washington than the vice president. they picked. and so the vice presidents until today, for the most part, have been mentor, ears and guides to the presidents. they serve. think about it. it's, you know, mondale for carter, bush for reagan, gore for clinton, cheney for bush, 43, biden for obama, pence for trump. all of these vice presidents have more experience in washington, more and foreign affairs, more experience at the national level than the presidents they serve who tend to be governors or had just come to washington relatively recently. now, the exception now, of course, is kamala harris. she's the notable exception. she's she hadn't even been in the senate for four years by the time biden picked her as his running mate. and i think it helps explain a little bit about the the trouble she's had finding a place for herself in biden's white house.

you know, unlike when obama leaned on biden, biden doesn't need kamala harris's advice about how to handle washington because he's been in washington since she was eight years old. so she's had to find her own way of making a mark. now she's had some influence that no other vice president has had. people don't know this is gone very little notice. but in her four years, she has broken 33 ties in the senate, 33 ties by comparison, pence broke, broke 13. cheney only broke eight. bush 41 broke seven. gore broke four. and biden and dan quayle never broke single tie when they were vice president. so kamala harris beat the record that had been held since 1832 by john calhoun, who broke 31 ties. i've been in her office. in her office, the frame copy of the roll call for the for the vote that she she she broke the record and she has a golden

gavel there that chuck schumer gave her as a as a memento. now, most revolts are breaking ties on nominations and things like that, but it really owes to how extremely close our politic are today. right. the first two years, the biden-harris administration and there was a 5050 senate, they didn't have a majority unless they had kamala harris as their tiebreaker. and they even in the last year and a half when the democrats have a 51, 49 margin, it's whom you count christian sinema. it's still so close, you never know. and so her presence is still very important. now, for me, covering a vice president can be fun and interesting because it isn't, you know, a lot of ways they they they are like what a president is without quite so much, you know, to do. they have our own motorcade not quite as big they have their own plane. definitely not quite as big and not nearly as comfortable as air force one. but you get a lot more access to a vice president when you travel

on cover them because they don't feel the need to hide from you quite as much, but is mostly off the record because they don't want to upstage or in any way upset the president or the president's staff are you learned, though, from them, how the white house works? you get to hear from them their perspective on things. i've traveled with al gore to campaigns tops and -- cheney to speeches and joe biden to eastern europe and mike pence to a space launch kamala harris to germany. and there was one trip with cheney. he went to chicago to talk to the i think it was a heritage foundation convention. and all the way back to the airport, he makes a sudden, unannounced stop to the american girl store where the american girl dolls they make her those, right? like, what are we doing here? this doesn't seem like very -- cheney. our liz cheney was with him, and she had to make a stop to buy a doll for her daughter, whose birthday it was. and so there was a vice president. nice day. darth vader himself shopping for a doll in the american girl

store. if i remember, they picked a wild west doll and in covering these last by vice presidents and interviewing for others, what i've learned is that we really did capture something important here. a vice president's power is entirely derivative of the president that he or she works for. you get as you know, you get as much as they're willing to give you and nothing more. right. you're wholly dependent on the president. there's a scene every almost every episode of veep where julia louis-dreyfus comes in and she assumes her assistant to the president, calls warning no. and that scene is funny because it's so real. the vice presidents are always waiting for a president to tell them what to do or they can do what they what they shouldn't do. and so forth. that's the life of the vice president. what does the president want from me? what can i do for him or her? and on the one hand, it just breeds insecurity.

and even though you're the second highest official in the land, the next in line, the presidency, the only person in the white house who can't be fired, by the way, is still leaves. the person who has that job feeling enormously uncertain about their place in the white house, their place in washington, and their place in the national political firmament. they. joe biden, a member, for instance, went on meet the press in 2012. it was an election year. and he was asked by david gregory whether he supports same sex marriage. and at the time obama didn't support it. it was he was still for civil unions. he had quite caught up to where things were going, although i think in his own heart of hearts, he never really was for civil unions. but he had said that because he thought it was the politically correct thing, the politically safe thing to say. and he was trying to figure out a way to change his position without look like he was, you know, he was simply catering to a constituency. and there's the vice president. i say, gets on television.

