July 26, 1970

The Amazing Success Story of 'Spiro Who?'

By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.

WHAT, in fact, is it all about? After 16 months, no one can question the force of Spiro T. Agnew's personality, nor the impact of his speeches, nor his Midas talent as fund-raiser for his party, nor his astonishing success in transmuting himself from a buffoon and bumbler, complete with malapropisms and pratfalls, into a formidable political figure. The question remains: What does the Agnew phenomenon mean?

Some will say that it means nothing more than a belated upsurge of patriotism, candor and guts in the republic, and this may well be so. Still the upsurge expresses itself through a specific personality; and conceivably the personality is worth examination. This writer may not be the best person to undertake the task. I opposed the Nixon-Agnew ticket in 1968; my enthusiasm for the Vice President, as well as for his senior partner, continues under total control; and this should be kept in mind in reading what follows. Nonetheless, the job of the historian is to try to explain why things happen, and the unexpected rise of Spiro T. Agnew offers its challenges. It is hardly necessary to add that this writer is no intimate of the Vice President, and that the ensuing speculations are therefore based entirely on public evidence, specially on a close and prayerful reading of speeches, statements and interviews.

The first thing that emerges from the ordeal of total immersion in Agnewiana is the Mr. Agnew is not, in the usual sense, a political figure at all. Of course his trade is politics, and at the moment he is one of the most effective practitioners around; but his interest in the substance of public questions seems limited. When he speaks out on issues of domestic policy-the economy or the budget or the welfare program-his words are perfunctory and banal. Such issues evidently bore him. In foreign affairs, it is even worse. On his trip to Southeast Asia in January, 1970, he undertook to explain the Nixon doctrine to a succession of Asian potentates-an exercise in inadvertent obfuscation from which the doctrine never quite recovered (even before it sank out of sight in the jungles of Cambodia). Mr. Agnew recites the boilerplate of public policy as part of his Vice Presidential duty. But one rarely feels that his heart is in it.

His heart is, however, deeply in another range of questions. Historians, notably Richard Hofstadter, have drawn a distinction between "interest politics" and "status politics." Interest politics revolves around conflicts of policy: whether we should raise or lower the interest rate, encourage or obstruct collective bargaining, extend or abolish farm price supports. Status politics revolves around personal values and folkways, social aspirations and frustrations, religious traditions and ethnic identifications-those intangibles which, without finding explicit embodiment in political issues, nevertheless affect the climate of politics and sometimes, especially when economic prosperity reduces the pressure of interest politics, determine political results. It is cultural politics, and not public policy which is the Vice President's bag. He has emerged as hero, or villain, not in the battle of programs but in the battle of life styles.

It is not clear whether this was what Richard Nixon expected when he said, after picking Mr. Agnew as his running mate, "There can be a mystique about a man. You can look him in the eye and know he's got it. This guy has got it." IT is not even clear how many times Mr. Nixon had actually looked Mr. Agnew in the even before the investiture at Miami, and one cannot escape the impression that by "mystique," which makes little sense in this context, Mr. Nixon must have meant the equally abused word "charisma." Still, the President, in making his choice, deserves all credit for a prescience which in retrospect makes the all-knowing American press look almost as bad as the Vice President keeps telling us it is.

No doubt Mr. Nixon saw the affable Governor of Maryland as a border-state politico who would please the South without displeasing the North. Beyond such immediate electoral calculations, however, he may well also have seen Mr. Agnew as the incarnation of those "forgotten Americans" whom he discussed with such solicitude during the campaign. Mr. Nixon remarked that the "forgotten Americans finally have become angry...because they love America and don't like what has been happening to America for the last four years."

AND here was Sprio T. Agnew, who had made his way in American life, like Mr. Nixon himself, without the aid of family fortune, Ivy League education or social standing. He was a second-generation American. His father, an immigrant from Greece, reared him with Old World severity. "he was no pal," his son told David Frost; "he was the authority in the family." Young Ted Agnew grew up during the Depression, dropped out of college, served bravely in the war and studied law in night school. Nothing was easy for him. When his law practice failed, he worked as a claims adjuster for an insurance company and as assistant personnel manager in a supermarket; he was now about 30. Then the Army called him back for stateside service during the Korean war. But he returned, persevered, carved out a foothold in the law and began to climb the ladder.

