The American Vice Presidency (67 page)

After a brief time as an assistant personnel manager for a small supermarket chain, Agnew was called up for the Korean War as a reserve officer, although he now had three children. He was about to be shipped overseas again when the army recognized it had made a mistake and discharged him, sending him back to his job at the supermarket. Because of his legal training he was “promoted” to interrogating petty shoplifters. He soon quit and opened a small law firm with a friend in suburban Towson, the Baltimore County seat. As a Republican he won a seat on the county board of zoning appeals and soon became chairman. He set his sights on the county executive position in 1962, offering himself as a civil libertarian and a champion of civil rights, and won as a result of a Democratic split, becoming the first Republican to hold the office in the twentieth century.
²

Agnew got the county council to create a new human relations commission, but during a local dispute over alleged racial discrimination, he scolded demonstrators for their “impatience and resentment” when the dispute was not being resolved to their liking. He finally stepped in and completed a compromise that the commission had been on the verge of reaching, taking credit.

At any rate, Agnew was beginning to cement his reputation as a strong but moderating liberal voice for civil rights in the state, embracing such things as open-housing legislation without offending Republican dogma. He told one Democratic audience, “Most of the voices raised so far in the civil rights controversy are either militantly integrationist or militantly segregationist. There is a great need to hear voices from calm moderates of both races,” the implication being, like his own.
³

Agnew had barely gotten into harness as the county executive in June 1963 when he decided to take a hand in presidential politics. He decided that in 1964 neither the ultraconservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona nor the ultraliberal governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York would
be able to unite the Republican Party and defeat President John F. Kennedy, expected to seek reelection. So he went to Washington and, in vain, urged the surprised moderate senator Thomas Kuchel of California to seek the 1964 nomination.

In 1964, when Rockefeller’s candidacy crashed and Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania was induced to try to save the party from Goldwater, Agnew became his Maryland chairman and was with a loser again, but the brief association boosted his reputation as a progressive. In 1965, when he first met Rockefeller, Agnew was impressed with his commanding personality and organizational skill and began to see him as the party’s 1968 standard-bearer after all. Agnew also wrote Richard Nixon, not yet personally known to him, to sound him out on his political plans. Nixon was now practicing law in New York after his failed bid for governor in California but didn’t answer for months, leading Agnew to tell a political associate, “That damn Nixon, he won’t even answer your letters. No wonder he can’t get elected.”
⁴

It was clear that Ted Agnew was getting restless in his job as a county executive, and as he approached the end of his four-year term he decided to run for governor. The Republican nomination in the strongly Democratic state of Maryland was not in great demand, and Agnew, as the highest-ranking Republican statewide officeholder, had no serious primary opposition in 1966. In the midst of all the racial turmoil at that time, the Democratic voters handed Agnew a huge gift by nominating a blatantly segregationist perennial also-ran named George Mahoney, a wealthy paving contractor. Taking dead aim at the talk of open housing, Mahoney adopted as his campaign slogan “Your Home Is Your Castle—Protect It!” and won the nomination on the strength of a white backlash vote.
⁵

In the general election, Agnew challenged Mahoney to a debate, but Mahoney refused, whereupon Agnew made much of a Mahoney rally at which Ku Klux Klan stickers were seen. Despite some allegations of a shady Agnew deal connected with the proposed construction of a bridge to be built parallel to the existing one across the Chesapeake Bay, which were raised again later in his career, Agnew won the general election over the outspoken segregationist, further enhancing his own reputation as a civil rights stalwart.

