Nation: THE COUNTERPUNCHER

When Richard Nixon lifted the Governor of Maryland from a position of relative obscurity to the second spot on the Republican Party’s tick et last month, Spiro Theodore Agnew reacted with becoming modesty. “Spiro Agnew,” he told reporters in Miami Beach, word.” By “is last not week, exactly a Nixon’s running household mate was well on his way to making quite a name for himself. There was considerable debate, however, over what sort of name it was and how it would affect the G.O.P. ticket’s chances in the 1968 presidential race.

In an extraordinary series of press conferences, speeches and interviews, Agnew conjured up some long-dormant poltergeists of American politics. Hubert Humphrey, he said, was “soft on Communism.” In addition, the Vice President was “soft on inflation and soft on law and order over the years” — in fact, “squishy soft.” Because of Humphrey’s attempt to straddle hawk and dove lines on Viet Nam, said Agnew, the Vice President “begins to look a lot like Neville Chamberlain.” He added: “Maybe that makes Mr. Nixon look more like Winston Churchill.”

Traditional Role. Richard Nixon’s strategists had assigned Agnew the traditional aggressive role of the running mate, but they scarcely anticipated such thrusts. “I am more blunt than Mr. Nixon,” the Governor explained. “I can’t change. I’m that way.” Agnew’s way may, in fact, prove a political boon to the G.O.P. After his attack oh Humphrey, the initial speculation was that he had damaged the Republican cause. That feeling eventually gave way to another. In 1968, a year when a strongly conservative mood has gripped many voters (see box, page 22), such a note of toughness may attract even more people than it repels.

Nixon’s strategy rests on his ability to siphon off enough strength from Alabama’s George Wallace to nail down the electoral votes of several Southern states. He is emphasizing “law and order” himself, but Agnew is doing it in much tougher terms. “Nixon and Agnew are riding the right issue—trouble in the streets,” said a Maryland Republican. “It’s the big issue. It outruns everything, especially with women voters. They’re scared to death to walk down the street any more. But what a hell of an issue to have to run on.” According to a Democratic strategist, the G.O.P. hopes to score victories in Dixie by telling Southerners through Agnew they can get what Wallace promises, but without Wallace. Nixon’s lieutenants deny the charge, but one of them demonstrates how the two men are viewed in the Nixon camp: “Nixon is going to do the big thing. He’s the knight, and this guy is the foot soldier.”

No Way. As foot soldiers will, Agnew soon found himself deep in the fray. Speaking in places like York, Pa., and Paramus, N.J., he began striking at rioters and protesters of every persuasion. Before a group of political writers in Washington, he declared: “I don’t think every student involved in a protest is a Communist. But in the case of an organization like the Students for a Democratic Society—on their own announcement that they are Marxist and endorse the overthrow of our Govern ment as we know it—what can we conclude?” He continued: “Any civil disobedience must be prohibited by the authorities because there’s no way to draw the line between what’s responsible and what’s irresponsible.” Humphrey, he said, seemed to be a “peace at any price” candidate. Then came the “soft on Communism” remark.

Five Somersaults. To those with longer memories than Agnew’s, the charge that Humphrey is “soft on Communism” is rather silly. Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, Humphrey was both a ground-breaking liberal and an anti-Communist of unquestioned zeal. In 1947 and 1948, he helped to purge Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Par ty of Communists and in 1954 sponsored the provision of the Communist Control Act that outlawed the party. When even the Eisenhower Administration protested that the provisions might be unconstitutional, Oregon’s Senator Wayne Morse chuckled: “It now appears that the White House thinks the Senator from Minnesota is a little too hard on Communists.”

Editorial writers were quick to accuse Agnew of trying to revive the McCarthyism and “Communist witch hunts” of the early ’50s. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and House Republican Leader Gerald Ford held a joint news conference to repudiate the charge against Humphrey. Said Dirksen pointedly: “I am rather restrained in the statements I make.”

Within the day, Agnew retreated. He acknowledged his intemperance. “Had I ever realized what an effect this phrase would have, I would have avoided it like the plague,” he said contritely. “If I’d known I’d be cast as the ‘Joe Mc Carthy of 1968,’ I would have turned five somersaults. I said ‘squishy soft,’ and I’m not proud of it.”

