Presidential contenders back to Alben Barkley

In this Sunday’s NY Times Week in Review section something put me off my train of thought, and I’m throwing it in the pot here in case someone else can figure it out.

The lead article about vanishing political establishments included this declaration: “This year will have the first presidential election in half a century in which neither a sitting president nor a sitting vice president is vying for major-party nomination.” I’m wondering which election we’re talking about here, after all these Bushes and Clintons in recent years.

A half-century, eh? That’s back to 1958, when there wasn’t an election, so we’re into an approximate half-century.

1956? Ike and Tricky Dick were incumbent on the Republican side, so it wasn’t 1956.

1960? Nixon ran as a sitting vice president, so it wasn’t that year.

1964? Lyndon Johnson had succeeded the assassinated John Kennedy and was president as he sought nomination. Not that year.

1968? Vice President Hubert Humphrey sought and won the Democratic nomination and lost to Richard Nixon. Not that year (when I was tear-gassed repeatedly around the Democratic convention in Chicago).

1972? Nixon was renominated (here on Miami Beach). Not that year.

1976? Gerald R. Ford, who had succeeded to the presidency after Nixon’s resignation (the elected vice president, Spiro Agnew, also had resigned), became the Republican nominee. Not that year.

1980? Nope, because President Jimmy Carter sought and won the nomination (but not the election).

Wait, maybe this is the wrong direction. Should I be checking older rather than more recent elections?

1952? Harry Truman wasn’t running, but his vice president, Alben Barkley, contended for the nomination. So it wasn’t 1952.

1948? No, President Truman was nominated. Before that FDR had won re-election three times, and in 1932 he defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover. So it’s no no no no to 1944, 1940, 1936 and 1932.

I’m wondering what kind of a half-century the NY Times is talking about in this piece. Or is there some fine print in “sitting president” and “sitting vice president” that’s not clear to this old head?

In fact I believe I’ve seen this kind of assertion repeatedly in this interminable election season. The "fact" gets fuzzy, but it seems to be rather more than a half-century since we’ve been in this situation with a “rare fluidity,” as the Times piece says.

I’ll leave it to someone else to identify another situation like the present. 1932 is well before my birth year, and who cares what they did back then, before the split atom, the cell phone and the computer. And Google to look things up.

Well, now I’ve gone and done it. Googled “presidential contenders without sitting president or vice president.” First thing that popped up was a National Journal article from last September that put it on 1952. I’d already read in Wikipedia that Alben Barkley, Truman's vice president, put himself forward for the Democratic nomination, so I guess the National Journal deemed that not a serious run. Barkley dropped out after organized labor said he was too old – at 74 -- to get their backing. And just as well, I guess. He died in 1956 before he would have completed a term as president.

UPDATE: This got a bunch of well-informed comments after I posted it on DailyKos. Consensus was that 1952 was the year in question but it was kinda murky as Truman might have run and Barkley did run, at least a little. 1928 may have been the last year when neither the president nor vice president ran at all.