This Month in History
March 18 - Happy Birthday, Vice President Calhoun!
"Posterity will condemn me more because I was persuaded not to hang John C. Calhoun as a traitor than for any other act in my life." - President Andrew Jackson, on his deathbed.
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On this day in 1854, Thomas Riley Marshall, the 28 th Vice President of the United States, was born in North Manchester, Indiana. Citing the considerable number of Vice Presidents from Indiana, Marshall would call his Hoosier state “the home of more second-rate men than any state in the country.” Marshall is fondly, if incorrectly, remembered for coining the phrase “what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” Curiously outspoken for a Vice President up to that time, Marshall’s candor wasn’t as appreciated by his countrymen nor by the Wilson administration, who did everything they could to keep him as far from the helm as possible after the President’s debilitating stroke. Of his post-Washington plans, Marshall said, “I don’t want to work again, but I wouldn’t mind being Vice President.”
January 5:, On this day in 1928, Walter Frederick Mondale was born in tiny Ceylon, Minnesota. America’s 42 nd Vice President, Mondale served Jimmy Carter for a single term and followed in his Chief’s footsteps by also getting epically clobbered by Ronald Reagan.
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COMING IN 2012!
"VEEPS
Profiles in Insignificance"
The Movie
A Rufus Pictures/Mike Lay Production
"The Cradle Of Insignificance"
Being single much of my adult life, my vacations have always been more untraditional from that of most people. I wasn’t much for the Fort Lauderdale/Lake Havasu Spring Break set in college, opting instead to work as much as possible to support what was then a complicated and expensive affinity for canned beer.
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VICE PRESIDENT'S DAY
There is no holiday honoring America's executive understudies.
Contact your Congressional Representatives about making this long overdue holiday a reality. Demand National Vice Presidents Day on July 4!
On sale everywhere! 
"Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance"
by Bill Kelter & Wayne Shellabarger
"I never found anything funny about our Vice Presidents, until I read Veeps, a welcome, often hilarious respite from the tedium of national politics."
--Howard Zinn, historian and author of A People's History Of The United States
About Bill and Wayne
(Reprinted from the Cedar Rapids [Iowa] Gazette - 1/2/2008)
A Shared 'Vice'
by Merle Stickney
It's their boyish enthusiasm that engages you first. Despite being nearly into middle age, they have a youthful zeal that's infectious--no matter how oddly directed it turns out to be.
Keltner and Schellaberger are self-proclaimed "Vice Presidential groupies"—hardcore wonks, VP obsessives, Veep "foamers" (an apparent reference to train aficionados whose hypnotic passion often makes them appear, slack- jawed, to be "foaming" at the mouth).
Veep of the Week
Richard Milhous Nixon
Republican
California
With Dwight Eisenhower
1953-1961
It’s hard to imagine that Richard Nixon—all jowls and beady-eyed suspicion—was ever a youthful man, but there was a time when Nixon could answer the ad for someone “young, vigorous, ready to learn”, and that was in 1952 when WWII hero and GOP standard-bearer Dwight Eisenhower was looking for a running mate. In Nixon, he got one of the party’s conservative young turks who could bridge the gap between two generations of Republicans, an ardent anti-Communist and designated party attack dog, and a left-coast native who could help deliver California’s 32 electoral votes.
Nixon got a chance to take the next step in a meteoric rise to the top of a party that still looked askance at him. He had never in his life been a warm and gregarious glad-hander, and his last six years in politics did nothing to change that. He was as cold, stony, and eyes-on-his-books as he’d been throughout his ascetic Quaker upbringing.
Now, after nearly 20 years of Democratic rule, the Republicans had the chance to take back the White House. They had their first choice in war hero Dwight Eisenhower, and his choice for his running mate was 39-year-old junior Senator Richard Nixon from California, whose first trip to the Executive Branch would begin a chapter in American politics that’s still reverberating today. And but for an adorable wet-nosed little puppy, it was a long, wrenching, and scandalous chapter that very nearly didn’t happen at all.
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Copyright © 2008-2012 - Bill Kelter & Wayne Shellabarger - All Rights Reserved
