WHEN AGNEW WAS YOUNG AND MODERATE

...It is acknowledged that you are thoughtful about the issues, articulate about the problems, and well-briefed about the specifics...

...I'm going to back him for President...

...He expressed deep concern that the two prospective Republican candidates, Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, would pull the party apart by 1964 unless a middle-road alternative was found...

...But at a luncheon later in his honor, his old friend Bud Hammerman presented him as a man who some day would be introduced "as President of the United States...

...To an all-white audience he said: "I'll take care of those birds...

...Nobody, of course, rushed out and ordered "Kuchel for President" buttons on the strength of the endorsement by Baltimore County's obscure executive officer...

...He has laid the groundwork of a strong, intelligent, well-thought-out treatment of the many issues in this campaign...

...It has happened in the last few weeks, and even in the last few days of this campaign...

...The other was the white backlash...

...He concluded in the recesses of his own mind that here was the man the Republican Party needed to rescue the country from the Democratic clutches of John F. Kennedy, who was, of course, expected to seek a second term in 1964...

...In striking back at Agnew, Mahoney only helped him...

...Let's go to Washington," Agnew said to him...

...He became emotional and animated...

...Agnew," and it began: "He has waged a constructive campaign...

...This election has attracted all the elements of hate, prejudice, and bigotry that still operate in this United States...

...As early as August, 1964, speculation started about Agnew, as the highest-ranking GOP officeholder in the state, running for statewide office...

...He wrote him about November and didn't get an answer until maybe January or February," Dutch Moore recalls...

...Ted made a real pitch for him to be a liberal candidate...

...Although Agnew had regarded Rockefeller as an unmarketable alternative to Goldwater in 1964, he had come to change his mind, partly as a result of an exposure to the New York governor at a meeting on water pollution in 1965...

...And, as far as I'm concerned, they just help to identify the kind of people who have entered this campaign...

...He is against the right of the public to know what is going on in government...

...Agnew went back home and thought about Kuchel and the shape of the Republican Party...

...This entire approach does not preclude appealing to the higher and more refined instincts of the voters on an inspirational level, such as employing the words 'Crusade for Conscience' to counterbalance the more emotional issue...

...The extremists...

...Among Republicans most prominently mentioned as Presidential prospects at that time, a full year before the 1964 Republican National Convention, the name of Thomas H. Kuchel of California had not been conspicuous...

...He talks like I think...

...He became Maryland chairman for Scranton, who proclaimed his candidacy at the Maryland state convention and set off on one of the sorriest Presidential candidacies on record...

...Around this time Agnew also wrote to Richard Nixon to sound him out on his political plans, although he didn't know Nixon either...

...Well, I'll change all that...

...He began to concentrate on the racism issue...

...I like your views.' " Kuchel heard Agnew with pleasure and more seriousness than the mission deserved...

...In a speech in the town of Hancock, he called the Mahoney slogan "an attempt to frighten people into walling themselves in from social responsibility...

...In mid-1963 Kuchel was the assistant minority leader of the United States Senate...

...the shortest unwritten chapter in The Making of the President, 1964, died stillborn...

...Two major candidates were considered to be in contention in the Democratic primary—State Attorney General Tom Finan, the party loyalist endorsed by the regulars and by retiring Governor Tawes, and Congress-man-at-large Carleton R. Sickles, a bona-fide liberal with strong support in Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs of Washington...

...In a speech at the Baltimore Civic Center, Mahoney gave a rebuttal to Agnew's KKK charge: "My opponent has reached the lowest of the low in the history of Maryland politics, but I feel sorry for this man...

...The Democratic liberals, backing Sickles, and the moderates and party regulars, supporting Finan, made the fatal political mistake of underestimation, and they happily went on attacking one another while Mahoney resolutely tapped the ugly lode...

...It was a gung-ho sort of talk...

...But by this time, the winter of 1965-66, Agnew had resolved whatever doubts he may have had about running for governor...

...A leading Democrat in the state went to Governor J. Millard Tawes, a Democrat, and suggested to him that if Agnew were appointed to the bench, Agnew would not run for governor, to which Tawes reportedly replied, "Who's Agnew...

...I have difficulty imagining myself as a national leader, and sometimes I have difficulty imagining myself as a state leader...

...The great crunch arose," Feingold recalls, "because Ted was so deadly dull...

...We had polls taken that showed what he had to do...

...One was money—he was a wealthy paving contractor who had no reluctance to spend freely...

...in Alabama it was Lur-leen Wallace, wife of the master-backlasher himself...

...The robed figures...

