J.D. Vance's Cactus Jack problem
As Trump flails, his veep faces the peril of being proven right
When John Nance Garner ran for county judge in Uvalde, Texas, in 1893, a young stenography student named Mariette ("Ettie") Rheiner made no secret of her opposition.
The daughter of a Swiss immigrant land owner thought that Garner’s fondness for whiskey and poker made him ill-suited for a judgeship.
Somehow Garner must have persuaded her he wasn’t such a bad guy, since the two got married in 1895.
For nearly half a century, they worked as a team, with Ettie typing John’s letters and helping run his office. He climbed the rungs of power to become Speaker of the House and then Vice President of the United States for eight years under President Franklin D. Roosevelt — all without giving up his fondness for whiskey.
When Garner briefly emerged as an obstacle to FDR’s unprecedented bid for a third term, the president told his Cabinet, “I see that the vice president has thrown his bottle — I mean his hat — into the ring.”
Garner had great powers of persuasion — indeed he used them to ensure the passage of Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation through Congress. But he also had a sixth sense for how Washington really worked. He was colorful and quotable, particularly about the vice presidency. “It wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit,” he said. The office was “a spare tire of the government.” The “worst damn-fool mistake I ever made was letting myself be elected vice president of the United States,” he said.
In private, Garner grew increasingly critical of FDR’s policies. He predicted that Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court with friendly judges and his purge of conservative Democratic lawmakers would both fail. He was proven right on both counts. But when you’re vice president, simply being right is perilous.
That thought must haunt J.D. Vance, a longtime opponent of American military operations overseas who President Donald Trump has noted was less enthusiastic than other advisers about attacking Iran. Vance has publicly supported the war, but, according to Politico, he is “ ‘skeptical,’ is ‘worried about success’ and ‘just opposes’ the war on Iran, a senior Trump official said via text message.”
On Monday, Vance said in the Oval Office as Trump looked on, “We have a smart president, whereas in the past, we've had dumb presidents, and I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren't repeated.”
Trump began the war, according to his press secretary Karoline Leavitt, because of a “feeling based on fact” that Iran would soon attack the U.S. and has said the war will end when he “feels it in his bones.” He appears to be flailing around, trying to find some way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran is choking off the movement of 20% of the world’s oil. Trump is asking China and America’s allies to send ships to force the strait’s reopening, but those nations aren’t buying into the idea.
The confusion over the war’s timing, its aims and potential outcomes, including the damage it is inflicting on the world economy, could well vindicate Vance’s private opposition to the war.
But his political fate lies in Trump’s hands. The president, who no longer talks about seeking an unconstitutional third term (because of the 22nd Amendment), commands the loyalty of MAGA voters. Many will support his choice of a successor as head of the Republicans.
Vance has to fear that Trump could try to sink his chances of winning the 2028 Republican nomination for president. The president could instead anoint Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime hawk supportive of the Iran War, the Venezuela raid and whatever action Trump may take to further weaken the shaky Cuban regime.
Cactus Jack
John Nance Garner had many nicknames. The most durable was “Cactus Jack,” a sobriquet he earned for campaigning to make the prickly pear cactus the Texas state flower. Instead the state chose to honor the bluebonnet.
When Garner entered politics, according to an article in the Saturday Evening Post, he was likened to the road runner, a bird that was more capable than its Looney Tunes incarnation would suggest. The bird “can outrun anything on two legs and is afraid of nothing,” not even rattlesnakes. In its honor, Garner was graced with the nickname “The Chapparal Cock of Uvalde.” The author of the Post’s article, Henry M. Hyde, said the label was “not inappropriate, for after he got really started, nobody was ever able to catch him in a political race.”
Garner was born in a log cabin in northeast Texas’ Red River County. He spent a semester at Vanderbilt University, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Garner returned to his native state, but ultimately chose a different region, seeking the dry climate in the southwest Texas town of Uvalde.
When he won a state legislative seat there, Garner soon gained control of the redistricting process. He designed for himself an extraordinarily large, rural congressional district that he proved exceptionally able to win — and win, again and again, racking up enough seniority to emerge as House Speaker when the Democrats took control of Congress in 1931.
The following year, he helped his party avoid a deadlocked convention by throwing his state’s delegates behind Franklin D. Roosevelt on the fourth ballot. He wanted the vice presidential slot on the ticket and got it.
Garner irritated Roosevelt and his more liberal advisers: he was a reluctant campaigner and took frequent “vacations” in Texas during his vice presidency. He used non-union labor in Texas and opposed the pro-labor legislation FDR backed. In their second term in office, he favored trying to balance the federal budget, a stance at odds with a president committed to expansive spending on social programs.
The No Man
“Since the election of 1931, Garner has not given a newspaper interview on any subject,” Hyde wrote. “He has kept the fight—as far as there has been one—in the Administration family.” Yet anyone who reads Hyde’s June 25, 1938 article entitled “White House No-Man” has to suspect that Garner shared his thoughts privately with the journalist.
