![]() Mondale’s insight reflected his faith that the presidency could promote positive change but his belief that presidents needed help, which a properly-equipped vice president could uniquely provide. He concluded that the vice president could contribute by being a general adviser to the president and by handling special presidential assignments. Whereas prior vice presidents thought power would come from managing some government programs, Mondale rejected that approach. Whereas past vice presidents had tried to structure a role to empower themselves and position themselves as presidents-in-waiting, Mondale asked instead how he could help Carter succeed. Mondale provided the vision which he conceived by looking at the office in a novel way. But Carter lacked a blueprint to make the vice presidency functional, and Rockefeller’s unhappy experience demonstrated that presidential intentions and hopes alone wouldn’t elevate the second office without a sensible vision appropriately resourced and well-implemented. ![]() Carter knew he needed help and thought Mondale could provide it. judged the vice presidency fatally flawed and favored abolishing it.Ĭarter and Mondale had a different idea. ![]() And that was all in a decade! By the mid-1970s, presidential historian Arthur M. Rockefeller a significant role did not work and he dumped the vice president from the 1976 ticket. Nixon and Watergate as he could get, and Ford’s well-intentioned promise to give Nelson A. Ford had spent nine unhappy vice-presidential months as far from Richard M. Agnew had resigned in disgrace, Gerald R. The vice presidency had moved into the executive beginning in the 1950s but it was experiencing troubled times when Jimmy Carter and Mondale were elected in November 1976. He reinvented the office, not as an end in itself, but to allow government to better promote the general welfare and foster a more just society and more peaceful world. Whereas others had failed to make the office consequential, Mondale created a new vision of the vice presidency and demonstrated that it could be a force for good. Converting that disparaged position into the true second office of the land was an historic accomplishment that tells a lot about the gifted public servant he was. Mondale transformed the American vice presidency. 2 once in office, particularly in the negotiations between Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that resulted in the Camp David Accords.VP Walter Mondale with President Jimmy Carter, 1979. Mondale was a key adviser as Carter's No. "Fritz did most of the talking," Carter said in 2015 about their initial conversations about Mondale's joining the ticket. Mondale's key role brokering an agreement in a fight over Mississippi's delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention led to the prohibition of segregated delegations, presaging the reforms that reshaped Democratic presidential politics, an important factor in Carter's nomination 12 years later. But Carter saw Mondale's heritage as a New Deal Democrat from the North as an important balance for his brand of moderate Southern politics. Mondale decided against running then because he wasn't able to gain any traction crisscrossing the country and trying to raise money. Owen Franken / Corbis via Getty Images file Candidates Jimmy Carter, right, and Walter Mondale stand with their wives at a 1976 Democratic Convention press conference. Frank Church, D-Idaho, to investigate abuses by government agencies like the FBI, the CIA and the IRS - Mondale oversaw investigations of the FBI's surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., building a national profile that propelled him into the discussion about contenders for the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. He helped lead the effort to amend the cloture process to make it easier to end filibusters - the 60-vote rule still in effect today.Īs chair of the domestic task force of the Church Committee - the special committee led in 1975 by Sen. Mondale was the driving force behind the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination in housing, and he helped to pass the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, which created the Congressional Budget Office. In a relatively short 12-year Senate career, Mondale was at the center of a number of reforms that reshaped how Congress voted, allocated the national budget and sought to protect lower-income and minority Americans. Mondale was elected to the Senate in 1966 and again in 1972. He graduated from the University of Minnesota law school in 1956 and was the state's attorney general from 1960 until he was appointed to the Senate in 1964 to finish Humphrey's term after he became Lyndon B. Mondale started his career as an activist in Minnesota’s Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, then by working on Hubert Humphrey's Senate campaign in 1948. News The career of Walter Mondale, Carter's vice president, in pictures
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