November 13, 1969: Vice President Spiro Agnew delivers a speech at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Des Moines, Iowa, as part of the Midwest Regional Republican Conference, an annual meeting of campaign strategists.
The speech was written by William Safire, later a Pulitzer Prize-winning longtime conservative columnist for The New York Times. Ten days earlier, President Richard Nixon had delivered a speech written by Safire, outlining his policy of "Vietnamziation," a process of slowly but surely turning the responsibility of defending South Vietnam over to the country itself, and pulling U.S. troops out.
Nixon appealed to what he called "the great silent majority of Americans" for support, and he did gain support for the plan in opinion polls.
But not everyone agreed, and Nixon thought that he was being undermined by the national networks' news broadcasts: The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, The Huntley-Brinkley Report with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC (not yet NBC Nightly News), and The ABC Evening News (not yet World News Tonight) with Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds. Nixon thought the newsmen, their correspondents, and their interviewees weren't giving him a fair shake.
Nixon had been through this before: When he ran for Governor of California in 1962, he lost badly, and blamed the media, telling them the next morning, "Just think of how much fun you'll be missing. You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." He lied, running for President in 1968, and winning.
He took Governor Spiro T. Agnew of Maryland as his running mate. Agnew had been Baltimore County Executive, and won the Governorship as a liberal Republican against a segregationist Democrat. At first, Agnew was seen as tough but fair. But his response to the riot in Baltimore after Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968 got Nixon's attention, and he was nominated for Vice President. His image as a moderate would soon be shattered by remarks of what we would now call "casual racism," and he very nearly cost Nixon the election.
As Vice President, he tended to give speeches that showed he had an acute affinity for alliteration. Safire, who later wrote a column titled "Language Maven," enjoyed writing for him, giving him the phrases "the nattering nabobs of negativism," "the professional pessimists," "the troubadours of trouble," and "the 4-H Club: The Hopeless, Hysterical Hypochondriacs of History."
Safire was Jewish, and it was more likely one of Nixon's other speechwriters, the Catholic Patrick J. Buchanan, who gave Agnew the line "the vicars of vacillation." And, while this phrase didn't reflect anyone's religion, or offer any alliteration, I suspect it was also Buchanan who had Agnew call the media "an effect corps of impudent snobs."
Agnew did not use that line in this speech, which all 3 networks broadcast live, an unprecedented forum for a sitting Vice President who, at the time, was not also a candidate for President. Among his remarks:
No nation depends more on the intelligent judgment of its citizens. And no medium has a more profound influence over public opinion. Nowhere in our system are there fewer checks on such vast power. So nowhere should there be more conscientious responsibility exercised than by the news media. The question is, "Are we demanding enough of our television news presentations?" "And are the men of this medium demanding enough of themselves?"
Monday night, a week ago, President Nixon delivered the most important address of his Administration, one of the most important of our decade. His subject was Vietnam. My hope, as his at that time, was to rally the American people to see the conflict through to a lasting and just peace in the Pacific. For 32 minutes, he reasoned with a nation that has suffered almost a third of a million casualties in the longest war in its history.
When the President completed his address -- an address, incidentally, that he spent weeks in the preparation of -- his words and policies were subjected to instant analysis and querulous criticism. The audience of 70 million Americans gathered to hear the President of the United States was inherited by a small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts, the majority of whom expressed in one way or another their hostility to what he had to say.
It was obvious that their minds were made up in advance. Those who recall the fumbling and groping that followed President Johnson's dramatic disclosure of his intention not to seek another term have seen these men in a genuine state of non-preparedness. This was not it.
One commentator twice contradicted the President's statement about the exchange of correspondence with Ho Chi Minh. Another challenged the President's abilities as a politician. A third asserted that the President was following a Pentagon line. Others, by the expressions on their faces, the tone of their questions, and the sarcasm of their responses, made clear their sharp disapproval.
To guarantee in advance that the President's plea for national unity would be challenged, one network (meaning ABC) trotted out Averell Harriman for the occasion. Throughout the President's address, he waited in the wings. When the President concluded, Mr. Harriman recited perfectly. He attacked the Thieu government as unrepresentative. He criticized the President's speech for various deficiencies. He twice issued a call to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to debate Vietnam once again. He stated his belief that the Vietcong or North Vietnamese did not really want a military takeover of South Vietnam. And he told a little anecdote about a "very, very responsible" fellow he had met in the North Vietnamese delegation.
All in all, Mr. Harriman offered a broad range of gratuitous advice challenging and contradicting the policies outlined by the President of the United States. Where the President had issued a call for unity, Mr. Harriman was encouraging the country not to listen to him.
