Second-Guessing The No. 2 Spot

Mondale may be best known to the public as a failed presidential candidate (wiped out by Ronald Reagan in 1984), but among historians he's known as a game-changing vice president. Mondale views himself that way, too.

He recalls that, after becoming vice president-elect in 1976, he paid a courtesy call on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller at his home in the District's Foxhall neighborhood (no way would a tycoon like Rockefeller stay in that official veep shack at the Naval Observatory).

"He was typical of vice presidents. He didn't have anything to do," Mondale says.

They were waiting for dinner to be served when the phone rang.

"Ohhh," Rockefeller said, "how nice it is to hear the phone ring."

That December Mondale wrote a famous memo (famous, at least, in the academic micro-niche of Vice Presidential Studies) to Jimmy Carter outlining an expanded role for the vice president as a counselor with access to all the top national security meetings. He wouldn't have any line authority and wouldn't be put in charge of feel-good commissions like past vice presidents. He'd be more of a deputy president.

Carter not only agreed but gave Mondale a plum spot in the West Wing, an upgrade from the digs in the Old Executive Office Building.

But Mondale doesn't like how the office has evolved under Cheney.

"The Cheney presidency -- vice presidency -- has really gone off the tracks," Mondale says. "It became an office of secret, unaccountable, extra-legal exercise of power. None of us ever thought it would be abused in this way."

The preeminent vice-presidential scholar in the country is surely Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University who has devoted his career to studying vice presidents.

"It's a fascinating office to study because it's an office that, for all of our history, has been a national laughingstock," Goldstein says. "Now, for the first time in our history, people are using the phrase imperial vice presidency, which would have been an unimaginable oxymoron."

The vice president's role has been a cause of confusion since early September 1787, when the Framers dreamed it up. Rifling through James Madison's notes of the Constitutional Convention, we see that the veep is made president of the Senate only because otherwise, as one delegate puts it, "he would be without employment."