Hello and welcome to this bonus episode of a history podcast recorded straight after our recently published episode.

What does the Vice President actually do?

I'm joined now by the guest from that episode, UCC's Clodagh Harrington, to discuss this a little bit more.

Cloda, thank you for hanging on.

Pleasure.

Really, really, really interesting chat that we had on the main podcast, actually.

And for anyone who hasn't listened to that yet, do go check that out.

Sort of diving into what the Vice President actually did does and, and you know, the influence that they, they may or may not have.

But going away from real life for a second because we, I mentioned Veep when we, when we recorded the main episode because I love that show and I just wondered what your, your favorite kind of fictional depictions of the Vice presidency were.

Yeah, I mean that series is just, it's so much fun.

You know, the acting is fantastic and the, you know, art imitating life and vice versa.

You couldn't make up some of those storylines because, you know, the fact and the fiction have just all blurred into to one.

So, yeah, anyone who hasn't seen that, I would so strongly recommend it.

And I think the standout kind of feature of it for me is the, you know, as we've talked about previously, that the slightly cynical role of the Vice president or one of two roles, but the one that everyone kind of talks about is the fact that they are the heart beat away from the main job.

And that Veep character just embodies that so perfectly.

I think she's like constantly, you know, dissatisfied, so opportunistic.

She's just ready to go.

And it's like the worst traits of a vice president of which I'm sure has not been the case, you know, in reality or not as blatantly anyway.

But that's really amusing.

I think the other depiction on screen or whatever for me that I would Recommend Is the 2018 movie Vice with Christian Bale as Dick Cheney.

That is absolutely, definitely worth the watch.

And again, same thing, just kind of dark and satirical and on the money and thought provoking and all of these things.

And particularly as Cheney was such a massively powerful and significant and consequential vice president.

I think it's especially for people who might be younger and weren't kind of taken any notice back when that was actually playing out in history.

It's just an interesting way to kind of recap on what's gone before.

Yeah, definitely two wildly different interpretations of the Vice President there in Veep and Vice.

But Christian Bale, I have to give kudos to him.

He's like a chameleon.

Right.

I had to double take when I first saw the trailer for Vice because, like, I guess the makeup team deserve all the credit because he looks unrecognizable.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, it's fantastic.

It really is.

And I just find Chaney such a fascinating character because, you know, we're this era, and especially like in the Trump era, since 2016, you know, it's just been Trump, Trump, Trump all the time, constantly.

That's all the bandwidth.

Even those years that he was out of power, we're still all talking about him, you know, prior to that.

I mean, it's easy to forget, I suppose.

I mean, this is stuff that I kind of tell my students about because they would have been, you know, children when the Bush Cheney administration was rolling out for those very long eight years, it has to be said.

And the idea that Cheney interpreted the vice presidency in a way that nobody had previously, the way he saw it was that the veep was not part of the executive branch because if you're president of the Senate, then you don't have an official role in the executive.

That's how he interpreted it, which was interesting.

And that's why I think, you know, he.

He was kind of.

He was worthy of having a film made about him in a way that, I don't know, perhaps Walter Mondale, to go back to him, might not have.

You know, so, yeah, really consequential, I think, in what he brought to the White House.

Yeah.

I mean, we did touch on the sort of power dynamics, though, between the vice president and the president.

I think for.

For Dick Cheney to have the sort of role that he had and assert as much power over the role that he did, you need the right president, because you can't.

I can't imagine someone like Trump would let Vance have as powerful a position in the vice presidency as Cheney was allowed under Bush.

Oh, absolutely.

But, I mean, I suppose it's all about the characters, isn't it, and what the power dynamic between the two is.

I mean, as we mentioned earlier, earlier, it's like the how.

How the formal power dynamic between Trump and Vance will roll out.

I mean, it's anybody's guess.

It's fun to speculate, but I mean, we just don't know.

We really don't.

And one of the things.

And again, you know, as a historian, I shouldn't be speculating, but one can't help it.

It's like, you know, we saw Joe Biden decline very Publicly and very quickly during his presidency.

You know, I think he's a wonderful, wonderful politician in many ways and I'm sure history is going to be very kind to him in he might have to wait a little while.