...An analysis of more than sixty pages based on extensive public opinion polling was prepared, and a memorandum went to the candidate...

...The literature is despicable, the threats are inflammatory and the attacks upon liberty and our basic constitutional freedoms are being made as if no Constitution and no Bill of Rights ever existed...

...This article is adapted from his new book, "White Knight: The Rise of Spiro Agnew," to be published this month by Random House...

...Liberal and moderate Democrats fell over each other in the rush to appropriate Agnew as a vehicle for averting the disaster of a Mahoney administration...

...Agnew thereupon appointed himself as a committee of one to see to it, and with Scott Moore and his brother Dutch in tow for company, he set off for nearby Washington to so advise his unsuspecting candidate...

...After all Ted Agnew had been through, no doubt he could stand some good-natured, even preposterous humoring, now that he had reached what few really doubted would be the pinnacle of his career...

...He began to stump with fire, campaigning before liberals and blacks and wowing them...

...Agnew said he intended to vote for Scranton on the first ballot but would not bolt the party if Goldwater were nominated...

...Position papers were spun out and issue-oriented speeches delivered by the candidate with all the dignity and reserve that his status as the citizen-politician demanded...

...in Georgia it was Lester Maddox, whose earlier answer to integration was the brandished ax handle...

...He was getting no press coverage...

...These are the fright peddlers, the fearmongers —the people who either for power, for money, or for some sort of destructive fanaticism will attempt to exploit a people to their own ends...

...only eight weeks separated the state from the shocking but real prospect that it would be led by a totally inexperienced, die-hard segregationist...

...He had to reach out to the liberals and the blacks in Baltimore City and County...

...But those who had been standing near him as Goldwater's words exploded through the frenzied convention hall heard Agnew remark after the "extremism" line, "God damn it...

...The next day, Agnew's forty-eighth birthday, he appeared smiling, triumphant, yet humble, at a press conference...

...Finan was rated the favorite, but the presence of a third candidate, an ultraconserva-tive perennial named George P. Mahoney, could conceivably drain off some redneck votes from Finan and help Sickles...

...The regular Republicans, the liberal Democrats, the black voters in Baltimore, and the Jewish voters there and in suburbia all had come through for Agnew...

...In January, 1964, Agnew urged county Republicans to avoid endorsing either Goldwater or Rockefeller because "neither represents the moderate course of progressive Republicanism"—a phrase borrowed from a letter to party leaders from the liberal Ripon Society in Cambridge...

...He called Kuchel "the courageous enemy of all political extremists" and the "leading exponent of the moderate viewpoint of Dwight Eisenhower...

...The same rich lode of racial prejudice and fear that George Wallace had mined so blatantly and effectively two years earlier was still present in Maryland, and George Mahoney was just the man to extract it to fuel his campaign...

...For all of Agnew's own vitriolic words, none served him better than such diatribes from Mahoney...

...Ted didn't have any qualms about going down to see a United States Senator he hadn't ever seen before," Scott Moore recalls...

...According to the Moores, Agnew never talked to Kuchel about it again, but his interest in the liberal Californian was noteworthy as a reflection of his political thinking at that time...

...They are here—in Maryland...

...Ted liked the way Rockefeller got things done," Scott Moore recalls...

...Victory for Mahoney would mean they would have to deliver up not only their state but also their party—for some an even more catastrophic contemplation...

...During the preceding months, you have proposed and presented details of your program for the state...

...I wouldn't want to say that my election has national significance," he remarked...

...Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue...

...But according to Edgar Feingold, Agnew's former human relations commission aide and chief public relations adviser in the 1966 campaign, Ted Agnew was a crashing bore...

...But] much remains to be done in Baltimore County, and in the two years just past we've made but a bare beginning...

...When Goldwater's nomination came, Agnew told reporters he would support him, but added, "We must work so that moderates can regain control of the party...

...He bombarded every available radio and television outlet during the primary period, which stretched into September...

...But Ted Agnew did not know Kuchel, had never met him, and he did not agree with that...

...One television spot had Agnew intoning: "We here in Maryland are at a time of crisis...

...Others were concerned, too, in October about the bland tone of Agnew's stump campaign...

...I tell you," he said, "that his outright appeals to the Negro population with promise after promise are a deliberate and calculated appeal to them to base their vote on the color of their skin, and this is racism in its broadest form...

...Asked about the speech afterward, Agnew told reporters, "He could have gone a little further trying to ameliorate the disparate feelings of the delegates . . . many things were excellent and well stated...

...In the next year Agnew focused much of his political activity, when he wasn't warring with the Democratic county council, on a struggle for the upper hand in county Republican affairs against those who wanted to deliver a Goldwater delegation to the national convention...

