The Short Rein of Spiro T. Agnew

As part of his reassessment after last fall's elections, President Nixon asked his senior advisers for written counsel on what steps he should take. When the memoranda started flowing into the Oval Office, almost all of them agreed on at least one point: Spiro T. Agnew's role should be moderated. It would create a significant softening of the Administration's rhetoric. Agnew was Nixon's most flamboyant and aggressive agent in last fall's campaign. Now, like other Vice Presidents before him, including Richard Nixon, he is being cast by some in the White House as a scapegoat for the G.O.P.'s performance. Nixon certainly cannot quarrel with the substance of what Agnew said during the campaign. In retrospect, however, there was something in Agnew's manner, his unpredictability and ferocity, that Nixon did not entirely like. The President, for example, sent Agnew out to capsize New York's liberal Republican Senator Charles Goodell. But Nixon did not tell him to label Goodell "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party."

Though murmurings are growing louder that Nixon will dump Agnew from the Republican ticket in 1972, such predictions are premature. By tradition, the vice presidency is a condition of insecurity--as Nixon himself knows, having faced the same prospect himself before the 1956 election. Whether Agnew joins the 1972 ticket will depend upon Nixon's political needs at the time. Actually, some of Agnew's friends think that he might even leave office without much resistance. One evening during last fall's campaign, he told an intimate: "I might just get out and open up a law office. I've had enough of this stuff."

Agnew harbors sufficient independence to chafe sometimes at being programmed. "We have a stud here, a real stud," says an aide. "He has some thoughts of his own." Now he is being reined in, and he cannot like the feeling. For the short run, Agnew's future will turn upon the success of the new persona he is cultivating under Nixon's direction. The White House is now sending him forth in a more statesmanlike guise as ambassador-advocate for the Administration's domestic reforms. Thus last Agnew met--and was photographed with--Newark Mayor Kenneth

Gibson, a black Democrat, to discuss the city's impoverishment.

In an effort to remake his image as an earnest moderator between the levels of government, Agnew will appear later in the year at a series of state and local conferences around the nation --while generally avoiding the kind of party fund-raising events that might bring forth his old sulfurous partisanship. He will also try to work closely with the nation's Governors and, unlikely as it may sound, court ethnic groups, including blacks. Such liaison was supposed to be an Agnew assignment all along.

Agnew flew to California last week for just such a conference of state and local officials. He listened thoughtfully, then delivered a mellow speech on local fiscal problems. To be sure, his older style briefly asserted itself when he flailed away at Ralph Nader and other "pontificators and pundits." But the Vice President has obviously learned some valuable lessons. "All I'm saying," he remarked at one point, "is that life is a very complex matter. There are two sides to every argument."

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