yeah, i'm from same sex marriage and is infuriated at obama staff. they were just absolutely ripped. well, they were really mad and i he got so much unmitigated --. and there's that word again from the from the white our staff. i asked biden about it later and he and in an interview he was still annoyed even like about a year later, he says they can have a -- job. he told me he was he was mad, but that's the problem, right? you're not an independent actor. biden had been a senator for 36 years. he didn't answer to anybody if he wanted to say he was for same sex marriage, he only had the voters to answer to. he didn't have a president who might get mad him or a president stahl so adjusting to that job, i think was a little bit of a, you know, a culture shock for him. the other part being vice president, that's hard. you can't look like you want the top job too much, although of course you do, right? that's the whole purpose of having the job. i remember when gore was vice president, he was put in the position of having to defend clinton during the sex scandals

and the investigation and the impeachment, even though the impeachment, of course, would have made gore president right. his own self-interest, arguably would have been. yeah, go ahead, gypsy biker. but obviously he couldn't do that. that would have been a police political kiss of death. right. so he has to stand by his president and defend him. and that's where the structural problems that we actually have with the vice presidency. so we saw this in the last few years, the 25th amendment was passed in the 1960s after the jfk assassination. and it's the first time that we put in the constitution some sort of procedure to deal with a president who might not be fit for office anymore, not be able might not be able to discharge the duties of the office. but the procedure is rather also convoluted. it's it takes the agreement of a majority of the cabinet and the vice president to remove present under the 25th amendment. now, i think the framers were thinking about a situation where

a president might be in a coma or simply not able to even, you know, pass along the duties. if he understood that he was no longer capable. but what we saw in the last few years is that there are circumstances in which a president is not going to admit or be willing to, you know, to to lose the powers of the job. and what do you do then is not enough for every cabinet member to agree. the vice president has to agree along with a majority of the cabinet, and that means a vice president has to certify the his or her own boss is unfit for duty. how hard is that for a political figure, even if they believe it right. so we saw it with that with mike pence there were a couple of moments in the trump presidency when there are some cabinet members, people appointed by donald trump, who thought he ought to be removed under the 25th amendment because they believed he was unhinged. but pence couldn't do that. he couldn't see himself being the person to make himself president right.

we are asking the vice president to take it upon themselves to overturn the will of the voters, in effect, and declare himself or herself the president. so that's such a cumbersome process that it doesn't seem realistic to the kind of circumstances that we've seen in recent years. now, pence, of course, was more loyal to trump that trump ever was to him for three years and 352 days. penn did whatever trump wanted him to do, and he never expressed a whisper of disagreement, not even in private, i don't think. i asked a i asked a republican governor about this once, as it does in private. does pence say? and it goes, no, he says, the governor says he says he's a complete stone face. he told me he would go to pence's say, but, mike, this decision is crazy and there'd be this pause. and pence, the governor would be waiting for him to say, yes, i know, but he never did. instead, pence always said, i understand. thank you for your input. it would never, ever, ever

betray even the tiniest hint of disloyalty. now, fortunately for reporters, other vice presidents haven't always been so reticent, or at least their staffs haven't won. one thing i've learned in covering the white house most of these last three years is that you could often get really good information from a vice presidents staff because they're actually in the meetings, but nobody notices them. and they have their own interest. they're promoting their own guy, their own person, as opposed to they're also promoting the president. but their first loyalty, the person they're thinking about the most is the vice president. sometimes, therefore, is in their interest as they see it, to help us understand what's going on in the white house. so as reporters, i would say i'm very grateful to vice presidents and their staff. but they they don't have because they don't have the same interests as the president at all times. the rivalry can sometimes define a white house. think about jfk and lbj. we talked about think about reagan and bush 41.

they had been rivals. they'd run against each other. these are not friends. they've been run against each other. obama and biden ran against each other before becoming ticket mates. and so by a second term, you get a vice president usually who pretty focused on running for president themselves. and they're thinking is based not in washington not in the capital, not the pentagon. they're thinking is iowa, new hampshire right? and a president, the person on the on the outbound part of the trajectory is thinking about history books. right. so you see the built in tension there between a president who wants to get things done in order to make sure he looks good in history or she looks good in history. and a vice president who's thinking, what do i need to do to get people to vote for me in manchester, new hampshire? so that is a prescription for tension there. and so partnerships sometimes don't end very well. in fact, basically, we haven't had a partnership and very well in quite few years. i have to tell you about ford and rockefeller, but even even

more recently, gore was so upset with clinton about the sex scandals and would have put him on the campaign trail with them. and he ends up losing. and the two of them end up having it out in the oval office in the final weeks of their administration, just two of them talking alone. and they're just apparently an hour long knockdown, drag out fight. it was gore blame clinton for his loss. and clinton says, no, it's your fault for not putting me out there. bill, if they spoke and since then, it's usually been polite and not very you know, not friendly. similarly, bush and cheney had a falling out in the end. i covered this in there's a fire. cheney was so determined to get a pardon for scooter libby, who was his chief of staff. scooter libby had been convicted in the cia leak case, and cheney thought it was unfair. cheney thought that the prosecutors were really coming for him, that is cheney and that scooter libby got in way and was was collateral damage. and so he's pushing bush in the last few days, the last few weeks of their administra ation. you got a pardon? you got a pardon and bush