...About six weeks after the meeting, he issued a statement unilaterally nominating Kuchel as the man "to lead a march of moderate Republicanism" in the image of Dwight Eisenhower and Wendell Willkie...

...The next day Agnew escalated, charging that Mahoney had "put his party to shame" and had shocked "decent men and women in the state by ram-rodding his anti-open housing slogan into the Democratic Party platform...

...And the next night, he again stood with Moore on the convention floor as Goldwater delivered his incredible invitation to party liberals to get lost, punctuated with his equally incredible invitation to party extremists to pull out all the stops: "Anyone who joins us in all sincerity we welcome...

...An internal memorandum was prepared entitled "Points to stress with Mr...

...I don't have to tell you that the fanatics are rallying to this election, because you can see their pictures in the newspaper...

...The liberal-moderate vote irreconcilably split between Sickles and Finan, and to the utter shock of the "good people" of Maryland, Mahoney squeezed through with the nomination by less than 2,000 votes over Sickles...

...He had no serious primary opposition, but nevertheless mounted an active, media-oriented campaign, hoping to use the primary election spotlight to get himself better known around the state...

...The contemplation of a Governor Mahoney provided a catalyst in the political community that no amount of Madison Avenue issue-making could have generated...

...From then on he was really hung up on Rocky...

...The line drew good-natured grins and applause...

...Police departments have been told to treat certain people with kid gloves—cautioned not to do anything to them except as a last resort...

...Moore asked...

...In a television appearance near the end, he accused Agnew of injecting racism into the campaign...

...Opening a "Democrats for Agnew" headquarters in Prince Georges County, he quoted President Kennedy as saying, " 'Sometimes party loyalty demands too much.' " From then on, Agnew needed no encouragement...

...All the right endorsements were coming in: the Baltimore Afro-American, The New York Times, even the Baltimore chapter of the Americans for Democratic Action...

...And yet, George Mahoney had two things going for him...

...WHEN AGNEW WAS YOUNG AND MODERATE JULES WITCOVER One morning in mid-June of 1963, when Spiro T. Agnew still was learning the ropes as Baltimore County's first Republican executive, he called in Scott Moore, the county solicitor and his closest political ally and adviser...

...The hooded Klans-men and the straw hats with my opponent's name on them are seen side by side...

...The jolt of the Mahoney nomination was particularly jarring because of the lateness of the primary...

...He had run and lost in seven statewide races and his candidacy had taken on the aspect of a local joke...

...Now, finally, Agnew was off and running...

...And he asked, "Wouldn't it be terrible if my opponent won...

...But Agnew was not turned aside by such solicitudes...

...bright, liberal, personable, very well liked,' a favorite dinner companion in Washington social circles...

...He just made up his mind Kuchel was the man, and that was it...

...They don't scare me...

...But the spark was missing...

...When Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania made an eleventh-hour drive to save the party from Goldwater, Agnew quickly embraced the effort...

...What has happened is that these people have seized upon my opponent's weakness—his desire for public office no matter what the cost...

...But he never was regarded as a heavy, so in most appraisals he was put down as "a good Senator" who had gone as far as he could go...

...There goes the election...

...He had tried to dismiss the man as a bad joke, Agnew said, "but I am afraid of encroaching Maddoxism across the country...

...The campaign picked up overnight...

...Now it was mid-September...

...My family and I are getting the threatening letters and phone calls that are typical of the extremist technique...

...Recalling the overture, Kuchel said Agnew had "talked like a progressive Republican and linked me with Nelson Rockefeller as the kind of Republican the party needed...

...In Agnew's interest in the statehouse, the work of one Republican governor stood out in his mind above all others to emulate—Nelson Rockefeller...

...Not in his wildest dreams could he have imagined the Democratic electorate would be so good to him...

...He said he was not interested in a candidacy for either attorney general or comptroller...

...Agnew jumped on his opponent, too, when Mahoney cursed reporter Frank DeFilippo, threatened to run him out of the state, and told another Democratic rally that the press has "had a pipeline, but it's going to be discontinued when I get to Annapolis...

...He is against free press...

...Police will be told to hit first, fire first...

...He began to get radicalized...

...Those who do not care for our cause, we don't expect to enter our ranks in any case...

...I can remember Ted yet, saying, 'That damn Nixon, he won't even answer your letters...

...Later, when he was Vice President, he acknowledged that the liberal anti-Mahoney vote had been critical for him...

...Slowly, Agnew warmed to the attack...

