Word: agnew
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Oddly, it was Spiro Agnew who seemed to be taking the higher rhetorical road. He accepted his uncontested renomination with a speech he wrote himself that was admirably devoid of bombast and his normal partisan narrowness. To be sure, he attacked McGovern's policies as "piecemeal, inconsistent and illusory" and claimed that the Democratic candidate would "retreat into isolationism, abandon our allies, and concentrate wholly on our internal affairs at the great expense of our national security." Yet he also called for an end to policies that would "divide this nation into partisan blocs, each fighting only...
During the campaign, Agnew will continue to address those $1,000-a-plate dinners where Republican fat cats come to devour the Veep's red meat. But Agnew has been instructed not to become any more of a campaign issue himself than he already is thanks to past rhetoric. "Give the Democrats hell," the President advised him, but judicious hell, and lay off everybody else, particularly the press. Agnew will not, of course, take the high road. That is still reserved for the President. Agnew will have to find something in between, perhaps what McGovern sarcastically calls "low-road...
There are signs, in fact, that Agnew is learning, though critics would say mainly from his own mistakes. "He didn't go to Harvard," says someone who knows him well. "Washington is full of educated people, and he has had to play catch-up ball." On his trips overseas, he may have stumbled less than the press has suggested; certainly they were publicity flops, in part because of his own hostility to the press, but they were not necessarily failures from the point of view of Nixon's foreign policy. A high ranking State Department official feels that...
...home, Agnew has been busy building up his own constituencies. Often feeling unwanted at the White House, not even let in on key projects like the President's journey to Peking, he has sought out groups where he would be more popular. As head of the Office of Intergovernmental Relations, he has ingratiated himself with many Governors and mayors round the country, Democrats included, who credit him with fighting hard for revenue sharing. That does not mean they would like to see him become President, but at least they have learned that he does not bite -them, anyway. Higher...
...further ahead of him politically, why wouldn't he grind his enemies under his heel?" Others foresee a very "relaxed" second term under a mellower Nixon, presiding over a healing "era of good feeling" in the nation. That, of course, would require a quite different use of Spiro Agnew, a less rhetorical and more substantive role for him in domestic programs...