The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  The climax came in California. Kennedy, rebounding in Oregon from the only defeat a Kennedy had ever suffered anywhere, got back on track by defeating McCarthy there. But his Election Night celebration in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles was suddenly shattered by more assassin’s bullets, as Robert Kennedy was departing through a kitchen passageway. He died about twenty-six hours later in a nearby hospital after surgery.33 From it all Hubert Humphrey now emerged as the Democratic hope to salvage the White House from the grasp of the anointed Republican nominee, Richard Nixon.

  The honor, however, had come at a heavy price for Humphrey. In July, Johnson resumed the heavy bombing of North Vietnam as Humphrey continued to stand uncomfortably behind him, and angry protesters at his rallies chanted, “Dump the Hump!” A pro-Humphrey committee wrote a Vietnam platform plank designed to be acceptable to LBJ. But when Humphrey showed it to him, Johnson warned, “Hubert, if you do this I’ll just have to be opposed to it, and say so.”34 He said it could jeopardize developments in the Paris peace negotiations. Humphrey submitted a rewrite of the plank, and Johnson rejected that one as well.

  At the convention in Chicago, for which Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered out the full city police force, the plank supporting Johnson on Vietnam beat the anti-war plank by a ratio of three to two, setting off more protests in the streets in what a postconvention investigation later said had turned into a “police riot.” Many angry and disruptive protesters created mayhem, shouting, “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today?”35 But on the one roll call for the presidential nomination, Humphrey won easily. Having failed at a last-minute effort to persuade Ted Kennedy to be his running mate, he settled on Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.

  The convention did not mark an end to Humphrey’s torment. Kicking off his fall campaign against Nixon and running mate Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, Humphrey was a man walking on eggs in any discussion of Vietnam, for fear of incurring the further wrath of Johnson. When he said in Philadelphia he thought some American forces could start coming home later in 1968 or early 1969, Johnson interjected, “No man can predict when that day will come.”36

  Nixon meanwhile, ready to exploit the slightest daylight showing between Humphrey and LBJ, offered, “It would be very unfortunate if any implication was left in the minds of the American people that we were able to bring home our forces now because suddenly the war was at an end.” He went on, “I for one don’t want to pull the rug out from our negotiations in Paris.”37

  By now, Humphrey’s campaign manager for the fall campaign, the Kennedy veteran Larry O’Brien, told Humphrey regarding Vietnam, “You have to prove you are your own man. You’re not going to be elected president unless people are convinced you stand on your own two feet—and this is the issue you can prove it on!” An irate Humphrey replied, “Damn it, I’m on my own two feet,” and set to work with his advisers on a tougher speech on the war.38

  The next night, fifteen minutes before airtime, Humphrey phoned Johnson and told him what he was going to say: “As President I would be willing to stop the bombing of North Vietnam as an acceptable risk for peace,” adding, “If the government of North Vietnam were to show bad faith, I would reserve the right to resume the bombing.”39 He wrote later that Johnson just listened and then said, “I gather you’re not asking my advice.” Humphrey told him that what he would say would “in no way jeopardize” what the president was trying to do. Johnson replied, “Well, you’re going to give the speech anyway. Thanks for calling, Hubert,” and he hung up.40

  The speech delivered in Salt Lake City liberated the vice president, answered the hecklers, and was an immediate spur to desperately needed fund-raising. Joseph Califano, a key Johnson White House aide, wrote later, “Humphrey’s speech turned the campaign into a horse race but Johnson never forgave him for it.”41 Nixon demonstrated his concern by suggesting in his fashion that Humphrey ought to clarify his statement “and say he is not undercutting the United States position in Paris.”42

  In the next days on the stump, the crowds grew larger, the hecklers desisted, and the Nixon lead in the polls began to narrow. The ADA executive board endorsed Humphrey and, tardily, so did McCarthy.

  Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson increased his efforts to achieve a breakthrough in the peace negotiations in Paris. On television he reported that the Hanoi regime had agreed to have the Saigon government participate, and the National Liberation Front would be permitted a role. Humphrey was jubilant. But suddenly the Saigon regime was boycotting the Paris talks after all, rejecting any participation by the NLF. Humphrey obviously was crushed.

