Word: canfields
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...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 There is no question that the book would have remained unpublished if anyone else had written it.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...
...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...
...Canfield entertains similar thoughts about the national media...