He was also a suburban American. "I had a very typical middle-class youth," he recalled, "in a suburban area...called Forest Park." Later, he was head of his local Parent-Teachers Association and president of the Loch Raven Community Council before entering politics and winning election in 1962 as Executive of Baltimore County. Six year later, he was elected Vice President In choosing the first suburban politician ever to make a Presidential ticket, Mr. Nixon was intelligently recognizing the emergence of a powerful new constituency in American politics.

With his dapper clothes, sharply crested trousers, French cuffs, manicured hands and generally sleek air, with his rumpus room in the basement, his Allen Drury novels (Drury, he has told David Frost, is the author he most wishes young people would read), his Lawrence Welk records and his Sunday afternoons with the Baltimore Colts, Mr. Agnew was the archetype of the forgotten American who had made it. He took pride, he used to say, in his belief in dull things-"dull things like patriotism. Dull things like incentive. Dull things like a respect for law." "The disease of our times," he said in June, 1968, "is an artificial and masochistic sophistication-a vague uneasiness that our values are corny-that there is something wrong with being patriotic, honest, moral or hard-working.' Americans, he said, were reaping "the hideous product of a society so permissive it has pointed our nation toward the brink of anarchy."

The forgotten Americans, Mr. Nixon said, had become angry; and Mr. Agnew had already displayed his capacity for anger. "As Governor of Maryland," he later wrote, "I saw civil disobedience flare into full-scale insurrection." For anyone unaware that full-scale insurrection has recently taken place in Maryland, or indeed anywhere in America, Mr. Agnew was referring to the riots in Baltimore after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Furious, Mr. Agnew summoned and berated the moderate leaders of the black community. He recalls this episode as "a very significant moment in my life."

MR. NIXON unquestionably knew what he was doing when he chose his running mate. No doubt his faith was tried during the campaign. We all remember the litany of blunders that accompanied the Agnew effort-the "fat Japs" and "Polacks," the suggestion that "if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all," and so on. When one interviewer, inquiring into Mr. Agnew's righteous attacks on civil disobedience, named, among others, Thoreau and Martin Luther King, the candidate strangely replied, "The people you have mentioned did not operate in a free society." The press regarded Agnew with uncontrolled hilarity, and the Democrats (this writer among them) dismissed him as a clown.

Then came the Nixon Administration. The Vice President, like all Vice Presidents, was busy trying to find a role. In February, 1969, as he became head of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, he told a press conference, "I feel right now as volatile as gas does. I am constantly expanding The only problem is, I have time." His volatility, however, burst out only occasionally - as a talk in Honolulu in May, where he mentioned the "vast faceless majority of the American public in quiet fury" over the protests in the colleges; and in a commencement address at Ohio State in June, where, pleading for authority, he said, "A society which comes to fear its children is effete. A sniveling, hand-wringing power structure deserves the violent rebellion it encourages."

In the meantime, as Mr. Nixon's associates see it, this was the period in which the President made a genuine effort to appeal to the liberals by offering them concessions as he thought, in connection with Vietnam and the ABM. Such things are relative, and certainly the liberals had no great sense of being appealed to. In any case, after nine months the President, exasperated by the failure of his supposed concessions to bring him moderate support, concluded that the moderates were unappeasable. The approach of the anti-war demonstration in Washington, planned for Oct. 15, 1969, further persuaded him that, if his Administration was to survive, he had no alternative but to rally his friends on the right. These, he supposed and soon said, constituted the great silent majority.

Did Mr. Nixon, as many have suggested, then unleash Mr. Agnew? While the Vice President undoubtedly sensed the exhaustion of the President's patience, we may accept his insistence that he was moving on his own. "The reason I spoke out," he said later, "was because, like the great silent majority I had had enough. I had endured the didactic inadequacies of the garrulous in silence." (This last sentence is good vintage Agnew.) The celebrated New Orleans speech ("A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals") came four days after the October Moratorium. The reaction was electric and, thus stimulated, the Vice President was soon off in full cry. In the eight months since, he has delivered himself of a series of picturesque orations and, in a manner unprecedented among Vice Presidents, has carried his personal message to the nation.

BEFORE considering the content of this message, one should perhaps pause a moment to look at the form. For the Vice President has a distinctive and arresting style, and the consistency of texture in his speeches from Annapolis to Washington supports the contention that he works on them himself. His prose has a certain resemblance to what Mencken used to call Gamalielese, including even a fondness for the word "normalcy," but Agnew is a far bolder and gaudier rhetorician than the lamented Harding. "If you want to get a point across," he confided to Stewart Alsop, "you say it in exciting language and then bland out everything else." The verb "bland out" is a good example of Agnewian.

