The Vice Presidency! This section's a bit slim, but just enough for a posting, I think.
--The Vice Presidency--
These days, we tend to think of the Vice Presidency as a fairly powerful position, if the holder chooses to make it so; nevertheless, two individuals have resigned from it. John C. Calhoun, who was elected to the Senate from South Carolina, resigned his former post as VP, regarding it as many others did as a dead end, and Spiro Agnew, Nixon's Vice President (who was, by the way, the first Greek-American Vice President and Governor of Maryland), resigned under fire from allegations that he had taken bribes while governor of Maryland. Agnew later went to prison for those bribes. Calhoun was the first Vice President to resign in office, and the second (and last) to serve under two Presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, the first being George Clinton, who was VP for Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
John Nance Garner, former Speaker of the House and two-term Vice President under Roosevelt: “The Vice Presidency is not worth a warm pitcher of piss.” He was replaced as Vice President by Henry Wallace (who gained a reputation as quite a . . well, "odd fellow" would be a kind way of putting it. "New Age mystic radical crackpot" would be much more brutal and more accurate, even though 'New Age' didn't even exist as a term back then), who was in turn supplanted by Harry Truman. Wallace later made an independent run for the Presidency under the Progressive Party's banner in 1948, with little success. Note that Henry Wallace of Iowa and George Wallace of Alabama are two completely different people.
Mark Twain: “There were once two brothers. One became Vice President, the other went to sea, and nothing was ever heard from either again.”
Lyndon Johnson was the third Vice President to get elected in his own right after the death of the President (the first two being Theodore Roosevelt, who was elected in 1904 after McKinley's assassination in 1902, and Harry Truman, who was elected in 1948 after FDR's death in 1945), and one of the few who served in both houses of Congress and both sides of the Oval Office. Johnson was nicknamed "Landslide Lyndon" mockingly after his 183-vote victory in Texas' Democratic primary for the Senate election in 1948 against then-governor Cokie Stevenson; Stevenson had gotten the plurality of the votes in July with Johnson coming in second, so there was a runoff in August. Initially, it looked like Stevenson had narrowly won the runoff, but Johnson was saved by the last-minute arrival of 202 votes for Johnson, delivered by his campaign manager, John Connally, and certified by a local judge (who admitted decades later that the ballots had been fraudulent); the Texas Democratic Committee decided in favor of Johnson 29-28. Connally, who later served as Governor of Texas and switched parties ten years after Kennedy's assassination (and one year after his sixteen-month tenure as Treasury Secretary under Nixon), at which he was seriously wounded, worked enthusiastically at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Chicago to garner the nomination for Johnson, which probably helped convince Kennedy that he needed Johnson on the ticket.
Johnson was the majority whip in the early fifties, minority leader in the mid-fifties, and then majority leader from 1955 to 1961, after Democrats took back the Senate. After John F. Kennedy offered Johnson a spot on his ticket (it is rumored that this was meant to be a formality, and Robert Kennedy wanted to be Vice President; we do know that Bobby Kennedy and Johnson never got along at all well), Johnson was elected Vice President, simultaneously running for reelection to the Senate. His opponent for the Senate seat, John Tower, ran with the slogan "Double your pleasure, double your fun - vote against Johnson two times, not one!" It didn't help him in the fall of 1960, and he lost by 17%, but he did win the special election. After Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson ran for President in 1964 with running mate Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and beat Barry Goldwater (distinguished conservative Senator from Arizona, who pissed off moderates something fierce at the 1964 Republican Convention when he said "Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you further that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.") and Walter Miller of New York. Goldwater reportedly chose Miller largely because he knew it would irritate Johnson, which seems like a really bad reason to choose a running mate. In any case, Goldwater won just Arizona, his home state, by one point, won the Deep South (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina) easily, and lost the rest of the South narrowly; overall, it was a 51-49 victory, but around half the Southern states Johnson won gave him four or five percent more than Goldwater. However, winning the Deep South was significant, since no Republican had won Alabama or Mississippi since Reconstruction, and Georgia hadn't voted Republican even then. While Goldwater was annihilated, it was clear that the Republican Party was gaining strength in the South, which had never been their strong point. Indeed, apart from Carter's near-complete sweep in 1976, no Republican lost more than three Southern states after 1964. Johnson's defeat of Goldwater, with 486 votes in the Electoral College to Goldwater's 52, made his nickname no longer ironic, which is really kind of a pity.
As his full term wore on and Vietnam became more and more of an unpopular mess, Johnson's popularity sank. He decided not to run for reelection, to the point of not entering any primaries, after his advisors told him it would cause a break in the party. As it was, his Vice President, Humphrey, won the nomination solely on the basis of the party organization supporting him, winning only a couple of primaries. Nixon successfully tied Humphrey to Johnson and Vietnam, which was becoming quite unpopular, though it was heading for peace in late October, an attempt which Nixon sabotaged so he could run as the peace candidate, which Johnson knew about. However, Johnson knew because he had illegal wiretaps on Nixon's phones, so he couldn't use that to damage Nixon without hurting Humphrey far more. In any case, Nixon managed to win the election in 1968 quite narrowly; his second inauguration in 1973 was spoiled by Johnson's death, and the festivities were cut short.
From January 20 to November 16, 1961, the Vice President and the Speaker of the House (Sam Rayburn) were both from Texas. This is the most power any state has ever had in that way, though it's debatable what difference it really made.