Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

Really happy to have you here.

You know, it was a tough inauguration, a really bad inauguration.

The drunk vice president inauguration was a really bad one.

Abraham Lincoln was president.

He'd just been reelected to his second term.

Now, Abraham Lincoln had had a perfectly fine vice president

in his first term. It was a guy from Maine who was an abolitionist. But when Lincoln was going to

run for a second term, he decided it might be a good strategic decision to trade in the guy from

Maine for a southerner instead. And so Lincoln ran with a different vice president in his second term.

And Lincoln won that election, and he got himself a second term. But when it came time for Lincoln

and his new running mate to be inaugurated, for them to be sworn in.

Lincoln's new vice president was almost too drunk to stand up at the inauguration.

His name was Andrew Johnson.

He apparently went to the outgoing vice president, the guy from Maine.

He went to him on the day of the inauguration and begged him for a bottle of whiskey, please. That outgoing vice president fetched him a bottle of whiskey and then Andrew Johnson

apparently drank most of it that morning before the inauguration. Some accounts from the time

suggests that Johnson had actually been drunk for the better part of two weeks by the time

the inauguration rolled around

that morning. Before he himself was due to be sworn in as the new vice president, Andrew Johnson

gave a caterwauling, slurring, screaming speech that no one could understand. When it came time

for him to put his hand on the Bible and swear the oath of office,

...