Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

It’s the topic that will dominate the next three weeks of political coverage—and if history is any guide, it may not matter much at all. “It” is the veepstakes, when the presidential nominees announce their running mates.

At noon on January 20, 2017, the winner of November’s presidential election will be sworn in. On that day, Donald Trump would, at age 70, become the oldest president at inauguration in American history; Hillary Clinton, who turns 69 just weeks before the election, would be the second oldest, behind only Ronald Reagan. This time, it’s easy to imagine that the choice of presidential running mate could really matter.


But for all the feverish pre-choice speculation and post-choice analysis, there’s a good case to be made that the vice-presidential nominee makes a marginal difference at best. Earlier this year, two academics argued in this space that the running mate almost never delivers his or her home state. The strength other picks may have had—Al Gore underscoring Bill Clinton’s “future vs. past” theme in 1992, Dick Cheney’s “gravitas” for George W. Bush in 2000—is best confined to the “who knows?” realm (it’s difficult to argue a counterfactual).

It’s even hard to argue that the less auspicious choices had any real impact: Spiro Agnew’s foot-in-mouth disease, Dan Quayle’s deer-in-the-headlights vacuity, the sketchy business dealings of Geraldine Ferraro’s husband, and Sarah Palin’s cognitive challenges were footnotes at most—none of them ultimately helped to decide the election. Even the most disastrous VP choice—George McGovern’s pick of Senator Thomas Eagleton, who had to be jettisoned off the ticket after his mental health history was revealed—didn’t mean much in the context of Richard Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972.

There is, however, one choice of a running mate that very likely changed the course of history—one where any choice among three strong contenders would have led to three radically different trajectories for the nation.

If you’re looking for the single most consequential vice-presidential choice in modern times—one that perhaps justifies our quadrennial obsessing over the veepstakes—look back to the Democratic convention of 1944.

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As the 1944 convention neared, there was no real doubt about who the Democratic presidential nominee would be. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had faced serious opposition in 1940 when he broke the “no third term” tradition that began with George Washington, but in the midst of a global war, there was little appetite for ousting the commander in chief. Besides, the Republicans had nominated 42-year old New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who brought to the campaign his reputation as a liberal reformer and had picked popular Ohio Governor John Bricker as his running mate. The GOP ticket was formidable; FDR, the Democratic powers thought, was the only candidate who could stop them.

That much, they agreed on. There was, however, deep division over who Roosevelt should choose as his running mate—and for a reason that far transcended the normal political arguments: FDR was dying.

It was a conviction held by a wide variety of people who had come in contact with Roosevelt—none of which was revealed to the public.

FDR was dying. In choosing his running mate, they were picking the next president. And the public had no idea.

In March 1944, Dr. Howard Bruenn examined the president at the request of FDR’s physician. Bruenn wrote that Roosevelt was “a drawn, gray, and exhausted individual, who became short of breath on the very slightest exertion. The examination of his eyes revealed some changes due to arteriosclerosis and hypertension.” Other medical experts agreed. In early July, a few weeks before the national convention, a team of doctors studied Roosevelt. One of those doctors, Frank Lahey, wrote a memo to FDR’s primary-care physician, stating flatly: “I did not believe that if Mr. Roosevelt were elected president again, he had the physical capacity to complete a term. … It was my opinion that over the four years of another term with its burdens, he would again have heart failure and be unable to complete it.”

Democratic political insiders privately shared that view. When Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Hannegan and his wife visited the White House in June 1944, they were so appalled by the president’s health that the couple spent anguished hours in conversation about it. As the convention drew closer, the Democratic power brokers knew what the public did not: in selecting Roosevelt’s running mate, they were almost certainly choosing the next president of the United States.

Why, though, was there any choice to be made? Four years earlier, Henry Wallace had been put on the ticket at the insistence of FDR himself; indeed, Roosevelt was so adamant about running with his then-secretary of agriculture that when serious opposition arose—he was too committed to civil rights, too liberal for more conservative Democrats, too “enthusiastic” about spiritualism—the only way Roosevelt got him on the ticket was by publicly threatening that he’d otherwise decline the presidential nomination.

By 1944, Vice President Wallace was a hero to both organized labor and the increasingly powerful African-American communities in America’s biggest cities. But among the Democratic elite, opposition to him was even more fervent than it had been in 1940.

Wallace’s full-throated denunciations of segregation inflamed opposition throughout the South, angering a vital bloc of the Democratic coalition. His leftist impulses led him to answer TIME-LIFE publisher Henry Luce’s 1941 essay about “the American century” with a speech in which Wallace proclaimed it “the century of the common man,” arguing that “no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. … there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.” For Democratic insiders like Hannegan, DNC Treasurer Ed Pauley, Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly and others, Wallace was simply too undisciplined and unreliable to occupy the Oval Office.

At one point, the clearest alternative to Wallace was James Byrnes, who’d served in the House, Senate, and on the Supreme Court before being plucked by Roosevelt to head the Office of War Stabilization—in effect making him, in Roosevelt’s own words, “assistant president.”