Agnewian is marked by a confident directness of judgment, by a sonorous righteousness of tone, by an impressive number of highbrow quotations (Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, John W. Aldridge, Bruno Bettelheim, John P. Roche, Daniel Boorstein, even Bayard Rustin, Clark Kerr, George Kennan and Walter Lippmann; never, alas, Allen Drury) and by an addiction to bizarre language. The Vice President has the autodidact's fascination for $20 words. When he came out this spring in successive pieces with "struthious" and "tomentose," one could only conclude that, in daily progress through the dictionary, he had moved on from S to T. One may paraphrase S.J. Perelman (and the Lucky Strike tobacco auctioneer) by saying that, with men who know rococo best, it's Agnew two to one.

The Vice President deploys his vocabulary with particular relish when he is on the attack. For a man who presents himself as the personification of the traditions of reason and civility, he has a pretty taste in vituperation. In his Houston speech in May, the following words rolled off his tongue as he contemplated his critics: "hysterical," "overwrought," "fulminated," "master of sick inventive," (alas, poor Herblock), "apoplexy," "strident," "pure unbroiled invective" (Carl Rowan), "vicious...irrational ravings" (Pete Hamill). Then, with splendid audacity, he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard a lot of wild, hot rhetoric tonight-none of it mine."

The Vice President takes quite reasonable satisfaction in contrasting his own richness of fancy with the four-letter-word monotony of the youthful protesters. "I have been accused of using invectives," he told David Frost, "but certainly my invectives are acceptable English in anyone's company whereas the invectives used by some of the people I am criticizing would not bear scrutiny in any kind of company." Mr. Frost said, "But I suppose your invective is 10 times as powerful as theirs because you are the Vice President." After some cogitation the Vice President replied, "Possibly that's true, and perhaps it should be."

No doubt Mr. Agnew's strength is as the strength of 10 in part because he is Vice President, but it will not do to discount the sheer power of a style, even on e as terrible as his, especially in an Administration most of whose orators, from the President down, read speeches that sound as if they have been printed out by the same computer. The baroque vigor of his language has established the Vice President as a national personality, won him a large and expectant audience and made him the present spokesman and potential leader of those Americans who feel that their views have too long been unrepresented in the national discourse.

WHAT are these views? If the Vice President is carrying a message to the nation, what is the message? At the risk of overschematization, one might sum up the gospel in three points:

[1] "The deterioration of American values."

The Vice President evidently sees his primary mission as the defense of "the traditional American values." As he looks out on the nation, he finds on every side a decline in faith in the verities. First of all, there is, he thinks, a decline in patriotism itself. "I would guess that many in sophisticated America consider love of country gauche or irrelevant...Apology appears to be becoming our national posture. We have seen attempts to pervert the liberal virtue of self-criticism to the national vice of self-contempt."

The decay of patriotism is matched, in the Vice President's view, by a decay in authority: "The last decade saw the most precipitous decline in respect for law of any decade in our history." He means not just crime in the streets; indeed, he makes less of this than Senator Goldwater did in 1964. The gravamen of the lawlessness charge is leveled rather against mass demonstration on public issues: "America today is drifting toward Plato's classic definition of a degenerating democracy...a democracy that permits the voice of the mob to dominate the affairs of government."

The permissive society is part of the trouble. "Traditional patterns of the discipline and expectation were discarded." He looks with gloom on the consequences-"much of the youth of America...blowing their minds on chemicals to escape reality and the plain business of facing up to tough, everyday problems." He sees them "by the thousands-without a cultural heritage, without a set of spiritual values, and with a moral code summed up in that idealistic junction, 'Do your own thing.'" The urgent need is the restoration of discipline, and this must start with the family: "Order in society begins with discipline and authority in the home....Parental discipline is the gateway to knowledge."

Evidently the Vice President takes pleasure in practicing the discipline he preaches. "Most people would consider me a rather stern parent," he told David Frost. As for children, "I think they should be punished." When he chastised his younger daughter, who wanted to protest the war in Vietnam, he explained to the press, "Parental-type power must be exercised. Some parents have forgotten how."

He is much preoccupied with the thought that, throughout American society, the institutions of authority have stopped being authoritative-"adults cowering before their children...leaders in the United States Senate apologizing to the enemy...college administrators confused and capitulating." "If my generation doesn't stop cringing," he told the graduating class at Ohio State "yours will inherit a lawless society."