His retreat, however, was not a retraction. He emphasized that in his view, Communism was enjoying “a renewed life” rather than a decline in the U.S. and that he intended to continue playing that theme. By Communists, he seemed to mean any anarchist, hippie, yippie, McCarthyite, black militant or other dissenter who might disturb the peace, either by bomb throwing, staging a sit-in or marching on the Pentagon. Despite his retreat, Agnew felt that he had been treated unfairly. “If I attack Mr. Humphrey,” the Governor told TIME Correspondent Charles Eisendrath, “it’s called taking the low road. But if Mr. Humphrey accuses Mr. Nixon, it isn’t called that at all.”

Bruisinq Autumn. To be sure, the Democrats struck back. “It is apparent,” said Humphrey Campaign Manager Larry O’Brien, “that Agnew has been delegated by Mr. Nixon to travel the low road, and with the traditions of Nixon campaigns, the low road is the rock bottom.” Said Humphrey: “He just got hold of one of Nixon’s old speeches.” Indeed, it seemed to many as if Agnew were trying to duplicate the hard-swinging role that Nixon had played during the 1952 campaign. In that bruising autumn 16 years ago, Nixon, an ambitious and abrasive freshman Senator from California, delivered corrosive attacks on Harry Truman and his regime. “If the dry rot of corruption and Communism, which has eaten deep into our body politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet,” he told an audience in Bangor, Me., “then let’s call for a hatchet.”

Nixon had indeed detailed Agnew to take the offensive while he himself cultivated a more statesmanlike, above-the-battle image. Since early this year, he has been saying that he wanted to win the primaries in a way that would allow him to win the nomination, to win the nomination in a way that would allow him to win the election, and then to win the election in a way that would allow him to govern effectively. That meant a polite, buttoned-up campaign. Accordingly, whenever Nixon wished to reply to attacks, he did so through written statements signed by either his press secretary, Herb Klein, or his campaign director, Robert Ellsworth.

Carried Away. Though he had been cast as something of the heavy, Agnew’s overzealous interpretation of his role irritated several of Nixon’s top aides. They insisted that “the old man is damned pleased with the choice he made,” but also admitted that Agnew had blundered. “Dick had his problems with this issue some years back,” said one, “and it took him a long time to shed himself of the image of a witch hunter. This was completely gratuitous and uncalled for.” Another observed dryly: “Agnew tends to get a little carried away sometimes.” At any rate, said John Mitchell, Agnew was not expounding Mr. Nixon’s opinions. Nixon was charitable. Perhaps that is because he ruefully recalls his own troubles as a running mate in 1952, particularly the “slush fund” charges that nearly persuaded Ike to dump him.

Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the Senate’s only Negro member and an adviser to the G.O.P. ticket on racial and urban problems, was troubled by another facet of Agnew’s campaign. “I don’t believe Spiro Agnew is a racist,” said Brooke, “but he doesn’t show much flexibility on the law-and-order issue.” Earlier, Brooke had urged Nixon to drop the phrase “law and order” and substitute “order with justice.” Though the phrase means different things to different people, Brooke noted that the black community often considers “law and order” to be a code name for ghetto suppression. Agnew, however, refused to discard the phrase. “I am not going to get involved in semantics,” he said. If he did change the phrase, he added, “the headlines in the next morning’s papers would be AGNEW SOFTENS POSITION ON LAW AND ORDER, and in so doing we would mislead a lot of people.”

If Agnew’s polemic against hippies and Communists k likely to do little harm to the G.O.P. ticket in terms of votes—it may do it some good—it just may help to unify the divided Democrats. “Many of the peace Democrats who said in Chicago that there was no difference between Nixon and Humphrey are now beginning to see some difference between the tickets,” said former Kennedy Speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. “Many more statements like this one either from Agnew or Nixon will take the Democrats as far down the road toward unity as can be expected. But what really frightens me is that Ted Agnew could be a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Two Brothers. For much of the nation’s history, Vice Presidents were politicians included on the ticket for geographical or factional balance but otherwise quickly forgotten. Woodrow Wilson’s Veep, Thomas R. Marshall, used to say: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either again.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death and the accession of Harry Truman—at the very dawn of the atomic age—began to shock the nation into an understanding of the importance of the office. Dwight Eisenhower’s heart attack was another reminder that Vice Presidents could—and eight times in U.S. history did—become accidental Presidents. The wave of assassinations of national lead ers underscored the need to select Vice Presidents for reasons other than ticket balancing or decorativeness.

