Spirow Agnew I Didnt Do It and Ill Never to It Again
The Mail‐Berkeley Post‐Agnew Post‐Nixon Dejection
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August 24, 1975
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A few months ago I went back to Berkeley await for myself. Somewhere between 1967 and 1976 I'd left a large piece of myself somewhere. idea I might discover it at Berkeley, for it was because of Berkeley that I went to piece of work for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon. Information technology's all over there now. Berkeley is as off‐shell and funky as e'er. But the hate has evaporated. And in a remarkable way, Richard Nixon has succeeded in accomplishing precisely what he was elected to reach—he has calmed the nation.
No more mass demonstrations, no more than confrontations, no more fire‐bombs. It's almost every bit Nixon drew all the hatred of a decade into himself and so pushed the self‐destruct push button.
It'south non that Berkeley has been deradicalized. still is and always will be the radical capital the nation. Information technology's hard to believe that it was just flake more than a decade ago that the Complimentary Voice communication Motion was born in Berkeley, a movement that fathered the New Left and by and so doing altered permanently the face of 0American politics, the shape of America's universities, and the terms of our national dialogue.
The. New Leftists didn't get everything they wanted. But they certainly fared amend than the people on my side. They have, to a significant extent, managed to get their ideas and attitudes institutionalized into the Democratic party. Their motility was responsible, more than any other single factor, for ending our involvement in Vietnam. They drove 1 Autonomous President from function, and,' ironically, elected Richard Nixon, who could not have beaten Hubert Humphrey in 1968 without the demonstrations in the, streets of Chicago.
Without the New Left in that location would has.re been no outraged weep from Heart Americans for the restoration of guild. Without the New Left hundreds of thousands of traditional Democrats would not have crossed over to vote for the lawand‐order Nixon‐Agneyi ticket. Without the New Left at that place would 'hare' been no" 'Nixon‐Agnew Administration, no Hodeman, no' Ehrlichmari, no Mitchell, no Huston' plan, no. Watergate. And without the New Left' I know that I would not within, the space of one year have' worked for two Vice Presidents and two Presidents.
But it's all over for them and for thousands similar me at present. I know that I'll never once more set off in search of that cause larger than self that Haldeman liked to recommend. And I am certain. that I volition never once again accept whatever political leader at face value.
My feel has been primarily with Presidents and Vice Presidents. And Presidents aniVice Presidents are the almost carefully prepared, packaged and protected political products on the market place today. Their daily lives are arranged to the infinitesimal by scheduling staffs. There are the speech writers, whose work I know best, whose function it is in office to translate policies into coherent English so that the President, having been informed of them, tin read them to the nation.
My experience equally a speech.writer has taught me that national politicians often have fiddling to do with what they say. And this in turn has taught me that it is nearly impossible to arrive at conclusions about the reality of the political man beneath the surface of his rhetoric,‐or conclusions about the principles to which that man holds, by analyzing his rhetoric.
During the disastrous Congressional campaign of '74, when President Ford broke out of the White House and raced beyond the country speaking for every Republican in sight, he never knew what to say side by side, and neither did the four of united states who did the bulk of the writing for him. The theme that Ford finally came uir with was the need to preserve the two‐party organisation, a theme that had been developed in an 'earlier unused speech.
The theme does make basic sense, of form. No one wants i‐party rule. Merely every bit we laid out' it sounded merely a fleck fatuous; Nether one‐party dominion, we said, massive abuse of power becomes possible. Therefore, in guild to prevent corruption of power, it was necessary to send Republicans to Washington. But since it was a Republican Administration that had demonstrated spectacularly merely how dramatically power could be driveling, the idea had a certain hollow ring.
We Were adrift. The prodding had no theme, the rhetoric was merely rhetoric. And and so, considering there was goose egg to say, Ford began to constitutional and blubbering, picking upwardly some of the prepared remarks, garbling others, speaking almost' incoherently for as long as 45 minutes, pushing against the outer limits of the rhetorical bulwark, hoping desperately to break through into some sphere of sense and 'ideas. Only he didn't, and the problem will remain for as long every bit the Republican political party continues to drift without distinctive and well‐thought‐out programs and without philosophical ballast.
I don't intend here to leave the impression that I believe Ford tin can't call back and talk. He can, and the starting time two speeches he gave upon assuming the Presidency were amongst the most quietly eloquent of the past few decades. But they were personal speeches, the speeches of a good and decent man responding to Watergate and affirming his religion in the basic goodness and decency of our.nation and its people.
But the problem arises in the later speeches, when he attempts to lay downwards the goals, programs, policies and philosophy of the Administration he heads and the political party he leads. As the '74 elections demonstrated, the Republican political party may exist well on its way to earning endangered species status.
