Dan Quayle for vice president - 26 August 1988

Well, for once there’s no question of knowing what to talk about. About a man whose name, two weeks ago, meant nothing whatsoever, to, I should confidently guess, about 239 million, of the 241 million Americans.

Whose name and face now, thanks to the inquisitive magic of television, is more familiar to more people than the faces and names of most movie stars. He is, need I say, J Danforth Quayle III. Already known the length and breadth of the land, and other lands, as Dan Quayle.

Two weeks ago, I believe, I should have had a hard time phoning any friend who could have told me more about him than I already knew from the pocket version of the congressional hand book – that he's in his second term as a Republican senator from the midwestern state of Indiana, 41 years old, married with three small children, lists himself as publisher of a small-town newspaper, lawyer, Presbyterian, is a BA from the small university of DePauw, served in the national guard for six years, 1969-75, is on the Senate armed services committee and on three sub committees that look into military budgets, sea power and strategic nuclear forces.

That's already much more than most Washington journalists knew before the fateful Tuesday of the Republican convention, when Mr Bush, breaking his original intention of keeping everybody in suspense until the Thursday night, and announced he had chosen his vice presidential running mate, Dan Quayle.

A universal query rose into the hot air from Mexico to Canada, Dan who? Now there is nothing strange in that in the choice of an unexpected name, it's entirely normal. I shall never forget the wave of incredulity that jolted the press and television people hanging around late at night, in Miami in 1968 when the Republicans' presidential nominee Richard Nixon retired into deep thought with his cronies and eventually emerged with the news that his vice president was one Spiro Agnew.

Not a man or woman among the weary cluster of us waiting for the news could say right away who this Spiro somebody was. No, there was one man, as shaken as the rest of us, a man from the Baltimore Sun papers, he knew Agnew was the governor of Maryland.

But this year, the disbelief was more startling because, as a consequence of the death of the nominating convention system, and the new decisive role of the primary elections, we have known from the spring who the two presidential contestants were to be. And there had been months in which the men defeated in the primaries have been angling pretty conspicuously to be chosen as the second man.

So the only speculative fun left in the conventions was guessing which, of at least half-a-dozen famous losers, would get the nod. But Mr Dukakis’s choice of Senator Benson of Texas was a surprise but one readily approved of by the Democrats, air force veteran of the second war, veteran senator, been there 18 years, from a state – Texas – with many electoral votes, expert on finance, the environment, a powerful figure on the Senate’s intelligence committee, a conservative Democrat who might be expected to catch Mr Dukakis if he appeared to be leaning too far over to the left.

But on the republican side there was a growing list of vice presidential possibilities, well publicised before New Orleans. Several of them actually announced that, for one reason or another, they wished to withdraw their names from Mr Bush’s list.

Throughout the first day at New Orleans the party bigwigs were wheedling, betting, urging the choice of either Senator Jack Kemp, the fiery young New York conservative, or Senator Dole, the waspish and witty Republican leader in the Senate.

Mr Bush decided wisely that each of them was too independent, too ambitious, to make a deferential vice president. And deference is the first qualification for the vice presidency, which has no constitutional role, except in theory to preside over the Senate – in practice, only when there is the probability of a tied vote.

It used to be that no party chieftain or party underling ever questioned the candidate's choice of his running mate, because all of them well knew that the vice presidency was a humdrum role, taking over the president's ceremonial chores, and for the rest, as HL Mencken put it, sitting in the outer office of the White House hoping to hear the president sneeze.

For the first half of this century, the office was easily regarded as almost a decorative joke. But then Franklin Roosevelt dropped dead one April afternoon in 1945, and the humble senator from Misoura –Truman – was president. Five years later he escaped unhurt when two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to shoot their way into his house.

On a November afternoon in 1963, President John Kennedy was killed on a Dallas street and suddenly the old cagey Texan, Lyndon Johnson, was president. Only 11 years later, on an August morning, in 1974, President Nixon, in effect, abdicated and of all old congressional work horses, least likely to be president, Gerald Ford was it.

