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- With 29 deciding ballots to his credit, Adams was responsible for more tiebreaking votes than any subsequent presiding officer of the Senate.
- One of three Presidents to die on the 4 th of July. Also, one of three Vice Presidents to die on the 4 th of July.
- After taking the job, Adams nearly resigned when he found out that Congress hadn’t bothered to consider a salary for the Vice President.
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- With 29 deciding ballots to his credit, Adams was responsible for more tiebreaking votes than any subsequent presiding officer of the Senate.
- One of three Presidents to die on the 4 th of July. Also, one of three Vice Presidents to die on the 4 th of July.
- After taking the job, Adams nearly resigned when he found out that Congress hadn’t bothered to consider a salary for the Vice President.
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- While in Congress, Johnson proposed a seven-day workweek for the postal service, just because he so enjoyed receiving letters every day.
- Even though Van Buren won the Presidency in 1836 with 174 electoral votes, his oft-despised running mate only won a majority-shy 147, leaving the Vice Presidency to be decided in the Senate for the first and only time in U.S. history.
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 Henry Agard Wallace |
- After leaving politics, Wallace devoted his energies to developing hybrid seed and a new breed of leghorn chicken that produced more eggs than conventional chickens. It would become for a time the most popular egg-laying fowl in the world.
- Wallace disliked the Senators as much as they disliked him. In a friendly boxing match with Senator Allan Ellender of Louisiana, Wallace KO’d his critic and adversary.
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 William Rufus Devane King |
- Seattle’s King County was named after Vice President King until the county council’s passage of Motion 6461 in 1986, "setting forth the historical basis for the 'renaming' of King County in honor of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
- King is the only Vice President to be sworn in outside the United States. By special Act of Congress, he took the oath of office in Cuba where he was convalescing prior to the 1853 inaugural.
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 Richard M. Nixon |
- Eisenhower wasn’t a big help to Nixon’s 1960 Presidential campaign. When asked about Nixon’s contribution to the governance of the nation during his eight years as Ike’s second-in-command, Ike said, “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
- The infamous 1960 Presidential campaign wasn’t the first time that Nixon and JFK met in a debate. The two actually squared off for the first time in 1947, when both freshmen congressmen were selected to debate the Taft-Hartley Act at a public forum.
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 Daniel Tompkins |
- One of Tompkins’ last gubernatorial acts before assuming the Vice Presidency was a bill banning slavery in New York State, effective ten years hence. In 1827, city aldermen acceded to the wishes of a crowd gathered in posthumous celebration of Tompkins’ order, and Clinton Square was renamed Tompkins’ Square, which it remains called to this day—a delightful boot in the groin to the Clinton family legacy.
- After Tompkins’ death, official audits determined that he may in fact have been owed in the neighborhood of $100,000—very nearly the amount that Tompkins had claimed was owed him when the legal wrangling began nearly a decade earlier. Um, no hard feelings?
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 James Schoolcraft Sherman |
- In the U.S. Senate there is a bust for every Vice President. James Schoolcraft Sherman’s is the only one wearing glasses.
- Sherman appears in a pivotal scene in E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel Ragtime. When a main character, Sarah, shows up at a rally to talk to the Vice President, she is mistaken for an assassin, beaten by Sherman’s bodyguards, and dies a few days later.
- Sherman’s work on behalf of Indian affairs earned him the nickname “Wau-be-ka-chuck”, which means “Four Eyes”.
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 George Mifflin Dallas |
- At least nine U.S. towns and cities are said to be named for George Mifflin Dallas, including Dallas, Texas. However, that Dallas’ founder said only that he named the city for “my friend Dallas”, and he did so several years before G.M. Dallas was elected Vice President. There’s no record that the two knew each other.
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 Hubert Horatio Humphrey |
- Musical humorist Tom Lehrer wrote a song about Vice President Humphrey entitled “Whatever Became of Hubert?”