The decay of authority seems tied up in the Vice President's mind with a decay in American manhood. He plainly fancies himself an old-fashioned, robust American male, overflowing with virility. When the unduly fastidious objected during the 1968 campaign to his free use of terms like Polacks and Japs, he asked "What has happened to the camaraderie that exists among men which allows them to insult each other in a friendly fashion?" His humor, apart from mechanical one-liners supplied by television writers, is the men's locker-room variety. "You can't hit my team in the groin and expect me to smile about it," he will say, or, in reference to the skeptical press, "Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages," Or, as he rose to speak at the President's stag dinner for Prince Philip, "All of you with tightened sinews and constricted sphincters can relax."

His locker-room boffos may be related to one of his favorite adjectives-that is, "effete." The Vice President, as a student of the dictionary, must know that effete does not mean effeminate, but he perhaps invites his audiences to revel in misconception. What in the world is one to make of the joke he recently told to the followers of Senator Strom Thurmond gathered in tribal conclave in Columbia, S.C.? President Nixon, the Vice President began, "suggested I try to get in a round of golf at Hilton Head. And he thought it might be a great bipartisan gesture if I invited Fulbright, McGovern and Muskie to round out the foursome. But I didn't really want to play golf with them. I just might accidentally tag one with a golf ball. And then he might respond the way they usually do to aggressive and brutal treatment. And I hate to be kissed on a public golf course." Ho, ho, ho. Perhaps such jokes tell more about the Vice President than about the targets of his humor.

(2) The conspiracy against traditional American values.

If traditional values have deteriorated, this is not, in the Vice President's judgement, consequence of some impersonal process. The immediate villains are those who break the law, especially through civil disobedience ad violent demonstration. But these people-"those tomentose exhibitionists who provoke more derision than fear"-do not constitute the basic threat. "These are dangerous-but they are obviously dangerous...Hating what they call 'middle-class' justice, they will openly disrupt a courtroom; hating capitalism, the will blow up a bank; hating law, they will attack law enforcers. Now these are dangerous and heinous crimes. But the very fact that they are openly committed makes them easy to identify and to contain."

The real villains, the Vice President tells us, are "those who perform a more subtle-but infinitely more dangerous-kind of violence: a philosophical intangible violence." In the universities, for example, the "true responsibility for these aberrations...rests not with the young people on campuses, but with those ho so miserably fail to guide them" (like President Kingman Brewster of Yale).

In this sinister group he would place, first of all, "those who characterize themselves as liberal intellectuals," that "glib, activist element who would tell us that our values are lies." These "arrogant ones...are asking us to repudiate principles that have made this country great. Their course is one of applause for our enemies and condemnation for our leaders....They have a masochistic compulsion to destroy their country's strength." (Almost parenthetically, he adds, in one of his very occasional partisan references, "These are the ideas of the men who are taking control of the Democratic party nationally.")

If there is disorder in America today, these men are to blame. "Some of those who call each other 'intellectuals' helped to sow the wind, and America reaped the whirlwind....If you walked through Harlem, or Berkeley, or Columbia, or Watts at the height of the disorders, you could hear-through the din of the battle between police and rioters-the unmistakable sound of chickens coming home to roost." The Vice President has no patience with the notion that conditions in Harlem, or Berkeley or Columbia, or Watts had much to do with the trouble "If you want to pinpoint the cause of riots, it would be this permissive climate and the misguided compassion of public opinion. It is not the centuries of racism and deprivation that have built to an explosive crescendo but the fact that law-breaking has become a socially acceptable and occasionally stylish form of dissent."

Nor has Mr. Agnew any doubt about motives. He scorns the idea that dissenters are moved by concern for injustice. Rather "they cannot achieve within the framework of our society and, therefore, seek to destroy it....They're simply lashing out in all directions because they cannot bear to face their individual inadequacies." They are, in short, those who, unlike Mr. Agnew himself, have not made it in American life.

Or so, until rather recently, the Vice President defined the threat-as a coalition between criminal misfits and their philosophical patrons, all "failures of our society." But in the spring of 1970 he added a new element, surprisingly drawn from those who had made it big in American life. Mr. Agnew had not always been a critic of what he likes to call the Establishment. "You may give us your symptoms," he said in the 1968 campaign. "We will make the diagnosis. And we, the Establishment-for which I make no apologies for being part of-will implement the cure."

