Thank You, Walter Mondale, for Paving the Way for a Female VP

On a hot September afternoon in 1984, I was at the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, Queens sitting about four rows from the upper rung of the cavernous stadium, eagerly waiting for the women’s final between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova to begin.

Suddenly, far below us, there was a murmur in the crowd, then the beginning of applause—the noise growing louder and louder as it moved its way up the stadium, with the spectators around us eventually joining in, many of them rising to their feet and cheering. “It’s Geraldine Ferraro,” my friend Christy turned to me and shouted. “She’s here!”

For a full five minutes, we joined in the ecstatic cheering, welcoming home the Queens native and celebrating the first woman ever nominated for vice president on a major party ticket. And that moment was all because of Walter Mondale, who died on Monday at the age of 93.

Mondale, the progressive Minnesota politician who was vice president under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1980 and then the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 1984 (where he suffered a crushing defeat to Ronald Reagan), left a lasting contribution to American history.

Though he and Ferraro would lose that election (and it would take 36 years before a woman would actually be elected vice president of the United States), Mondale chiseled that first crack in the political ceiling that long kept women out of high office.

And on Monday night, once news of Mondale’s death became public, among those who paid tribute to the former vice president was the woman who holds that office today. “When he won the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1984, Vice President Mondale made a bold and historic choice,” Vice President Harris said in a statement issued by her office. “He selected Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate—the first woman to be nominated as Vice President on a major party ticket in American history. With that nomination, Vice President Mondale opened ‘a new door to the future,’ to borrow his words.”

She added that she was “able to speak with him just a few days ago and thank him for his service and his steadfastness” and that, “each time I open my desk drawer and see his signature there, alongside the signatures of 11 other Vice Presidents, I will be reminded of and grateful for Vice President Mondale’s life of service.”

There was also a moving tribute from Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, one of six women who ran for president in the Democratic primaries in 2020, and someone who counted Mondale as a crucial influence on her political career, beginning when she was an intern for the then-vice president. 

On MSNBC Monday night, Klobuchar told Rachel Maddow she said she still recalled the image of Geraldine Ferraro at that year’s Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, accepting her historic nomination, adding, ‘It wasn’t just me. I think every little girl at the time knew that anything and everything was possible.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also cited Mondale’s ground-breaking achievement, tweeting that he “blazed a trail by choosing a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, to join him on the presidential ticket,” while former President Barack Obama tweeted that Mondale “changed the role of VP,” while also paving the way for Kamala Harris “to make history.”

In his memoir, The Good Fight, Mondale wrote that he was encouraged to pick Ferraro by both House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a longtime political powerbroker, and his wife Joan, who told him she saw it “as a natural progression in American politics.”

And Mondale himself thought “putting a woman on a major-party ticket would change American expectations, permanently and for the better.” As he wrote, “Picking Ferraro was symbolic in that sense, but a symbolic gesture with consequences. Skeptical voters would see what an effective woman candidate would accomplish. Young women could see new horizons open up. Everyone would see how America had changed in our lifetimes and more doors would open.”

Of course, Geraldine Ferraro, who died in 2011, turned out to be something of an imperfect candidate. She was smart, charismatic, and funny, but as a three-term Congresswoman from Queens, she was largely untested on the national stage and neither she nor Mondale seemed prepared for the frequently sexist treatment she would be subjected to on the campaign trail. (The more traditional helpmate, Barbara Bush, the wife of Vice President George H.W. Bush, famously referred to her husband’s opponent as a word that “rhymes with rich.”) In addition, she was married to a man whose finances turned out to be somewhat complicated, causing an unwelcome distraction in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Though Reagan, then running for his second term, was almost unbeatable in 1984, the symbolism of Ferraro’s candidacy was deep and lasting, especially among the female reporters who covered that race. Writing about Ferraro shortly after her death, the longtime New York Times political reporter Joyce Purnick, spoke of the grudging respect she gave the vice presidential candidate. "She made no apology, gave no quarter,” Purnick wrote for The Times. “That brand of intransigence had to impress even those who disagreed with her. Her stubbornness must have resonated in particular with women, many of whom, to this day, know how it feels to hide their intelligence or mute their opinions or avoid confrontation rather than appear challenging to male power.”

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, the journalist Alison Mitchell wrote about covering Geraldine Ferraro for Newsday 32 years earlier, and doing so because of her gender. “I was dispatched to the campaign—like women from most major networks and publications—because editors sought women to capture the history of one of their own,” Mitchell wrote. “Perhaps, we occasionally suspected, some of them also thought it would be beneath a man to ride that campaign plane.”

On that campaign trail, she wrote, “I watched the euphoric, rapturous crowds, mostly women and girls who showed up with ‘To Gerry with Love’ signs, even in the campaign’s last days, when it was going down to a decisive defeat to President Reagan and George Bush.” Reflecting on that campaign, Mitchell wondered whether the intense scrutiny of Ferraro, one that seemed to expose the weakness of the first-time national candidate, was “fair game or driven by discomfort with the idea of a woman as vice president?” A little of both, she concluded.

So, yes, the Mondale-Ferraro ticket may have gone down in flames 36 years ago. But let’s take a few minutes on the occasion of his passing to pay tribute to Walter Mondale—who had the boldness to recognize it was time a woman was elected to national office and the courage to try to make it happen.