The Vice Presidency and a Precaution Against Death - 09 March 2001

For over 200 years the office of vice-president of the United States has been mocked and belittled like no other.

When I first arrived in this country I asked a famous newspaper man what exactly did the vice-president do?

He said: "The vice-president is a man who sits in an outer office of the White House hoping to hear the president sneeze."

More recently Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president - a small ferret of a man from Texas - said, more rudely, of the vice-presidency: "It's not worth a warm spit in a pot."

The commonest cliché in my time was that the vice-president attended all the best funerals. He was always sent, and he still is, to represent the president when a foreign dignity, a famous general, dies.

When, almost 50 years ago, the newly-elected President Eisenhower came to pick a vice-president he asked the man he'd chosen if he wouldn't rather have a cabinet post since history has shown that politically the vice-presidency is a dead end. And so it has been.

But Richard Nixon himself knew enough history to recall that several vice-presidents had had the habit of succeeding by the accident of sudden death or assassination of the president. Didn't come his way but he bided his time and 16 years later he won the prize himself.

I think Eisenhower was the first president of modern times, or any other time, to say publicly and seriously that he was going to reform the long-despised office by giving his man a bigger hand in affairs - have him sit in on cabinet meetings and so on. It didn't happen then or after similar promises by later presidents.

Lyndon Johnson, the most artful politician of his time, almost went ballistic in the job. What he thought of doing nothing under John F Kennedy has not been published. It would almost certainly be unprintable.

The Constitution gives the vice-president two services to perform. To cast a deciding vote in the Senate if there's a tie. And he can preside over the Senate, which he does about once a year when the president addresses a joint session of Congress.

But I do believe that Vice-President Gore was actually given some of the powers so many previous presidents had promised. Not powers but a daily say in things.

In fact Mr Gore was responsible for many of the policies with which President Clinton was credited in defence, in economic policy, in space matters.

Even so no previous vice-president has achieved the status and the governing power that came to Mr Dick Cheney once Governor Bush decided he'd better prepare for the White House, even while the Florida voting fiasco was going on.

Mr Cheney had been national security advisor and secretary of defence to Governor Bush's father and whatever else the elder Bush recommended to his son he recalled the knowledge, judgement and administrative expertise of Mr Cheney.

Thereupon Mr Cheney handled the so-called transition between the two regimes and was the man in charge of the group of advisors choosing and checking on the character of likely cabinet officers, as also of the vice-president. Till one day he looked in the mirror and saw the man that Governor Bush himself had chosen.

Once President Bush was installed in the White House even the Republicans were surprised at the workload that Vice-President Cheney took off the shoulders of President Bush.

So much so that Mr Cheney got to be called something new in American government - the prime minister. And a famous nightclub comic voiced a wicked switch on the oldest bromide about the vice-president.

"To think," the man said, "that Mr Bush is only a heartbeat away from the presidency."

In retrospect that's rather a ghoulish joke for, as you know, one day last week Mr Cheney had two or three bouts of chest pain and since he'd been there before he took himself off to the hospital to check on his long suffering heart.

He had his first major heart attack 23 years ago, when he was 37. Since then he's had a quadruple bypass and last November, during the weeks when the election was still in doubt, he had another heart attack.

All this has been public knowledge and when Mr Cheney was chosen by President Bush it was all brought up again of course and firm reassurance was given that Mr Cheney's health was good and his condition was well under control.

So it was no surprise to wake up on Tuesday morning and find what at first glance looked like a special coronary edition of the New York Times. Its medical reporting is famously incomparable but on Tuesday there were three enormous pieces on Mr Cheney's coronary history and on the medical procedure, which at least half a million Americans have had done - about one in four of whom will have done again - namely what is known as angioplasty.

First, through the circulation of a dye a blockage is discovered in an artery where the blood can barely go through.

The artery is opened up by a catheter, tipped by a little balloon, which is inflated to dispose of the blocking material called plaque - known better to us all as French fries, beef, butter and other saturated fats plus eggs and other receptacles of the dreaded cholesterol.

When the artery is clear again a spring, possibly two, a spring is inserted to keep the artery open.

Sometimes, as happened with Mr Cheney, the spring collects scar tissue and the artery gets blocked again, requiring another blow out. That is what was done to Mr Cheney.

Next morning he was up bright and early, put on his politician's racy red tie, waved goodbye to the hospital staff and promised to be back at work on Wednesday.

The doctor in charge made a nice distinction.

"Was this operation, pardon sir procedure, an emergency?"

"No not an emergency, but urgent."

Mr Bush, as much of a medical outsider as any of the press, gave us the presidential assurance that the vice-president had had a precautionary procedure.

That's correct. It was a precaution against death.

In the following day's pieces on this daunting episode the responsible doctors interviewed mentioned casually that in the normal course of events Mr Cheney could expect to have another angioplasty - "correction" was the tactful word used - about six months from now.

On Wednesday Mr Cheney was back to a 10-hour working day. Said he expects to work for President Bush through 2004 by which time - a jocular smile here - Mr Cheney will wait to see if the president wants him to serve through a second term.

Well all very cheering and it's a positive relief to see that Mr Cheney is in such high spirits.

But I don't think any of us should assume that the public face of President Bush and Mr Cheney and the other consulted members of the administration successfully reflects their private misgivings and secret, perhaps guilty thought, about who would be appointed if Mr Cheney finds that the job he's doing is too much for him.

But in the wake of this episode there is uneasiness in Washington, most discreetly put by a New York Times editorial which hoped that Mr Cheney will remain vigilant about his diet, his exercise and the management of his workload and that the White House will make candour the rule in informing the public about Mr Cheney's health.

While we're talking about public appearance and private misgivings I think I ought to mention what has so far been officially unmentionable - the health of one other man whose departure from the Senate would drastically affect the party balance of power, would produce, in fact, what neither party secured, namely a majority in the Senate.

As you know the present party representation in the Senate is exactly split - 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans.

Facing the passage of any bill the Democrats must feel desolate and the Republicans confident only because of that one provision in the Constitution that the vice-president can cast a deciding vote. So in any tied vote Mr Cheney can be called on to do his duty and tip the scale the Republicans' way.

But, I noticed the other day that Senator Strom Thurmond, a famous old senator, once a Democrat and for many years a born-again Republican, has just paid his fifth visit to the hospital during this past year.

Senator Thurmond is 98 - the oldest person ever to sit in the Senate. He is, need I say, very frail. And his time here cannot be long.

If he goes the governor of his state - a Democrat - can appoint a successor. So the Democrats would then have 51 senators against 49 and will at last be able to mount, even if barely, a decisive opposition, something they can't do in the paralysis of the present stalemate.

I've not talked about the president's tax bill, which dominates the Washington news, because his bills on anything are proposals - what he'd like to happen, not as in a parliamentary system, the power to carry out what his victory in an election had given him.

And even if the Senate passes his tax bill no money bill is law till it is passed in the House and nothing passes in the House unless the chairman of the ways and means committee has decided to bring it to the floor.

When it comes to the true engine of American government he is the engineer, deciding the root question: Who gets how much for what.

There was once a ways and means chairman named Wilbur Mills. And one year he decided to run for president. He did very poorly in the primaries and he withdrew.

But the day he announced his candidacy an old friend called on him and said in horror: "Wilbur, Wilbur what are you doing?

"You actually want to be president and give up all that power?"

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