If he was part of it, he has now evidently submitted his resignation. The ultimate scoundrels, he decided by May, 1970, "are not at the bottom of the social ladder-indeed, many of them were born on the social ladder and have very great say about who is to climb on which rung....They can found in every segment of society that helps to form the opinions of society at large: in the universities, in the media, in the government, in the great professions....For the first time in history a great nation is threatened not by those who have nothing-but by those who have almost everything."

THE addition of the Establishment to the coalition compounds the danger. "We are strong enough to deal with the violent revolutionaries in the streets.... But what of those in power who make insidious attacks on the philosophical and religious ideal of Western civilization?... We have listened to these elitists laugh at honesty and thrift and hard work and prudence and logic and self-denial; then why are we surprised to discover we have traitors and thieves and perverts and irrational and illogical people in our midst?"

The Vice President intrepidly pursues the enemy into the privileged sanctuaries of American society. In politics, for example, he condemns "the parasites of passion...ideological eunuchs whose most comfortable position is straddling the philosophical fence." The eunuchs, though, are not the worst. "Some of the politicians in this country, in their feverish search for group acceptance, are ready to endorse tumultuous confrontation as a substitute for debate, and the most illogical and unfitting extensions of the Bill of Rights as protection for psychotic and criminal elements in our society. The Mayor of New York..." (he thus pressed on, perhaps ungratefully in view of Mayor Lindsay's action in seconding his nomination at Miami).

It is education, however, which concerns the Vice President most. "The biggest revamping," he has said, "must come from within the institution of education....Every sector of society should begin questioning present premises shaping the total institutional form of education, root and branch." He is particularly worried about higher education, and, in a bravura passage, gives his impression of the scene in the colleges: "Junior-his pot and 'Portnoy' secreted in his knapsack-arrives at 'The Old Main' and finds there a smiling and benign faculty even more accomodating and less demanding than his parents." When one looks "at the smoking ruins of a score of college buildings, at the outbreaks of illegal and violent protests...at the totalitarian spirit evident among thousands of student sand hundreds of faculty members...that record hardly warrants a roaring vote of confidence in the academic community that presided over the disaster."

What to do? "This hard core of faculty and students should be identified and dismissed from the otherwise healthy body of the college community lest they, like a cancer, destroy it....Instead of conciliation and placation to immature, ridiculous student demands, the adult academic community-administrations and faculties-should call the shots. That's what they are being paid to do."

TELEVISION and the press stand second only to education in the Vice-Presidential concern: "The media comprise another American institution which must share in this drive for renewed responsibility." Hence his attack on television news commentators, who "by the expression on their faces, the tone of their questions and the sarcasm of their responses..[by] a raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a broadcast...can make or break by their coverage and commentary." "It represents," he said, "a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history," wielded by a tiny fraternity of privileged men, "elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government," men who "read the same newspapers...draw their political and social views form the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another."

Mr. Agnew's solutions have not always been consistent. At one point he said, "A broader spectrum of national opinion should be represented among the commentators of the network news. Men who can articulate other points of view should be brought forward." Later, he complained that news is distorted because "if one point of view is presented, a conscious effort is made to find its opposite and present a new controversy to the public."

The press-at least, the anti-Administration press-displays the same characteristics of concentration of power and arrogance of bias. The answer, as the Vice President sees it, to the sins of the media is public pressure: "As with other American institutions, perhaps it is time that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation." As for newspaper editors, "when their criticism becomes excessive or unjust, we shall invite them down from their ivory towers to enjoy the rough and tumble of the public debate."

As the Vice President's conception of the anti-American coalition has evolved, it has assumed a marked regional cast. The regional breakdown, it is true, is not absolute. He has recently observed of The Atlanta Constitution that it "doesn't care much for me anyway," and of The Arkansas Gazette that it "views me with varying degrees of horror." But his more zealous concern is with "the verbose people in Washington and New York who refer to each other as intellectuals" and with the "commentators and producers [who] live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C. or New York City." These communities, he says, "bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism." "You pick up a typical Eastern newspaper and you'll see that someone who has broken into a building and thrown files out the window is referred to as though he's on a spiritual crusade." As for the impact of his own words: "As soon as they come clacking off the news wires into the horrified city rooms of the East, my friends of the editorial pages will start sharpening their knives and dancing around the typewriters."

If the East is the center of American iniquity, the South emerges in the Vice President's view as the saving remnant. "the Administration," he told the Conference of Southern Governors, "regards the South not as a pariah, but as a patriarch of America." He added that President Nixon had filled Washington "with more Southern voices than it has hear since 'Gone with the Wind' enjoyed a record run at Loew's Palace." His was "the first national Administration in more than 100 years to welcome the South back into the Union."