The arraign has to rest, of class, with the Nixon‐Agnew Administration and all of us who worked for the Assistants. I make no apologies here. I went to piece of work for Agnew because he personified for me "the onetime American verities." And when I went to piece of work for Nixon, assertive firmly that he had dealt kindly with Agnew did so certain that although Nixon was a hateful, tough, hardball politician, he was withal man of neat personal rectitude. No apologies. Merely I wouldn't do it once again.
In the late '60's, I still believed firmly that social and moral conservative principles could exist joined to political principles and combined in the person of a national politician. That politician became, for me and millions of others, Spiro Agnew. Information technology crystallized for me because of the condition of the Ameridan university and the New Left. I had come to Berkeley at a time when confrontation had get an accustomed function of daily life. The demonstrations and riots which had begun on the campuses had spilled out into the cities.
In the nation the unrest was reaching new heights. The President, a prisoner in the White Firm, could no longer appear publicly in whatsoever sizable urban center, and would soon be forced to announce that he would non run once more. The mobs were marching on Washington and the Authorities seemed no longer to function. Robert Kennedy was murdered. Martin Luther Rex was murdered. And to many of u.s. it seemed the land was coming unglued.
As the '60'southward wore on we came more and more to believe that the social unrest and the plummet of traditional morality was the logical outcome the neoliberal philosophy that had evolved our century, an eclectic intellectual mixture of Marxism, Freudianism and Darwinism, a philosophy that was preached unthinkingly in the classroom and that had led, inevitably, to the birth of the New Left movement r
My own beliefs were simple, perhaps naive. believed in all those values that Agnew used to like to say. "made America the hope and envy of the world." I believed patriotism to exist 1 of the highest of those virtues. I believed our Authorities and our political system to be the finest yet devised by man, and I believed absolutely that the men charged with running our Government and our political system were sincere and totally dedicated men who, no matter what their idiosyncracies, could be trusted to exercise their very best for their country.
I believed it all, and I grew greatly uneasy every bit I watched the rapid growth of a motility patently defended to destroying that system and replacing it with a new neo‐Marxian collectivist system modeled vaguely on Fidelist and Maoist principles. I didn't want to live in such a society and I didn't desire my children growing up in it. And then, without quite realizing information technology—I was relatively apolitical, had voted for J.F.K. in 1960 and might accept voted for Bobby had he lived—I became a counterrevolutionary.
The process at Berkeley, of grade, commonly worked the other way. Centre‐class students arrived on campus still instinctively clutching them most of the ideas and values they'd grown up with. Only after a' couple of years of steady attacks on those ideas and values by the professors who taught them ('middle‐course morality," they'd snort, every bit if having delivered themselves the ultimate obscenity), they finally complanate, leaving a vacuum into which rushed a whole new set up of values, those consort past their radicalized peers.
For a few of u.s.a., all the same, perhaps because we were veterans, it all had the opposite effect, for we believed that revolution was not only possible just very likely inevitable. And of course we lost on all fronts. The New Left won in the universities. They didn't destroy the universities, but they demonstrated just how bankrupt the universities Were, and by then doing they forced them to commit public suicide. And precisely the aforementioned thing happened to our Authorities.
Once more, that isn't to say the New Left caused massive abuse of power. The potential for those abuses had been building steadily as. Government came increasingly to rule rather than stand for, and as our rulers became increasingly cut off from their subjects.
The New Left didn't cause Watergate. But acted as goad. The dam bankrupt, and we suddenly realized that the same thing was true of our massive Regime that was true of our massive universities—structures without substance, run by men without centers. And so, those of us who set out to defend our universities and Authorities found we had nothing to fight for.
Are we finished? I don't know. But it is now obvious that the disease at the center of our arrangement—or maybe a lack of center—is symptomatic of a much deeper sickness. The old values are still there, merely every bit immutable as e'er. Simply somewhere we seem to have forgotten how to apply them, as we once did, to life. And this more than anything else dramatizes failure of higher education in America.
Perhaps we tin still pull it out. If we can detect a style tore‐establish the proper relationships between students and teachers, between representa'fives and the people they represent, betwixt ideas and action, philosophy and politics, values and life—and so nosotros might make it. But information technology's getting late.
John R. Coyne Jr., a contributor to the National Review and author of "The Impudent Snobs Agnew vs the Intellectual Establishment," made this presentation, adapted hither, at Hillsdale College in Michigan. This is reprinted from Imprimis, a Hillsdale publication.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/24/archives/the-postberkeley-postagnew-postnixon-blues.html
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