Nation: SPIRO AGNEW: THE KING'S TASTER

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To what extent is Agnew speaking for Nixon in his choked-bore blasts against dissent? The President himself is not about to acknowledge as his own every word that Agnew speaks. To do so would vitiate the point of the strategy, which is to let the Vice President absorb the heat of controversy while Nixon, in imitation of Eisenhower's executive mode, seems to take a loftier course. The White House has done nothing to censor Agnew's speeches, and does not demand to review them in advance. Nor has Nixon muzzled Agnew. despite the outcry from the left and even from some fellow Republicans. Agnew, says an aide, is pretty much a self-starter anyhow: "You don't have to say 'Sic 'em, Ted.'" There have been times, says a Nixon adviser, "when the President has cringed at Agnew's choice of words," but in general Nixon thinks of him as a "gutsy guy." On his office wall in the Executive Office Building, Agnew has hung a portrait of Nixon inscribed: "To Vice President Ted Agnew, who has demonstrated his character in the ultimate tests of political combat. From his friend, Richard Nixon." During a Cabinet meeting last week, the President dished up the warmest compliment he has yet paid Agnew. He wanted everyone to know, said Nixon, that he thinks the Vice President is doing a good job and that he likes what Agnew is saying. Further, what Agnew is saying is in keeping with what Nixon believes should be said. "Agnew's not just yapping when he yaps," says a White House aide. Agnew put it another way to a reporter three weeks ago: "The President and I have an understanding."

That understanding centers on the Vice President's franchise to rouse the "great silent majority" to verbal support of the Administration, specifically to drown out anti-war dissent. Simultaneously, Marylander Agnew is a chief agent of the President's Southern strategy. During the presidential campaign, he was dispatched to help capture the Southern and Border states for the G.O.P. The effort was markedly successful; George Wallace took Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, but Nixon and Agnew emerged with the electoral votes of four out of five Border states, along with North and South Carolina and Florida.

Now Agnew is concentrating upon turning the Deep South into a Republican enclave. Of the 25 political speeches he has delivered since the Inauguration, nine were made in the South. It is also significant that it was in the South—in New Orleans and Jackson, Miss.—that Agnew detonated his biggest rhetorical bangalores to date. "He came through like Gangbusters," says Louisiana's G.O.P. State Chairman Charles De Gravelles. "If you'd run a poll, he'd get 98% support." In Jackson, Agnew told fellow Republicans at a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner: "The principles of most of the people of Mississippi are the principles of the Republican Party. South Carolina's Judge Clement Haynsworth is not guilty of any impropriety, unless that impropriety is his place of birth and residence." For too long, the Vice President added, the South has been "the punching bag for those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals."

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