WE'RE FOR YOU AND AGNEW TOO read a telegram that arrived in the White House last week after the President's Viet Nam speech. In earlier Administrations it might have seemed odd to tack on the name of the Vice President of the United States, who is traditionally almost an official non-person in Washington. Spiro Theodore Agnew, however, is turning the vice-presidency into something like an oratorical happening, raising the No. 2 office to a level of visibility and controversy unknown since the days of, well, Richard Nixon.
Agnew is not merely seeking political capital in the South, nor is his rhetoric aimed only at Moratorium marchers and other opponents of the war. Rather, he is emerging as a kind of improbable mahdi of Middle America. His often odd, occasionally clownish locutions, rendered in a W. C. Fields singsong, are abristle with nostalgias and assumptions of what American life ought to be. Armored in the certitudes of middle-class values, he speaks with the authentic voice of Americans who are angry and frightened by what has happened to their culture, who view the '60s as a disastrous montage of pornography, crime, assaults on patriotism, flaming ghettos, marijuana and occupied colleges. If he speaks with Richard Nixon's tacit approval—and he does—Agnew does his duty gladly, bringing missionary zeal and a sense of genuine moral outrage to his oratory.
In effect, as Eugene McCarthy observes, Agnew is acting as "Nixon's Nixon." Just before the 1954 congressional elections, Richard Nixon said: "Ninety-five percent of the Communists, fellow travelers, sex perverts, dope addicts, drunks and other security risks removed under the Eisenhower security program" were hired under Harry Truman. Now Agnew is out walking the point, flailing at "ideological eunuchs," "merchants of hate," "parasites of passion" and campus protesters who "take their tactics from Castro and their money from Daddy."
There is, however, a fundamental difference in the reactions to the two men. Nixon tended to enrage his opponents and the targets of his venom; Agnew's thrusts are more often met by amusement or disdain. Nixon and Agnew came to the vice-presidency with very different intellectual and educational equipment; Nixon in 1953 was a young but consummate politician with far more practical savvy than Agnew brings to his job. Moreover, the present Vice President has a dual mission that was not necessary in the less ambiguous days of
Nixon's vice-presidency. His task is not only to attack the President's foes but also to probe the body politic's mood and temper for the cautious Nixon. Says Massachusetts' Republican Senator Edward Brooke: "Agnew is the King's taster"—sampling the public's ideological moods.
Nixon's Agent