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Agnew personally is a talkative, gregarious and kindly man, but he keeps slipping unwittingly into crudity. As when he branded the Baltimore Sun's Gene Oishi "the fat Jap" during the campaign. Or when he told a Chicago press conference: "When I am moving in a crowd, I don't look and say, 'There's a Negro, there's a Greek, there's a Polack.' " Or when his aide, C. D. Ward, barreled through a glass door at San Clemente and ended up with permanent facial scars; for fun, Agnew started calling him "Wolfgang."
The counterbombardments that his speeches have triggered have left Agnew baffled and somewhat defensive. He now limits most of his interviews to sympathetic publications, such as U.S. News & World Report, or to columnists like Holmes Alexander. It is not only the criticism that is troubling Agnew. His friends describe him as "unhappy, disappointed and frustrated" by the job of Vice President.
Occasionally in recent months he has gone on campaigns of self-depreciating humor that debunk the nature of his office—usually with the aid of Paul Keyes, a former writer and co-producer for Laugh-In. Two weeks ago at a meeting of the American Bakers Association, Agnew excused himself by remarking: "The President needs me at the White House. It's autumn, you know, and the leaves need raking." Earlier, at a Gridiron Club dinner, he described the joys of the vice-presidency. "I have my own plane—Air Force 13. It's a glider."
The Awful Office
As every Vice President since John Adams has known, the nation's second highest office is a dispiriting post only slightly preferable to a rural postmastership (see box preceding page). "The Vice President of the United States," said Thomas R. Marshall, Vice President under Woodrow Wilson, "is like a man in a cataleptic state: he cannot speak; he cannot move; he suffers no pain; and yet he is perfectly conscious of everything that is going on about him." Agnew on the subject: "It's a sort of ancillary job where you're not in the mainstream of anything. The job itself creates some sort of debility."
Beginning with Eisenhower, Presidents have tried to activate the office by adding responsibilities to involve their Vice Presidents in the decision-making processes. But quite often the responsibilities are simply chores that the President wishes to avoid. Nixon wants Agnew on the political line, giving them heil. He also wants Agnew to handle such ceremonial chores as Boy Scout awards, embassy breakfasts and Medal of Honor presentations.
Agnew's only constitutionally mandated job is presiding over the Senate, but his highly fragmented duties include heading the Space Council, the President's Council on Youth Opportunity, the Office of Intergovernmental Relations and the National Council on Indian Opportunity. White House business occupies up to 15 hours of his week—meetings of the National Security Council, the Cabinet, the Urban Affairs Council, the Environmental Quality Council, plus a weekly gathering of the Republican congressional leadership.