Vice-President
In an upset victory, Truman and Barkley were elected over their Republican opponents by over 2 million votes, and Democrats regained small majorities in both houses of Congress. Seventy years old at the time of his inauguration, he was the oldest man ever elected vice-president. During his tenure, he was familiarly known as "Veep", a name suggested by his grandson, Stephen M. Truitt, as an alternative to the more formal "Mr. Vice President". The nickname was picked up by the press, but his successor, Richard Nixon, declined to continue using it, saying it belonged to Barkley alone.
Despite their previous differences, Truman and Barkley agreed on nearly every major issue. Because of Barkley's extensive legislative experience, Truman insisted on his attendance at meetings of the president's cabinet, an unprecedented request. Barkley also chaired the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and regularly attended Truman's weekly legislative conferences. When Congress approved the creation of the National Security Council, they included the vice-president as a member. Truman also used Barkley as the administration's primary spokesperson; in the first eight months of his term, he made 40 major speeches touting administration positions. Because of the vice-president's increased visibility, Truman commissioned the United States Army Institute of Heraldry to create of a seal and flag for the office. He also advocated raising the vice-president's salary and increasing his expense budget. In his biographical sketch of Barkley, Mark O. Hatfield noted that he was "the last to preside regularly over the Senate, the last not to have an office in or near the White House, the last to identify more with the legislative than the executive branch".
Despite the Democrats' advantage in the Senate, conservative Democrats united with the Republican minority to oppose much of Truman's agenda, most notably, civil rights legislation. This was the case in Barkley's most notable ruling as the Senate's presiding officer, which occurred in March 1949. Illinois Senator Scott W. Lucas introduced an amendment to Senate Rule XXII designed to broaden the number of instances in which a cloture vote was in order. Lucas proposed the change to enable a cloture vote to end a ten-day filibuster that prevented a vote on an administration-backed civil rights bill. Conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats opposed both the civil rights bill and Lucas' rule change, and they immediately took up a filibuster against the rule change. Lucas asked for a cloture vote on the rule change, but opponents of the change contended that the motion was out of order. Before ruling, Barkley studied the original debate on Rule XXII, which also governed this cloture motion. From this study, he ruled Lucas' motion in order. Georgia Senator Richard Russell, Jr. appealed the chair's decision, and the chamber voted 46–41 to overrule Barkley. Sixteen Republicans, mostly from the Northeast and West Coast states, voted to sustain Barkley's ruling, while most of the Southern Democrats voted with the majority of Republicans to overrule him.
When Barkley attended a party thrown by Clark Clifford on the White House yacht on July 8, 1949, he met Jane (Rucker) Hadley, a widow approximately half his age from St. Louis, Missouri. Hadley was attending the party as a guest of the Cliffords, and after her return to St. Louis, Barkley continued to keep contact with her via letters and his frequent plane trips. The courtship between the two garnered national attention, and on November 18, 1949, they married in the Singleton Memorial Chapel of St. John's Methodist Church in St. Louis. Barkley remains the only U.S. vice-president to marry while in office.
Barkley's most notable tie-breaking vote as vice-president was cast on October 4, 1949, to save the Young-Russell Amendment which set a 90% parity on the price of cotton, wheat, corn, rice, and peanuts. The vote put him in opposition to his friends, Scott Lucas and Clint Anderson, but was consistent with his promise during the 1948 campaign to support such a measure.
In 1949, Barkley was chosen to give the commencement address at Emory University. He also received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at the ceremony, which was the first event ever televised from Emory. The following year, the university's debating society renamed itself the Barkley Forum in honor of the vice-president. The university also created the Alben W. Barkley Distinguished Chair in its Department of Political Science.
Barkley tried to mentor his immediate successors as floor leader – Scott Lucas and Ernest McFarland – by teaching them to work with the vice-president as he had during Truman's brief tenure in that office, but cooperation between the executive branch and the legislature had became more difficult due to Truman's unpopularity. After the United States' entry into the Korean War, Truman focused on foreign affairs, leaving Barkley to campaign on behalf of Democratic candidates in the 1950 midterm elections. He traveled over 19,000 miles (31,000 km) and spoke in almost half of the states during the campaign. Feeling ill when he arrived home in Paducah on election day, he contacted a doctor, who diagnosed him with a "tired heart". On his return to Washington, D.C., he spent several days in Naval Hospital, but was able to preside over the Senate session that opened November 28, 1950. Although Democrats lost seats in both houses during the election, they maintained their majorities in each.
On March 1, 1951 – 38 years to the day from his first day in Congress – Barkley's fellow congressmen presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of his long tenure as a legislator. Truman surprised Barkley by appearing on the Senate floor to present both the medallion and a gavel fashioned from timbers used to renovate the White House after the burning of Washington in 1817.
In November 1951, Barkley and his wife traveled to Kimpo Air Base in Seoul and ate Thanksgiving dinner with U.S. troops engaged in the Korean War. Days later, on his seventy-fourth birthday, Barkley traveled to the front lines on a fact-finding mission for the president. On his return, he helped pass Truman's plan to replace 64 Internal Revenue Service collectors with 25 deputy regional directors. On June 4, 1952, he cast another notable tie-breaking vote to save Wage Stabilization Board.
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