Spiro Agnew:The Word's the Thing
WITCOVER, JULES
Spiro Agnew: The Word's the Thing by JULES WITCOVER There may be nothing that irritates Vice President Spiro T. Agnew more than being called another Joseph R. McCarthy. In both appearance and...
...for saying Richard Nixon was elected President by a "hucksterized process...
...he has a good intellect and unbelievable political instincts when he needs them...
...And although in 1966 he was a crusader against conservatism, in sharp contrast to his current role as its apostle, Agnew's rhetoric in the Mahoney campaign gave Marylanders a clear indication of oratorical things to come...
...He attended public schools in Baltimore and studied chemistry for three years at Johns Hopkins University...
...That masterpiece of bullying innuendo at once marked Agnew as the man Main Street needed to cut the intellectuals down to size, and the favorable response gave him his head...
...It was the opinion of a few, distorted and magnified by the silence of most of you here today...
...He was against going outside the established way of doing things...
...And he looks so harmless, so aloof...
...Webster's Third New International defines it as "an assumed gift for finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for...
...It was not until last October 19, when he characterized anti-war protesters as "an effete corps of impudent snobs," that he began to surface as the prime phrasemaker and champion of Middle America...
...Within days, Agnew was visited by Robert Ellsworth, a key figure in the Nixon-for-President operation...
...And the days when he could be written off as a mere bumbler are long gone...
...It was only later, when a series of volatile events pulled Agnew sharply to the right, that his talent for bitter rhetoric began to sink in...
...Hearing the Vice President speak in public, watching him, is to observe benignity itself...
...On March 29 they seized the administration building and closed off the campus...
...But when segregationist George Mahoney upset Representative Carlton R. Sickles for the Democratic nomination, Agnew suddenly found himself the liberals' last hope...
...And in an early demonstration of his favorite device of alliteration, he intoned: "Backlash is the personification of tangible terror...
...When Mahoney refused to debate, Agnew accused him of running a "yellow, skulking, slinking campaign...
...Maybe it was, but there never was a conscious connection...
...Until Mahoney threw a scare into Maryland moderates and liberals with his slogan, "A Man's Home Is His Castle—Protect It," Agnew had been conducting a lackluster campaign...
...Born in Baltimore in 1918, the only son of a restaurant owner who was a leader of the city's Greek community, Agnew, according to aides, got his first taste of speechwriting by helping his father prepare talks to the local Greek society...
...This was the beginning of the relationship that eventually lifted Agnew onto the national stage...
...He simply stands there, neither his voice nor his small, spiritless eyes adding much punctuation to his monologue of social antidotes...
...Many associates during his appeals board service, his term as county executive from 1963 to 1966, and his abbreviated term as governor of Maryland from 1966 to 1968 express no surprise at the way Ted Agnew acts and talks in 1970...
...Joe McCarthy played with words too, but his style was to distort or change their pronunciation or meaning to humiliate...
...The Agnew oratory of 1969-70 has had such a strong impact in part because it burst on the national consciousness so suddenly, from a source who had been written off by so many as irrelevant ("Spiro Who...
...Politicians who encouraged protests against the war became "ideological eunuchs...
...The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy," and his new book, "The Resurrection of Richard Nixon," will be published by Putnam this month...
...Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, the man Agnew alone among the Republican governors had been trying to draft as the Republican Presidential candidate, was about to announce his readiness to run—or so Agnew and the nation thought...
...you were intimidated by veiled threats...
...Instead, as Agnew watched dumbfounded, Rockefeller informed the television audience he had decided the party did not want him to contest Richard Nixon...
...But this action did not satisfy Agnew that black community leaders had done enough...
...51 Attacked the " 'progressive' preacher more interested in fighting pollution than fighting evil . . . who lifts his weekly sermons out of old newsletters from a National Council of Churches that has cast morality and theology aside as not 'relevant...
...Agnew's moment of triumph became instead a moment of public humiliation...
...His skin," Roy N. Staten, a Democratic state senator told me recently in Baltimore, "always was a little thin and he had a tendency to make his feelings known...
...f Labeled University of Michigan President Robben W. Fleming a "marshmallow" who needed a verbal roasting to give him "a tough crust" for dealing with campus black militants...
...That night, in Memphis, a sniper's bullet cut down Dr...
...Today, the Reverend Mr...
...I have a tendency now to believe it was politically inspired...
...H Said he didn't want to play golf with Senators Muskie, Fulbright, and George McGovern because "I just might accidentally tag one with a golf ball...
...Agnew refused to meet with them until they vacated the building, and on April 4, when 227 Bowie State students seeking a meeting with him staged a sit-in at the State House in Annapolis, he had them arrested and closed the school...
...Agnew is the President's subordinate...
