Echoes of the Other Nixon Scandal

Over image from Amazon.com.

In my media history classes, we do spend some time on Watergate, a scandal that started in 1972 and eventually brought down a president who had just won a landslide reelection.

But I also mention Spiro Agnew, President Nixon’s first vice president, forced to resign in disgrace. Mostly I teach about him because, as the designated attack dog of the Nixon years, Agnew constantly attacked the news media, pointing the way to a Republican strategy of shooting the messenger that has intensified as it continued through the decades.

While Richard Nixon was no Donald Trump—in Nixon’s case, he was a long-time public servant who had some grasp of both government and history, subjects that Trump has flunked in his adult life—Nixon’s scandals did scar and shape the future of his party. So there is a through line to the modern GOP flirting with a cult of personality and proto-fascism.

Anyway, I just finished reading “Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House” by Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz. I did a few seconds of internet research, but could not find out who drew the interesting cartoons that begin each chapter—a mystery to me that I wish I could solve.

Despite wondering where the cover and chapter art comes from, I found the book to be a readable, interesting summary, not just of Spiro Agnew’s crimes, uncovered by federal prosecutors in Baltimore, Maryland—it’s instructive in terms of how Agnew chose to fight the charges and frame the scandal.

From Wikimedia Commons, official White House mug shot of a criminal: Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Because he pretty clearly was a felon. He had taken large cash bribes to award construction contracts for state projects as governor of Maryland--and continued to take bribes as Nixon's VP. But to get him out of office before Nixon’s fall—otherwise the U.S. would have had a criminal president, something we didn’t really get until we crazily elected one in 2016—the Justice Department agrees to let Agnew escape the ignominy of wearing prison garb in exchange for his quitting.

The Nixon years were years of political shocks. There was Lyndon Johnson, deciding in March of 1968 to quit the race for reelection even as Nixon's primary campaign was just taking hold. Bobby Kennedy being shot during the primary campaign. Nixon picking an obscure, right-wing governor of Maryland, who he never respected, because Nixon was shoring up right-wing support in his own party. A close election that Nixon won. Years of paranoia about the media culminating in the CREEP engaging in clumsy, illegal manipulation in 1972.

And just as Johnson stunned the nation in 1968 with his sudden departure from the campaign, we have the sudden execution of the “the deal,” where Agnew unexpectedly cashed in the only cards he held, giving up his public office. He maintained his innocence, not just to the end, but beyond, claiming at one point that Nixon was plotting to have him killed and that federal prosecutors had engaged in a “witch hunt” against him.

Happier days for Spiro Agnew--as VP, meeting crew of Apollo 10 in 1968. NASA official image downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

I was pretty young when it all broke and, at least briefly in my young adulthood, a Republican. But I lived in a newsy house—my parents always watched the nightly news, they subscribed to three daily newspapers and news was always around. I never bought into Agnew’s version; it was pretty obvious at the time to any consumer of the news that he was a crook.

Yet he did maintain a base of support. I suppose he could have shot a man on Fifth Avenue and some of his supporters would have remained loyal to him.

Politics in this country is a rough game—I guess it is globally and throughout human history. Just ask Julius Caesar what he thought of Brutus. Our particular times are not particularly different, except we have stumbled on a system that at least balances our worst impulses with some rule of law and some semblance of We the People having our say.

As our democracy wobbles a bit in election denial—face it, today’s Republicans, Joe Biden won with no trickery, deceit nor widespread conspiracy—it is nice that we survived those Nixon year shocks. Yet buying into Trump’s lies today is in line with a darker moment of your past recent history.

Agnew did it. Sure there was a witch hunt but the point is that there really was a witch (or warlock). They caught him but didn’t burn him just so that he would never become president. And Agnew's evasions created an odd playbook that, sadly, is still being applied by crooked politicians today.

The Leadership Style of Duck the Media

Official portrait of Spiro Agnew.

In Des Moines Iowa almost 50 years ago (Jesus, I just made myself feel really old), Vice President Spiro Agnew famously decried the news media as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Well, he didn’t call journalists “enemies” of the American people, but we’ve seen a thread of political vitriol from the right spreading over the decades. It turns out rejecting “coast” culture and decrying the media snobs who look down on the “real” America is a winning brand.

Agnew was a crook who worked for a crook, and both he and his boss Richard Nixon left office in disgrace. But Nixon was an evil political genius, and many of the strategies he unleashed during the turbulent late 1960s have become embedded in American political fabric. The GOP as a party of the White South? See Nixon. The “mainstream media” as a distrusted punching bag? See Nixon.

And now we are in the fragile election year of 2018, waiting to see how potent the poison in the well has become. We have an ignorant, misogynist, narcissistic president who is pumped up and rallying the boob troops. True, it’s too easy to underestimate Trump—he does have some entertainment instincts that seem to serve him eerily too well in American politics, where government seems to becoming show biz.

In the run up to the election, Trump is ratcheting up his delusional, politically charged lies. See this PBS interview with a media fact checker.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Gage Skidmore. Donald Trump in happier times--2011. He wasn't yet the liar-in-chief.

Trump says crazy stuff: Democrats are a liberal “mob.” A caravan of migrants is full of “bad people” were probably funded by Democrats. This self-described nationalist (the reason, sir, that you’re not supposed to use that word is because in politics it is the philosophy espoused by facists) lies, lies and lies some more. Because it works for him. His base doesn’t care—they just like the message.

And most of all they like to see those enemies in the media squirm.

The tragedy, to me, is not that it’s unfair to accuse the American media of bias. There are all kinds of bias built into our media system that should be recognized. But to term journalists as enemies of the people is breathtakingly ahistorical. We have a First Amendment that protects the press because our founding political philosophers understood that, perfect or not, independent purveyors of information were vital for democracy to maintain itself.

I don’t think Trump cares about democracy. He is way too chummy with authoritarians, and makes too many wild assertions to be taken seriously as a man who wants to lead or convince or persuade. He’s a bully with a bully’s worst instincts—and he loves leading a bully mob.

Anyway, the deterioration of respect for sellers of information has led Republicans down to the local level to shun media. I read a post on Facebook by a local state representative, Ashley Hinson, who was calling on this local newspaper to publish an op/ed written by her leader, the Republican speaker of the House of Iowa. But Representative Hinson herself is part of an awful trend. In 2012, running for the U.S. Senate, then candidate Joni Ernst eschewed meetings with major Iowa newspaper editorial boards.

Hinson herself did the same with the Gazette this year, and she is not alone. I’m sure she has an explanation for her decison, and I’m also sure I don’t want to hear it. Because whatever it is, as a former TV anchor she should know it's BS. Shame on her. Shame on Senator Ernst. Shame on Republicans who shun editorial boards in general. It’s fair to be critical of the media—but to refuse to sit down with working journalists and discuss issues with them is to disrespect the role that the press serves in our democracy.

The Gazette was right to complain about the trend. See their editorial.

Vice President Agnew had a bit of a point, even if he was a crook. In his time, print media were more conservative than today—his main complaints were about network television, which then was way more powerful than now in shaping public discourse. As a media professor, I think the spreading of outlets, the ability of anybody to publish anything (including this blog) can have positive impacts. Voices that were silent can be heard. Diverse points of view are readily available.

But the rallying cry of “fake news” that Agnew’s remarks eventually unleashed have reached a dangerous fever pitch.

And the right has won the war against news, in many ways. Mainstream media is in retreat.

But, what’s left in its place? Fox “News,” Russian trolls, Brietbart? It’s a vapid swamp of delusion and misinformation. Sort of like any political speech theses days by that national embarrassment, the liar-in-chief, Donald Trump.