doesn't having any of it. no, i'm not going to do that. he had already commuted the sentence, but he didn't think he should be pardoned. a jury decided he was guilty if bush felt it wasn't up to him to overrule that judgment. and so he said no to cheney, and it led to this extraordinary exchange in the oval office in the last few days, in which cheney says to bush, you're leaving a good man wounded on the field about a banning eight years of deference. and he hit bush right where he left bush's own self identity of being self-conception, of being a loyal person to his own troops. now, obama and biden have a fight at the end, but there was bad blood there, too. and despite the fact that they had been pretty close, i think for a while, biden was pretty wounded, felt pretty wounded when obama tried to talk him out of running for president 2016. by that point, obama already endorsed hillary clinton. it felt too late for biden to get in. biden was mourning the death of his son beau. his head wasn't really in the game and obama's he would only hurt it. i mean, he had in some ways biden's message to heart, at

least as he presented it. he thought that biden would would would not do well, would hurt himself. and he tried to talk him out of did succeed in talking about it. but biden i think felt bad about that. why are you supporting her and not me? and i think that calling people around him remains sort of a sore point between the two of them. and that, of course, we know how things ended with trump and pence. as we talked about trump, a to do something pence wasn't going to do it. my colleague maggie haberman and i reported trump on the morning of january 6th, told pence, you can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a. and here he used a crude term for a woman's. we're trying to keep this clean. just hours later, of course, we all know the mob on the capitol was chanting hang mike pence and trump back in the white house was thinking maybe they have a point, maybe he should be, maybe he deserved it.

that's what trump said. now we know that mike pence won't be president for the next four years. he tried, didn't get the nomination. mcconnell, harris might be. and whoever trump picks in the next few weeks might be as well. and that's why the choice this year, a vice president matters. republicans are already attacking biden by saying a vote for biden is really a vote for a president. harris democrats are already researching all the potential trump picks, looking for things to attack on, to to undermine his support and for good reason. i mean, this is actually probably the most consequential vice presidential election that we've ever had as well, because as john adams had it right all those years ago, whoever wins may be nothing, but they may be everything. thank you very much.

now, i think i think we're going to take questions and we have a microphone here and please wait for the microphone to come to you. raise your hand. but waiting the microphone comes to you before you speak so the c-span audience can hear the question at home. we have any questions? no. come on. somebody has a question right here. all right. right in front of your another microphone over here. you mentioned woodrow wilson's vice president when woodrow wilson had the stroke and. that was not 25th amendment yet. and yet the vice president was not brought into this spray. it was left to his wife. yeah, that's an excellent question. and my friend rebecca roberts recently wrote a biography of ella wilson, who if wilson, who was wilson's first lady and

you're right, basically didn't like thomas marshall, she didn't think much of him. and she basically kept him out of the room. he tried to visit wilson because, of course, he's vice president, because, of course, it would be his job to try to take over. but we had not had at that point a president who was lived that was not fit for the office. we had no president at that point. so he didn't have anything to do as you rightly said, there was no 25th amendment. and he basically took our you know, it took a backseat. he was very passive about it. and he just allowed things to to go the way they went. and that's something i think that everybody recognizes is not a healthy, you know, healthy system for the government. that's why it's great for the amendment is important. but as we talked about it, so structurally, you know, convoluted, it seems almost unworkable in anything other than a clear cut situation where a president, let's say, is, you know, not able to literally speak or something like that. so i think your right to bear to

raise that as a good precedent to talk about. thank you. yeah. the office of the president, vice president includes many staff which have a great deal role to play. can you compare their staffs and how that's evolved and what the vice presidential staff, what their responsibilities may entail? yeah, that's a great question. the vice president staff has grown over time. it's not anywhere near as large the president's staff, but they have sort of a shadow of every part of a president's staff. so you have a vice presidential, national security adviser. you have a vice presidential chief of staff, you have a vice presidential domestic policy adviser, and so when you have, for instance, a national security council meeting that was subject, sullivan runs the vice president's national security advisor will also attend. and then report back to the vice president things that are said and discussed and debated there. so it's sort of a presidential staff in miniature, in a way,

and they obviously have a lot of expertise and they have a lot of experience in many cases. but it's kind of it could be it can be both symbiotic. it could be a, you know, a good, healthy working relationship in which the vice president's team is brought in by the president's team to be, you know, adjunct to be part of the the overall team, or it can be kind of a, you know, you're over there. thanks very much for playing and right now, i think this this president and vice president's team were pretty, pretty copacetic. but know there's a natural strain built into that where so for some of us who are old enough to remember alexander haig is i'm in charge i'm in charge. and and and we also remember our people like tip o'neill and nancy pelosi from your few who really is the most powerful