...We must all go out and work," he told a rally at the same place, "to halt this festering, creeping, grasping Maddoxism...

...In fact, it had not been mentioned at all, except perhaps in liberal precincts of his own state...

...Mahoney, however, was an old political horse who had gone around the track too often—or so everybody thought...

...He sent me to New York to go over his complete legislative record...

...Asked about the governorship, he observed: "There's always a possibility in politics...

...At the advertising agency handling the Agnew campaign, the same thinking prevailed...

...The faceless men...

...He called Mahoney "an embarrassment...

...He's terrific," said the Agnew of 1963...

...This issue is that of the Ku Klux Klan and the fanatical extremists who are supporting the candidacy of this opponent...

...More than Mahoney's slogan "is the way in which the emotional overtones of this slogan have been exploited and used to inflame...

...A Republican who shelled out $100 at an Agnew fund-raising dinner was overheard to say, "I can step outside and tell air pollution is bad, but when we pay $100 for a roast beef dinner we want to hear something that will inspire us to go out and lick Mahoney...

...Now we know that the man who talks about guarding castles doesn't really care about individual rights and constitutional protections...

...Because there would not be sufficient time to mount an effective campaign from a standing start in September, Agnew ran against the Democratic field all spring and summer, until the voters of the opposition party had worked their will and selected a single target for him...

...The motto needed no translation for the liberals and moderates who deplored it as a naked appeal to white fears of integrated neighborhoods, nor for the conservatives and outright segregationists who embraced it as a rallying cry and a return to sanity...

...It was shocking and yet it was happening, and not only in Maryland but in three other Southern states where the white backlash had turned politics upside down...

...We are facing an opponent who has an emotional issue and we agree that the best way that we can overcome it is with an even stronger, longer, deeper, wider, even more emotional campaign than that of this opponent...

...I don't believe—at least I don't want to believe—that he directs them...

...In Arkansas, rabid segregationist Jim Johnson was the Democratic nominee...

...The Republican Party has reached a serious impasse," Agnew said...

...All at once Ted Agnew, whose nomination on the Republican ticket had gone without serious challenge, found himself the beneficiary...

...Agnew had looked over Kuchel's record and had read some of his speeches, including one made on the Senate floor condemning right-wing extremists...

...But I know he cannot reject them, for without the fright peddlers he cannot win...

...The audacity of these people...

...he was fooling around with these large conceptual things and getting nowhere...

...At the outset, Agnew's gubernatorial campaign traveled the high road...

...I shall pray for him...

...This was when Nixon was in his law firm...

...Why...

...Against that background, it is critical now to begin an emotional appeal to the voter, to arouse and spark his interest, to compel his attention, and to bring him to the polk out of a sense of urgency and commitment...

...Agnew's preconvention opposition to Goldwater, and his obvious chagrin at his nomination, served to advance his own image as a liberal, or at least a moderate, within Maryland Republican ranks...

...And no one needs to tell me who's at work in this campaign...

...It began: "The election is four weeks away—it is time to shift the emphasis of the campaign from the cerebral to the visceral...

...Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...

...Agnew made much of a widely publicized Ku Klux Klan rally at which Mahoney stickers were seen everywhere...

...And then Mahoney was off...

...Instead of being united behind a candidate with broad bipartisan appeal, it is nurturing within itself the seeds of its destruction, in the form of an absurd ideological struggle . . . between liberals and conservatives...

...He said, 'I think you're from a state that maybe our Presidential candidate has to come from...

...Apparently Agnew liked Rockefeller even then, but was looking for a stand-in who did not have quite the "brand name" that Rockefeller had...

...Talk about open housing finally reached scare proportions, but by that time the lines were drawn...

...I want to see Senator Kuchel," Agnew replied...

...When all the votes were in, Spiro T. Agnew had been elected governor of Maryland over Mahoney by 81,775 votes...

...Copyright © 1972 by Jules Witcover Jules Witcover, a Washington correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of "85 Days: The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy" and "The Resurrection of Richard Nixon...

...On April 17, 1966, he officially entered the race...

...And in Maryland, the Democratic nomination nearly always was the ball game...

...He adopted a slogan of which George Wallace himself could have been proud: Your Home Is Your Castle—Protect It...

...Said Agnew, "He is against free speech...

...We would like to bring the campaign together in a unified climax as it is closing, so that the voters will see a clear choice...

...At the same time, Feingold says, Agnew was receiving more and more threatening calls...

...They think they can go along and do anything they want...

...That's the ball game...

...No wonder he can't get elected.' " What Nixon eventually wrote to Agnew, Moore says he does not know...