Word: agnew
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...committed his crimes in a less corrupt regime, Spiro Agnew would have earned himself a prominent place in the history texts: The Vice President Who Resigned in Ignominy. As it is, he will be recorded merely as a footnote to Watergate. The speed with which he was forgotten was remarkable; after he left Washington on October 10, 1973, there were no prayers offered by Rabbi Korff, no million dollar interviews with David Frost, no Woodward and Bernstein account of his (and Judy's) final hours. It was not long before many had forgotten that he had not been felled...
...Agnew is back, at least temporarily, as the author of a novel. The Canfield Decision, the former Vice President's first work of fiction, leads one to believe that Agnew's career as a writer will be about as successful as his career as a politician. There is no question that the book would have remained unpublished if anyone else had written it. The editors at Playboy Press (if there are editors at Playboy Press, and not just photo-retouchers) appear to have adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward the manuscript, which at 344 tedious pages is too long...
UNLIKE JOHN EHRLICHMAN'S recently excerpted "novel," the characters of which are closely based on members of the Nixon Administration, Agnew's book is not based on his own experience. It does concern a Vice President's fall from grace, but under different cirumstances and for different reasons. The Canfield Decision tells the story of Porter Newton Canfield ("handsome, with aristocratic features"), Princeton '57 (cum laude), University of Virginia Law School '60, elected to Congress in 1968 and to the Senate in 1972 appointed Vice President upon the death of the incumbent VP in 1979 and elected to serve...
Meanwhile, Canfield, growing increasingly tired of his boring, upper crust wife (who Agnew writes comes from "North Philadelphia," which happens to be that city's largest black ghetto), falls for Meredith Lord, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Lord, who is beautiful as well as political ("The cloth clung to and outlined her shapely legs with every sinuous stride"), is interested in Canfield not only for his aristocratic good looks but because he can help her obtain funding for her pet program, a medical-aid bill known as THC (Total Health Care...
...October). He also talks tough; in his 1971 "law-'n'-order" campaign, he called his opponents "bleeding hearts, dangerous radicals, pinkos and faggots." In certain respects, to be sure, the comparison is hardly apt. Rizzo, who favors costly conservative clothes, looks less like Archie than like Spiro Agnew, and enjoys good liquor and luxuries of all kinds. He and his rarely seen wife rule over a big, expensive house in fancy Chestnut Hill (Rizzo denies persistent reports that he spent up to $410,000 to buy it and fix it up). He will not even say "hell...