Dan Quayle Biography, Age, Wife, Children, Potato and Previous Offices

Dan Quayle Biography | Who Is Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle (full name: James Danforth Quayle), is an American politician and lawyer who was the 44th Vice President of the United States from 1989 to 1993. He also served the state of Indiana from 1981 to 1989 as a U.S. Senator and a U.S. Representative from 1977 to 1981.

Quayle is a native of Indianapolis, Indiana, hence he spent most of his childhood in Paradise Valley, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. He obtained his J.D. degree from the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in 1974. Quayle practiced law in Huntington, Indiana, with his wife before his election to the United States House of Representatives in 1976, aged 29. In 1980 he won election to the Senate.

Dan Quayle Age

How Old is Dan Quayle? Quayle is 71 years old as of 2018. He was born on February 4, 1947 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.

Dan Quayle Family

Dan is one among four children of Martha Corinne Pulliam Quayle and James Cline Quayle. He was brought up in Indianapolis, Indiana where his family lived. The 44th Vice President of the United States has three siblings: a sister by the name Martha Quayle and brothers; Christopher Quayle and Michael Quayle.

Dan Quayle’s Photo

Dan Quayle Wife

Quayle is married to Quayle Marilyn Tucker, an American lawyer and novelist since 1972. The couple has three children together: two sons and a daughter and they live in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

Dan Quayle Children

Quayle has three children: sons, Benjamin Eugene Quayle born on 5th November 1972 and Tucker Danforth Quayle and a daughter by the name Mary Corinne Quayle, born in 1976. His son Tucker, is the founder of Tynwald Capital, an investment company while Benjamin is an American lawyer and politician who is a former U.S. Representative for Arizona’s 3rd congressional district from 2011 to 2013.

Dan Quayle Potato

In 1992, when serving as the Vice President, Quayle was visiting Rivera Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey, and jumped in to help facilitate a spelling bee. William Figueroa, aged 12, was called to the board to demonstrate how to spell “potato” and with a stick of chalk and perfect penmanship, Figueroa carefully spelled the word correctly on the board. The student stepped back, satisfied until the Vice President, Quayle, himself urged the young man to tack another letter on to the end to make the spelling “correct.”

Despite the ensuing applause from the adults in the room, Rivera Figueroa knew he had spelled it correctly the first time.

What most people don’t know or maybe don’t remember is that Vice President Quayle, was looking at a flash card provided by the school that had the “correct” answer on it, spelled incorrectly. So, yes, Vice President Quayle really did mess up, but so did the school.

And whether Quayle should have known better or the school should have known better, that one letter was the vowel that heard round the world, damaging Quayle’s credibility and adding to the public’s perception that the vice president wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box.

Yes, Vice President Quayle, was embarrassed, of course and he later wrote in his memoir Standing Firm that “It was more than a gaffe; It was a ‘defining moment’ of the worst imaginable kind. I can’t overstate how discouraging and exasperating the whole event was.”

Dan Quayle Previous Offices

In 1971, Quayle became an investigator for the Consumer Protection Division of the Office of the Indiana Attorney General and later that year, he became an administration assistant to Governor Edgar Whitcomb. From 1973 to 1974, Quayle was the Director of the Inheritance Tax Division of the Indiana Department of Revenue.

In 1976, he was elected to the House of Representatives from Indiana’s 4th congressional district, defeating eight-term incumbent Democrat J. Edward Roush by a 55%-to-45% margin. In 1978, he won re-election by the greatest percentage margin achieved to date in that northeast Indiana district and in 1980, at age 33, he became the youngest person ever elected to the Senate from the state of Indiana, defeating three-term incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh by taking 54% of the votes to Bayh’s 46%.

In 1986, Quayle made Indiana political history again, after he was re-elected to the Senate with the largest margin ever achieved to that date by a candidate in a statewide Indiana race, taking 61% of the vote and defeating his Democratic opponent, Jill Long.

Vice presidential candidate

At the Republican convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, on August 16, 1988, George H. W. Bush chose Quayle to be his running mate in the 1988 United States presidential election, a choice that immediately became controversial.

