As Donald Trump seeks a vice president for his 2024 presidential run, he could do far worse than look at J. Danforth "Dan" Quayleas a model. Quayle deserves study for two reasons, one practical and one cautionary. First, he balanced the ticket and compensated for his running mate's weaknesses. Second, he is a warning that if the selection process and announcement are handled poorly, the decision could be needlessly damaging for all players.
Quayle was born in Indianapolis in 1947, the grandson of newspaper magnate Eugene Pulliam. He grew up in Indiana and Phoenix and attended the Indiana University law school, which his wife, Marilyn, was also attending when they met. They married in 1972. Ambitious and personable, Quayle ran for and won a seat in Congress in 1976, at age 29. In 1980, he defeated longtime incumbent Birch Bayh in a run for Senate, buoyed in part by Ronald Reagan's landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter.
Entering the Senate at 33, Quayle was dubbed a rising star. He was young, handsome, and articulate, with an easygoing manner that earned him friends on both sides of the partisan divide. He was also a workhorse. He quickly became an expert in both missile defense and job-training programs, showing knowledge of both national security and domestic policy. His moment arrived in 1988, when Republicans nominated George H.W. Bush for president. After eight years as Reagan's vice president, Bush, a World War II pilot with deep roots in the GOP establishment, wanted a running mate who represented the conservative movement, the heartland, and the next generation. Quayle, 41 and already a 12-year veteran of Congress, was his choice.
To the extent that people know anything more about the story, it is usually the following: Quayle was on the receiving end of one of the most devastating lines ever leveled in a vice presidential debate. His opponent, Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, famously answered Quayle's assertion that he served for as long as John F. Kennedy in Congress with the premeditated, and decidedly cruel, rejoinder: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
Besides running into the buzz saw of the Washington establishment, Quayle is remembered as vice president for getting caught under the treads of pop culture, with every blunder or misstep obsessed on and magnified. In May 1992, Quayle criticized TV character Murphy Brown's decision to have a child out of wedlock, for which he was widely mocked by elites. Then in June 1992, Quayle misspelled "potato," reading "potatoe" as it was written on the card he was given by a teacher, when visiting a school spelling bee, leading to more mockery. Given such adverse coverage, some urged Bush to drop Quayle from the ticket in 1992. Bush refused and lost the election to Bill Clinton.
Of course, reality is far more nuanced than partisan media coverage. Quayle was, in fact, a good vice president. He represented the administration well externally, prepared for engagements, was highly accessible to the media, and was thoroughly versed in policy. He was well liked inside the administration and much respected by conservatives outside the administration. Perhaps most importantly, Bush liked and trusted him, which explains why Quayle remained on the 1992 ticket. Quayle then waged a consistently strong campaign and put in a spirited, effective performance against Al Gore in the vice presidential debate.
One lesson presidents should learn from Quayle's story is to choose a vice president who will select a top-notch staff. Quayle did that. As presidential historian Stephen Knott told me, "His team as VP, as you know, was first rate. ... [Quayle] was not a political figure who resented those who were smarter than him — he brought them into his circle." Top hires included national security adviser Carnes Lord and chief of staff Bill Kristol, who both had Ivy League doctorates.
Quayle also read widely, and he was always open to learning new ideas. He read Paul Johnson's Modern Times, a history of the 20th century that Quayle called "the best book I've certainly read." He also read biographies of Douglas MacArthur and Winston Churchill and Richard Nixon's book Leaders, recounting meetings that Nixon had with prominent 20th century figures such as David Ben-Gurion, Nikita Khrushchev, and Zhou Enlai. In addition to learning from his reading, Quayle brushed up on policy during the presidential transition by meeting with the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, Nixon, and Edward Teller. As vice president, Quayle stayed in touch with top conservative thinkers and columnists Irving Kristol, William Safire, and George Will. These interactions helped inform his thinking and his efforts as the Bush administration's liaison to the conservative movement.
His preparation helped him in his job of representing the administration. In December 1989, for example, Quayle got great marks for a speech he gave at Yeshiva University. In discussing the speech, the liberal, and very arch, New Republic noted that the speech, which referred to Albert Einstein, the Talmud, and George Washington's famous letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, "went over brilliantly," noting that Quayle received "a prolonged standing ovation."
Quayle's Yeshiva University speech also had an important policy purpose. Quayle announced for the first time the Bush administration's intent to repeal the United Nations's infamous "Zionism is racism" resolution. As the New York Times's A.M. Rosenthal wrote, in launching the repeal efforts, Quayle had "honored his country, himself, the supportive Bush-Baker diplomacy — and given the nations a chance to undo a great wrong." The Bush administration successfully moved to repeal the resolution two years later, in December 1991, with Quayle heavily involved in the lobbying on behalf of the successful repeal.
Quayle's efforts gave him credibility with conservatives. Gary Bauer, head of the Family Research Council, said in 1990, "There is now a sense that Quayle is a force to be reckoned with within the administration." Quayle earned points outside the conservative world as well. Liberal scientist Bruce Murray was impressed with Quayle's knowledge of space policy, saying after a dinner with him that "Quayle has done a surprisingly good job."