- At the 2004 Republican Convention, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger cited the 1968 Presidential debates between Richard Nixon and Vice President Humphrey as his moment of political awakening as a Republican. There were no debates between Nixon and Humphrey in 1968.
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 Schuyler Colfax |
- As Speaker of the House, Colfax visited President Lincoln at the White House on April 14, 1865. Lincoln invited Colfax to join him in his box that evening at Ford’s Theater for a performance of “Our American Cousin”, but Coxlfax declined.
- Railroads were not kind to Colfax. Besides the ignominious end to his political career in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, he was later forced to walk ¾ of a mile in –30° weather to change trains in Mankato, Minnesota . . . and dropped dead of a heart attack.
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 Garret Augustus Hobart |
- McKinley was ashamed that he had once declared bankruptcy, so he turned over part of his Presidential salary to his financially savvy Vice President to invest for him.
- The First and Second Couples were so close that President and Vice President escorted one another’s wives to state functions, and the couples vacationed together on Lake Champlain. Jennie Hobart visited Ida McKinley daily and often performed First Lady duties because of Ida’s epilepsy.
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 Gerald R. Ford |
- Quite the football player in his youth, Ford received offers to play for both the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers. He turned down both to coach the football team at Yale.
- Ford served on the Warren Commission on John F. Kennedy’s assassination and altered the first draft of the report so that the path of the bullet into Kennedy supported the Single Bullet Theory.
- Gerald Ford is the only Eagle Scout ever to serve as President.
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 George Clinton |
- There was, amazingly, still talk of running Clinton for President in 1812, but fate mercifully intervened and he died of “the general decay of Nature” (mostly a bout of pneumonia) in April 1812—the first VP to die with his boots on.
- Since Clinton died in office in 1812, the United States has been without a Vice President for a total of 37 years and 290 days.
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 Albert Gore |
- As a freshman at Harvard, Gore’s roommate was future actor Tommy Lee Jones.
- Reclusive and reportedly bitter after his 2000 defeat, Gore was lampooned in The Onion as delivering an imaginary address to the nation to his bathroom mirror after the 9/11 attacks and holding a cabinet meeting at his dining room table with his two cats.
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 Spiro Agnew |
- Showing his intimate knowledge of America, Agnew made a trip to Chicago in the great state he referred to as “Illi-noise”
- In his memoir “Go Quietly…Or Else”, Agnew implies that Nixon and Alexander Haig were plotting to have him assassinated if he didn’t voluntarily resign from the Vice Presidency.
- Haig didn’t trust Agnew either, telling his wife that if he disappeared, she "might want to look inside any recently poured concrete bridge pilings in Maryland."
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 Thomas Riley Marshall |
- Marshall’s only real claim to fame is the phrase, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” In fact, that line originated in the Kin Hubbard comic strip Abe Martin of Brown County. Marshall saw it in the strip and repeated it on the floor of the Senate, and it was forever after ascribed to him.
- Marshall was the first since John C. Calhoun to win re-election.
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 Charles S. Curtis |
- Curtis was the last U.S. President or Vice President to wear facial hair.
- The 1932 George & Ira Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing featured a Vice President named Alexander Throttlebottom, who was clearly modeled after Curtis. VP Throttlebottom could only get into the White House on public tours, and “last week, he tried to join the library, but he needed two references, so he couldn’t get in.”
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 Lyndon Baines Johnson |
- LBJ was very fond of his penis, naming it “Jumbo”.
- While probably no less fond of his dogs, he was less creatively inspired in choosing their names, “Him” and “Her”.
- LBJ died less than a month after Harry S Truman, leaving the United States with no living former Presidents until Richard Nixon reluctantly accepted the mantle on the afternoon of August 9, 1974.
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"I never found anything funny about our Vice Presidents, until I read Veeps, a welcome, often hilarious respite from the tedium of national politics."
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Richard Mentor Johnson 