Last month former Vice President Walter Mondale turned 90, only the sixth vice president to reach that age (the others were John Adams, Levi P. Morton, John Nance Garner, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush). I have missed any mention of this milestone, and think it’s worthy of some notice.
For Walter Mondale, more than anyone else, has transformed the vice presidency into a useful office. It was, notoriously, not always so: the first vice president, John Adams, lamented that it gave him almost nothing to do, with his only duty being to preside desultorily over the Senate; the second vice president, Thomas Jefferson, spent much of his four years as VP conniving to defeat Adams, the sitting president, and be elected president himself. In the early 1970s, during the vice presidency of Spiro Agnew I think (I can’t find a link online), I wrote an article for the Washington Post advocating abolition of the office of vice president. I received a spirited and thoughtful dissenting letter in response from Hubert Humphrey, a politician of great energy and effectiveness, who was nevertheless notoriously frustrated in his four years in the office.
