In 1956, the intrigue was historic. The most serious assault that Nixon faced came from within his own party as Eisenhower, his aides, and other Republicans – prodded by the vice president’s perceived vulnerability – schemed to replace the 42-year-old southern Californian on the ticket.  

Nixon parried the blows, but the effort left him in what his doctor called “a deadly state of frustration.” He turned to pills and alcohol. At times, he was so anxious that he dared not make a speech or deal with the simplest political chores, like reading the office mail. 

He survived. It is incredibly difficult, in modern times, to dump an incumbent vice president from the ticket. And scary forecasts of presidential debility are not the potent weapons that the opposition party might desire. The Democrats tried hard in 1956, especially once Eisenhower faced a second medical crisis – an emergency operation to remove a segment of a blocked intestine. Stevenson raised the specter of “Nixonland,” a land of “slander and scare; a land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” 

Tough stuff – but brought on, no doubt, by a state of desperation. These were the happy days of peace and prosperity for many. The voters did not focus on Ike’s age, or illnesses – or Nixon’s inexperience. Eisenhower and Nixon carried 41 states, winning 457 electoral votes and more than 57 percent of the popular vote. 

In the modern age, since World War II, the vice presidency has grown in importance, as presidents like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama gave serious duties to Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden. Even the perceived lightweight of the post-World War II era – Dan Quayle – was re-nominated by the Republicans in 1992. 

But, if it is an American political parlor game to speculate about a president dumping a lusterless vice president, it hasn’t been done by an elected president since World War II – when Franklin Roosevelt conspired to prompt the Democratic convention to replace the left-leaning visionary Henry Wallace with the more suitably centrist Harry Truman in 1944. 

FDR’s declining health was a tangible issue for Wallace’s ideological enemies that year. “You are not nominating a vice president of the United States, but a president,” the party treasurer and oilman Ed Paley, recalled telling delegates. “Almost any minute, there might not be any Roosevelt anymore.” 

But Wallace may have survived if the foxy Roosevelt – looking to unite the party in the race against Thomas Dewey, the popular Republican governor of New York – had not deftly and covertly maneuvered to undercut the liberal wing. “He never used the word ‘succession,’ but cared enough about qualifications for the presidency to eliminate Wallace,” wrote Roosevelt biographer Joseph Lelyveld. 

The vice presidency has its own famous and peculiar drawbacks, but it is a position of national stature and a ledge from which to build a constituency among the party’s base. These elements – and Nixon’s native cunning – allowed him to persevere in 1956.  

As Irwin F. Gellman, a dean of Nixon scholars, notes, Eisenhower was a superb military leader, organizer, and manager – but an unschooled politician. Nixon, who had forged a reputation stalking domestic communists after World War II, had been presented to Ike by his Republican captains at the 1952 convention as someone who would bring the ticket strength in California, appease the conservative base, and appeal to the younger generation of veterans, who had filled the ranks in the wartime crusade against Germany and Japan. 

The gap between the president and his vice president was formidable, however. During World War II, Eisenhower had trafficked with giants like Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Marshall, Bernard Montgomery, Douglas MacArthur, and Chester Nimitz. Nixon, a young Navy lieutenant in the South Pacific theater, was desperate to be seen as a partner of his great hero, but Ike viewed him as staff.  

Nixon’s insecurity, inexperience, and native mean streak troubled Eisenhower. When the president announced, in early 1956, that he would indeed run for re-election, he was – predictably – asked by the White House press corps if Nixon would join him on the ticket. Eisenhower, pointedly, did not say yes. He declared, instead, that Nixon would have to chart his own course. Privately, he told Nixon that the vice president would do better in a second Eisenhower term by getting administrative experience as Secretary of Defense, or in another high-ranking Cabinet slot. 

Neither man was a fool. Secretary of Defense was a fine job, and there was logic in Eisenhower’s argument: William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover had used cabinet posts to rise to the presidency, but the last vice president to succeed a healthy president was Martin Van Buren in 1837. But Ike and Dick knew that the

Privately, Nixon griped to pals and advisors that Eisenhower “never liked me. He’s always been against me.” 

Senator John F. Kennedy, then a friend of Nixon, was stunned by Eisenhower’s behavior. The president, Kennedy told an advisor, “won’t stand by anybody…. He is terribly cold and terribly vain. In fact, he is a shit.” 

Nixon resolved to fight. If Ike was going to ditch him, the vice president would not make it easy. For three months, as Eisenhower temporized, Nixon endured “absolutely indescribable anguish,” their mutual friend and aide, Bryce Harlow, recalled. And Irwin Gellman recounted how Nixon was in and out of hospital beds, fleeing Washington, relying on alcohol and pills: uppers and downers.  

Nixon, however, had standing with the party’s conservative base – which was demonstrated when a campaign orchestrated by his allies yielded tens of thousands of write-in votes in the New Hampshire and Oregon primaries. Party leaders brought Eisenhower and Nixon together, and the White House announced that the team was intact. The “dump-Nixon” effort was reduced to a simmer, and was ultimately extinguished at the Republican convention.  

Aside from Henry Wallace, the only other recent veep to be dumped by a president was the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, who had served as Gerald Ford’s vice president. Ideology, not age, was once again the issue. Unlike Nixon, Rockefeller did not have strong, forged ties with the party’s conservative activists when he came under fire in 1975 and 1976, and it cost “Rocky” his job.  

Both Rockefeller and President Gerald Ford were appointed officials, serving out the terms of Nixon and his disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, in the wake of Watergate. They could not ignore a forceful primary challenge launched by the conservative Ronald Reagan. 

Ford and Rockefeller – an uncomfortable second banana – agreed they should part, notes scholar Richard Norton Smith, and Ford selected Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his running mate. Rocky put his best face on the situation: “Having spent the last two years as vice president,” he told the capital’s Alfalfa Club, “I think it’s time I returned to public life.”