Word: agnew
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...conduct of the Presidency ... I think for your own credibility you ought to correct the image you have left. I don't mean that I like him (frankly I would have to classify myself as a Lindsey [sic] Republican ...) I feel this so strongly, because I detest Vice President Agnew and am repelled by his attacks on the press. [But] if millions of people on television see Nixon as he is, and then read a column by a respected journalist like you which appears to be patently biasted [sic] against him, the very dangerous Agnew theme ... will gain much credance...
...Perhaps Agnew deserves a better remembrance. Although he did take cash bribes while vice president, he never ruthlessly carpet-bombed Indochinese civillians, nor did he condemn American youth to die in a needless war for political reasons. He didn't illegally marshal the resources of the CIA, FBI, IRS, FCC and the Justice Department against the news media and his political opponents. Compared to Tricky Dick, J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger '50, John Mitchell and other seriously and criminally depraved goons of Nixon's administration, Agnew was a petty thug...
...Agnew even managed to leave office quietly and to fade back into obscurity. Nixon thrashed about hideously for months, refusing to surrender his audio tapes and firing a special prosecutor and insisting that he was not a crook...
...other hand, Agnew deserves harsher criticism than he has recieved. His harangues against the press did not merely "rais[e] issues of media bias, arrogance and unaccountability that are still banging around," as Lance Morrow wrote last week in Time magazine. Agnew was the point man in Nixon's crusade to gut the First Ammendment, laying the rhetorical framework for police style measures in areas such as confidentiality of sources, gag orders and prior restraint. These attacks on free speech also included extensive and illegal intimidation of the press; they were intended to cow the mass media into becoming...
...editorial, the Crimson staff declared that Agnew's attacks on the media, war resisters and others who disagreed with him "were discredited by their illogic when they were first made" and that his resignation proved them "to be the rankest hypocrisy as well." Examining Agnew's sordid political career should discredit myths regarding the Nixon legacy and should remind hubris-crazed hypocrites that the media and free speech are not so easily trampled underfoot. The end of any human life is always a tragedy. But we must not forget the kind of life Agnew lived and the damage he caused...