The Secret Life of Spiro Agnew
GOODMAN, WALTER
Perspectives THE SECRET LIFE OF SPIRO AGNEW BY WALTER GOODMAN Spiro Agnew is not one of those unusual politicians who by sheer force of mind or character compels one to take him seriously; in...
...But this is not what bothers the Vice President...
...One might explain his continuing assaults on the New York Times and the Washington Post as the old game of playing up to haters of the Eastern seaboard who attend Republican fund-raising dinners in the Midwest and the South...
...Television is no place for an ideologue or a snob...
...Agnew errs, however, when he suggests that it is ideology or snobbishness that makes the commentators unkind...
...His ailment is a common one in Baltimore, Cleveland and points west...
...Here youth calls the tune—and it is the Administration's misfortune that the war in Vietnam is not one of young America's favorite numbers...
...While we're at it, who speaks when Spiro Agnew opens his...
...Walter Goodman, author of The Committee, is a freelance writer...
...our Vice Presidential blowhard is an intellectual manque...
...A liberal drift is certainly there, but it tends to be most pronounced in fairly safe areas, such as calls for more humane treatment of drug addicts and a crackdown on bigots...
...Nobody, of course, ought to depend on television for news---yet the millions who do, although inadequately informed, have not been deluged with propaganda...
...Yet by settling for ridicule, we may be neglecting some interesting aspects of his performance...
...and the entire operation is acutely responsive to the whims and vogues that make broadcasting what it is...
...The Vice President's attacks, perforce, oblige all of us libertarians to rush to the defense of a medium which in our heart of hearts we despise...
...Don't be surprised if one day soon he turns up in the letters page of the New York Review of Books...
...The collaborative requirements of television make Time magazine look like a bastion of personal journalism...
...But where is the precedent for a Vice President of the United States going to the pages of Commentary (to the embarrassment of its editor) to find support for his dislike of campus radicals...
...Inside this spokesman for Square America is a swinger...
...For show business purposes, only two kinds of politicians are of use?idols of the millions and figures of fun...
...in fact, it is pretty hard to take him at all...
...Who, exactly, are we defending...
...Who speaks when Walter Cronkite opens his mouth...
...the commentators are star players...
...He is merely annoyed that the commentators have been critical of the war and the Administration...
...In practice, though, it seems to me that the network news departments have not abused their oligopolistic situation...
...And whoever heard of a mainstream politician taking the trouble to include /. F. Stone's Biweekly in an attack on unfriendly press lords...
...A reading of the Agnew output over the past few months makes it clear that the Vice President wishes to be taken seriously...
...Deep inside, he wants to be part of the New York scene...
...The network news departments are branches of show business...
...It's quite a coup...
...Since the beginnings of the medium, practically everyone who has troubled to write about it has revealed the ominous fact that a small group of people situated in New York shape the news for the entire nation...
...It should be evident by now what is really eating the Vice President...
...Even if Spiro Agnew did not engage in competitive sports, he would be a figure of fun and that irks him...
...His political motives are transparent, his methods gross, and more than most public men, he has mainly himself to blame for the ridicule and abuse he receives up and down the land...
...He wants people who count to know that he is acquainted with Commentary, disdains television, and operates in a league where one picks fights with I. F. Stone...
...Consider the Agnew case against television newscasters and commentators...
...Indeed, who in his audience of smalltown realtors and insurance brokers can ever have heard of Izzy Stone...
Vol. 53 • June 1970 • No. 12
