Spiro T. Agnew, RIP - Column - Obituary

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by John R. Coyne, Jr.

YES, he was all of that. Tribune of Middle America, Voice of the New American Majority, Scourge of the Liberal Media, who didn't get it till he said it. The great "Spiro Is Our Hero" rallies of 1972, the 49-state landslide and a lock on the nomination for 1976. The defender of Richard Nixon as the Watergate tom-toms began to beat, with James Reston calling him "the personification of the Old American Verities," and his old-line liberal colleagues increasingly agreeing. The ardent wooing by neo-con intellectuals and academics of all stripes, just before the fall. Then the charges, the "I will not resign if indicted" speech in Los Angeles ("Play me some organ music, John," he had told me a week earlier) and, finally, nolo contendere and resignation.

What to make of it? There's the obvious, of course: Had not the political culture of Maryland been so strikingly similar to the political culture of, say, Arkansas, he would have been our 39th President. And were he running today, chances are the charges that broke him then would seem as irrelevant as Whitewater -- they were much less serious, in fact.

But that's sour grapes. What he did, he did with great flair and effect. He permanently altered aspects of the national debate and gave respectable political focus to previously scorned political constituencies. His deficiencies are well known, and should not be confused with deficiencies in the ideals he personified. And beyond that, his accomplishments were real. The 1960s was an emotional, neo-romantic, and ultimately violent and revolutionary decade. The Nixon - Agnew Administration was hired to draw the line, end the uprisings, restore order. That's what it did. It succeeded in carrying out its mandate. And Spiro Agnew was central to that success.

My own association with Spiro Agnew is tied closely to NATIONAL REVIEW. He called me at NATIONAL REVIEW in 1970, out of the blue, to discuss my book, The Kumquat Statement, read aloud parts he enjoyed, and said he was giving copies as Christmas presents. Later I joined his staff, and at the time of his resignation was his chief writer. During those years he asked me to stay close to the magazine, which he admired greatly, and continued to read through the years. I saw him last in May 1995, at the unveiling of his bust in the U.S. Senate, an event for which NATIONAL REVIEW's and assistant literary editor Matthew Scully had worked for four years.

Spiro Agnew was his own man, sometimes very nearly to the point of eccentricity. And generally, he was perceived as tough. ("The only way you can put a tough crust on a marshmallow is to roast it.") But there was something else. Richard Nixon is said to have observed, wonderingly, "The Vice President is a soft man."

And in his own way, he was. During the weeks of emotional shellshock following his resignation, he worked hard to ensure that all his staffers had jobs. And though his dislikes were strong, he was never vindictive. In April 1994, he wrote me: "Judy and I will attend the Nixon funeral tomorrow. I have never fully been able to forgive the abandonment in 1973, but I have enormous respect for his accomplishments. Moreover, both Judy and I loved Pat and we think Tricia and Julie are first rate."

To which I'd like to add on my own, So were you, Mr. Vice President. In your own way, so were you.