Nation: THE UNLIKELY NO. 2

I’M going to mention two words to you,” a TV reporter told pedestrians in downtown Atlanta. “You tell me what they mean. The words are: Spiro Agnew.”

“It’s some kind of disease,” said one man.

“It’s some kind of egg,” ventured another.

“He’s a Greek who owns that shipbuilding firm,” declared a third.

Richard Nixon’s choice as running mate would not have batted an eye. “Spiro Agnew,” admitted Spiro T. Agnew last week, “is not a household word.” Anonymity may indeed have been one of the strongest factors in his selection as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. For if the Maryland Governor has done little to excite attention beyond the borders of his own state, he has done even less to arouse real antagonism in the G.O.P. Outside Maryland he has been known chiefly as the first Governor of Greek descent.

Elected in 1966 after a Democratic split, Agnew, now 49, quickly gained a reputation as a competent, if not brilliant Governor. With the help of a newly apportioned Democratic legislature, released for the first time from rural domination, he pushed through a number of progressive measures. His accomplishments gained added luster when his record was contrasted with the mediocre one of his Democratic predecessor and the putative program of his segregationist opponent, the bumbling George Mahoney. More money was put into much-needed state services and state administration was modernized. With experience gained during four years as executive of Baltimore County, the populous (620,000) suburban area that surrounds the city of Baltimore, Agnew was more than usually sensitive to the problems of local government. As a pragmatic, administration-minded Governor, he appealed to Democrats as well as Republicans.

If his administration was progressive, his stand on civil rights was positively liberal in a Border State that still retains many vestiges of segregation. At his urging, a 306-year-old antimiscegenation law was repealed, the state public-accommodations law was broadened, and the first state open-housing law south of the Mason-Dixon Line was enacted. Negroes were appointed to some high offices and, for the first time, to the Governor’s personal staff.

The Most Ardent Admirer. While most other moderate Republican Governors were hedging on the party’s 1968 presidential nominee, Agnew was out working for his man—who was then New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller. “Nelson Rockefeller,” he said again and again, “is the man best qualified to be President.” In response to “the ground swell of public opinion that I have seen developing,” he sponsored a draft-Rockefeller organization, flying around the country in a Rockefeller-chartered plane to sing the New Yorker’s praises. He was still singing when Rocky pulled out of the race on March 21.

Rockefeller’s withdrawal, together with the Baltimore riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, profoundly altered Agnew’s thinking. Agnew was so certain that Rockefeller would announce his entry into the Oregon primary that he invited reporters into his office to watch the Governor’s press conference on TV. Through some incredible oversight in New York, no one had bothered to inform Rockefeller’s most ardent admirer that Nelson was about to quit the race instead. Agnew had to bear his disappointment and humiliation in public. Though the New Yorker apologized handsomely, Agnew never forgave him. Nixon became more and more attractive.

The Baltimore riots were even more traumatic for Agnew, who had to call out some 5,700 National Guardsmen and ask for nearly 4,800 federal troops to restore order. Agnew suspected a conspiracy, citing a visit to Baltimore by Stokely Carmichael several days before the trouble—and King’s murder—as evidence. Within hours after the shooting stopped, he called 100 moderate Negro leaders into his office and gave them a tongue-lashing for not having counteracted Carmichael’s fulminations. “You were intimidated by veiled threats,” the Governor told them. “You were stung by insinuations that you were Mr. Charlie’s boy, by epithets like Uncle Tom.” Before he had finished, 70 of the 100 had walked out, insulted by his top-sergeant tone. “In dignity,” editorialized the Baltimore Sun, “they could hardly do otherwise.”

Maryland’s Negroes had helped boost Agnew to victory in 1966 and generally considered him a firm friend. After April, his black support shriveled virtually to nothing. Today he is anathema to Maryland Negroes. He criticized national “preoccupation with civil liberties” at the expense of security, said that police were justified in shooting looters if they failed to obey commands to halt, assailed President Johnson for allowing the Poor People’s Campaign to camp on federal land. He attacked the Kerner Commission for abetting rioting by talking of white racism. There is “an aura of belief,” he said shortly before the convention, “that rioting is the inalienable right of the ghetto resident. If one wants to pinpoint the cause of riots, it would be this permissive climate and the misguided compassion of public opinion.” He added: “It is not evil conditions that cause riots, but evil men.”

