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If Agnew's polemic against hippies and Communists k likely to do little harm to the G.O.P. ticket in terms of votes—it may do it some good—it just may help to unify the divided Democrats. "Many of the peace Democrats who said in Chicago that there was no difference between Nixon and Humphrey are now beginning to see some difference between the tickets," said former Kennedy Speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. "Many more statements like this one either from Agnew or Nixon will take the Democrats as far down the road toward unity as can be expected. But what really frightens me is that Ted Agnew could be a heartbeat away from the presidency."
Two Brothers. For much of the nation's history, Vice Presidents were politicians included on the ticket for geographical or factional balance but otherwise quickly forgotten. Woodrow Wilson's Veep, Thomas R. Marshall, used to say: "Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, and nothing was ever heard of either again."
Franklin D. Roosevelt's death and the accession of Harry Truman—at the very dawn of the atomic age—began to shock the nation into an understanding of the importance of the office. Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack was another reminder that Vice Presidents could—and eight times in U.S. history did—become accidental Presidents. The wave of assassinations of national lead ers underscored the need to select Vice Presidents for reasons other than ticket balancing or decorativeness.
Both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon insisted, ritualistically, that they chose their running mates as the best possible men to succeed them in the event of death. In the case of the Democratic ticket, the argument was more convincing. Edmund Muskie, after two terms as Maine's Governor and nearly ten years in the U.S. Senate, is as handsomely qualified as almost any other Democrat to step into the White House. If his knowledge of foreign affairs is rather limited, he deeply understands the nation's domestic problems, especially the complex relationships among federal, state and local governments. In the Senate he led the fight for passage of bills on air and water pollution and the Administration's controversial Model Cities bill for urban development. In fact, some Democrats who have wearied of long exposure to Hubert Humphrey and the Johnson regime have wistfully wished that the ticket could be turned upside down, with Muskie on top. Richard Nixon, by contrast, suffers no such unflattering comparisons with his running mate.
Neutral Territory. "This was the toughest political decision I ever made," Nixon declared after combing through his list of possible running mates and coming up with Agnew. To placate South Carolina's Strom Thurmond and the party's Southern wing, Nixon had to eliminate from consideration moderates like Oregon's Mark Hatfield and Illinois' Chuck Percy. Nor could he have accepted such conservative Thurmond favorites as Texas' John Tower or California's Ronald Reagan. In the end, Nixon went to comparatively neutral territory, picking Agnew over Massachusetts Governor John Volpe.