“I was the only person who would preserve [Joe Biden’s] legacy,” former Vice President Kamala Harris writes in her new campaign memoir, 107 Days. “At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him — and all the good he had achieved — right under the bus.”

The pose Harris struck and held through her unsuccessful 2024 campaign for the White House is called the good soldier. It’s an important role for vice presidents and vice presidential aspirants to play in modern American politics, and it serves a number of purposes: it helps to drive their shared agenda forward, encourages party cohesion, and reassures party donors, among other things.

Recommended Stories

• Generational fight in budding Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary
• Sorry farmers, Trump's tariff revenue is already spoken for
• Pete Hegseth's command performance

We saw vice presidential nominee Mike Pence play the good soldier by defending an idealized version of Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton‘s running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), in their 2016 debate. Then-Vice President Joe Biden soldiered in when Rep. Paul Ryan made several factual criticisms of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy moves in 2012, declaring the Wisconsin Republican’s assertions “a bunch of malarkey.”

When Dan Quayle, or Al Gore, or Dick Cheney defended their president’s agenda and brushed off the latest scandals and criticisms, and didn’t let interlocutors drive a wedge between them and the presidents that they served, they were good soldiers.

Yet Harris discovered that being a good soldier doesn’t necessarily help when the vice president is contending for the highest elective office in the land. After Biden stumbled badly in a nationally televised debate with Trump last June, Harris went on several shows to make the issue anything other than the horror show Americans who watched had seen unfold before their eyes.

In the best-case scenario, the debate was a cold-driven, not-good, very-bad night for President Biden. In the worst-case scenario, it seemed more like elder abuse of an old man who was losing cognitive function, by those in the White House who wanted to retain their positions of power.

Biden would shortly drop out and endorse Harris. The Democrats rubber-stamped that decision in a “virtual roll call” before they even filled the convention hall. As her party’s nominee, she was asked on a sympathetic program, The View, what she might have done differently as president over the past four years.

“I had prepped for that question; I had notes on it,” Harris writes. For instance, “I had a note that I was a new and different generation. And I had this: But to specifically answer your question, throughout my career, I have worked with Democrats, independents, and Republicans, and I know that great ideas come from all places. If I’m president, I would appoint a Republican to my Cabinet.”

Yet in the moment, she “didn’t say any of that.” Instead, Harris, the good soldier, said there was “not a thing that comes to mind” that she would have done differently.

Harris writes that she continued to talk on, blithely unaware that she’d “just pulled the pin on a hand grenade” that would help to destroy her chances of retaining the White House for her party.

From soldiers to orphans

“Victory has 1,000 fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The saying from antiquity, dusted off and popularized by President John F. Kennedy, aptly summarizes the fate of failed presidential campaigns.

Nobody wants to take the blame for such a large failure. This typically includes the candidate, who will often grasp at other explanations. The distancing often leads to a falling out between former presidents and their former understudies who didn’t quite land the big role.

Gore and President Bill Clinton had what has been characterized as a “shouting match” following the then-vice president’s narrow defeat by then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the 2000 GOP nominee. Bush relied on Cheney as a trusted adviser until the war in Iraq went badly and cost the GOP its congressional majority, whereupon the vice president was largely frozen out of the Oval Office.

Obama reportedly helped shoulder Biden aside twice — first to make way for Hillary Clinton and then to make room for Harris. People close to Biden have suggested that he didn’t drop out earlier because he didn’t feel like Harris was up to the job of beating Trump.

Of course, all of that pales in comparison to Trump’s epic falling out with his first vice president, Pence. Facing defeat in the Electoral College in early 2021, Trump claimed the election had been stolen. He also tried all kinds of stratagems to get around that defeat. Trump’s team solicited alternative electors to muddy the waters and encouraged protests around the country and in Washington, D.C.

One of those protests, at the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, got out of hand, to say the least. The events of that day led to several injuries; one protester being shot fatally; one police officer dying later from a heart attack that certainly wasn’t helped by the day’s stress; the iconic image of a man with a bare upper torso, face paint, and horned bison hat invading the Senate chamber; over 1,000 criminal federal charges; and Trump’s second impeachment.

Trump expected Pence to go along with his post-election efforts to retain the White House, which endangered Pence and many members of Congress in the process. Pence ultimately refused. Trump thus condemned him and treated him as an enemy. Four years later, Pence would run against Trump in the Republican primaries.

Harris saw that divide as a rhetorical slam dunk, proving Trump needed to be stopped.

“There’s one person on that stage who has the endorsement of their vice president, and that’s Joe Biden,” she said after Biden stumbled.

KAMALA HARRIS’S BOOK TOUR: SIX TAKEAWAYS FROM HER RETURN TO THE SPOTLIGHT

But in many smaller ways, Harris peppers her narrative with places where the Biden White House undercut her or failed to support her. For instance, she complains that “When Republicans mischaracterized my role as ‘border czar,’ no one in the White House comms team helped me to effectively push back and explain what I had really been tasked to do, nor to highlight any of the progress I had achieved.”

Trump’s second vice president, JD Vance, is young (40) and has apparent ambitions for the White House. On the campaign trail and in office, he has played the good soldier well. Vance is the official whom Trump could count on to go to Europe to quite literally make the leaders cry. But Trump demands a lot from his supporters and doesn’t always reciprocate. If Vance stumbles in his pursuit of the Oval Office, we shouldn’t be surprised to see a future falling out.

Jeremy Lott is the author of several books, including The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.