It’s full of praise. For example: “Senators had confidence in the shrewd, earthy wisdom of the Vice President and in his patriotism, and they liked the man.” Long naps and full nights of sleep “are two of the reasons why, at sixty-nine, Garner is as strong and husky as most men of fifty.”
Hyde noted that during the last year, “the relations between the President of the United States and the Vice President have been officially correct and, in public, almost ostentatiously friendly.” But at White House meetings, Garner objected to FDR’s use of deficit spending to spark economic growth and “the free digging of wells and the building of water tanks, outhouses and other improvements for farmers, and the making of loans and grants of all kinds to individuals, as tending to break down the self-respect and self-confidence of the people.”
Garner’s dissents from FDR’s policies would soon become public, Hyde predicted. “Sooner or later, such a break seems inevitable… For instance, if the precedent-breaker {FDR] should announce his candidacy for a third presidential term, it is certain the old Texas cowhand will give a “Yip!” and start shooting from the hip.”
As historian Thomas T. Spencer wrote, it wasn’t just the third-term idea that affronted Garner. “Roosevelt’s use of executive authority, his desire to broaden the base of the party, and the unprecedented scope of the New Deal, which expanded the role of the federal government in the economy, all challenged Garner’s long-standing ideals about government and how politics worked.”
On the bill to “pack” the Supreme Court, Spencer noted, “Garner reportedly ‘loathed’ the plan and walked from the Senate rostrum holding his nose while gesturing thumbs down to colleagues as the bill was read.”
Poker vs. chess
If Garner was the consummate poker player, Roosevelt was a grandmaster at chess. Devious, manipulative, strategic, the president was the superior player. He realized that Garner, doing well in the polls, could block him from a third term and set out to remove the obstacle.
Union leader John L. Lewis had testified to Congress that the proposed weakening of pro-labor legislation “emanates from a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man whose name is Garner.” Texas representatives were outraged by this public attack on one of their leaders and wanted to draft a resolution denying the allegations against Garner. But one of their number, Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson, refused to sign a document saying that Garner wasn’t a big drinker and a big enemy of labor.
As Robert Caro noted in The Path to Power, the first volume of his LBJ biography, Johnson argued that trying to absolve Garner of those sins would make the Texas delegation look foolish. Johnson was placing his bet against Garner’s long-term prospects and instead was trying to score points with Roosevelt.
LBJ’s strategy paid off, in a windfall of federal funding to build the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station that benefited Johnson’s prime financial backers. Roosevelt benefited too, from contributions to his Texas campaign, which challenged Garner’s status as the state’s favorite son.
The final blow to Garner’s 1940 presidential ambitions came early that year, when Nazi Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. In a time of high tension, Democratic leaders began to unite behind the idea of keeping a trusted hand in the White House for a third term.
“The most down-hearted man on Capitol Hill,” syndicated columnist Ray Tucker wrote, “is Vice President John Nance Garner. His friends have deserted him—left him cold.” At the height of his power, senators flocked to Garner’s office. “They rushed in every hour of the day to seek advice or toss off a quick drink.” Now they were climbing aboard the “Third Term bandwagon,” noted Tucker.
Roosevelt picked Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace to replace Garner on the 1940 ticket. Their 1941 Inauguration was the last time Garner visited Washington. (FDR wasn’t done replacing vice presidents. He dumped Wallace when he ran for a fourth term in 1944 and selected Harry S. Truman, who would succeed FDR when he died in April, 1945.)
Advice to LBJ
Garner settled in for what proved to be a long retirement on his Texas ranch, where he raised chickens and grew pecans.
It’s one of history’s small ironies that Garner got to give Lyndon Johnson advice on whether to accept the vice presidential nomination in 1960.
The writer Theodore White “revealed the uncertainty in the Johnson camp over accepting Kennedy’s offer to join the ticket,” wrote Patrick Cox. “From his suite in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Johnson telephoned Garner at his home in Uvalde. White reported Garner’s remarks to LBJ. ‘I’ll tell you Lyndon,’ Garner surmised. ‘The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.’ Any other advice from Garner went unrecorded.” Many believe Garner actually said “piss” rather than “spit,” and maybe it was “bucket” rather than “pitcher.”
In any event, Johnson signed on as Kennedy’s running mate.
LBJ came to deeply regret his move from his powerful perch as Senate Majority Leader to the invisibility of the vice presidency, where President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy marginalized the Texas Democrat.
On November 22, 1963, hours before an assassin killed JFK in Dallas, the president made one of his last telephone calls — to John Nance Garner. It was Cactus Jack’s 95th birthday. He would live nearly 4 more years.
Sources: Briscoe Center for American History; Miller Center; In Search of the Proverbial Bucket; History News Network; “For the Good of the Party: John Nance Garner, FDR and New Deal Politics, 1933-1940, by Thomas T. Spencer, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January, 2018; “White House No-Man” by Henry M. Hyde, Saturday Evening Post, October 25, 1938; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 1982.