Nation: SPIRO AGNEW: THE KING’S TASTER

WE’RE FOR YOU AND AGNEW TOO read a telegram that arrived in the White House last week after the President’s Viet Nam speech. In earlier Administrations it might have seemed odd to tack on the name of the Vice President of the United States, who is traditionally almost an official non-person in Washington. Spiro Theodore Agnew, however, is turning the vice-presidency into something like an oratorical happening, raising the No. 2 office to a level of visibility and controversy unknown since the days of, well, Richard Nixon.

Agnew is not merely seeking political capital in the South, nor is his rhetoric aimed only at Moratorium marchers and other opponents of the war. Rather, he is emerging as a kind of improbable mahdi of Middle America. His often odd, occasionally clownish locutions, rendered in a W. C. Fields singsong, are abristle with nostalgias and assumptions of what American life ought to be. Armored in the certitudes of middle-class values, he speaks with the authentic voice of Americans who are angry and frightened by what has happened to their culture, who view the ’60s as a disastrous montage of pornography, crime, assaults on patriotism, flaming ghettos, marijuana and occupied colleges. If he speaks with Richard Nixon’s tacit approval—and he does—Agnew does his duty gladly, bringing missionary zeal and a sense of genuine moral outrage to his oratory.

In effect, as Eugene McCarthy observes, Agnew is acting as “Nixon’s Nixon.” Just before the 1954 congressional elections, Richard Nixon said: “Ninety-five percent of the Communists, fellow travelers, sex perverts, dope addicts, drunks and other security risks removed under the Eisenhower security program” were hired under Harry Truman. Now Agnew is out walking the point, flailing at “ideological eunuchs,” “merchants of hate,” “parasites of passion” and campus protesters who “take their tactics from Castro and their money from Daddy.”

There is, however, a fundamental difference in the reactions to the two men. Nixon tended to enrage his opponents and the targets of his venom; Agnew’s thrusts are more often met by amusement or disdain. Nixon and Agnew came to the vice-presidency with very different intellectual and educational equipment; Nixon in 1953 was a young but consummate politician with far more practical savvy than Agnew brings to his job. Moreover, the present Vice President has a dual mission that was not necessary in the less ambiguous days of

Nixon’s vice-presidency. His task is not only to attack the President’s foes but also to probe the body politic’s mood and temper for the cautious Nixon. Says Massachusetts’ Republican Senator Edward Brooke: “Agnew is the King’s taster”—sampling the public’s ideological moods.

Nixon’s Agent

To what extent is Agnew speaking for Nixon in his choked-bore blasts against dissent? The President himself is not about to acknowledge as his own every word that Agnew speaks. To do so would vitiate the point of the strategy, which is to let the Vice President absorb the heat of controversy while Nixon, in imitation of Eisenhower’s executive mode, seems to take a loftier course. The White House has done nothing to censor Agnew’s speeches, and does not demand to review them in advance. Nor has Nixon muzzled Agnew. despite the outcry from the left and even from some fellow Republicans. Agnew, says an aide, is pretty much a self-starter anyhow: “You don’t have to say ‘Sic ’em, Ted.'” There have been times, says a Nixon adviser, “when the President has cringed at Agnew’s choice of words,” but in general Nixon thinks of him as a “gutsy guy.” On his office wall in the Executive Office Building, Agnew has hung a portrait of Nixon inscribed: “To Vice President Ted Agnew, who has demonstrated his character in the ultimate tests of political combat. From his friend, Richard Nixon.” During a Cabinet meeting last week, the President dished up the warmest compliment he has yet paid Agnew. He wanted everyone to know, said Nixon, that he thinks the Vice President is doing a good job and that he likes what Agnew is saying. Further, what Agnew is saying is in keeping with what Nixon believes should be said. “Agnew’s not just yapping when he yaps,” says a White House aide. Agnew put it another way to a reporter three weeks ago: “The President and I have an understanding.”

That understanding centers on the Vice President’s franchise to rouse the “great silent majority” to verbal support of the Administration, specifically to drown out anti-war dissent. Simultaneously, Marylander Agnew is a chief agent of the President’s Southern strategy. During the presidential campaign, he was dispatched to help capture the Southern and Border states for the G.O.P. The effort was markedly successful; George Wallace took Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, but Nixon and Agnew emerged with the electoral votes of four out of five Border states, along with North and South Carolina and Florida.

