Word: agnew
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Instant Rapport. He gained his first elective office, at the age of 44, when he became executive officer of Baltimore County, and suddenly his career took off. It was George Wallace, as much as anybody, who made Agnew Governor in 1966, Witcover judges. Fighting for power in Maryland, Wallace helped Agnew appear attractively liberal as a crusader for urban renewal and against discriminatory housing...
Thereafter, writes Witcover, it was Nelson Rockefeller who helped turn Agnew, the "White Knight" of civil rights, into Agnew the conservative. In 1968 Agnew backed Rockefeller early and aggressively for the Republican presidential nomination. When Rockefeller publicly withdrew without privately notifying Agnew, he humiliated a proud man, Witcover reasons, and drove him into the arms of Richard Nixon. Agnew's only previous contact had been a long unanswered letter. "That damn Nixon!" he exploded to a friend. "He won't even answer your letters." But when the two sometime losers finally met, there was instant rapport...
Thus occurred, Witcover says, "the great Agnew transformation." He goes on to give a play by play of the Vice President's Pier 6 career, first as a clown and then as an increasingly feared gut fighter who made "an odyssey of divisiveness and personal vilification...
Witcover thinks it would be nice if Agnew, and all Vice Presidents, did more and talked less. But talking is precisely what Agnew does. Rather than a party politician, he is a populist-a spokesman personally tuned to the frustrations, resentments and credibility gaps of Middle Americans. In their name, he flogs effete intellectuals, media stars, long-haired demonstrators. In their name, he recites the nostalgic litanies of patriotism and honest labor...
Beyond ideology he speaks for a lifestyle. In believing the myth of Middle America, Agnew has become a myth himself, and what he really needs is not a journalist but a novelist-a 1972 Dreiser-to do him justice. · Melvin Maddocks