Word: agnewism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Irving Wallace, or Arthur Hailey, or any of the other neo-realists in the supermarket-check-out-counter-school of modern American fiction might have been able to go somewhere with this plot, but Agnew simply does not know where to start. Nothing happens for the first two hundred pages. Agnew introduces his characters with an almost Proustian verve for description, but his idea of expressing meaningful detail is to inform the reader every time a character shaves, or brushes his teeth. Then, when the action finally takes place--most of it in the final fifty pages--Agnew makes...
...patchwork nature of the plot also makes it difficult to divine morals from the tale. Canfield is both guilty and a victim of circumstance. One is tempted to look for similarities between Canfield's fate and Agnew's, but there are simply too few parallels between the two cases and not enough clues in the book...
More important than the book's moral--if it has one--is the presence of Agnew's old, anti-liberal venom. Though he has scrapped his polysyllabic, alliterative invectives, Agnew still displays contempt for students, activists, professors, welfare mothers and the rest of that crew. He displays his feelings about the media, and about Jews, with special gusto...