Now Agnew is concentrating upon turning the Deep South into a Republican enclave. Of the 25 political speeches he has delivered since the Inauguration, nine were made in the South. It is also significant that it was in the South—in New Orleans and Jackson, Miss.—that Agnew detonated his biggest rhetorical bangalores to date. “He came through like Gangbusters,” says Louisiana’s G.O.P. State Chairman Charles De Gravelles. “If you’d run a poll, he’d get 98% support.” In Jackson, Agnew told fellow Republicans at a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner: “The principles of most of the people of Mississippi are the principles of the Republican Party. South Carolina’s Judge Clement Haynsworth is not guilty of any impropriety, unless that impropriety is his place of birth and residence.” For too long, the Vice President added, the South has been “the punching bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals.”

Speaking in New Orleans of the Oct. 15 Moratorium, Agnew delivered his most notable line of the season, one that instantly became part of American political history: “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” The line sounds like George Wallace armed with Roget’s, but Agnew is no George Wallace, despite their common streak of anti-intellectualism. The Vice President is neither a racist nor a demagogue and, curiously enough, he seems little driven by political ambition. Says Carl Paolozzi, an aluminum-plant supervisor in Southern California, “Wallace is an extremist just like those guys on trial in Chicago. Wallace is against our system of government; Agnew is trying to preserve it.”

In many ways, Agnew means simply to fight fire with fire, to counter the extreme “Up Against the Wall” rhetoric of the American left with his own equally tough vocabulary. M.I.T.’s Noam Chomsky, a prominent antiwar critic, has a habit of making slightly hysterical comparisons between the U.S. today and Hitler’s Germany. For months, protesters have chanted: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/Viet Cong is gonna win!” Earlier, the chorus was “Hey, hey, L.B.J./ How many kids did you kill today?” In adopting equally simplistic phrases, Agnew contributes to a sort of verbal totalism. And, of course, there is the difference that the protesters are not highly placed officials who publicly represent the U.S. Government.

The Gut Chord

Agnew’s canon is a pastiche of Ronald Reagan, Norman Vincent Peale and American home truths. “Parental discipline is the gateway to knowledge,” he has said. “The family alone can provide the bedrock security of the soul.” Stressing the need for civil order in another speech, he asked: “Do ‘we the people’ enjoy uproar? Obviously, the answer is no. Civil rights are balanced by civil responsibilities. People cannot live in a state of perpetual electric shock.” One of the Vice President’s favorite words is “Establishment.” “It is time,” he has urged, “for the Establishment of this country—governmental, educational, industrial, religious—to revitalize themselves, to be proud that they are integral and vital components of the greatest nation this world has ever produced. I am not ready to run up a white flag for the United States of America.”

“Make no mistake about it,” says California Pollster Mervin Field. “Agnew is strumming a real gut chord. The issue is much more than Viet Nam. When the President of the U.S. has to say in his speech, ‘I know that it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism these days,’ you get an idea how wide the gap is.” Another California pollster, Don Muchmore, agrees: “What Agnew is telling the public is precisely what the man in the middle has been saying to his neighbor for the last six months. What Agnew is saying isn’t new; what’s new is that the Vice President of the U.S. is saying it.”

How resonant is the note that Agnew is striking? “People in the New York/Washington axis read their Times and Washington Post every morning, and what they say is critical,” says a White House adviser. “But when you get out into the country, the feeling changes.” Liberals—including many editorial writers and columnists—mock Agnew. Even the White House staff is divided between those who regard the Vice President as “hopeless” and those who think him “educable.” A moderate Republican Senator said recently: “The man’s a laughing stock, even among other Republicans. When I speak to a Republican group, I don’t have to tell a joke to get a laugh, I just say ‘Spiro Agnew.’ ”

Yet in many parts of the nation, Agnew’s voice is vox populi. Barry Goldwater allowed last week that Agnew’s attacks on the peace movement leaders express “the sentiment of the vast, overwhelming majority of the American people.” He even suggested that Agnew might find himself being touted for the White House before his time. Says Fred Nemeth, a printer in Phoenix, Ariz.: “We all want this war to end, but we don’t like to see those demonstrators in the streets. No matter how much we disagree with each other, we don’t like to see this country ridiculed and torn down, and we think Agnew’s right.” Arizona Boxing Manager Al Fenn adds ominously: “I can’t help but feel there’s going to be a revolt against the protesters in time, and it’s not going to be a silent majority any longer. Instead, it’s going to be an outspoken majority.”