Both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon insisted, ritualistically, that they chose their running mates as the best possible men to succeed them in the event of death. In the case of the Democratic ticket, the argument was more convincing. Edmund Muskie, after two terms as Maine’s Governor and nearly ten years in the U.S. Senate, is as handsomely qualified as almost any other Democrat to step into the White House. If his knowledge of foreign affairs is rather limited, he deeply understands the nation’s domestic problems, especially the complex relationships among federal, state and local governments. In the Senate he led the fight for passage of bills on air and water pollution and the Administration’s controversial Model Cities bill for urban development. In fact, some Democrats who have wearied of long exposure to Hubert Humphrey and the Johnson regime have wistfully wished that the ticket could be turned upside down, with Muskie on top. Richard Nixon, by contrast, suffers no such unflattering comparisons with his running mate.

Neutral Territory. “This was the toughest political decision I ever made,” Nixon declared after combing through his list of possible running mates and coming up with Agnew. To placate South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond and the party’s Southern wing, Nixon had to eliminate from consideration moderates like Oregon’s Mark Hatfield and Illinois’ Chuck Percy. Nor could he have accepted such conservative Thurmond favorites as Texas’ John Tower or California’s Ronald Reagan. In the end, Nixon went to comparatively neutral territory, picking Agnew over Massachusetts Governor John Volpe.

In 1960, Nixon had learned the dangers of running with a more glamorous partner. Henry Cabot Lodge, though a popular hero of daytime television from his days as a debater at the United Nations, irritated Nixon with his rather indolent campaigning style. He insisted on a full night’s sleep and an afternoon nap. He made only one major speech a day and avoided exhausting handshaking tours. Local politicians never forgave him. Perhaps worse, from the point of view of Southern Republicans, Lodge told a New York audience near the climax of the campaign that Nixon, if elected, would appoint a Negro to his Cabinet. The impact of the statement was debatable but, to some, Lodge became the scapegoat when the G.O.P. subsequently lost North and South Carolina by relatively narrow margins.

Spiro the Tyro. This year, said a Nixon aide, “we wanted a guy with some brains and enough strength of character that he wouldn’t fold up on you.” Nixon also wanted a running mate who would not upstage him, as would, for example, New York’s Mayor John Lindsay. As one Nixon agent cracked, with unwitting black humor: “You don’t want Guys and Dolls coming on before Death of a Salesman.”

After Agnew’s selection there were those who thought that Nixon was coming on more like King Lear, forfeiting his kingdom in the first act. Humphrey could scarcely contain his glee over Nixon’s choice. Columnists suggested that Nixon, having avoided a serious blunder right up to the nomination, had finally tripped up. Yet in the following weeks, and particularly during the chaotic Democratic Convention, the decision seemed shrewder than many had at first realized. Despite his comparative obscurity, Agnew will have wide appeal in the crucial Border States and possibly even in the Deep South.

During a week of strategic planning at Mission Bay, Calif., after the convention, Nixon advisers put Agnew through a crash course in political campaigning. By the standards of a politician like Nixon, who went to the U.S. Congress more than two decades ago, Spiro is a tyro. Nine years ago he was president of the P.T.A. in Baltimore’s Loch Raven Village, and he was elected Governor of his small state only in 1966. Nixon’s staff of instructors staged mock press conferences, firing questions at Agnew—first obvious, then more difficult. “That answer was too long,” they would chide him. He learned to pare five-minute responses to 90 seconds, and to answer with poise and care.

To some extent, the tutoring paid off. The press corps at the capitol in Annapolis is astonished at the difference in manner that Agnew has developed. Where his dealings with reporters back home had frequently been chilly and curt, he now smiles through press conferences, answering fluently and fully, and sometimes almost bantering, a gift that does not come naturally to him.

Interchangeable Parts. His stumping style, however, leaves something to be desired. Reciting a prepared text, Agnew’s flat voice falls—like that of Nelson Rockefeller in similar circumstances —into leaden, soporific cadences. Two weeks ago, for example, Agnew delivered a well-reasoned and progressive speech to the American Political Science Association at the Washington Hilton. The applause was scattered, and several younger members of the audience even drifted to the room next door, where Draft Director Lewis Hershey was holding forth.

