MINUTE STEAK, DISARMED HANDS

...And both are-how shall I put it...

...Frank Church did not tell us this...

...If Nelson Rockefeller were to write a novel-and who can safely say he won't?-he at least would not stand in awe before Wedgewood and old silver...

...The service is discreet and efficient...

...For me they will remain forever suspended in mid-air, the fingers of one clenched, the other splayed...

...The same cannot be said of Agnew...

...Lately, as if to confirm what we always knew, he has been echoing the line of his benefactors by running off at the mouth about the insidious "influence" of Jewish bankers and journalists, thereby spawning another grubby version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

...Again, yes...

...Apart from transparent elements of roman a clef, its mild interest lies in two questions: Can the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency blackmail the President with hard evidence of illegal acts of surveillance and other villainies...

...Ehrlichman's book is not quite as bad as it should be, an astonishing fact which led the reviewers to exaggerate wildly its slight merits...

...Jews are everywhere, put on earth by a vengeful God to torment him...

...And: "His eyes narrowed and he spat out the words with passion...

...at last, at long last, a Somebody...

...or so we are told...

...the blue-and-white sublimity of Air Force Two, that slightly less-lofty bird...

...Instances, both of dumbness and nuttiness, abound on every page...

...And: "How many sleepless nights had Martin speculated, fearing the ugly words on these pages...

...Yes, he can...

...Moreover, Ehrlichman isn't nutty...

...Both the former Assistant for Domestic Affairs and the former Vice President, once their bellies have been filled, their esurience slaked, share other interests, principally the outward and visible signs of power and money: Air Force One, where even the cellophane wrappers on the candy bars and the plastic coffeecups are emblazoned with the presidential seal...

...but we are worldly people, you and I, and we know that happiness is a sometime thing, and even the good life as Ambassador to Jamaica (no, not Teheran) is no certain guarantor of perpetual bliss...

...The accompanying wines, disappointingly unidentified, are described as "superb," and here, as is not the case with the Brie, my confidence in the author's taste buds falters though it does not utterly topple...

...John Erlichman does, and he should know...

...A consequential distinction seems worth making...

...his palms were sweating...

...Time has not mellowed his paranoid hatred of the press...

...The sweet is meringue purl piled with fresh strawberries...

...Dinner at the G Street Club, however, is something else again: mousseline de sole Breton, Chateaubriand with grilled mushroom caps, and endive salad served with a perfect soft Brie...

...And yet of how many bigots in our midst can it be said, as it can be said of Agnew, that bigotry however sodden, dullwitted, scurrilous is the least of his sins, that alongside his many other notable qualities it is almost the most endearing of them...

...It is a little awesome to recall that were it not for his venality and avarice, this is the man who might at this moment be prancing about with the little black box containing the little red button, flying the ozone not on Air Force Two but Air Force One...

...On another occasion the grilled steak is served with baked potato and string beans, which may seem rather pedestrian to your ear, or palate, though nothing edible seems less than memorable to Ehrlichman, least of all the lunch served to a clandestine informant by the celebrated gourmet who is Washington's deadliest investigative reporter-veal scaloppini and sauteed baby zucchini...

...All done in the name of candor, you understand...

...Thesaurus is related to the language he grunted when in his glory days he was wielding the hatchet on the Yahoo Circuit, precisely the language a stone-deaf autodidact might glean from a dictionary of synonyms if he were equipped with no instinct at all for the sound and rhythm of words, shades of meaning, meaning itself...

...the book is Jew-haunted, Zion-tormented...

...john ratte, formerly chairman of the History Department at Amherst, is headmaster of the Loomis-Chaffee School in Connecticut...

...Escoffier would not have used that disagreeable word but Escoffier did not know the G Street Club...

...michael f. mccauley is the editor of Overview, published by the Thomas More Association...

...This thing was hitting him hard...

...At the same time he assures his interlocutors on the promotion circuit that he's "not a bigot...

...or speak of an "erubescent neck...

...In this connection one recalls the charming and playful Green Beret motto, which the twice-born thug Chuck Colson adopted as his own: "When you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow...

...Agnew, amid the tumult of his checkered life, appears to have forgotten, or to imagine we have forgotten, that his own name is composed of a mere two syllables of his original multi-syllabic surname...

...MINUTE STEAK, DISARMED HANDS SAUL MALOFF The Company JOHN ERLICHMAN Simon & Schuster, $8.95 The Canfield Decision SPIRO AGNEW Playboy Press, $8.95 When the Director of Central Intelligence entertains guests in his private diningroom in Langley, Va., he provides, after cocktails, of course, a meal consisting of minute grilled steak and tossed green salad and, for dessert, melon and cookies...

...One Jewish newsman affably exposes another one bearing the Wasp name "Douglas Drake" as "Dravitz"-and Agnew adds: "It pleased him to refer to the television reporter by his original surname because he resented people who changed their names for professional reasons...

...In a book impacted with such felonies against the language, one is hard-pressed to choose a favorite...

...Spiro Agnew always had a way with words...

...His nightmares teem with Jews...

