What They All Do at a Cabinet Meeting
President Warren Harding's 1921-23 custom of regularly inviting his vice president to Cabinet meetings was a "well-meant innovation" that "will never be followed," declared a 1925 New York Times Magazine article.
Today, it's the norm.
In 1925, Charles Willis Thompson wrote about the subject for NYT Mag. Incumbent President Calvin Coolidge, who had previously served as VP under Harding, had been regularly invited to Cabinet meetings alongside the Attorney General, Treasury Secretary, etc. At the time, this was a new phenomenon.
But after Coolidge ascended to the presidency upon Harding's death, his VP Charles Dawes declined Coolidge's similar offer:
Dawes's reason for not attending Cabinet meetings can be stated accurately without going to Evanston [where Dawes lived]. It is that he does not wish to waste his time, indulge in lost motion, or make a fool of himself.
...
Dawes... knows that to sit in them would be lost motion, besides making his relations with the Senate more difficult. President Harding, who despite his six years in the Senate did not know anything about Cabinet meetings, thought he had a good idea when he invited the vice president to attend them. It is safe to say that Harding's well-meant innovation will never be followed.
When and why did that change?
About eight years after the 1925 article publication, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began regularly including John Nance Gardner in Cabinet meetings. Unlike Harding's brief foray into the practice, this time it stuck.
(Fun fact: Gardner was also the first vice president to travel abroad, visiting the Philippines and Japan in 1935.)
Prior to the 1930s, though, the vice president usually had little to no involvement in presidential administration decision making.
While everybody knows what Abraham Lincoln was doing the night he was assassinated, most people probably couldn't tell you what he did that day. Much of his day was taken up by a Cabinet meeting. Besides Lincoln, eight others were in attendance – and it would strike modern eyes as bizarre that Vice President Andrew Johnson was not among them.
In President Donald Trump's first term, his first full Cabinet meeting didn't occur until June 2017, about five months into his administration. President Joe Biden held his comparatively earlier, on April 1, 2021, a little more than two months in. We'll see when Trump holds his first Cabinet meeting this time around, although first the Senate has to actually confirm or reject each of his nominees.
What They All Do at a Cabinet Meeting: The President Is the "Majority," and If There Is a Decision, He Makes It
Published: Sunday, February 8, 1925