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There is something akin to touching poetic justice in Agnew's parental troubles with his daughter Kim, who would be a handful for any father of the Ozzie Nelson school. Kim, who has been known to experiment with marijuana, wanted to wear a black armband for Moratorium day last month. Agnew said no and twice went through a laborious historical explanation of the Geneva Accord and American involvement in the war. Kim shrugged: "All right, but why not just get out of there?" Finally, Agnew invoked parental prerogative and forbade her to demonstrate. "They need authority at some point," he said, "and when they don't get it, they're unhappy."
The Agnews and the Nixons maintain a formal, distant relationship. They meet at receptions, but have never entertained one another exclusively. Pat Nixon and Judy Agnew exchange surface gossip about their children or their schedules. Dick and Ted meet in conference; Agnew has rarely sought out the President for a private audience. Their relationship is businesslike—but then so are nearly all Nixon's relationships.
Thus Agnew's life has divided like that of a closet poet or weekend preacher. His office hours are occupied with rustling in a midden of executive trivia. But when he takes to the lectern, he is transformed into what might be a cartoon character called "Suburbanman." The combination doesn't really work very well for the Vice President. Says a good friend: "He is not happy. An ambitious man would eat it up, but he is not an ambitious man."
There has been talk that Nixon might drop Agnew as his running mate in 1972, although such a move would be out of character for the President. Ultimately, that question will depend mainly upon Agnew's usefulness to Nixon in the next three years. It seems clear that Nixon did not select Agnew because he thought him the one man best qualified to succeed him in the presidency. Agnew's value to Nixon is as a front man, mixing with and speaking to the public as the President cannot. As such, he is doing his job, playing the Middle American calliope, trying to get a grip on what is happening to his society.
At root Spiro T. Agnew is, like so many of the people he speaks to and for, a political innocent of fundamentally decent impulses, a "normal" American in the old sense who is grappling with the puzzlements of what may be simply an evil time. That, of course, is part of his appeal, but it is also his curse in the television age, when every malapropism and mistake by a public man is caught and magnified. It is clear that Agnew is not comfortable in the stratosphere of Washington's sophisticated politics. As his wife Judy observes, perhaps with a touch of wistfulness: "He is a very good lawyer. He can always go back to practicing law."