But you know, so you saw his star waning, you know, quite rapidly.

And so the kind of attention and the expectation and the potential power dynamic of his Vice president, you can kind of see it raising or you could see it raising over time.

You know, the spotlight was increasingly on Harris with regard to the Trump Vance dynamic.

I mean, Trump is still, you know, fighting fit and good to go for the time being, but you don't know, you know, how that four year period will go.

He's going into par.

I think he's 78 now.

You know, there could be a series of, of unknown.

Unknowns, let's put it that way in which could mean that Vance's star rises pretty rapidly.

Yeah, well, I mean the facts are there's been two apparent assassination attempts on Trump just during the re election campaign.

So, you know, I think for the first time in many years or since Reagan, really the threat of that has become a lot more real and a lot more dangerous.

Like him or not.

I mean, you know, it's.

The threat is there.

I think.

Yes, that's actually very true.

I wasn't even thinking along those lines.

I was thinking along the lines of somebody who appears to not exercise and eat a lot of junk food.

So there's that.

But you're absolutely right.

And I mean that would be a, a profoundly traumatic way for Vance to actually, you know, become, you know, if he's a heartbeat away from the presidency.

You need to be careful what you wish for because you don't, I mean, you know, any of those predecessors who stepped up in, in dramatic and traumatic circumstances, I don't think any of them would have wished that, you know, you, you'd want to be pretty inhuman to be that person.

So for a whole range of reasons, one would hope that that is not the case.

It's, it's, it's a profoundly traumatic thing for the country.

Yeah, of course.

And going back to the Vice President itself, you know, who do you think is the best and you know, I guess the reverse that.

Who do you think is the worst Vice president in, in U.S.

history?

Gosh, I actually, not to keep talking about Walter Montale, but I have a really soft spot for him.

I think I just loved the fact that.

I think it's partly because I really, really, really love Jimmy Carter.

He's possibly my favorite president, and I think he was enormously underrated at the time, et cetera.

The fact that, you know, Mondale and Carter had this genuine friendship and that Mondale bought things to the office that his predecessors just kind of hadn't been allowed to do, or it just wasn't even, you know, relevant, but that it became more of a serious entity.

Now, it did happen a bit previously, as we mentioned in the main conversation.

You know, the idea of somebody like Gerald Ford or whatever who had to kind of step up under dramatic circumstances, started putting those, you know, a bit more resources, you know, more funding, more staffing, more space into the office of the Vice Presidency.

But I have a real soft spot for Walter Mondale, I have to say, in terms of the worst.

Gosh, I mean, there's a few to choose from.

I, I suppose the one that I would find, I don't know if it's the worst, but, but the guy who would have unnerved me most would have been Dick Cheney, definitely.

Because those were, those were kind of dangerous times, you know, after, after 9, 11, you know, it was, you know, Iraq war, Afghanistan war, the war on Terror, all.

It was a very tumultuous kind of unnerving period.

And to have somebody there, like when you're looking at what the President does and the President is Commander in Chief and all the rest of it, it's relatively clear cut when you have somebody in the background, as Cheney was apparently with all this huge, not just influence, but actual power over the President himself and his very unconventional interpretation of what the, the VP office was about.

I always found him to be.

Yeah.

Unnerving, I suppose, is how I would put it.

So he, he was the one that kind of kept me awake at night and Walter Maldade was the one that kind of made me feel a bit, you know, good about the executive more broadly, but particularly about the veep office.

Yeah, interesting.

Yeah.

And been a great discussion to sort of find out a bit more about historically what the Vice President has and maybe has not done.

And I think Dick Cheney certainly seems like a bit of an outlier there in terms of, you know, the amount of political gravitas that he, that he threw around during his eight years.

But we're going to wrap up there.

I'm sure there is so much more to talk about and certainly as the Trump and Vance administration gets underway, I'm sure the next four years won't be short of, of headlines and prompts for us to discuss further.

But thank you, Claudia, for joining me for this and also for the main episode.

And anyone, anyone that's listening to this, if you are listening to this and haven't seen the full episode, go and do that right now, please.

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Thank you so much for listening and goodbye.