In his first weeks of campaigning, Agnew stuck almost exclusively to what an aide dubbed his “TFX” speech-named for the U.S. fighter-bomber that has been tailored for both Air Force and Navy use. The speech was a collection of interchangeable parts to be used or dropped according to the audience. But when recited in Agnew’s Baltimore accent, with its semi-glottal ts and distinctively rounded os, the TFX seldom got far off the ground.

Joe America. Agnew has switched from reading texts to the more congenial medium of off-the-cuff speaking, which has the disadvantage of encouraging him to be impulsive. He began his “soft on Communism” outburst defensively, in reply to reporters’ questions. Later he explained that he simply had been angry because Humphrey had attacked Nixon as a hard-lining “cold warrior.” “I guess by nature I’m a counterpuncher,” he explained. “You can’t hit my team in the groin and expect me to stand here and smile about it.” He has yet to learn to temper his “counterpuncher’s” reflexes with the politician’s self-restraint.

Nonetheless, Nixon and his aides insist that they have no intention of muzzling Agnew. Said Press Aide Herb Klein: “We haven’t tried to dictate to him in any way. You have to allow a man of this stature to speak out on his own. We’ve never had a monolithic line.” Agnew himself emphasized: “Mr. Nixon hasn’t put any gag on me.” Nor, if the Nixon camp’s judgment of Agnew’s appeal is correct, would there be any reason to do so. “This guy is made for 1968,” said a Nixon agent. “He’s Joe America. Follows the Colts. Drinks beer. Comes across honest.”

After the unguarded jab at Humphrey, Agnew made certain that he also came across cautious. Reverting to the middle ground during a shopping center appearance in Erie, Pa., he made no mention of Communism. “Law and order” was judiciously counterweighed with a call for equal opportunities. But then an incident occurred that illuminated both Agnew’s character and his campaign style. Agnew had just completed his customary pitch that there can be no U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam without an “honorable settlement.” The audience was responding well. Agnew made a rhetorical reach and asked: “Are we going to stop the bombing?”

To his astonishment, a handful of pro-McCarthy collegians in the crowd cried back: “Yes, yes, yes!” The heckling, the first that he had encountered in the campaign, continued through his next several sentences. Agnew was badly shaken. His voice lowered with emotion, his face reddened. Quickly ending the speech, the candidate departed for the airport ahead of schedule.

A New Life Style. Agnew is a prideful and successful self-made man who is still insecure about certain things. In some ways, he is like the younger Richard Nixon, before Nixon moved to New York City and achieved the serenity of a lucrative six-figure law practice. Like Nixon, Agnew grew up in somewhat straitened circumstances. His father, Theodore Spiro Anagnostopoulos, came to the U.S. from Greece in 1897 and shortened the family name. He became the owner of two Baltimore restaurants (the Brighton, the Piccadilly), but eventually wound up selling groceries from the back of a truck during the Depression. After young Agnew graduated from Forest Park High School, he studied chemistry for three years at Johns Hopkins, then switched to the University of Baltimore. Having interrupted his education to serve four years in the Army during World War II, he received a night-school law degree from Baltimore in 1947.

In 1946, under the influence of a senior partner at the law firm where he was working, Agnew changed his registration from Democratic to Republican. He had his earliest experience in practical politics working during the ’50s in the four successful U.S. House races of Congressman James Devereux, a conservative Marine war hero. By then, Agnew had adopted a life style that has influenced his personality and political views ever since. He had moved from the city of Baltimore to Baltimore County and become a suburbanite.

Sodded Lawns. Ted Agnew, now 49, and his wife Judy, 47, were exemplars of the postwar generation of married couples who settled in the suburbs to raise their families in an environment of newly laid asphalt, freshly planted saplings, water sprinklers on sodded lawns and prefabricated houses. The Governor prefers evenings in the recreation room of the 19th century Governor’s mansion, which Judy has remodeled in what she calls “Victorian with chintz.” There, Agnew shoots billiards, listens to stereo (Lawrence Welk is the family favorite) or plays a furious game of pingpong. One good-natured rumor has it that Agnew’s squint, which all but hides his eyes in hooded crescents, is the result of watching too much football on television. One of the special advantages of his office is that various Baltimore Colt linebackers and defensive ends can accept invitations to dinner at the mansion.

