And Now, Here's Spiro... for '76

THE phrase does not trip lightly off the tongue: President Agnew. Yet with the landslide victory of Richard Nixon, his once and present running mate Spiro T. Agnew immediately becomes the first unannounced presidential candidate for 1976. Recent history favors his chances. Since World War II, only one Vice President has failed to go on and capture his party's nomination for the top job, or accede to it; that was Harry Truman's Veep, Alben Barkley, who was 74 years old when his turn came in 1952. In his victory speech on Election Night, Nixon went out of his way to praise Agnew's campaigning for the ticket while he himself remained at work in the White House.

Of course Agnew is not running yet, and his intimates say that he will not even think about running until after the '74 congressional election. But that is part of the required ritual, and it also makes a good deal of common sense: Agnew watched what happened to Front Runner Edmund Muskie this year and his own party's George Romney in 1968. He knows that even more attention than he gathered in his more vitriolic days will be focused on his every move for the next four years. He also knows, as do both his advocates and detractors in the G.O.P., that if the party were to reconvene next month to pick a 1976 ticket, Agnew would top it in a walk.

All this seems heady indeed for a man who just ten years ago won his first public office as Baltimore county executive. Or even for the disappointed and dispirited Vice President of two years ago, whose curare-dipped diatribes against "nattering nabobs of negativism" were being blamed in part for the Republicans' indifferent success in the 1970 off-year elections. Good at raising money, he was poor at mixing with the local G.O.P. leaders whose turf he visited, secluding himself in his hotel or disappearing to play golf or tennis.

But all that has changed. Agnew on the trail in 1972 was a model of assiduousness, going out of his way to flatter every Republican officeholder or seeker in his travels, be he the Senator or a county clerk. In keeping with the tone laid down for the campaign by the President, his principal surrogate mainly stayed on the high road of rhetoric, proving himself in fact a sometimes more thoughtful and frequently better public speaker than Nixon. Emulating the President, Agnew, secure in the affection of conservatives, is already moving toward the center and the image of the statesman.

There will be more to come. Agnew hopes to pay his own visit to the Soviet Union some time in the second term. Once campaign fervor has died down, he intends to visit more U.S. campuses. Agnew is convinced that he, like Nixon, can win over large segments of the young, whom he regards as opposed to him only because they do not understand him. Early in his political career, Agnew was considered liberal, and although he had to serve as what he termed the President's "cutting edge," he feels he holds liberal attitudes that may displease some conservatives in the future.

Ultimately, Agnew's chances for the nomination stand or fall with the approbation or opprobrium earned by Nixon's second term. Hubert Humphrey could explain to him better than any man alive that in the eyes of the voting public, a Vice President is lashed to his President's policies as securely as Ahab to his white whale. Also, Agnew has Nixon himself to contend with. The President felt he needed to retain Agnew as his running mate in 1972 to appease the party's right wing; that does not mean Nixon has to support him in 1976, or, for that matter, allow him a spotlight over the next four years. Says one veteran Nixon watcher: "The President will keep his knights divided and equal. Agnew won't be able to rise. Once any Nixon subaltern begins to rise too far above the pack, Nixon encourages the others to shoot at him. It will be this way with Agnew, and I wouldn't expect Nixon to tip his hand much if any before the 1976 convention."

In theory, at least, the 1976 G.O.P. Convention could be a donnybrook. The liberals will surely mount a strong attack on Agnew's qualifications to be President. They will push someone like Charles Percy, but that seems likely to succeed only in the event of a disastrous Nixon performance over the next four years. Percy, 53, has the youthful appearance and manner to attract a lot of voters. But his criticism of the White House on the Viet Nam War has put him in Nixon's doghouse, and the President would undoubtedly try to squelch his bid for the nomination Governors Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan will be too old for presidential aspirations. The strongest line-up of dark horses comes from Tennessee: Senators William Brock and Howard Baker and Governor Winfield Dunn, all more moderate than Agnew. In Ohio there is, of course, a Taft Senator Robert Jr., who carries a nice balance of his father's conservative reputation and his own liberal attitudes.

Although such men may politically grow and prosper during the interval, they still must be considered long shots for 1976. The odds now are with Agnew, if for no other reason than the fact that he is the favorite of the G.O.P.'s conservatives, who proved indubitably in Miami Beach in 1972 that they control the Republican Party. Indeed, in the only interesting confrontation of the entire starched-and-pressed convention, the right wing gerrymandered the delegate structure for the next convention to favor rural, conservative, and hence potentially Agnew-lining, states. Says Mississippi's Clarke Reed, a shrewd spokesman for the G.O.P.'s right-wing constituency: "We proved that this is a conservative party by a margin of about 2 to 1, and that's why conservatives are going to choose the nominee again in 1976."

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