Questions of Style

Even those who agree with Agnew’s views frequently find it difficult to take him very seriously as a leader—and many Americans wince at the thought that he might be thrust abruptly into the presidency. Says Ray Caponigro, a Chicago pressman: “I think it’s good he’s coming down on those hippies, but I wouldn’t like him as President. He’s too temperamental.” A Houston housewife, Mrs. R. W. Hirsch, places herself squarely in Middle America, but Agnew makes her nervous. “While the man is definitely honest in his opinions, he is anything but tactful,” she says. Jake Johnson, a garage owner in Atlanta, applauds Agnew for “speaking his mind.” But to the thought of Agnew in the White House, he says, “Not yet.” A reaction that is common among many other Americans: a you-can’t-be-serious grin.

The Vice President’s campaign biography, a 116-page document called Where He Stands: The Life and Convictions of Spiro T. Agnew, records that as a boy in Baltimore, he used to help his Greek-born father prepare talks before local groups. “While the Governor’s best subject was English,” writes Author Ann Pinchot. “this is how he learned to perfect and polish the eloquence and clarity for which he is now known.” Alas, it is precisely his prose style that frightens off so many, including some who are sympathetic to his basic message. Columnist William F. Buckley Jr., while concurring in Agnew’s description of an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” felt impelled to deliver an explication de texte: “The rhetorical arrangement is extremely unsatisfactory,” wrote Buckley. “The word ‘snob’ should rarely be preceded by an adjective. An ‘effete corps’ has its stresses wrong, which is itself distracting.”

There are more serious criticisms. Agnew delivers a sort of .45-cal. prose —heavy, highly charged, often inaccurate and dangerous. If students and liberals are disposed to an apocalyptic vision of America as a runaway, can cerous technocracy, Agnew’s audiences are suggestible to his appeals to a “Love It or Leave It” America. In Harrisburg. Pa., two weeks ago. Agnew attacked the more militant dissidents as “vultures” and declared: “We can afford to separate them from our society with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.” What did he mean by separation? Expulsion? Concentration camps?

Black and White

Other times, the sayings of Spiro are merely camp—howling violations of political politesse. “If you’ve seen one slum,” he declared during the campaign, “you’ve seen them all.” The odd thing is that the line makes a certain cockeyed sense: there is a miserable monotony about urban slums. If Agnew had made the point with any sensitivity, the effect would have been the opposite of the one he achieved.

A strong tendency to verbal excess reflects the essential Agnew. He sees things in black and white, and has an absolute passion for oversimplification.

“Civil disobedience.” he says, “leads inevitably to riots, and riots condoned lead inevitably to revolution.”

Agnew’s delight in locker-room bonhomie also leads him astray. Last week, for example. Agnew attended a black-tie stag dinner at the White House for Prince Philip. With remarks from the diplomatic Deans—Acheson and Rusk —the evening proceeded with a certain urbanity. Then the Vice President rose to propose a toast to the guest of honor. Some people, Agnew began, found his manner of speech alarming, but there was no need to worry about that now: “All of you with tightened sinews and constricted sphincters can relax.” A distinct chill settled on the room. One White House adviser slowly dropped his head to the table and cupped both hands over his ears.

Agnew personally is a talkative, gregarious and kindly man, but he keeps slipping unwittingly into crudity. As when he branded the Baltimore Sun’s Gene Oishi “the fat Jap” during the campaign. Or when he told a Chicago press conference: “When I am moving in a crowd, I don’t look and say, ‘There’s a Negro, there’s a Greek, there’s a Polack.’ ” Or when his aide, C. D. Ward, barreled through a glass door at San Clemente and ended up with permanent facial scars; for fun, Agnew started calling him “Wolfgang.”

The counterbombardments that his speeches have triggered have left Agnew baffled and somewhat defensive. He now limits most of his interviews to sympathetic publications, such as U.S. News & World Report, or to columnists like Holmes Alexander. It is not only the criticism that is troubling Agnew. His friends describe him as “unhappy, disappointed and frustrated” by the job of Vice President.

Occasionally in recent months he has gone on campaigns of self-depreciating humor that debunk the nature of his office—usually with the aid of Paul Keyes, a former writer and co-producer for Laugh-In. Two weeks ago at a meeting of the American Bakers Association, Agnew excused himself by remarking: “The President needs me at the White House. It’s autumn, you know, and the leaves need raking.” Earlier, at a Gridiron Club dinner, he described the joys of the vice-presidency. “I have my own plane—Air Force 13. It’s a glider.”

