The Strange Destiny Of a Vice President

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The vice-presidential ritual demonstrates a phenomenon of political optics: few men -- or women -- look qualified to be President before they get into office, either by winning it or taking the place of a fallen predecessor. Or, conversely, those who look abundantly qualified beforehand may prove to be disappointing. Presidential politics is inventive, bizarre and addicted to surprise.

Consider: Harry Truman, who seemed hopelessly unqualified when Roosevelt died, is now regarded as one of the better Presidents, a strong leader of substance, intelligence and personal force.

John Kennedy in 1960 had glamour, money and his father's ambitions for him. And no record of any real achievement anywhere. Many regarded him as a rich, graceful pretty-boy and little else. Some still do. J.F.K. may have a larger place in American memory than he did in the actuality of his time.

History discloses character in unpredictable ways. Much of America's elite in 1860 regarded Lincoln as a wilderness buffoon. There is the counterpattern: Ulysses Grant, the soldier who saved the Union, looked like a much greater man at his Inauguration than he did when he left the White House. So, too, some candidates (Michigan Governor George Romney in 1968, for example, or Texas' John Connally in 1980) had an air of silver-haired inevitability about them until the political process almost mysteriously rejected them. Ex-Vice President Lyndon Johnson came to the White House by a strange, fatal route. He was splendidly qualified to be President, it seemed. But his Administration % ended like the fifth act of King Lear.

Before George Bush arrived at the White House, a certain amount of ambient wisdom had written him down as a wimp, an opportunist who, at almost every step of his career, would be overtaken by the Peter Principle (in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence). Bush has not yet completed his transformation to Lincoln. Dan Quayle does not yet look Trumanesque either. But there is time. Hope lies always in the evolving surprise.