...Whether the disarmed hands stuck to the ceiling or bounced back into their sockets we are not told...

...or refer to a subject best not talked about as "caveated...

...And: Can the same DCI find happiness in the arms of an abstract photographer...

...Here it is, in all its surgico-calisthenie singularity: "Bedson [the junior Senator from California] threw up his hands disarm-ingly...

...Ehrlichman would love us to speculate...

...Ehrlichman is a smart lawyer and writes like one...

...Both of these malefactors are casebook instances of seedy castoffs standing noses pressed to the plate glass window of the fashionable restaurant dumbstruck at the sheer majesty of the candlelit spectacle, splendid with "beautifully dressed ladies and their escorts," wondering what the quality-folk are "masticating" (another Agnewian word, naturally) and how much it costs...

...When Erlichman isn't recording menus, he tends to favor the language of pulp melodrama: "He was excessively warm...

...I must risk sounding effete but only the French term will do-both authors are prosateurs...

...Next to veal he prefers boys...

...My own might have been that one about the fluently Farsi-cursing Persian were it not for one other which not even a Perelman at his most wanton could have imagined-or, having imagined, dared to write...

...and sitting in tense expectation of an after-dinner speech, "their esurience satisfied, the audience waited to slake a different hunger...

...but the arrivistes and shopkeepers who once tasted of ambrosia and nectar can't seem to get over the wonder of it all...

...Margaret wimsatt lives in New Haven, Connecticut...

...By choosing to make noises in public rather than concealing himself in silence and exile, Agnew forces a further word upon us...

...it rages, it boils, it drives him up walls and round bends...

...he sees Jews everywhere, everywhere...

...one must serve...

...Damn bunch of Jews is what they are...

...Agnew is "not a bigot" in the measure that his former commander was "not a crook...

...and when Agnew responds tremblingly to the "rustle of expensive formal gowns," it is not the fictive well-born V.P...

...he's sordid but not a nut...

...Agnew's book, on the other hand, is exactly what it should be, to the centimeter: vulgar, malicious, elephantine, bungling, churlish, nasty, morally leprous-scurvy and mindless, devoid of the least jot of intelligence and sensibility-a smelly, loathsome little object (his few grim little jokes, such as they are, are crudely anal, wouldn't you know...

...Balls, as the psychohis-torian begins to suspect and the people of Indochina knew all too well, were a subject (or a "subject matter," as John Mitchell might have said) of extraordinary interest to the former President and his former men...

...As opposed to Ehrlichman's robust visceral fascination with food and drink, Spiro Agnew's may be described as cerebral and spiritual: people are "hungry for bold leadership...

...and that he prefers his friends call him "Ted" rather than by his honorable Greek name...

...REVIEWERS saul maloff's most recent novel is Heartland (Scribner's...

...Agnew's barbarisms and solecisms "played" in Peoria, as Ehrlichman used to say, and mark the user as a buffoon everywhere else, including Peoria, an unfairly maligned city...

...Poles, Japanese and Blacks will be glad to know this...

...The style is the man, the man is the style...

...he's that sort...

...Who but Agnew could use such a word as "esurience" with a straight face...

...If, on the whole, Ehrlichman's language is derived from the style of briefing papers, minutes, memoranda and computer printouts, and his sense of fiction from spy thrillers, Agnew writes a queer variant of English that can only be called Thesaurus and his sense of fiction derives from nowhere, not even from trash...

...From there to "He scowled darkly in feigned rage" and 'The Iranian climbed out, cursing effortlessly in Farsi" and "She was a complete package of high-class sensuality" and "Everywhere the poor were becoming restless and angry, and the rich were showing a furtiveness that bespoke a gnawing anxiety about the future" is a small step...

...Candor, to adapt Emerson's remark on Daniel Webster-candor in the mouth of Agnew is like love in the mouth of a whore...

...Yet when the urgent need stirs in his loins he can burn with lyric incandescence, as when a character remarkably reminiscent of Kissinger "catapults his corpulence" down the hallway to the Oval Office or when he calls the dead-ringer for Haldeman "a philosophical eunuch...

...His nerves were taut...

...a man who can hold a couple of ideas in his head at the same time without splitting down the middle...

...Only such a butcher of language could write of a man munching on peanuts as having an "ever-restless mouth," or, better still, a "masticating machine...

...butlers, servants, intercoms, Secret Service agents, state dinners, the Marine Corps orchestra rising as the majestic presence enters the room...

...Only born nobodies think that way...

...Ehrlichman pretends to scoff at a climber's "elegant long gown" but only a climber would call it that...

...Working, one must suppose, independently, Agnew oddly strikes a similar phrase in calling one of his characters "a political eunuch...

...Porter Canfield quivering but the Pier Six brawler whose "pulse quickened just a fraction" and who, standing tall in the White House, thinks it is "good to be somebody, and particularly good to be somebody in this house, where so many somebodies had walked...

...Agnew is a grossly stupid shyster whose head has never been violated by an idea of any kind, and whenever he attempts to formulate one he collapses into incoherence...