...People now have a preconceived notion of Agnew and try to fit all past events into it," Finney went on...
...Two of a Kind "Vice President Agnew is now saying what...
...It was obvious he had not received even a courtesy call of warning from Rockefeller...
...Agnew's friend Finney does not share this harsh view of the motivation behind the April meeting...
...He slammed his hand down, walked out and left them...
...But the phenomenon has roots clearly traceable to the man's early personal and political experience in Maryland...
...campus militants dispensed "totalitarian ptomaine...
...In both appearance and style he is cut from an entirely different pattern from that of the disheveled, gruff, bombastic Wisconsin Senator who in the 1950s inflamed public passions with a street-fighter's repertoire of rank misstatement, twisted logic, and gross brutality...
...He had a tape of Brown's speech in his office and he would keep playing it to black ministers who came in...
...He thought for the first time maybe he would become governor...
...The big words often go right over his listener's heads—indeed, they send newspaper copy editors scurrying to their dictionaries—but that fact seems to make Agnew all the more effective...
...He entered politics as president of a local community council, and in 1957 he was appointed minority (Republican) member of the county board of zoning appeals...
...Bascom says nothing has happened since to make him change his mind...
...King...
...A segregated amusement park, Gwynn Oak, was the scene of a massive desegregation demonstration, at which for the first time prominent members of the clergy joined blacks in a sit-in...
...It is the kind that sends the average listener to the dictionary for elucidation...
...He now was in full gallop...
...Those who try now to pinpoint a time when Agnew "turned around" and emerged as a hard-line "law-and-order" man cite a three-week period running from March 21 to April 11, 1968...
...He is the author of "85 Days...
...The rest is political history...
...But with his new, highly motivated recruits and an identifiable target, he came alive as a candidate...
...Whether Agnew has sought the role or had it dropped in his lap, it is clear he has been honing his oratorical tools for a long time now and is making the most of his current opportunity to use them...
...Six days after Rockefeller's bombshell, Agnew found himself suddenly faced with the kind of negotiation under threats and deadlines that his early associates say he could not stomach...
...They] see a last glimmer of hope and flock like moths to the flame of the fiery cross...
...The fright of Mahoney became so great," Feingold recalls, "that Agnew became the knight in shining armor...
...They are not, however, typical of the Agnew style, which in doling out disdain and contempt usually seeks to strike a tone of erudition...
...While he was county executive he was regarded as a moderate," says Jervis Finney, a Republican state legislator and one of Agnew's closest friends in those days...
...Early in 1966, Agnew as a Republican county executive in a normally Democratic state had only token opposition for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, which at the time did not appear to be worth having...
...He became the salvation...
...State Senator Clarence M. Mitchell 3rd, another of the leaders who walked out, says today: "I was shocked, primarily because it had not been his pattern as governor...
...And he was bogged down by legal proceduralism...
...Rockefeller's conduct did jolt and disappoint Agnew, he told me...
...you were stung by insinuations that you were Mr...
...One of the first to leave, the Reverend Marion C. Bascom of the Interdenominational Alliance, said of Agnew: "He is as sick as any bigot in America...
...As he [Nixon] said at his recent press conference, I am responsible for what I say...
...And if Middle America does not come to his speeches with pocket dictionaries in hand, it is abundantly clear that the overall effect is as emotionally productive as George Wallace's Stand-Up-for-America simplicities...
...The most distinguishing feature is, clearly, the selection of words...
...f Advised academic communities faced with violent mobs of students to "just imagine they are wearing brown shirts or white sheets—and act accordingly...
...It drove him crazy," Feingold told me...
...A coalition of county civil rights groups submitted names for membership to Agnew, but in a show of independence he rejected that list and picked his own group...
...Agnew warned that "this state must not be controlled by a devil that sits holding a two-pronged pitchfork of bigotry and hatred...
...with Agnew, one gets the distinct feeling he would rather not touch anybody, or be touched, with a ten-foot pole...
...Spiro Agnew probably would like that word "serendipity...
...Instead of the "castle" slogan, Agnew suggested, Mahoney's motto should have been, in the phrasing of a popular toothpaste commercial of the day, "I wonder where the yellow went...
...He is as sick as anything I have seen in America...
...He does not wave meaningless sheets of paper before crowds and claim they contain lists of Communists in the State Department, nor does he refer to Senator J. W. Ful-bright, as McCarthy did, as "Senator Halfbright," nor to Senator Stuart Symington as "Sanctimonious Stu...
...f Likened Senator Edmund S. Muskie to "a small dog trying to follow four boys home at the same time...
...Isn't it?' " It became a matter of increasing concern to Agnew that black civic, church, and civil rights leaders would not speak out against Brown—a concern that finally burst into the open in April, 1968, when Baltimore was wracked with rioting as an aftermath of the assassination of Dr...
