Harry Truman once quipped that the job of the vice president is to “go to weddings and funerals.” But that no-heavy-lifting approach went out the window when Walter Mondale took office as Jimmy Carter’s vice president in 1977. “Mondale really transformed the vice presidency from a job that didn’t amount to much to the job it is today, which is a very consequential part of the government,” says Saint Louis University School of Law professor Joel Goldstein, author of The Modern American Vice Presidency: The Transformation of a Political Institution . In a statement, Carter said that Mondale “had excellent ideas about how to make the vice presidency a full-time and productive job. He had sound judgment and strong beliefs and never was timid about presenting them.”
Goldstein says that Mondale—a two-term U.S. senator who was the first vice president to have an office inside the White House—was fully versed on all of the president’s policies. For instance, Mondale convinced Carter to reform the government’s intelligence-gathering activities and to file a brief in support of affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , a 1978 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of affirmative action in graduate school admissions.
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