A word about Mr. Harriman. For 10 months, he was America's chief negotiator at the Paris peace talks, a period in which the United States swapped some of the greatest military concessions in the history of warfare for an enemy agreement on the shape of the bargaining table. Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Mr. Harriman seems to be under some heavy compulsion to justify his failures to anyone who will listen. And the networks have shown themselves willing to give him all the air time he desires.
Now, every American has a right to disagree with the President of the United States, and to express publicly that disagreement. But the President of the United States has a right to communicate directly with the people who elected him, and the people of this country have the right to make up their own minds, and form their own opinions, about a Presidential address without having the President's words and thoughts characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested.
Agnew was underestimating the intelligence of TV viewers. He believed they were incapable of making up their minds about what Nixon said before any opposing views could be aired. He also underestimated their ability to decide for themselves about what Harriman, also a former Governor of New York, and others opposing Nixon had said.
Agnew continued:
When Winston Churchill rallied public opinion to stay the course against Hitler's Germany, he didn't have to contend with a gaggle of commentators raising doubts about whether he was reading public opinion right, or whether Britain had the stamina to see the war through. When President Kennedy rallied a nation in the Cuban missile crisis, his address to the people was not chewed over by a roundtable of critics who disparaged the course of action he'd asked America to follow.
And when those speeches were given, they were on the subject of existential threats to the countries involved. North Vietnam was not Nazi Germany. Nor was it the Soviet Union. And there had already been plenty of doubt about what America was doing in Vietnam. Americans were very much used to questioning their leaders on that subject. If they hadn't been, Nixon -- and, by extension, Agnew -- could never have been elected.
So for Agnew to suggest that Nixon's words should go unchallenged was an authoritarian gesture. And the American people didn't like that. He wrapped up:
In tomorrow's edition of The Des Moines Register, you'll be able to read a news story detailing what I said tonight. Editorial comment will be reserved for the editorial page, where it belongs. Should not the same wall of separation exist between news and comment on the nation's networks?
Now, my friends, we'd never trust such power, as I've described, over public opinion in the hands of an elected Government. It's time we questioned it in the hands of a small and unelected elite. The great networks have dominated America's airwaves for decades. The people are entitled to a full accounting of their stewardship.
At the conclusion of the speech, all 3 network's anchors interviewed their own network's president, to give their own response. Frank Stanton of CBS gave the best one, calling the speech "an unprecedented attempt by the Vice President of the United States to intimidate a news medium which depends for its existence upon government licenses."
The networks were not intimidated. As the years went on, all 3 would be rather harsh toward Nixon -- and Agnew. They couldn't convince people not to re-elect the Republican ticket in 1972. But when Agnew fell under investigation for tax fraud and bribery, the networks covered it as a serious news story worthy of investigation, keeping whatever glee they may have had to themselves.
Agnew resigned his office on October 10, 1973, cutting a plea deal to avoid prison time. That same month, the Watergate scandal that had engulfed Nixon got worse, and ABC's Smith became the 1st network anchor to issue an on-air editorial calling for Nixon's resignation.
Early the next year, Dan Rather, then CBS' White House correspondent, stood up to ask Nixon a question during a press conference. Upon introducing himself, he got a round of applause from his colleagues. Nixon, smiling, asked him, "Are you running for something?" Rather, not smiling, answered, "No, Mr. President. Are you?"
The Republicans hated Rather for the rest of his career, and hated CBS above all networks, until the 1990s, when NBC spun off the network MSNBC, which frequently challenged the conservative movement's own favorite network, Fox News Channel.
Speaking of which: Spiro Agnew died on September 17, 1996, at the age of 83. Exactly 20 days later, Fox News Channel went on the air. Something tells me he would have been just fine with the way they have conducted themselves since then.
*
November 13, 1969 was a Thursday. Scottish actor Gerard Butler was born on this day.
Baseball season was over. Football was in midweek. There were 3 games played in the NBA:
* The New York Knicks beat the Chicago Bulls, 114-99 at the new Madison Square Garden.
* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Phoenix Suns, 124-110 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.
* And the Seattle SuperSonics beat the Detroit Pistons, 117-113 at the Seattle Center Coliseum.
There were 2 games played in the American Basketball Association. The Indiana Pacers beat the Miami Floridians, 115-109 at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. And the Kentucky Colonels beat the Denver Rockets, 109-104 at Freedom Hall in Louisville.
And there were 2 games in the NHL. The Boston Bruins beat the Detroit Red Wings, 3-1 at the Boston Garden. And the St. Louis Blues beat the Pittsburgh Penguins, 4-0 at the St. Louis Arena.