The Awful Office

As every Vice President since John Adams has known, the nation’s second highest office is a dispiriting post only slightly preferable to a rural postmastership (see box preceding page). “The Vice President of the United States,” said Thomas R. Marshall, Vice President under Woodrow Wilson, “is like a man in a cataleptic state: he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him.” Agnew on the subject: “It’s a sort of ancillary job where you’re not in the mainstream of anything. The job itself creates some sort of debility.”

Beginning with Eisenhower, Presidents have tried to activate the office by adding responsibilities to involve their Vice Presidents in the decision-making processes. But quite often the responsibilities are simply chores that the President wishes to avoid. Nixon wants Agnew on the political line, giving them heil. He also wants Agnew to handle such ceremonial chores as Boy Scout awards, embassy breakfasts and Medal of Honor presentations.

Agnew’s only constitutionally mandated job is presiding over the Senate, but his highly fragmented duties include heading the Space Council, the President’s Council on Youth Opportunity, the Office of Intergovernmental Relations and the National Council on Indian Opportunity. White House business occupies up to 15 hours of his week—meetings of the National Security Council, the Cabinet, the Urban Affairs Council, the Environmental Quality Council, plus a weekly gathering of the Republican congressional leadership.

The Vice President is most influential with the President in dealing with state and local governments. Specifically assigned to coordinate the three levels of government, Agnew has established excellent communications with the Governors, although many mayors are unhappy with his efforts to channel federal funds to cities through the states. Still, Nixon listens to Agnew on domestic matters; the Vice President has traveled 77,091 miles in the U.S. since January, observing at each stop.

Agnew witnesses the decision-making in such areas as Viet Nam or the ABM, but he does not really participate. Asked to name a major contribution the Vice President has made to policy, a White House adviser modified Ike’s reply regarding Nixon: “If you give me ten minutes, I might think of something.” Eisenhower said that he would need a week, and Agnew could thus be considered a considerable improvement. Nonetheless, the Vice President has complained to friends that he feels like an errand boy. Says one of his aides: “He misses the authority of a top executive. When he was Governor of Maryland, he had full control of his schedule.” Now his weekends and evenings as well as his days are at the disposal of the President. Although he dislikes parties, he attends about four receptions a week, for foreign visitors, for example, or party leaders.

Senate Failure

The first Vice President in 24 years with no Senate experience, Agnew has not had an easy time on the Hill. In the early months after the Inauguration, he conscientiously courted Senators, attending each noon’s opening of business, presiding in the chair to learn parliamentary procedures and school himself in Senate ways. He lunched with members in the Senators’ dining room. Most important, he flattered Senators by his deference, thereby convincing them of his wit and discernment. He worked so hard at his homework during those first months that he burst a blood vessel in his eye.

Last summer, however, perhaps feeling overly buoyant about his good national press, Agnew began lobbying clumsily for Administration programs. He started with the ABM, buttonholing members on the Senate floor, then repeated the mistake in an attempt to get the income-tax surcharge extended for a year. As a wheeler-dealer, he failed ingloriously and provoked a curt civics lesson from Majority Leader Mike Mansfield: “A Vice President should not interfere in Senate affairs regardless of his party. He is not a member of the Senate. He’s a half-creature of the Senate and a half-creature of the executive.” In recent weeks, perhaps as a result, Agnew has displayed little interest in the Senate. The pattern worries some Republicans, since it has occurred before: Agnew has a tendency to give up and turn away when rebuffed.

Life Styles

He is defensive about the press. “Now it seems to be fashionable to make out Agnew to be some kind of goof,” he tells friends. “I don’t think I’m a brain. I’ve got an I.Q. of about 135 when it was last tested. I think that’s pretty fair.” He has been known to remark unhappily: “I’m still fighting the idea of being a rather ill-equipped, fumbling, obtuse kind of person.”

For all the limited opportunities of the vice-presidency, Agnew, at 51, has displayed small capacity for development. Ten years ago, he was president of the P.T.A. in Loch Raven village near Baltimore. Five years ago, he was the Baltimore county executive, presiding over a horseshoe-shaped suburban community that knew little of the urban agonies on which he is now supposedly an Administration expert. Today, as Vice President, he retains his earlier prejudices.