Taking office in January 1967, Agnew inherited a Democratic-con-trolled legislature in Annapolis. He supported and passed a limited open-housing plan that would apply only to new houses and new apartment units, still defending the right of the individual owner of an existing home to sell to a buyer of his choice—apparently his version of Mahoney’s “Your Home Is Castle” slogan. It was the first open-housing legislation passed in Maryland history, further embellishing his pro–civil rights record.
⁶

Early on, Agnew also called on the General Assembly to authorize three new bridge sites across the Chesapeake, and one was eventually chosen after he had disposed of his share of the land involved, supposedly settling the matter. In time, however, his aloofness and jibes at uncooperative Democratic legislators wore thin. When a young state delegate, Paul Sarbanes, later a U.S. senator, balked at Agnew’s education cuts in “the East Coast version of the Ronald Reagan budget” in California, Agnew dismissed his criticism as “a Sarbanality.” It was a demonstration of his way with words that soon would become his trademark.
⁷

Meanwhile, Agnew’s interest in presidential politics and his efforts to bring more progressive leadership to the Republican Party had not waned. In April 1967 he brushed aside Rockefeller’s declaration that he was strongly backing Governor George Romney of Michigan for the 1968 party nomination and began to court him anyway. In May, Rockefeller agreed to see Agnew in his Manhattan office but would not budge in his disinterest in running. In July, however, Romney made his infamous remark of having received a “brainwashing” from the American generals in Vietnam and his candidacy began to go south. Soon after, in response to a
Time
magazine cover touting a Rockefeller-Reagan “dream ticket,” Rockefeller declared flatly, “I am not a candidate, I’m not going to be a candidate, and I don’t want to be President.”
⁸

Romney’s campaign meanwhile collapsed so thoroughly that he was forced to withdraw from the race two weeks before the opening 1968 primary in New Hampshire, won overwhelmingly by Nixon. Soon after, though, Rockefeller gave a go-ahead to the presidential draft Agnew had been pushing. Rockefeller scheduled a televised news conference ostensibly to declare his candidacy, and Agnew invited the Annapolis press into his office to share the great moment with him. As all eyes were glued to the television set, the blow came. “I have decided,” Rockefeller said, “to
reiterate unequivocally that I am not a candidate campaigning directly or indirectly for the Presidency of the United States.”

Agnew sat there, frozen and humiliated, as Rockefeller explained that “a considerable majority of the party’s leaders” had made clear they wanted Nixon as their nominee. Nixon agents swiftly fielded the disappointed Agnew on the short hop, recruiting him to their cause.
⁹

Two developments in Maryland now crystallized Agnew’s political thinking and sharpened his view on law enforcement in dealing with racial protest in a way that coincided with Nixon’s own. First, students at Bowie State College, a predominantly black school in the state university system, complained about decrepit dormitories, triggering a boycott and demanding that Agnew come to the campus. He refused and ordered Bowie State closed. Then, just as news broke of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, all hell broke loose in Baltimore among its black population. Fires and vandalism spread, killing six and injuring seven hundred, with thousands more arrested. Local black moderate leaders took to the streets to cool the rioting, but to little avail.

On the night before King’s assassination, Stokely Carmichael, a young evangelist of Black Power, had shown up in a tough black Baltimore neighborhood allegedly preaching, “The only way to deal with a white man is across the barrel of a gun.” When Agnew heard this, he was furious.
¹⁰
He summoned a hundred moderate Baltimore black leaders, who sat stunned as he read them the riot act, with uniformed, armed state troopers at his side. He charged that these well-respected moderates “ran” in the face of intruding Black Power rabble-rousers. They angrily walked out, declaring that when “the chief executive [of Maryland] should be calling for unity, he deliberately sought to divide us.”
¹¹

The story of Agnew’s confrontation was big news in Maryland and was picked up by the wire services and brought to Nixon’s attention. That summer at the Republican convention in Miami Beach, at two private sessions with party leaders on the party’s prospective choice for vice president, no one even mentioned Agnew until Nixon did. A Nixon pollster confided later that a survey investigating which Republican would most help the ticket found that Nixon would run strongest alone, so he chose the little-known Agnew, whose latest views on domestic violence closely resembled his own. “The name of Spiro Agnew is not a household name,” the new
running mate wistfully acknowledged to reporters. “I certainly hope that it will become one within the next couple of months.” Few who heard him express that wish could have foreseen how soon it would come to pass.
¹²

The day after Nixon disclosed his choice, he held a press party at nearby Key Biscayne. An amiable Nixon at poolside proudly explained, “There is a mysticism about men. There is a quiet confidence. You look a man in the eye and you know he’s got it: brains. This guy has got it. If he doesn’t, Nixon has made a bum choice.”
¹³
He had chosen a potential president by his gut feeling.