But to put it mildly, there were problems with Byrnes. In his role as “assistant president,” he’d angered labor with edicts about wage increases. He was a Catholic who’d changed his faith when he married an Episcopalian, and party insiders worried that his conversion from Catholicism would offend white ethnics in cities throughout the North. And Byrnes’ views on race were fully reflective of his South Carolina roots: He’d once opposed federal anti-lynching laws on the grounds that lynching was an effective means to “hold in check the Negro in the South.”

It’s a measure of the times that these views did not seem immediately disqualifying to either the Democratic bosses or President Roosevelt—who more than once assured Byrnes that he was his choice for running mate. Of course, FDR being FDR, he’d also assured Henry Wallace that he was the favored candidate, going so far as to write a public note—“If I were a delegate,” I would vote for Wallace—an “endorsement” that fell so far short of enthusiasm that it was labeled the “kiss of death” letter.

Just before the Democratic convention, an assortment of partisan kingmakers met with Roosevelt at the White House to argue that neither Wallace nor Byrnes would be acceptable running mates. What finally persuaded Roosevelt to abandon Byrnes was the implacable opposition of labor leader Sidney Hillman—whose veto power throughout FDR’s tenure gave rise to the Republican gibe that when it came to policy, FDR’s rule was “clear it with Sidney.”

The president seemed to sign off on their compromise choice: Missouri Senator Harry Truman.

Kingmakers met with FDR, and convinced him that neither Wallace nor Byrnes would be acceptable running mates.



He signed off on their compromise choice: Truman.

But Roosevelt’s preference almost didn’t matter. Wallace had the support of a majority of delegates, as well as the overwhelming majority of Democrats around the nation. In 1944, a Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Democrats supported Wallace as FDR’s running mate, while the relatively unknown Truman earned support from just 2 percent.

On Thursday, July 20, the second night of the Democratic National Convention, a huge pro-Wallace demonstration erupted. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, one of the most liberal members of Congress, tried to fight his way to the podium to put Wallace’s name in nomination—a move that likely would’ve resulted in a stampede of votes. But the chair of the convention, Philadelphia Mayor David Lawrence, suddenly called for a voice vote to adjourn for the day. Despite the clear overwhelming vocal majority of “nays!”, Lawrence gaveled the convention to a close with Senator Pepper just a few feet away from the microphones.

By the next day, the all-night efforts of Hannegan, Chicago Mayor Kelly, Bronx County Democratic boss Ed Flynn and others had paid off: Although Wallace led on the first ballot with 429.5 votes (Truman had 319.5), he was significantly short of a majority. By the second ballot, the rush to Truman was on.

That November, the Roosevelt-Truman ticket won 432 electoral votes. In April 1945, less than three months after he began his fourth term, FDR was dead of a stroke. Truman was now the president.

Byrnes went on to become Truman’s secretary of State and then governor of South Carolina, where he adamantly opposed school integration while trying to tamp down the violent responses of the Ku Klux Klan.

Wallace became Truman’s secretary of Commerce, but after breaking sharply with Truman’s Cold War policies, the president fired him. In 1948, Wallace ran against Truman as the presidential nominee of the Progressive Party, an organization that came under the increasing control of the U.S. Communist Party; he received 2.5 percent of the popular vote. Four years later, Wallace wrote an essay, Where I Was Wrong, in which he acknowledged he’d been naive about Joseph Stalin’s crimes, the nature of the Soviet Union, and the USSR’s international intentions.

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Just imagine if Claude Pepper had gotten to that convention rostrum in 1944 and put Wallace’s name into nomination: The United States would have likely faced the postwar period with a president who, by his own later admission, was dangerously naive about the Soviets. Revisionist historians, filmmaker Oliver Stone among them, suggest there would have been no Cold War. But given what we know about Soviet intentions and the power of Communist parties in Western Europe, it’s also conceivable the U.S. might have adopted an appeasement policy toward Stalin’s expansionist aims, and, post-Wallace, faced a continent dominated by Moscow all the way to the English Channel.

Imagine President Wallace, a Soviet sympathizer. Or President Byrnes, an all-out segregationist.



Instead, we got President Harry Truman.

Or imagine that Roosevelt had somehow persuaded labor to sign off on Byrnes. What would it have meant for an all-out segregationist to have been in the Oval Office just as the postwar demand for racial justice was beginning to build? Would the 1948 Democratic convention have approved the strong civil rights platform that began to resolve the historic intraparty tension between the liberal North and the segregationist South? Without Truman’s executive order that year, would America’s Armed Forces have desegregated? It’s easy to imagine that under a Byrnes presidency, the Republican Party—then without a Southern presence and with ardent civil-rights proponents in its front ranks—could have emerged as the party of choice for African-Americans for generations.

So let the veepstakes obsession proceed; let countless dead trees and pixels be spent in pursuit of the Gingriches and Kaines, the Pences and Castros, the Christies and the Warrens. Maybe this time, the running mate will make a clear, measurable difference, but it’s just hard to imagine that it will come close to the first-rank impact the second-place choice had more than seven decades ago.