...Although he was sensitive to criticism, his pique was not governed in those early days by any notable ideological bent...
...McCarthy wielded an oratorical meat cleaver...
...The county executive's curt dismissal of the coalition's "pressure," Feingold told me in his Baltimore office, "revealed to me for the first time that Ted Agnew had a propensity to fly off the handle fast, and say things he later regretted...
...He's unusually loyal himself and he senses the presence of disloyalty early...
...You were beguiled by the rationalizations of unity...
...And then he might respond the way they usually do to aggressive and brutal treatment...
...Some say one of the times those instincts were working was when he gave that speech...
...He wasn't angling for that...
...Invitations came in at a rate of fifty a day, and he raced around the country filling them, two or three speeches a week...
...The last two remarks were intended as gags, and Agnew's Dixie audience roared at them, but the words betrayed a bitterness and "instinct for the jugular" that suddenly did not make Spiro Agnew seem quite so far removed from Joe McCarthy at that...
...long-haired demonstrators were "tomentose exhibitionists...
...The big thing that people don't realize is that he is a very able man, an able administrator, he has a good mind, he gets things done...
...In words his critics would find ironic in 1970, he told Maryland voters that worse than Mahoney's slogan "is the way in which the emotional overtones of this slogan have been exploited and used to enflame...
...Through the 1968 campaign and in the first nine months of the Nixon Administration, Spiro Agnew in general had come off as an obscure buffoon, a typical Throttlebottom whose choice of words was noted more for sheer obtuseness and insensitivity than for sophisticated venom...
...Marshall W. Jones, a Republican Baltimore committeeman who had been one of the first blacks to back Agnew against Mahoney, agrees...
...There was in McCarthy a physically intimidating force, an ever-present suggestion that the man if sufficiently aroused would not hesitate to wrestle an opponent to the ground...
...He switched to the much less prestigious University of Baltimore for his law degree, after service in Europe as an armored division company commander in World War II...
...Agnew is saying now," he told me...
...Agnew is an able man...
...He was characterized by conservatives as having liberal leanings, but no more than that...
...On April 9, at the request of civil rights leaders, local blacks were permitted to patrol ghetto areas to try to cool the city...
...Spiro Agnew: The Word's the Thing by JULES WITCOVER There may be nothing that irritates Vice President Spiro T. Agnew more than being called another Joseph R. McCarthy...
...And I intend to be heard above the din even if it means raising my voice...
...Agnew uses words respectfully, almost cloyingly, to dress up his speeches the way he wears cuff links as a finishing touch to his immaculate appearance...
...Six persons were killed, about 700 injured, and 5,000 arrested as Agnew called in the National Guard and Federal troops...
...The excessive Agnew oratory, employed in what Maryland liberals regarded as a just cause against the feared Mahoney, did not seem to disturb them at the time...
...But if he ever had a conscious thought about the Vice Presidential nomination, I doubt it...
...His campaign gems—Hubert Humphrey characterized as "squishy soft" on Communism, a Japanese-American reporter as "the fat Jap," Polish-Americans as "Polaks"—had conditioned the electorate to underestimate the man as an effective public voice...
...And I hate to be kissed on a public golf course...
...On the first date, the governor interrupted a press conference in the reception room of his office to have two television sets brought in...
...After Rockefeller insulted him, I believe Agnew decided he had to cast his lot with the conservatives...
...In two Republican fund-raising speeches, one in Columbia, South Carolina, and the other in Hollywood, Florida, he: 51 Called on the Yale University alumni to throw out Yale President Kingman Brewster Jr...
...Agnew administers a surgical scalpel, using fancy words never uttered on a street corner...
...Then he proceeded to accuse the black leaders of meeting "in secret" with black extremists and pledging to them "that you would not openly criticize any black spokesman, regardless of the content of his remarks...
...One Saturday morning, at a hearing on an urban renewal proposal of his, some opponents started asking him questions about it...
...And he characterized old-line Democrats who backed Mahoney as "political vultures circulating greedily about the Democratic candidate waiting to pick clean the bones on the carcass of state government...
...Charlie's boy, by epithets like 'Uncle Tom.' God knows I cannot fault you who spoke out for breaking and running in the face of what appeared to be overwhelming opinion in the Negro community...
...They finally did...
...Senators who rejected President Nixon's Supreme Court nominees practiced "learned idiocy...
...A meeting was arranged between Nixon and Agnew in New York...
...Although he has speechwrit-ers, he digs out the choicest gems himself and fashions them into the ostentatious phrases that have become his trademark...
...Agnew, to the surprise of many, sided with the demonstrators and told the concessionaires they had a moral obligation to integrate the park...