Agnew stoutly maintains that he is for both equality and betterment of the Negro’s lot, even while he takes a harsh view of trouble in the streets. In fact, his attitude is similar to that of many first-and second-generation Americans who had to work hard for a living. Many urban programs seem to them a giveaway to the lazy, something-for-nothing. Agnew’s father, a Baltimore restaurateur (the Piccadilly and the Brighton) went broke during the Depression and had to sell vegetables from the back of a truck. While many were surprised at Agnew’s unyielding stance on civil disorders in April, some tip-off might have come a few weeks earlier when more than 200 students from Bowie State College, a dilapidated, predominantly Negro institution near Washington, came to Annapolis to petition for better facilities. The Governor not only refused to see them but had them arrested, ordering the school closed as well. He could not, he said, bow to pressure. Later he saw student leaders.

Nixon said he was looking for someone with whom he is “simpático,” and Agnew, who comes from a similar background, should fit his definition on several counts. He agrees with Nixon on most domestic issues, criticizing many federal spending programs. Like Nixon —until recently—he has also in the past voiced “100% support” for the present war policy and expressed skepticism about improved relations with the Communist world. He will meet Nixon’s demand for a hard-working campaigner. Nixon thought Henry Cabot Lodge was not energetic enough in 1960. The Marylander’s credentials as a potential President and an expert on urban affairs—two of Nixon’s other stated criteria in making his choice—are less convincing. He has no background at all in foreign affairs and little experience in city problems, which Nixon has said would be a prime concern of his Vice President. Baltimore County, which Agnew governed until 1966, has few of the problems of the big cities. The minuscule Negro population (2.6%) has actually decreased in recent years.

A tall, heavy-set man (6 ft. 2 in., 192 lbs.), whose grooming has won him the accolade of the Men’s Hairstylist & Barber’s Journal, “Ted” Agnew should be a reasonably attractive campaigner. Born and raised in Baltimore, he attended public schools, then went on to Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where he studied chemistry. His college education was interrupted by World War II, and he served in the Army in Europe, ending up as a company commander in the 10th Armored Division. After the war, he turned to the law, earning his degree at night from the University of Baltimore in 1947. Shortly after, on the urging of a senior partner in his law firm, he changed his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican.

Zorba the Veep. Though Agnew’s father was born in the Peloponnesian village of Gargalianoi, he took on most of the ways of the new country after he moved to the U.S. in 1897. He changed the family name from Anagnostopoulos to Agnew, and married a Virginian with the un-Hellenic name of Akers. His son went further, converting from Greek Orthodoxy to Episcopalianism. To his embarrassment, Agnew cannot speak any Greek—though that will probably not lose him many of the votes of an estimated 600,000 fellow Greek Americans. Some people indeed were already referring to him last week as “Zorba the Veep.”

His tastes tend toward the homey. He follows the Baltimore Colts and Orioles faithfully—some claim that his constant squint comes from too much TV watching—plays golf, and spends as much time as possible with his family. The Agnews have four children: Pamela, 25, a social worker in Baltimore; James Rand, 22, a Navy Seabee in Viet Nam; Susan, 20, a secretary in Baltimore; and Elinor Kimberly, 12, who is in the eighth grade. Elinor Agnew, 47, who is called Judy, is known as a thrifty housewife. Since discovering a cache of empty peanut-butter jars in the kitchen of the executive mansion, she has used them as cocktail glasses.

Until 1962, Agnew had held no elective office—other than the presidency of the P.T.A.—and had never proceeded much further in politics than the Baltimore County zoning board. He is therefore something of an unknown quantity even in Maryland. “Agnew,” says Roy Innis, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, “is the kind of guy who can’t be described in terms of good or bad. He is sort of a nonentity.” Humorless and cautious, often inflexible, yet straightforward and unaffected at the same time, he has something of the air of a high school math teacher. At press conferences in Annapolis, he would usually not speak until he had absolute silence. In many respects he is the archetypical man of the suburbs, the first of the new breed of suburban politicians to come so close to high office. Because of his seeming turnabout on Rockefeller and civil rights, some suspect that he is opportunistic. Agnew insists he has stayed in the same place, but that attitudes and conditions have changed. After the April riots, he says, “I saw this country do a flop-over.”

While voicing optimism about November, Agnew is totally realistic about the task ahead of him. “I’m starting at the bottom of the ladder,” he said, “I’ve got a big job to do in three months to become interesting and viable to people who don’t know me . . . I am confident that I can do what has to be done in this campaign and, hopefully, in the Administration to follow.”