Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, by Jules Witcover (PublicAffairs, 412 pp., $27.95)
LONGTIME NR readers will recall that in the early 1990s this magazine took up the cause of Spiro T. Agnew, who at the time had been denied his rightful place in the pantheon of vice-presidential busts in the U.S. Capitol. A few petty tyrants in the curator's office, along with surviving members of the "effete corps of impudent snobs" in the Washington media, had decided to stick it to the old fellow--one last kick to keep him in his place. With a series of stirring editorials, NATIONAL REVIEW put his tormentors to rout, and today, eleven years after Agnew's death, you will find no missing faces among those busts.
It turned out the statue meant a lot to our 39th vice president, as a mark of what he had achieved in life and what he had lost, and he was grateful. NR's example, as I recall, also inspired Maryland governor Parris Glendening to order his predecessor's official portrait removed from a broom closet in the State House and put in a proper place--and with that the work of our little Fairness for Agnew campaign appeared to be complete. But with this new book by Jules Witcover, an old Washington Post hand and one of the original tormentors, we must spring back into action to defend the man again, or at least his memory, from historical inaccuracy and gratuitous insult.
Very Strange Bedfellows is Witcover's 17th book, and his fourth just about the travails of the '68 ticket. To start with the author's good points (a favor he has never extended to Nixon or Agnew): Witcover does offer some fresh research, drawn from neglected reels of the Watergate tapes, that helps explain their "back-to-back political suicides." And he confines himself to actual events and conversations, sparing us the creative conjecture of his Post colleague Bob Woodward. Here and there he relies on a faulty memory (Nixon did not, for instance, first meet his speechwriter Pat Buchanan in St. Louis, and the vice-presidential residence was not donated by the Rockefellers). But these are the excusable errors of an accomplished senior reporter, and in general the book is a capable work of history--limited only by Witcover's thoroughly conventional opinions and inability to think twice about the facts before him.
As if there were not enough cautionary lessons in a straight telling of the Nixon-Agnew story, throughout the book the author labors to instruct us in the perils of that time when a "rabble-rousing divider" from Maryland dared to criticize the liberal establishment. "Not since Barry Goldwater's famous defense of 'extremism in defense of liberty,'" he writes (another of those minor errors--it was "in the defense of liberty"), "had a major political figure expressed such venom." It was a scary time, in which "an air of intimidation wafted through many newsrooms," and it's clear that Witcover has never quite gotten over the audacity of the man.
Agnew wasn't impressed by the self-importance of his critics, and spoke to them in a tone to which they were not accustomed--as in the case of the protesters of the era, who, he said, "take their tactics from Fidel Castro and their money from Daddy." He'd had his fill of "instant analysis and querulous criticism" from the media, as he explained in a nationally televised address in Montgomery:
The day when the network commentatorsand even the gentlemen of the New York
Times enjoyed a form of diplomatic immunity
from comment and criticism of
what they said--that day is gone....
When their criticism becomes excessive
or unjust, we shall invite them down from
their ivory towers to enjoy the rough and
tumble of public debate.... The time for
blind acceptance of their opinions is past.
And the time for naive belief in their neutrality
is gone.
A fine motto, declared in 1969, for every conservative today with a blog, column, or TV or radio show. Like all of Agnew's rhetoric, it had an edge but also assumed the intelligence of his listeners, both conservative and liberal. A fair-minded author would give the man credit at least for bold and reasoned argument, but all Witcover has to offer is more whining about Agnew's "thinly veiled hate-mongering"--more of the same querulous criticism, even 38 years later.
"There was a time," Agnew observed (and I'm going to go out on a limb here and declare this one the work of Buchanan), "when the liberalism of the old elite was a venturesome and fighting philosophy--the vanguard political dogma of a Franklin Roosevelt, a Harry Truman, a John Kennedy. But you know and I know that the old firehorses are long gone. Today's breed of radical-liberal posturing in the Senate is as closely related to Harry Truman as a Chihuahua is to a timberwolf."
Dusting off such lines, Witcover thinks he is demonstrating what a nasty character Agnew was. But many readers, and especially those familiar only with the baby talk of political candidates nowadays, will be left filled with admiration for the unflinching, manful tone of the Agnew style. To appreciate Spiro Agnew when he was in form, one needed, at the very least, a sense of humor: not a strong point of "supercilious sophisticates."
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