The Impudent Snobs
Docksai, Ronald F.
Book Review: The Impudent Snobs by John R. Coyne, Jr. Arlington House, $8.95 "I think I'm properly considered a part of the center. Labels are very difficult. I made some judgments in the course...
...Early in the semester, in late August, Professor Kissinger declared his pupil to be profoundly unprepared for the course work because of previous inexperience with the curriculum...
...Conjunctive analysis uniting his introduction provides a portrait of the man ritualistic liberals and even some conservatives relegate to "All in the Family" status...
...And his name Ronald F. Docksai...
...Orthodox Randist friends of mine bow to Saint Ayn's endorsement of Nixon, but they express to me their "rational" contempt for a vice president who does not include the Virtue of Selfishness in his speeches...
...I don't think they were...
...Unlike young Richard Nixon, young Tec Agnew had no intention of being president of the United States...
...Like the majority of Americans, he does not operate as an ideological agent...
...And while most vice presidents bide their time covertly running for president and flirting with the labor and press aristocracies, Vice President Agnew has concentrated on perfecting his knowledge of statecraft and mastering the native languages of Washington, D.C...
...better than Nixon or any other political figure, is the authentic product of and spokesman for the Silent Majority, the productive middle of our country without which our nation might be little bigger than Iceland and as productive as India during the cow season...
...After Vice President Agnew appeared on "The David Frost Show" in 1969, the White House was besieged by letters from viewers who professed astonishment over what they called Agnew's "humane and intelligent" nature which, though known to Agnew, was unknown to viewers accus tomed to seeing an insensitive vice president eating students for breakfast...
...Not because he read it in National Review...
...The press has never forgiven him...
...Samuel Johnson, his professed hero, living in the world he imagines Dr...
...are tanstaafling it at McGovern headquarters...
...Agnew by Hollywood's most famous professor...
...He is not a card carrying conservative or a liberal and has never pretended to be...
...His adventures as a young man are more akin to the typical stories of hard working, "regular," growing Americans than the President's strictly-confined, Quaker upbringing of self-imposed isolation from his adolescent peers...
...I made some judgments in the course of my political career...which have been characterized as flaming liberal...
...Agnew...
...At a time when Ph.D candidates in economics actually receive their union cards without ever having heard of Von Mises, even Milton Friedman is supporting the election of the New Keynesian, while the Vice President has expressed "grave misgivings" over FAP and a Generation of Deficits - misgivings which he is unable to articulate publicly because of his office...
...I think some of the things I'm saying now that are compatible with the views of the people who consider themselves very conservative are still sensible...
...Explains Coyne, When my first book appeared, I remember that Gary Wills, in a killer review, called me a hard-hat with a degree.'' I found this phrase, and the attitude which informed it, particularly offensive, for I was proud of the fact that I came from a working-class family, that I had also been a hard-hat, and that I managed to earn a couple of degrees...
...The Pennsylvania leaders of the late S.I.L...
...This is not to cast judgment on either, but only to mark the difference in the two so that we may compensate for differences in the two men, respectively...
...A month after the election, after four months of study, Kissinger revised his earlier criticism thus: The Vice President is the fastest learner I have ever met...
...The President, upon learning of the broadcast in which the Vice President did not feign fire-eater, was greatly dis turbed...
...Not because a president asked him to perform in return for political gifts...
...As Coyne explains in a letter to National Review, June 9th, correcting an uncharacteristically shoddy review of Coyne's book by Neal Freeman, The Impudent Snobs is not purported to be a biography of the Vice President - incognito or otherwise...
...Those who are closest to him, however, note a dominant and growing conservatism in his nature, one which reflects the waxing social conservatism in the American population...
...This would not have been possible in most of the countries in Europe, for instance, or at least not nearly as easy...
...The garden variety liberal professor of American literature, who cant write a novel and, therefore, hates Ernest Hemingway," and who can't love his country and, therefore, hates Spiro Agnew...
...Robert MacNamara, the Agent of Pure Intellect, the Fleshy Computer who...
...While most men formally prepare themselves for the vice presidency before coming to Washington, Mr...
...in the tradition of the true Rationalist, is only capable of making politics as the crow flies...
...129) But Gary Wills, like most elitists, is not of this world...
...In April, 1968, Governor Agnew reprimanded a group of Black community leaders by reminding them that it is wrong to throw bombs at innocent civilians...
...Agnew started reading only after his arrival...
...But because these values have become a part of him...
...patriotism, the role of religion, societal order, and the preservation of more than a mere vestige of our republican political system is important to most Americans, and it is important to Agnew...
...He is fast becoming one of the most well read of America's public servants...
...Agnew is Middle America's Man in Washington, a Middle America vividly drawn by Coyne's recognition of its most prominent non-members: Professor Charles Reich (The Greening of America), totally "cloistered in the academy," composing uninformed sappy books so that he may win membership in The Kids, Daniel Ellsberg, the agent of pure Emotion in search of his personal Calvary, carrying his wooden cross and floodlights up the steep stage en route to the nearest street corner to set up shop...
...That is, it is in correlation with sentiments by the Silent Majority, emphasis on individual reliance and initiative, the right to privacy (i.e., as challenged by compulsory busing, abortion, the drug culture, Zero Population Growth, Skinnerites, etc...
...He must never be allowed to get onto something like that Frost Show again, snapped the President "He must be my hammer...
...Still, many libertarians of various creeds either sneer at the Agnew name or in some cases, they are supporting the Free Enterprise ticket of McGovern (e.g...
...On Bill Buckley's Firing Line, a few years ago, the Vice President confessed that he did not belong to the Philadelphia Society, and some young conservative colleagues of mine have privately burped "Betrayal" ever since...
...However, millions of Americans-most of them, in fact, live in a place called the real world...
...And the elitism of media men who hold disdain for those who cannot eat wine-soaked luncheons at San Soucis...
...He believes that he is a reincarnation of Dr...
...National security affairs, congressional relations and similar areas of topical importance to the technically complete vice president would be spoon fed" to Mr...
...the Gary Wills variety of disdain of those ho find it offensive that the American workingman simply can't seem to stay in the place they would like to assign him...
...And they have a hero too...
...I think they were sensible...
...A story, privately told by Henry Kissinger, runs as follows...
...The important thing in Wills' statement seemed to me to be the underlying assumption that somehow it was wrong for a hard-hat to earn a college degree...
...But the reaction wasn't so much personal...
...It is important to understand that this so-called conservatism of the Vice President, one which expresses itself two out of three times politically (e.g., pro-Nixon on Federal Health Insurance, but anti-FAP and anti-China), is fundamentally social...
...It deals with Spiro Agnew's ninety-four most important speeches (the texts of which are included in an appendix) and the various reactions to them (reported by Coyne in a 171 page introduction) For all the charges of rhetorical genocide enthusiastically made by media types against these speeches (which Eric Hoffer has described as the only consistently thoughtful commentaries proffered by a living American politician), Coyne offers an impressive empirical rebuttal and more...
...Vice President Agnew, 1970 on Firing Line...
...Johnson living in, the world of Miniver Cheevy, the world of Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadore...
...Though one may read all of the avail able biographies of Agnew, only in Coyne's book can one put the choo-choo train of lifeless statistics concerning where, why, and how the Vice Presi dent was born into true perspective, thus allowing a glimpse of the man President Nixon might never let us see...
...Almost as many people misunderstand John Coyne's excellent book on the Vice President as join Henry Kissinger in wrongly pegging the Vice President...
...Shortly after the 1968 Republican convention, candidate Richard Nixon gave Henry Kissinger the assignment of educating" Spiro Agnew...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