On October 1988, Quayle participated in the vice presidential debate alongside Democratic candidate Lloyd Bentsen. When the subject of the debate turned to Quayle’s relatively limited experience in public life, Quayle compared the length of his congressional service (12 years) with that of late President John F. Kennedy (14 years), as Kennedy had less experience than his rivals during the 1960 presidential nomination. It was a factual comparison, although his advisers cautioned beforehand that it could be used against him.

Bentsen’s response – “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy” subsequently became a part of the political lexicon and during the debate, Quayle’s strategy was to criticize Dukakis as too liberal.

Vice presidency (1989–1993) | Dan Quayle Vice President

The Bush/Quayle ticket won the November election with a 53–46 percent margin, after sweeping 40 states and capturing 426 electoral votes.

Bush named Quayle as the head of the Council on Competitiveness and the first chairman of the National Space Council. As head of the NSC Quayle, called for greater efforts to protect Earth against the danger of potential asteroid impacts.

During his vice presidency, he made official trips to 47 countries and throughout his time as vice president, he was widely ridiculed in the media and by many in the general public, both in the U.S. and overseas, as an intellectual lightweight and generally incompetent.

Contributing greatly to the perception of Quayle’s incompetence was his tendency to make public statements that were either impossible, self-contradictory or confused like; “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”

During the 1992 presidential campaign, he told the news media that he believed homosexuality was a choice, and “the wrong choice.”

Quayle, has since described the vice presidency as “an awkward office. You’re president of the Senate. You’re not even officially part of the executive branch, you’re part of the legislative branch. You’re paid by the Senate, not by the executive branch. And it’s the president’s agenda. It’s not your agenda. You’re going to disagree from time to time, but you salute and carry out the orders the best you can.”

Dan Quayle Murphy Brown

Quayle gave a speech entitled Reflections on Urban America to the Commonwealth Club of California on May 19, 1992, on the subject of the Los Angeles riots.

In his speech, he blamed the violence on a decay of moral values and family structure in the American society and in an aside, he cited the single mother title character in the television program Murphy Brown as an example of how popular culture contributes to this “poverty of values”, saying, “It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown – a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman – mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice’.”

This “Murphy Brown speech” became one of the most memorable incidents of the 1992 campaign and even long after the outcry had ended, the comment continued to have an effect on U.S. politics. Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history and the author of several books and essays about the history of marriage, said that this brief remark by Quayle about Murphy Brown “kicked off more than a decade of outcries against the ‘collapse of the family.”

Dan Quayle Net Worth

Quayle has an estimated net worth of $3 million.

Dan Quayle Successor

Quayle was succeeded by Al Gore, who was Bill Clinton’s running mate in their successful campaign in 1992.

What is Dan Quayle Doing Now | Dan Quayle Today | Where is Dan Quayle

Quayle is now into money business and he is the chairman of Cerberus Global Investments, part of Steven A. Feinberg’s $30 billion Cerberus Capital Management.

Dan Quayle Book

Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir, Harper Collins, May 1994. hardcover, ISBN 0-06-017758-6; mass market paperback, May 1995; ISBN 0-06-109390-4; Limited edition, 1994, ISBN 0-06-017601-6
The American Family: Discovering the Values That Make Us Strong (with Diane Medved), Harpercollins, April 1996, ISBN 0-06-017378-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-06-092810-7 (paperback)
Worth Fighting For, W Publishing Group, July 1999, ISBN 0-8499-1606-2

Dan Quayle Quotes

Below are some of Quayle’s famous quotes;

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the back! … That’s a
Hoosierism. You’ve got to get used to that!
You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.
Bobby Knight told me this: “There is nothing that a good defense—cannot beat a better offense.” In other words a good offense wins.
The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. [followup] No, not our nation’s, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century, but in this century’s history.
It is not just age; it’s accomplishments, it’s experience. I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack
Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration, if that unfortunate event would ever occur.
In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get the future.
We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur
People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here.
When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.
Mars is essentially in the same orbit. … Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.