(3) Time for "positive polarization."

"I feel this way, the Vice President has said, "that it is necessary for the frustrations of the American people, as they sit back and observe the steady erosion of the fabric of our society taking place, with hardly a word raised in its defense, to have a strong spokesman. When a fire takes place, a man doesn't run into the room and whisper 'Would somebody please get the water'; he yells, 'Fire!' and I am yelling fire, because I thin fire needs to be called here." There is, he has said, "a cacophony of seditious drivel," and "to penetrate that drivel we need a cry of alarm, not a whisper."

"Consider the idea of protest purely," he said, "removing it from any issue, and still it raises a multitude of questions. Protest is generally negative in content. It is against some person or thing. It does not offer constructive alternatives and it is not conducive to creating the thoughtful atmosphere where positive answers may be formulated. Over the last few years we have seen protest become a way of life. In fact, protest has become a policy and program unto itself. This is negativism at its quintessence....I need only rest my case upon the short and turbulent life of the Weimar Republic to prove this point."

So, if the country is divided between those who believe in "traditional American values: and the protesting coalition of intellectuals, Establishmentarians and criminals, let us accept the division. "It is time for the preponderant majority, the responsible citizens of this country, to assert their rights....If, in challenging, we polarize the American people, I say it is time for a positive polarization....It is time to rip away the rhetoric and to divide on authentic lines." Does this contradict President Nixon's post-election pledge to "bring us together"? Absolutely not, the Vice President replies: "When the President said 'bring us together' he meant, the functioning, contributing portions of the American citizenry. He certainly didn't mean that there's any chance of bringing the violent criminal left-or right, either-into this accommodation we are seeking."

"I FEEL like I'm involved in a crusade, almost," the Vice President told U.S. News and World Report. "And I'm going to see it through." The crusade, he explains, is in the cause of "the proud voice of reason, of tradition, of respect for legitimate authority and human freedom." And its reason, as filtered through the Vice President, replies: "bizarre extremists...kooks or demagogues...oddballs...learned idiocy...the cynics, the relativists... the radical criminal left...the totalitarian ptomaine dispensed by those who disparage our system." The criminal left, the Vice President said, belongs not in a dormitory but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of English-it is a problem for the Department of Justice....The era of appeasement must come to an end." It must end because "we have reached the crossroads. Because, at this moment totalitarianism's threat does not necessarily have a foreign accent. Because we have a home-grown menace, made and manufactured in the United States of America.... Let us automatically, briskly, ,and effectively against the threat of violent revolution and recognize it for the clear and present danger it constitutes."

Mr. Agnew has latterly become fond of the phrase "clear and present danger." "Civil disobedience leads inevitably to riots,' he tells us, "and riots condoned lead inevitably to revolution. This is a clear and present danger today." Now, as a lawyer and Vice President, Mr. Agnew surely knows that "clear and present danger: has a specific meaning in American jurisprudence. It was the phrase Justice Holmes used in the Schenck case to define the limits on the right to free speech under the First Amendment/

The Vice President remarkably loose invocation of the Holmes test suggests his doubts about the hole question of individual rights. Of the first sentence in the inscription on the justice Department-"Justice is founded in the rights bestowed by nature upon man"-Mr. Agnew says curtly. "I do not believe the first sentence is true." As against the belief in natural rights, the Vice President argues. "it is only when society acknowledges it as a right and backs it by the power of the state and the respect of a majority of its responsible citizens that the right exists.

The italicized phrase (emphasis mine) raises interesting questions, especially in view of the Vice President's somewhat narrow conception of "responsible citizens." Certainly it helps us understand his frequent statements of his reservation about the bill of Rights. "Democracy's greatest flaw," the Vice President said at Ohio State, "rests in its intransigent commitment to individual freedom." We must, he told the National Governor's Conference, defy the liberals "so blinded by total dedication to individual freedom that they cannot see the steady erosion of the collective freedom that is the capstone of a law-abiding society." A lot more dissidents "would be prosecuted," he told the editors of The Detroit Free Press, "if the Supreme Court would reverse some of its trends and emphasis on the absolute requirements of individual constitutional protection and balance that against, to some extent, the needs of the whle of the citizenry. Constitutional rights have never been absolute." (Has not the Vice President heard the President's homilies about the virtues of "strict constructionists"?)

