Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s account of tension with former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in her new book about last year’s campaign to be published Tuesday is revealing, intriguing and even sensational. But it is not uncommon.
American history is replete with partnerships between presidents and vice presidents that broke down in mutual acrimony. In modern times, in fact, the relationships between the past five presidents and their vice presidents all turned notably sour by the end in ways that had lasting consequences.
It probably should come as no surprise that presidents and vice presidents are at times frenemies. They are often party rivals who team up out of political expediency to win an election, much as Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris ran against each other for the Democratic nomination in 2020 before he tapped her as his running mate. Inevitably, both want the same job, but only one can have it at a time.
In her book, “107 Days,” Ms. Harris touches on the strain with the president during their four years together — and its revelations may exacerbate them. Ms. Harris spoke with Mr. Biden recently, according to a person familiar with the conversation, to give him a heads-up before an excerpt from the book ran in The Atlantic in which she wrote that it was “recklessness” for Democrats to let Mr. Biden decide to run for a second term without weighing in. But the excerpt generated angry blowback from Mr. Biden’s loyalists and it was not clear if the two have spoken since.
Here is a short history of the fraught relationships between presidents and vice presidents.
The Early Years
Under the original Constitution, the vice president was not the running mate of the president but the second-place finisher in the Electoral College, making competition inevitable. In 1796, Vice President John Adams was elected the nation’s second president by beating Thomas Jefferson, who then became his vice president.
For four years, the theoretical partners in governing represented the two competing factions of the age, taking opposing positions on domestic and foreign policy. Jefferson even secretly wrote the Kentucky Resolution protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were signed by Adams. The two then ran against each other again in 1800, and this time Jefferson won.
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