In 1957, with a civic-minded interest in the progress of the prospering horseshoe-shaped county that rings the city of Baltimore, Agnew accepted an appointment to the county board of zoning appeals. Three years later, he made his first attempt at elective office, but ran dead last in a five-way race for judge of Baltimore County circuit court.

Apotheosis. Nixon has designated Agnew as the ticket’s urban authority, but in fact his expertise is somewhat more specialized. In 1962—thanks mainly to the bitterly divided Democrats —he was elected to a four-year term as Baltimore County Executive. As the apotheosis of the new suburban man, Agnew learned not the problems of the ghetto but those of the subdivisions outside the city’s scabrous core. Still, Agnew backed and signed an ordinance barring discrimination in some public accommodations—one of the first such ordinances in the nation.

His record in the Governor’s mansion was also laudably progressive. Even though Maryland’s voters register 3 to 1 Democratic, Agnew was elected to the governorship in 1966 because, once again, the Democrats had been split by a bloody primary campaign. His opponent was Baltimore Contractor George P. Mahoney, a buffled-headed segregationist who campaigned on the slogan: “Your home is your castle—protect it.” Agnew staked out a moderate position, emphasizing the need for fiscal responsibility and tax reform.

Maryland’s fifth Republican Governor in 180 years, Agnew proved to be an eminently competent and imaginative chief executive. In contrast to some of his predecessors, he was positively revolutionary. Enjoying a year-long honeymoon with the Democrat-dominated state legislature, he pushed through a graduated income tax and obtained passage of one of the nation’s toughest state antipollution laws. He also won repeal of the state’s 306-year-old antimiscegenation law and signed the first statewide open-housing law below the Mason-Dixon line (which was across Maryland’s northern border). The law was limited to dwellings of more than five units, but Agnew later said he might even favor “total open housing.”

Personal Offense. In spite of that splendid record, the man from the suburbs was never fully attuned to the brutal realities of Baltimore’s gritty ghettos. Last spring’s riots in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination wrought a peculiar change in Agnew. When he saw the Negroes who had helped him to defeat Mahoney rioting in the ghettos, he took it practically as a personal offense, reacting in the style of the stiff-necked counterpuncher.

Having restored order with National Guard and federal troops, he summoned about 100 of the city’s black moderate leaders to a conference. Agnew dressed them down like a prison warden. He accused them of conspiring with such black radicals as Rap Brown and suggested that they had abdicated their leadership. “I publicly repudiate all white racists,” he said. “I call upon you to publicly repudiate all black racists. This, so far, you have not been willing to do.” Seventy of the Negroes angrily rose and walked out. State Senator Verda Welcome, who had praised Agnew as “a wonderful, honest statesman” after the antimiscegenation law was repealed, now snapped: “He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Toward the Ticket. When some 300 students from dilapidated, predominantly Negro Bowie State College appeared at the Statehouse to protest their school’s condition, Agnew refused to see them, ordered out the state police, who arrested 227. “I was not going to respond while they were putting the pressure on,” Agnew said. Curiously, the Governor had already doubled the school’s budget and added capital funds to upgrade the college. What annoyed him was that the demonstrators had failed to make an appointment with him. Agnew cherishes a routine governed by an appointments calendar as neatly arranged as the rows of bungalows in a subdivision.

The Negro disorders so affected Agnew that eventually he seemed to be acting at complete odds with his earlier record. He implied that fleeing looters ought to be shot on sight by police. He claimed that the Kerner Commission Report on ghetto rioting might actually abet further disorder. When the Poor People’s Campaign arrived in Washington, he condemned the Johnson Administration for allowing the marchers to camp on public land. Those gut reactions at once neutralized his liberal image and sent him toward a place on the G.O.P. national ticket.

“There can be a mystique about a man,” Nixon said of Agnew after the convention. “You can look him in the eye and know he’s got it. This guy has got it.” What Agnew has got is a reflexive feel for how millions of fellow Americans view the world—many of them through suburban windows. It is another question whether he also has the qualities of leadership, intellect and judgment that are required, in an age of instant communications and thermonuclear weaponry, of a man who might some day be thrust into the presidency of the U.S. Agnew has certainly made some errors of judgment in the campaign so far, but the campaign is relatively young. As things stand now, the name Agnew could indeed become a household word in the U.S. His conduct in the next several weeks will determine just what sort of word it is.