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Bruisinq Autumn. To be sure, the Democrats struck back. "It is apparent," said Humphrey Campaign Manager Larry O'Brien, "that Agnew has been delegated by Mr. Nixon to travel the low road, and with the traditions of Nixon campaigns, the low road is the rock bottom." Said Humphrey: "He just got hold of one of Nixon's old speeches." Indeed, it seemed to many as if Agnew were trying to duplicate the hard-swinging role that Nixon had played during the 1952 campaign. In that bruising autumn 16 years ago, Nixon, an ambitious and abrasive freshman Senator from California, delivered corrosive attacks on Harry Truman and his regime. "If the dry rot of corruption and Communism, which has eaten deep into our body politic during the past seven years, can only be chopped out with a hatchet," he told an audience in Bangor, Me., "then let's call for a hatchet."
Nixon had indeed detailed Agnew to take the offensive while he himself cultivated a more statesmanlike, above-the-battle image. Since early this year, he has been saying that he wanted to win the primaries in a way that would allow him to win the nomination, to win the nomination in a way that would allow him to win the election, and then to win the election in a way that would allow him to govern effectively. That meant a polite, buttoned-up campaign. Accordingly, whenever Nixon wished to reply to attacks, he did so through written statements signed by either his press secretary, Herb Klein, or his campaign director, Robert Ellsworth.
Carried Away. Though he had been cast as something of the heavy, Agnew's overzealous interpretation of his role irritated several of Nixon's top aides. They insisted that "the old man is damned pleased with the choice he made," but also admitted that Agnew had blundered. "Dick had his problems with this issue some years back," said one, "and it took him a long time to shed himself of the image of a witch hunter. This was completely gratuitous and uncalled for." Another observed dryly: "Agnew tends to get a little carried away sometimes." At any rate, said John Mitchell, Agnew was not expounding Mr. Nixon's opinions. Nixon was charitable. Perhaps that is because he ruefully recalls his own troubles as a running mate in 1952, particularly the "slush fund" charges that nearly persuaded Ike to dump him.
Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the Senate's only Negro member and an adviser to the G.O.P. ticket on racial and urban problems, was troubled by another facet of Agnew's campaign. "I don't believe Spiro Agnew is a racist," said Brooke, "but he doesn't show much flexibility on the law-and-order issue." Earlier, Brooke had urged Nixon to drop the phrase "law and order" and substitute "order with justice." Though the phrase means different things to different people, Brooke noted that the black community often considers "law and order" to be a code name for ghetto suppression. Agnew, however, refused to discard the phrase. "I am not going to get involved in semantics," he said. If he did change the phrase, he added, "the headlines in the next morning's papers would be AGNEW SOFTENS POSITION ON LAW AND ORDER, and in so doing we would mislead a lot of people."