...I have been saying for years...
...he can speak out against the President's wishes or command only at the risk of having every function cut out from under him except his constitutional role as presiding officer of the Senate, and at the risk of being dropped from his party's ticket in 1972...
...Two days later, rioting erupted in Baltimore, which now had a black population of more than forty per cent...
...It was a sort of serendipity effect...
...Early in his term as chief county officer, Agnew found himself confronted with a sticky civil rights situation...
...And he got swept along too...
...I'm not surprised at all at what Mr...
...He hated them, he resented working aginst deadlines...
...About eighty of the 100 blacks walked out...
...By mid-spring, before the pressure mounted on Mr...
...Edgar Feingold, now director of public affairs at Johns Hopkins University, was selected by Agnew to be executive director...
...Others, however, did not see a sickness in Agnew's blast at the black leaders...
...Around this time, the county council created a human relations commission...
...What Agnew found was that Richard Nixon, having been supplied with reports of this and subsequent hard-line speeches by the governor of Maryland, began to show increasingly warm interest in him...
...It was calculated to create a conservative image for political purposes...
...He has an unusually high belief in loyalty...
...Nixon's press conference assurance on May 8 that he had no intention of muzzling his Vice President was all that Agnew needed to brush aside the President's general advice, given at the same press conference, that "when the action is hot, keep the rhetoric cool...
...You take a poll one day," he said recently, reflecting on the same meeting, "and you say, 'I'm going to move to bigger and better things.' You go with the breeze...
...About 300 of the 500 students at predominantly black Bowie State College boycotted classes, demanding better housing, educational facilities, and black history courses...
...If you questioned him at any length at all, you could really irritate him...
...Isn't that incitement...
...He had been open, listening to our problems...
...His remarkable ideological transformation was triggered, according to Maryland associates who saw him at close range then, by the growing racial unrest of 1967—particularly the Cambridge demonstrations and H. Rap Brown's inflammatory speech that led to charges of inciting a riot...
...Nixon to muzzle him, the Vice President had become the unquestioned High Priest of the Great Silent Majority...
...It can be argued that the same "serendipity effect" has continued to the present time, with Agnew not really seeking the role of Grand Inquisitor of the Nixon Administration, but having it left to him—either by default or assignment—by a President who strives constantly for a low public profile, lest his own earlier reputation for loud and excessive rhetoric be revived...
...He called the Mahoney slogan "a veil of voodoo" and the Mahoney campaign "a festering, creeping, grasping Mad-doxism...
...On April 11, he called a meeting of about 100 of these leaders and, in phrases worthy of the Agnew of 1970, read them the riot act because, he said, they had not publicly denounced black extremists...
...Demonstrations rankled him, especially any that carried threats and deadlines...
...Listen to that,' he would say...
...Agnew went on, but by this time the meeting was in an uproar...
...George Wallace On the eve of the Alabama run-off primary election, June 2 JUliES WITCOVER, a member of the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times, has covered many of Vice President' Agnew's recent public appearances...
...He hated use of threats as a negotiating position, and deadlines...
...Agnew is, first of all, a man of fastidious dress, impeccable grooming, and almost regal bearing who somehow gives the impression of having just stepped out of the shower into brand-new clothes...
...I believe he will do whatever the person over him suggests that he do...
...But actually it was only the opinion of those who depend upon chaos and turmoil for leadership—those who deliberately were not invited today...
...conservative America at last has a man who can take on "the intellectuals" on their own highfalutin ground, a kind of word power white hope...
...Agnew gave his answer to that advice in his May 23 broadside at his press critics in Houston: "I choose my own words, and I set the tone of my speeches...
...One of the obvious differences between the position occupied by Joseph R. McCarthy in the 1950s and that held by Agnew today is that McCarthy as a Senator and Senate committee chairman was essentially a free agent who could be censured by his colleagues but not silenced...
...He is sleek, tanned, and manicured, and for all his well-publicized rhetoric, he is far from being an arm-flailing ranter in the 1950 McCarthy style...
...One must conclude, therefore, either that Spiro Agnew is abiding by the wishes or the command of his boss, or that he is a fool...
...He had called them in, he said, because they were not "the ready-mix, instantaneous type of leader . . . the circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting type of leader . . . the caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of leader...
...It probably helped him politically, but that was a result—a matter of luck...
...In 1961, after having become chairman in a brief Republican takeover, Agnew was ousted by the new Democratic majority in the city council, a well-publicized controversy that led to his nomination by the Republicans to be county executive, and his election...
...Martin Luther King Jr...
...When Mahoney's campaign manager predicted his man would win by as many as 100,000 votes, Agnew remarked: "I wonder where he gets his LSD...
Vol. 34 • July 1970 • No. 7
