Odyssey of Divisiveness

By Melvin Maddocks

WHITE KNIGHT: THE RISE OF SPIRO AGNEW

by JULES WITCOVER

465 pages. Random House. $10.

The hands of the Spiro Agnew watches move on, a dated joke. The man--no joke--moves on too. In 31 years he has advanced from "Spiro who?" to the most famous Vice President in U.S. history--but he is still an enigma.

Exactly who is Spiro Theodore Agnew and why is he saying all those terrible things about radic-libs? Jules Witcover, Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, addresses himself to these questions like a good newspaperman: patiently, in detail. His trusting assumption is that if a biographer provides a reader with a politician's record, he is finally giving him the man.

Witcover's interesting failure--the reader gets just about everything but the man--suggests this basic rule for future biographers: Agnew must be understood less as a politician than an improbable culture hero.

His early days read like a bad Theodore Dreiser novel in their unequal mating of ambition to mediocrity. In high school he rated run of the mill as a student. The caption under his yearbook picture read: "An ounce of wit is worth a pound of sorrow." Witcover reports: "Classmates still scratch their heads over what that might mean."

A dropout from Johns Hopkins, Agnew studied law while working at Maryland Casualty Co. in the sprinkler-leakage department. After Army service in the war, he hung out his lawyer's shingle--and starved. Driven to the help wanted ads, he became assistant personnel manager at Schreibers', a Baltimore supermarket chain. Then the Army recalled Agnew and nearly sent him to Korea, although he was a married man in his 30s with three children.

Agnew kept faith with the American dream. A civilian again, he began to find himself as an underdog representing other underdogs. Negotiating contracts for AFL-CIO butchers as well as for black fishermen in Chesapeake Bay, he became a labor lawyer to warm the bleeding heart of any liberal.

Instant Rapport. He gained his first elective office, at the age of 44, when he became executive officer of Baltimore County, and suddenly his career took off. It was George Wallace, as much as anybody, who made Agnew Governor in 1966, Witcover judges. Fighting for power in Maryland, Wallace helped Agnew appear attractively liberal as a crusader for urban renewal and against discriminatory housing.

Thereafter, writes Witcover, it was Nelson Rockefeller who helped turn Agnew, the "White Knight" of civil rights, into Agnew the conservative. In 1968 Agnew backed Rockefeller early and aggressively for the Republican presidential nomination. When Rockefeller publicly withdrew without privately notifying Agnew, he humiliated a proud man, Witcover reasons, and drove him into the arms of Richard Nixon. Agnew's only previous contact had been a long unanswered letter. "That damn Nixon!" he exploded to a friend. "He won't even answer your letters." But when the two sometime losers finally met, there was instant rapport.

Thus occurred, Witcover says, "the great Agnew transformation." He goes on to give a play by play of the Vice President's Pier 6 career, first as a clown and then as an increasingly feared gut fighter who made "an odyssey of divisiveness and personal vilification."

The detail is brilliantly marshaled, but the Dreiser hero implausibly making good--the stand-in for Middle America--is hardly present. Where is the incredible personification of passion and blandness, the slicked-down, good-posture public figure who is as careful with a trouser crease as he is careless with an innuendo? Where is the collector of Lawrence Welk records, the doter on Allen Drury novels?

Witcover thinks it would be nice if Agnew, and all Vice Presidents, did more and talked less. But talking is precisely what Agnew does. Rather than a party politician, he is a populist--a spokesman personally tuned to the frustrations, resentments and credibility gaps of Middle Americans. In their name, he flogs effete intellectuals, media stars, long-haired demonstrators. In their name, he recites the nostalgic litanies of patriotism and honest labor.

Beyond ideology he speaks for a lifestyle. In believing the myth of Middle America, Agnew has become a myth himself, and what he really needs is not a journalist but a novelist--a 1972 Dreiser--to do him justice. . Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.