Mike Pence’s Role Will Depend on His Bond With Donald Trump

By Peter Nicholas, Wall Street Journal

Updated Jan. 20, 2017 2:35 p.m. ET

What role will Vice President Mike Pence play in the Trump White House? How influential will he be and what chance will he have to make any sort of mark?

It is up to President Donald Trump.

Vice presidents are first in the line of succession and duly elected in their own right. But their power is entirely dependent on the president. Mr. Pence figures to be the main point of contact for Congress, given his history as a former six-term congressman from Indiana.

Mr. Trump, in a recent interview, said, “Mike is very popular with the political class. They like him a lot. And what’s not to like?”

Should the president’s feelings change, Mr. Pence could easily find himself sidelined.

He is coming into a job that, for all its ceremony and potential, has left plenty of occupants disillusioned. The nation’s first vice president, John Adams, described his status in mordant terms.

“I am vice president,” he said. “In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.” Writing to his wife, Abigail in 1793, he described the office as the most “insignificant” one “that ever the imagination of man contrived.”

In earthier terms, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, once said the office wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit,” or “piss,” depending on the source.

Lyndon B. Johnson might have agreed. The master legislative tactician left the Senate to become John F. Kennedy’s vice president. In his new role, he quickly found himself marginalized by the president and his brother, Robert Kennedy, who served as attorney general.

Robert Caro, a Johnson biographer, quotes Mr. Johnson’s own brother as saying he couldn’t bear to witness the vice president’s “day-to-day humiliation.”

Typically, the vice president’s portfolio expands and shrinks according to the confidence he has earned.

In 1960, Dwight Eisenhower did Vice President Richard Nixon no favors when, asked at a news conference what ideas of Mr. Nixon he had adopted, replied: “If you give me a week I might think of one. I don’t remember.”

Mr. Nixon lost to Mr. Kennedy in the election that year, though he went on to win the White House in 1968.

It isn’t always the case that the vice presidency is a springboard to the Oval Office—perhaps another reason some who have held the office found it unsatisfying.

Republican George H.W. Bush is a notable exception, succeeding the popular Ronald Reagan in 1989. He only served one term, though, losing to Bill Clinton in 1992.

After eight years as Mr. Clinton’s vice president, Democrat Al Gore lost in 2000.

Walter Mondale, who was vice president under Jimmy Carter, lost badly to Mr. Reagan in 1984.

Death and scandal are other paths vice presidents have taken to the top. Democrats Johnson and Harry Truman reached the presidency through the deaths of Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, respectively.

Gerald Ford became president when Richard Nixon resigned amid the Watergate scandal in 1974. Mr. Ford ran for his own term in 1976, but lost to Mr. Carter.

Neither Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, nor George W. Bush’s No. 2, Dick Cheney, opted to run for president.

Mr. Biden flirted with the idea of running in 2015, but was still mourning the death of his elder son and concluded he didn’t have time to mount a credible campaign.

Mr. Cheney made clear from the start that he had no interest in running.

Mr. Cheney was a dominant figure in the West Wing during George W. Bush’s first term. As the Iraq war deteriorated and Mr. Bush’s approval ratings fell, Mr. Cheney went on to play a more diminished role in the second half of the Bush presidency.

An aide to Mr. Biden once described his relationship with Mr. Obama as a marriage followed by a courtship. He meant that the two men didn’t know each other well when Mr. Obama selected Mr. Biden to be his running mate and they needed time to forge ties.

As the years passed, Mr. Obama entrusted huge swaths of foreign and domestic policy business to the vice president. Their friendship grew over regular lunches and Oval Office meetings, culminating in a recent White House ceremony in which Mr. Obama awarded a tearful Mr. Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

During the event, he called Mr. Biden his “brother.”

It is too soon to say Mr. Pence and the president will develop that same sort of bond. But Mr. Trump has been adamant that choosing Mr. Pence was one of his best decisions.

“When I was going through some of the lesser positive patches, people would say, ‘Wait a minute. He picked Mike Pence. He really knows what he’s doing,’” Mr. Trump said in the interview.