MR. AGNEW has vigorously denied, of course, any desire for government censorship, and no doubt he would be satisfied with self-censorship on the part of universities, newspapers and television networks. As Tricia Nixon aptly observed of his intervention into the problems of television news: "He's amazing, what he has done to the media-helping it to reform itself.... You can't underestimate the power of fear. They're afraid if they don't shape up...." Certainly the resources of intimidation have not been fully tested. Conceivably President Nixon himself had these more informal methods in mind when, after the demonstration by the New York City construction workers, he received a hard-hat delegation at the White House. The delegation's leader, Peter J. Brennan, later said, "The President was very happy with our demonstration in New York City and some other places, and asked if we had plans for similar action elsewhere."

Still the course of making the American people shape up presents problems, especially for champions of law and order. "The effect of verbal violence," Mayor Lindsay has remarked, "is an atmosphere of intimidation which all too easily breeds physical violence-in lower Manhattan or at Kent State." The strategy of intimidation may thus only deepen the crisis. Should the crisis deepen-and Mr. Agnew has described the challenge of lawlessness as formidable "for humans without inexhaustible patience"-he has made it abundantly plain that his crusade need not be constrained by fussy constitutional scruples or by antiquated beliefs in the rights of man.

The issue, as the Vice President sees it, is clear. "I have sworn I will uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Those who would tear our country apart or try to bring down its Government are enemies, whether here or abroad, whether destroying libraries or classrooms on a college campus or firing at American troops from a rice paddy in Southeast Asia." The proposition that college hoodlums are constitutionally equivalent to members of the Vietcong is heady stuff, especially from a sitting Vice President. And, if this is so, then obviously we must move against the enemies in our midst; we must, Mr. Agnew insists, "separate them from our society-with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel." The rotten apples, he later explained, are those who "persist in antisocial conduct. My purpose is...to separate them effectively from the society." A reporter wondered whether it would be fair to say "that you feel that with your words you have attempted to draw a fence around that group that you have just described?" Mr. Agnew answered, "You mean the criminally insane and those people? Yes, I think that's fair." He has not yet disclosed the preferred methods of separation, but he has no question about the urgency of the crisis: "Right now we must decide whether we will take the trouble to stave off a totalitarian state. Will we stop the wildness now before it is too late, before the witch-hunting and repression "that are all too inevitable [my emphasis] begin?"

SOME will feel that the Vice President's crusade against the rotten applies is an honest attempt to smash a revolution before it provokes a counterrevolution. Others may feel that his insistence on the inevitability of repression is a means of preparing the nation for repression. There can be little question, though, of the broad strain of authoritarianism in Mr. Agnew's outlook. Indeed, the next time the Vice President is tempted to browse through the works of Professor Dr. Kristol or Professor Dr. Roche, he might instead find a few profitable moments in examining "The Authoritarian Personality" by T.W. Adorno and associates. Here he would find a description of what Dr. Adorno calls the "pseudoconservative"-the man who shows "conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness" in his conscious thought and "violence, anarchic impulses and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere.... The pseudoconservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition."

But if the Vice President is a "pseudoconservative," then so are many of his countrymen; and no one can doubt that his crusade is touching the exposed nerves of thousands of Americans. Some of the things he says are sensible enough-as, for example, his concern over concentration of power in press and television, or his opposition to the idea that every American child should go to a four-year college. But the emotional power of his utterance comes from his success in voicing the hatred of the American lower middle class for the affluent and the articulate, for the blacks and the poor, for hippies and Yippies, for press and television, for permissiveness and homosexuality, for all the anxieties and disruptions generated by the accelerating velocity of history.

In doing this, he has created, or at least reawakened, a whole constituency. Liberal Senators, for example, report a great increase in hat mail, much of it strikingly obscene in language and conception, since the Vice President's crusade began. And the emergence of this new constituency raises political problems. For one of its characteristics will probably be a greater loyalty to Mr. Agnew than to Mr. Nixon. The Vice President may well turn out to have a "mystique" in a sense the President never intended. The President simply does not inspire strong feelings of devotion; the Vice President evidently does. This is parly because of Mr. Agnew's more vivid style. It is even more because his admirers see in him a man of directness and candor who speaks his mind and tells it like it is; and this is refreshing after Presidents Nixon and Johnson, who, deservedly or not, come over to many Americans as devious men, incapable of straightforwardness or honesty. It is in part too because, though the Vice President's rhetoric is often bloodcurdling, his manner of dispensing it is always calm, bland and confiding. He rarely seems rattled.

