Putting the “Vice” in “Vice President”

Silly me – I thought it was a big deal that Dick Cheney shot a guy in the face. But after a little research, I discovered that the office of Vice President has always gone hand-in-hand with mayhem and violence. You won’t read about any of this on the Internet (until now), so let me again state that a librarian and a subtle $20 bill are your best research tools. Let’s hit the history books:

July 11, 1804. Aaron Burr shoots Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in New Jersey in a duel. Hamilton dies, but gets the consolation prize of the $10 bill and a commemorative rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike.

April 20, 1812. George Clinton fakes his own death, with the help of a wax dummy and a compliant Washington press corps. He goes into hiding for 150 years, then reemerges as the leader of the P–Funk All-Stars.

1835. Martin Van Buren, popularly known as "Old Kinderhook", terrorizes Baltimore in the summer of 1835 with a spate of grisly killings. He carves the initials "O.K." on the forehead of each victim. The suspicious nature of the time led people to start asking each other "Are you O.K.?"; the phrase stuck.

September 17, 1848. Polk’s VP George Dallas, fed up with the slow rate of hangings in the United States, formed the first and most efficient vigilante squad in the nation. They recorded 345 executions in just over a month; Dallas was honored by having a major city in Texas named after him.

April 18, 1853. William Rufus Devane King, VP for only a month, dies in Cuba under mysterious circumstances. It is later revealed that he was trying to foment a revolution in Havana, and was one of the masterminds who eventually got Fidel Castro into power in the spring of 1855.

March 1, 1873. VP Schuyler Colfax is gunned down by Secret Service agents for taking a shot at Ulysses S. Grant; it turns out Grant placed a bottle of whiskey (empty) on his head and dared Colfax to shoot it off.

May 14, 1901. VP Theodore Roosevelt, on a camping trip in the Arizona Territory, awakens from a fever dream and mistakes his entourage for enemy soldiers from San Juan Hill. He silently dispatches 27 handlers with nothing more than a tentpole; when asked for comment, his quip "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was recorded for the ages.

August 2, 1923. Former VP Hannibal Hamlin, who served under Lincoln and died in 1891, is moved from his resting place in a Bangor, Maine, cemetery to an ancient Indian burial ground, for some reason. He instantly zombifies and starts attacking the townspeople before retreating into seclusion. Some people think that entire region of Maine is haunted, and there may be big bucks there for the storyteller who can put some of the grisly tales on paper.

March 4, 1933. On Inauguration Day, John Nance Garner (a Texan) learns how limited his Vice-Presidential duties are and attacks incoming President Franklin Roosevelt with a hatchet. Roosevelt has difficulty walking for the rest of his days.

November 22, 1963. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, from a grassy knoll in Dallas, shoots John F. Kennedy in the head. His role in the Kramer/Newman/Keith Hernandez spitting incident is still the subject of controversy.

September 4, 1973. Tired of people making rude anagrams of his name, Spiro Agnew climbs up a water tower in Virginia and starts randomly firing into the town below. This proves to be too much for even the Nixon Administration, and Agnew is forced to resign a month later.

August 7, 1974. Gerald Ford goes into the Oval Office, but this time with Luca Brasi. He puts a gun to Nixon’s head and says, "Either your brains or your signature are going to be on this letter of resignation." True story. It’s my government, Kay, it’s not me.

December 22, 1999. Al Gore, inventor of the Internet, decides that his creation has gotten out of control and unleashes a series of computer viruses and worms that cripple the fledgling World Wide Web and plunge American back into the Stone Age.

February 11, 2006. Dick Cheney shoots a guy in the face.