The Agnew life style has changed considerably, however. Last January the Agnews moved from the handsome 54-room Governor’s mansion in Annapolis to a nine-room apartment in Washington’s Sheraton Park Hotel. The capital has transformed the family’s domestic life, which in years past consisted largely of lawn sprinklers, pizza, ping-pong in the basement rec room, Sunday afternoons watching the Baltimore Colts on color television. As Governor, Agnew could even have the Colts over for dinner from time to time.

Now the Vice President’s schedule begins about 7:30 a.m. with breakfast and keeps him shuttling between White House, Executive Office Building and Capitol until 7 p.m.—or much later if there is an official reception to attend. He still sees his Maryland friends often, especially George White Jr., the family lawyer who presides over the Agnew family assets of some $100,000. Although his weekends are always subject to interruptions, Agnew has managed to trim off 15 lbs. by playing tennis, often with G.O.P. National Chairman Rogers Morton or Postmaster General Winton Blount. One thing that Agnew has not sacrificed is his pro football : this season he has made it to five Colts games, usually ducking into the locker room before kickoff to wish the team luck.

Agnew’s wife Judy, who admits that “every once in awhile I think to myself, what am I doing here,” must also sacrifice considerable domestic time (“I majored in marriage”) for such chores as entertaining the wives of foreign visitors or chamber of commerce officials. Judy Agnew has two houseboys and a live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Ann Leer, who used to manage the Governor’s mansion at Annapolis. But the Agnews do not entertain often at their own quarters, which can accommodate a party of only 20 or 25. For larger groups, they use the State Department reception rooms downtown.

Parental Discipline

Two of the four Agnew children still live at home—Kim, 13, and Susan, 22. Susan is now dating Maryland State Trooper Colin Maclndoe, an old friend from Annapolis. The Agnews were always close to the state police, who were assigned to guard the Maryland Governor’s mansion. One of the first dinner parties that the Vice President held in Washington was for the state troopers from the old palace guard. Noble Collison, a state cop with whom Judy Agnew used to play pool in the Governor’s mansion, has joined Agnew’s Washington staff.

There is something akin to touching poetic justice in Agnew’s parental troubles with his daughter Kim, who would be a handful for any father of the Ozzie Nelson school. Kim, who has been known to experiment with marijuana, wanted to wear a black armband for Moratorium day last month. Agnew said no and twice went through a laborious historical explanation of the Geneva Accord and American involvement in the war. Kim shrugged: “All right, but why not just get out of there?” Finally, Agnew invoked parental prerogative and forbade her to demonstrate. “They need authority at some point,” he said, “and when they don’t get it, they’re unhappy.”

The Agnews and the Nixons maintain a formal, distant relationship. They meet at receptions, but have never entertained one another exclusively. Pat Nixon and Judy Agnew exchange surface gossip about their children or their schedules. Dick and Ted meet in conference; Agnew has rarely sought out the President for a private audience. Their relationship is businesslike—but then so are nearly all Nixon’s relationships.

Thus Agnew’s life has divided like that of a closet poet or weekend preacher. His office hours are occupied with rustling in a midden of executive trivia. But when he takes to the lectern, he is transformed into what might be a cartoon character called “Suburbanman.” The combination doesn’t really work very well for the Vice President. Says a good friend: “He is not happy. An ambitious man would eat it up, but he is not an ambitious man.”

There has been talk that Nixon might drop Agnew as his running mate in 1972, although such a move would be out of character for the President. Ultimately, that question will depend mainly upon Agnew’s usefulness to Nixon in the next three years. It seems clear that Nixon did not select Agnew because he thought him the one man best qualified to succeed him in the presidency. Agnew’s value to Nixon is as a front man, mixing with and speaking to the public as the President cannot. As such, he is doing his job, playing the Middle American calliope, trying to get a grip on what is happening to his society.

At root Spiro T. Agnew is, like so many of the people he speaks to and for, a political innocent of fundamentally decent impulses, a “normal” American in the old sense who is grappling with the puzzlements of what may be simply an evil time. That, of course, is part of his appeal, but it is also his curse in the television age, when every malapropism and mistake by a public man is caught and magnified. It is clear that Agnew is not comfortable in the stratosphere of Washington’s sophisticated politics. As his wife Judy observes, perhaps with a touch of wistfulness: “He is a very good lawyer. He can always go back to practicing law.”