This imperturbability, of course, increases the contrast with the uptight President. Mr. Agnew gives the impression of having m more self-confidence, greater inner stability, a surer sense of his own identity, than Mr. Nixon. He seems to know a good deal better who he is. During the 1968 campaign, he cheerfully survived a series of gaffes which Mr. Nixon would probably have transmuted into more of his "crises" and which might well have reduced him to panic and paranoia. Mr. Agnew is even going to survive his luckless habit of beaning partners and bystanders in tennis and golf.

Before the election, Mr. Agnew gave an astonishingly brash account of his expectations once in office. When asked how he saw the job, he replied pointedly that the Vice President "to some extent must accommodate the President's views" and "accommodate "to some extent the policies he articulates" [my emphasis], adding: "Where the thinking of one man may be advanced further than the other, I think it's an incumbent responsibility on the Vice President to try to push strongly in these areas."

Mr. Nixon had fair warning; and it is little wonder that Mr. Agnew seems to thrive in what most of those who have held it regard as the most wretched and frustrating office in the world. His unruffled, eupeptic, self-satisfied manner contrasts spectacularly with the gloom of his predecessors-Hubert Humphrey, a fine man wrecked by humiliations of the office; Lyndon Johnson, a man of prodigious ego reduced by the office to quiet melancholy; Mr. Nixon himself, standing outside the Eisenhower Presidency like a hungry child peering through the window at the feast within.

ONE feels that Mr. Nixon himself may sense the contrast between the Vice President's impassive assurance and his own obsession with crisis. At least, he has deferred more to Mr. Agnew than any other President has ever deferred to a Vice President. He seems to have accepted unquestioningly Mr. Agnew's conception of his independent role; he has denied making any effort to restrain even the most extravagant Vice-Presidential utterances; and, in public at least, has only loaded him with praise: "This Vice President has done better than any that I know in history." It is true that most of the time up to now the Vice President has been saying things which it is convenient for the President to have someone say but which he cannot, as a presumed statesman, say himself. By leaving the President the high road while himself taking the low road, Mr. Agnew has been, as Senator McCarthy wittily put it, "Nixon's Nixon." But the test of wills between the two men may be yet to come.

Already one detects a note of subtle-perhaps unconscious-challenge in the Vice President's rejoinders to the President's inaugural admonition that people should lower their voices. "I, for one, will not lower my voice," Mr. Agnew said last November, "until the restoration of sanity and civil order will allow a quiet voice to be heard." "I intend to be heard above the din," he said this May, "even if it means raising my voice." As for his crusade, he has repeatedly assured the public that it was "all on my own initiative. The President and I never had any discussion about this....The President puts no reins on me....I did not make my speech at New Orleans to accommodate the President or even the American people. I made it to fulfill my own conviction that a political leader should lead."

The Vice Presidency has not ordinarily been a place from which to exercise political leadership; but Mr. Agnew looks to the future with his usual somewhat smug confidence. When asked about the Presidency: "The answer is a very frank yes, I think I'm up to it.... I'd have no qualms about taking over the helm....I would not have sought the Vice Presidency if I had doubts about my ability to handle the Presidency." But should President Nixon continue to fade, the Vice President would still have to compete with Governor Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1972. And the course required to win the nomination would probably increase skepticism and resistance within the electorate as a whole.

For, with all his demonstrated effectiveness, the Vice President does have notable weaknesses. His lack of instinct for-or even any interest in-public policy will increasingly disturb thoughtful people. His chronic carelessness about facts-his major speeches tend to be followed by indignant corrections, and, on occasion, by apologetic statements from his own office-does not inspire confidence. His attacks on great public servants like Averell Harriman make the Vice President look ridiculous.

In time his self-appointed role as a complacent Savonarola may begin to fatigue the public; there is nothing more boring than a national scold.

Most serious of all are the fears raised by the implicit but persevering authoritarianism of his speeches and of his personality. Some one recently asked Orson Welles how anyone today could match his success 30 years ago in frightening the nation with his radio dramatization of an invasion from Mars. Mr. Welles replied, "I would say unlimited air time to Spiro Agnew."

As the Vice President himself has put it: "At this moment totalitarianism's threat does not necessarily have a foreign accent...We have a home-grown menace made and manufactured in the United States of America." Also: "They are, for the most part, articulate and possessed of that smugness that comes only when one is dogmatically certain of one's essential rightness." Also: "A sniveling, hand-wringing power structure deserves the violent rebellion it encourages." Maybe the fellow has some points there.

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr., who was an assistant to President Kennedy, is Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York.

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