Quayle got great marks within the administration as well. Bush granted him walk-in privileges, which meant that he could walk into the Oval Office whenever he wanted. He also had lunch with Bush weekly and participated in daily national security and agenda meetings, as well as regular policy and strategy meetings with Bush. Bush did not include Quayle out of a sense of obligation. He genuinely liked his vice president. Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater, who was close to Bush, said of Quayle during the administration that "the president and his wife are crazy about him."
Quayle had other fans besides the president. White House chief of staff Sam Skinner acknowledged that Quayle had a "perception problem" but still thought he should be heir apparent to Bush. Skinner described his reasoning as follows: "No. 1, his basic values are right. No. 2, his political judgment is solid. No. 3, he is not wrapped up in the trappings of office or those things that would cloud his judgment. And No. 4, while young ... he has had an experience that is very significant."
The "perception problem" was a genuine challenge, but it also meant that the actual Quayle caught people off guard. While still in the Senate, analyst Alan Ehrenhalt put Quayle on a list of most underrated senators. During the administration, New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman called Quayle "vastly underestimated." The Washington Post'sDavid Broder undertook what was expected to be a hit piece but found that "six months of reporting on Quayle revealed [he is] a more complex and resourceful politician than the comic-strip caricature that emerged during the 1988 campaign." And years later, Knott, who interviewed Quayle for the Miller Center on the Presidential Oral History Program, recalled that he "was 'blown away' by Quayle within minutes after our interview began," adding that Quayle "was as sharp as could be." According to Knott, this interview was one that "revealed to me just how often the standard 'take' on a public figure was off the mark."
So with all this positive press and these good reviews from colleagues, what went wrong? Why did Quayle develop such a negative reputation? And what is the lesson from Quayle for a president looking for a running mate?
Much of Quayle's problem started with the selection and announcement process. The assumption within the campaign and the expectations from the media were that Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, the runner-up to Bush in the primaries, was going to be the pick. (Interestingly, Trump also offered himself up as a running mate at the time.) To the extent there was any preparation for the vice presidential announcement, the Bush campaign prepared for it for to be Dole. Dole was a known player, someone who had been in Republican politics for three decades. There was no need to introduce him to the public.
Quayle, however, was a different sort of animal. As someone who was up and coming, he was, by definition, not yet widely known. Having the same outreach plan for both men made no sense. Quayle needed his own outreach and announcement plan, something that the Trump campaign should keep in mind whenever it is making its vice presidential announcement. It may have multiple possibilities for who might be the nominee, but each one should have his or her own tailored plan.
A second problem Quayle faced was a lack of backing from within the campaign. As Knott put it, "There's no doubt in my mind that James Baker and other Bush 41 cronies who didn't want Quayle on the ticket sabotaged him from the start, including when he had to fight his way through the crowd to be introduced as Poppy Bush's running mate." What this means is that whoever Trump picks as a running mate will have to have the support of both Trump and his senior campaign advisers. This is hard to pull off, especially in a famously fractious Trump world. However, Trump's new campaign team seems to be doing a good job at tamping down internal conflict and showing discipline throughout the operation. Perhaps it can do a better job with the 2024 nominee than the Bush campaign did in keeping the long knives away from Quayle. If the nominee is undercut by leaks and bad-mouthing in the press, he or she could face the same fate as Quayle.
A third problem that Quayle faced was bad luck. He gave his Brown speech in May 1992. As Quayle recalled in his oral history, the Brown comments made little noise initially in the New York Times and the Washington Post. According to Quayle, while the speech made the front pages, "the Murphy Brown reference was down at about the eighth paragraph because it was on values and they could see that we were going to put values front and center in the campaign." The print media saw it as no big deal, but, Quayle said, "The electronic media were the ones that just went ballistic. I think they felt that somehow I was attacking television journalists, and they're so sensitive that they would make that stretch, that somehow this is an attack on them." The story would have likely blown over in a normal world, but the electronic media were both newly important — CNN became a phenomenon during the 1990 Gulf War — and hypersensitive since the fictional newscaster Brown was one of theirs. As Quayle recalled of the electronic media, "They're the ones who just blew this thing way out of proportion, and the print media ... caught up in the next couple of days."
Compounding Quayle's bad luck was the "potatoe" incident, which took place in June 1992. The tone of the coverage went from "how dare he?" to "how dare someone who can't spell 'potato' lecture us?" with the attendant late-night comedian mockery to follow. Even though the Atlantic ran a cover story called "Dan Quayle was right" on single-parent families, the story didn't appear until April 1993, by which time Bush and Quayle had become private citizens.
With the Trump pick looming and in the shadow of President Joe Biden's misstep in his selection of the unpopular and awkward Kamala Harris as vice president, it is worth looking to the Quayle episode for suggestions on how to proceed.
The lessons for the Trump team in looking into vice presidential picks seem clear. Be sure that there is an appropriate rollout plan as well as alignment within the campaign from the outset. Bad luck is always a possibility in politics, but handling things right, especially knowing you will face partisan media, could mitigate problems. It sure would have made a difference for Dan Quayle.
Former senior White House aide Tevi Troy is a contributing writer at the Washington Examiner, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Institute, and a senior scholar at Yeshiva University's Straus Center. He is the author of five books on the presidency, including the forthcoming The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between American Titans of Industry and Commanders in Chief.