Customer Reviews

Vice Presidents: Biographies of the 45 Men Who Have Held the Second Highest Office in the United States

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It's hard to find good, thorough and easy-to-use reference works on VPs, and this book fills a needed gap--however...Any reference work is valuable only to the extent that it is accurate, and some big blunders make me nervous here. Andrew Johnson is inexplicably given the middle name Jackson. Has anyone ever heard of Andrew Jackson Johnson? I've done some published work on the Presidency myself, and I can find absolutely no corroboration for this moniker. The author certainly doesn't bother to source it, or much else unfortunately. There was a story, evidently contemporary with Johnson's career, that he was named Andrew after Jackson, but scholarly consensus is that this tale is wholly apocryphal, easily invented for a 19th century Tennessee politician. Since Johnson was born in 1808, in North Carolina, and before Jackson had risen to any particualr prominence, the likelihood that a he was named after the General is slight. Unless she had new info that would be quite w! ! orth sourcing, Waldrup just seems overly willing to repeat a good story as if it were fact. Of course this is unacceptable for a reference work. Then there is the matter of the near-full page portrait of William Henry Harrison (who was only briefly a president, and never a vice)which the book tells the reader is in fact John Tyler. Again, very bad for any work, let alone a reference. Who's on a $20 dollar bill, Martin Van Buren? Don't they have editors in these houses?