A year later, twice within one month, first in Sacramento then in San Francisco, a bystander's quick move to deflect a pointed pistol saved Gerald Ford from assassination. In 1981, on a Washington street, President Reagan was shot and perilously wounded. He survived and his jaunty walk on all public occasions is due to the necessary flexing of his arms, akimbo, to accommodate his bullet-proof vest.

These things are well remembered by a living generation of voters. In the first century and a half of this republic, six vice presidents succeeded on the death of the president but only since the second world war, there have been three – as they are called – accidental presidents, following on one natural death, one assassination, one unprecedented resignation.

So, it’s not surprising that down these last two decades the moment a man chooses his vice presidential running mate, is a moment of recall, a reminder that the second man is... as the grim saying goes. a heartbeat away from the presidency. And so, as we never did before Dallas, we start to weigh also the second man’s qualifications for the presidency.

Add to this new caution the new and unparalleled resources of the media to dig and probe, through the freedom of information act, as well as through their own competitive frenzy and you can see unless a man’s life has been as pure as the driven snow, the instant examination of it can be rough on anyone chosen for high office. It was very rough on young Dan Quayle.

One summer's day at noon, Dan Quayle was an unknown a blank. Two hours later the whole country was being told that he once been on a golfing weekend with a man whose girlfriend had posed for Playboy. That mischief was quickly defused – to Dan Quayle a golfing weekend, is a weekend of golf.

Then, the main charge exploded – during the Vietnam war, in his 20s, and right from the draft, he went to the national guard. The national guard springs directly from the old 18th-century militia. The founding fathers were against a national standing army, but they encouraged each state to have, on call, men who in a crisis would form a militia. It's the reason – and the only reason – given in the Constitution for sanctioning the right to bear arms.

Today, the United States army has a reserve, a national reserve, under command of the president. But the units of the national guard, misleadingly named, belong to each state and their disposition is at the discretion of the governor unless the president declares a national emergency. In practice, the guard is rarely called for national service to go broad; in the Vietnam war, only one half of one percent of the guard went into combat.

Now, young men of draft age knew this, knew that the national guard was a safe haven, though some conceivably joined up who would have been willing to go to Vietnam. And one of them, according to Dan Quayle, was Dan Quayle. He was not one of the war-time rebels, not, as Mr Bush, rather desperate to remind us, one who escaped to Canada, one who burned his draft guard, or burned the flag. But he wanted to go to law school and students could be deferred.

To show he was not ducking the whole show, he went into the guard, and after basic training spent most of his six years filing press releases. There is nothing culpable in this, but two remembered facts make it seem so.

One is that three men in four who went to Vietnam were from the working class or the lower middle class and the linking fact is that Dan Quayle is heir to fifty millions. Of course it's not his fault that, as we have shamefacedly come to admit, Vietnam was a class war and not many of Quayle’s class fought it.

Well in the first days the media leapt on this story like famished wolves and did themselves little credit working away at every tiny bone of rumour and innuendo. Still, although the uproar is ended the misgivings linger on.

Dan Quayle remains in the national consciousness, specially in the consciousness of the families of Vietnam veterans, as a privileged type. Very rich, very conservative, for Star Wars and aid to the Contras, a gung-ho all-American hawk who had the good fortune, shall we say, to escape Vietnam by joining the national guard.

His defence of his position has been alternatively fumbling and defiant, never conceding that the idea of a passport to safety ever crossed his mind. Of course, many thousands did what he did, but they remain anonymous. As he said in the moment of helpless naivety, "I didn’t know I would be standing here today". That's it, he never dreamt he would one day be picked for the vice presidency.

One other thought will not go away. It’s the question of Mr Bush’s judgement in choosing, from the 46 Republican senators and the 177 Republican members of Congress, such a nice, naive young backbencher of a hawk as a man qualified to lead the western world.

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