person, makes the most change, who has the most impact beyond the president? because clearly, from what you've talked about, it's really not the vice president. right. that's a great question. and i think kind of depends on the moment. right. i mean, if you have a strong speaker like nancy pelosi was, she clearly, clearly played a critical role, especially in the first two years of biden's presidency. he would not have gotten a lot of the things got done without her. and he and we can see in the trouble that mccarthy and mike johnson have had running a narrow majority on the republican side. how important it is to have a speaker who knows what they're doing right. she had a majority just as narrow as the republicans do now on the democratic side. and she kept them all together even when they were fractious. she knew when to call a vote, when not to call, about how to get people together, even if they disagreed to it. and she never allowed the kind of public, you know, fratricide that you're seeing on the republican side. now, that's not all her obviously is partly the nature

where the republican party is right now. but she was a very effective player in washington. i was certainly say during those two years. she was the second most powerful person in washington. there are times it's the white house chief of staff. you know, we wrote a book about james baker. i say, i think, you know, in a lot of ways when reagan was president. you could make the that baker was the second most important or second most powerful person in washington. of course, his powers derivative as a vice presidency is that he can be fired as chief of staff, are quite right quite frequently. so it's not it's not necessarily the position is partly who has the position and how they use it. yeah. i'm wondering if there's ever been a case where in select ding his vice presidential running mate a presidential candidate would tend to pick a lesser light and hopes that the thinking being they'll never try to get rid of me because this person is going to become president. i've got examples say you've

been reading richard nixon half. yeah. no, absolutely. you know, no question about that. that is definitely happened. richard nixon picked spiro agnew thinking that, you know, that was a guarantee for him. but obviously he underestimated president for he picked president ford thinking that that wouldn't be, you know, that would discourage against impeachment. it was quite the opposite. arguably because what he didn't realize just how much people on the respected and admired ford and thought that he would actually be a perfectly good president. i think trump picked pence because he thought pence wouldn't outshine him. you know, the pence was a stolid, quiet, you know, not very flashy kind of guy. trump wants one star on the show. he doesn't want to write in the in the apprentice. there was really only one star and he wasn't going to pick somebody who was going to be, you know, get a lot of attention. and and that's important. me so when you think about who he's going to pick this year, keep that in mind, right?

there are two factors. i think, for trump this year in picking his running mate. one, he's got to find somebody he thinks is more loyal than mike pence was, which is hard because pence was up until the last minute anyway. very loyal. so he's what he's got. pick somebody he thinks will pull the trigger on on a january six the other way next time if something like that were to happen, who would actually claim the power to change an election if he asked them to? and secondly, he wants somebody who will not outshine him. somebody will not get more attention than he will. somebody will not attract the cameras and the and the press in a way that makes him feel envious. you know what what impact did willie brown on campus political career for? that's a good question. willie brown, of course, was the longtime california democratic powerbroker speaker of the state assembly. they, as i understand it, they a friendship going back a lot of years. and he a mentor to her. i haven't done a biography of her so i don't know a lot about

her time in california, but yes, i think he was important player for her in california. you know, he she is interesting figure. obviously, not just because she's a historic figure, the first woman, first person of color to be vice president. but she you know, she also had run against biden. we talked about how a lot of these these tandems are a marriage of political rivals her she had offended the the bidens and particularly joe biden with her comment during the debate about joe biden and bussing and so forth. i was that girl. joe biden, we are told, has never forgiven her for that. you can ask her on friday, ladies, if you get an answer, call me. let me know. i'd like to know that answer. so there's there's you know, there's some history there, but ironically, i know that willie brown obviously is seen as a as obviously a liberal force as he was. she was because she was not seen

as the most liberal of the candidates that he was working for. she if he had already decided, okay, i'm a promise, you're going to pick a black man for vice president. all at once. he was thinking about she was the one who had the most conventional path and who had the most, if not middle of the road, at least mostly, you know, center left wrecker as a prosecutor or, an attorney general in california. so she was seen as the safe choice among the people he was looking at. but i don't know enough about her biography to give you a more detailed answer about willie brown's influence. you might have somebody here now. are we good? we got we're good. all right. good. well, listen, you guys have been great. thank you very much for coming in. delighted to be here. my nephew has been with peter, obviously answering all of your questions because that was a very gratifying talk. and i want to say, you know,

maybe the vice president tends to be declaw dee neutered, buried and and and neutered and all those other things. but thank goodness the people who write about the vice president. the president are not declawed d neuter everything else. so thank you very much. go and to express our appreciation for all of your great work i mean yeah this is a guy who's gotten the four journalism prize twice. i mean, he's seasoned and seasoned out. one of the greatest, most seasoned reporters in new york. washington, thank you much for all you've done. you know, we give you this gift and we want you to come back after your next book. okay? all right. we want to address something to thank you. you