In the ensuing campaign, Agnew was assigned to secondary markets and told to aim his criticisms at the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, which he did with relish. But as a novice in the national arena, he invited criticism. When he accused Humphrey of being “soft on communism” and “squishy soft” on crime, he drew comparisons to the Red-hunting Joe McCarthy and to Nixon himself in his early campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas and was described as Eisenhower’s hatchet-man in attacks on Adlai Stevenson.
¹⁴
The Nixon aide John Sears was dispatched to keep an eye on Agnew.

The vice presidential nominee seemed to stumble from one gaffe to another. When a reporter asked him in Chicago whether he was concerned there weren’t many blacks in his crowds, Agnew replied, “When I am moving in a crowd I don’t say, ‘Well, there’s a Negro, there’s an Italian, and there a Greek and there’s a Polack,’ ” using the derisive word for a Pole. Later when leaving Las Vegas on his campaign plane, he observed a portly, nativeborn Japanese American reporter from the
Baltimore Sun
snoozing in a seat and asked, “What’s the matter with the fat Jap?”
¹⁵
Agnew professed not to realize he was being offensive, but as time went on his rhetoric hardened to the point that his promise to be a household name was well on the way to reality.

Nevertheless, with Humphrey having his hands full justifying Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, Nixon and Agnew made the most of law-and-order issues in the face of rising street protest against the war, street crime, and racial conflict. On Election Night, Nixon and Agnew edged Humphrey and Edmund Muskie of Maine by seven-tenths of 1 percent of the popular vote, 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent, with the third-party nominee, George Wallace, winning a surprising 13.5 percent. In the electoral
college, the Republican ticket won 301 votes compared with 191 for the Democratic and 46 for Wallace.

Agnew embarked on the vice presidency with high hopes, but from the start he was frozen out by the tight-knit Nixon staff. He conscientiously undertook presiding over the Senate, but as the first Senate president in nearly a quarter-century not to have been a member, he stumbled concerning a traditional prohibition against trying to lobby a senator on the floor. When he asked the conservative GOP senator Len Jordan of Utah whether the administration had his vote on a particular measure, the indignant Jordan replied, “You did have, until now.” Soon after, the senator announced that henceforth the “Jordan Rule” would apply: If Agnew tried to lobby him again, he would vote the other way. Agnew apologized and backed off.
¹⁶

Initially Agnew was loaded with responsibilities, a few of them real, most of them showcases. He was a member of the cabinet and the National Security Council and chairman of a host of councils dealing with urban affairs, economic policy, intergovernmental relations, and the space agency. As a former governor, he was responsible for dealing with governors, county executives, and mayors, becoming a shortstop fielding their gripes. Agnew had particular trouble with his old hero, Rockefeller of New York, who insisted on dealing directly with John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s chief aide on domestic matters.
¹⁷

Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman, known derisively in the White House as “the Germans,” themselves functioned as shortstops, keeping Agnew out of the presidential loop they constituted with Nixon and, on foreign policy, with Henry Kissinger. Agnew wrote later that Haldeman once told him, “The President does not like you to take an opposition view at a cabinet meeting, or say anything that can be construed to be mildly not in accord with his thinking.”
¹⁸

Agnew soon turned to the political side of his job, selling the administration to the public, looking to the 1970 midterm elections. That suited him; he found speech making more personally rewarding and less arduous than being entangled in bureaucratic tasks. It also gave him an opportunity to repair his somewhat tarnished image, with what came to be known as Agnewisms, preaching the anti-liberal, anti-protest gospel of “the silent majority” to the masses.

In Dallas six days before the huge November 15, 1969, Vietnam
Moratorium Day protest on campuses around the country, he asked, “Should the establishments of this country … cringe and wring their hands before a small group of misfits seeking to discredit a free system because they can’t effectively compete and find success elsewhere? I find it hard to believe that the way to run the world has been revealed to a minority of pushy youngsters and middle-aged malcontents.… Only the president has the power to negotiate peace. Congress cannot dictate it, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee cannot coerce it, and all the students in America cannot create it.”
¹⁹