Word: agnew
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course there are slums and there are slums, as Spiro Agnew did not know. Every impoverished area of New York is a few notches better off than Charlotte Street, but that fact gives no consolation to those who live in sagging wooden tenements or in squat red apartment houses with laundry strung like paper necklaces from window to window. In the summers what passes for life in these areas moves out to the fire escapes or up to the roofs among the antenna forests, or out to the doorways where teen-agers and their elders mill, hang out and wait...
Nixon as Machiavellian realist also pulls the strings in Spiro Agnew's account of how he was forced out of the vice presidency: Go Quietly . . . or else (Morrow; 288 pages; $10.95). Agnew says he would never have given up the post if his boss had supported him. But when word leaked that Agnew was under investigation for accepting kickbacks even while in the White House, the President dexterously arranged to jettison him. His Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig, finally warned that if Agnew did not step down, things could "get nasty and dirty...
...burst of hyperbole that seems wildly excessive even for the darkest hours of the Watergate White House, Agnew writes that he feared for his life at the hands of Nixon aides who would stop at nothing to save the President. After vigorous bargaining, he pleaded nolo contendere to one count of income tax evasion and left office. Had he known Nixon was so vulnerable, he says now, he might have fought for his job and thus become President. It was that possibility that alarmed so many people in government, even the Prince...
...reason for Agnew's downfall, of course, was the liberal press--"I remember how enraged I was when I saw on television a gang of scruffy looking characters proudly carrying a Viet Cong flag down Pennsylvania Avenue, while a national network commentator ran along beside them with his microphone deferentially extended for whatever seditious statements they might choose to make." Not only did the press insist on covering both sides of the issue when one of them should have been "justly condemned for being traitors," it also slanted its depictions of the Vice President. One reason for the press' hostility...
...Agnew's book explains more eloquently than any outsider could ever hope to do the sad history of this star-crossed leader. As Agnew himself concludes his liner notes: "As a man I knew once often said, let me make one thing perfectly clear. This is not an autobiography; it is not intended to be a chronological account of my life." Period...