  Johnson was furious. He turned over to Humphrey pertinent classified information garnered in wiretaps at the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, including a phone call from Anna Chennault, the Chineseborn widow of the World War II flying ace General Claire Chennault, who was a friend of the South Vietnamese leaders and a strong Nixon supporter and confidante. She was heard, according to Clark Clifford’s memoir, conveying “a simple and authoritative message from the Nixon camp” that Thieu would get a better deal in any peace negotiations if he were to wait until Nixon was elected and in office.43 The reason Johnson didn’t make use of the information himself, Clifford wrote, was that he did not want to further disrupt any negotiations, because “he was really ambivalent about whether he really wanted Humphrey to be elected” and was more concerned about “what his place in history would be.”44

  As for Humphrey, he wrote later in his memoir, “I wonder if I should have blown the whistle on Anna Chennault and Nixon. He must have known about her call to Thieu. I wish I could have been sure. Damn Thieu. Dragging his feet this past weekend hurt us. I wonder if that call did it. If Nixon knew. Maybe I should have blasted them anyway.”45 Joe Califano wrote later that Humphrey’s refusal to use the information “became the occasion for a lasting rift” between him and LBJ.46

  In any event, no firm evidence became public about the Anna Chennault caper, and in an extremely close election, Nixon won with 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for the former Alabama governor George C. Wallace, running as an American Independent. Nixon got 302 electoral votes, 32 more than he needed, compared with 191 for Humphrey and 45 for Wallace, all from the South. In his memoir Johnson argued that the failure of the Saigon regime to go to the Paris peace talks “cost Hubert Humphrey the presidency.”47

  Beyond that, the defeat of Hubert Humphrey meant the end of Johnson’s Great Society, embodying some of the most innovative ideas for implementing liberal social goals since the New Deal. Despite Johnson’s personal pettiness and often ill consideration of his vice president, Humphrey served LBJ well, if often uncomfortably and torn by his own doubts about Johnson’s policies on the war.

  A committed public servant who reveled in “the politics of joy” even when it was joyless, Humphrey returned to the Senate in 1971, winning the Minnesota seat being vacated by Eugene McCarthy. He sought the presidency in 1972, winning some state primaries, but lost the Democratic nomination to George McGovern, with the Vietnam War still a centerpiece of the campaign. He was reelected to the Senate in 1976 and served into the next year, when he was hospitalized with terminal bladder cancer. He bid a tear-inducing good-bye to his decades of colleagues with dramatic speeches to the Senate and the House. He died on January 13, 1978, at the age of sixty-six, beloved in his own party and respected outside it, despite allowing his sense of loyalty to Lyndon Johnson to cloud his political judgment on the war in the most critical moments of his political life.

  SPIRO T. AGNEW

  OF MARYLAND

  Until Spiro Agnew’s time in office, probably no American vice president had brought more attention to it, was more controversial during his incumbency, or left it in greater disgrace. As the governor of Maryland, “Ted” Agnew was relatively unknown nationally when he was unexpectedly chosen by the presidential nominee Richard Nixon as his running mate in the tumultuous year of 1968, but Agnew rose
like a rocket in that campaign and thereafter. His climb was fueled by his aggressive yet entertaining rhetoric against a variety of political targets. But after nearly five years of Agnew’s controversial prominence, his career imploded in a personal scandal that ended in resignation to avoid impeachment and imprisonment.

  Agnew’s childhood and early adult years gave no hint of the controversies that eventually would envelop him. He was born of a Greek immigrant father and a western Virginia mother in a second-floor rear apartment over a florist shop in Baltimore on November 9, 1918, two days before the armistice ending World War I. He was an average child, not particularly athletic, and an average student, winning acceptance in his Forest Park High School crowd as a piano player. The school being highly rated, young Agnew was admitted to Johns Hopkins University, majoring in chemistry, but didn’t do well and dropped out. Later, while taking law school night classes at the University of Baltimore, he worked as an assistant insurance underwriter, where he met his future wife, Judy. Three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the army, six months later he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and three days after that, he and Judy were married. He was shipped overseas in March 1944 and that winter took part in the Battle of the Bulge in France, his unit then pushing into Germany by war’s end. He returned with a Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.1

  After a brief time as an assistant personnel manager for a small supermarket chain, Agnew was called up for the Korean War as a reserve officer, although he now had three children. He was about to be shipped overseas again when the army recognized it had made a mistake and discharged him, sending him back to his job at the supermarket. Because of his legal training he was “promoted” to interrogating petty shoplifters. He soon quit and opened a small law firm with a friend in suburban Towson, the Baltimore County seat. As a Republican he won a seat on the county board of zoning appeals and soon became chairman. He set his sights on the county executive position in 1962, offering himself as a civil libertarian and a champion of civil rights, and won as a result of a Democratic split, becoming the first Republican to hold the office in the twentieth century.2

  Agnew got the county council to create a new human relations commission, but during a local dispute over alleged racial discrimination, he scolded demonstrators for their “impatience and resentment” when the dispute was not being resolved to their liking. He finally stepped in and completed a compromise that the commission had been on the verge of reaching, taking credit.

  At any rate, Agnew was beginning to cement his reputation as a strong but moderating liberal voice for civil rights in the state, embracing such things as open-housing legislation without offending Republican dogma. He told one Democratic audience, “Most of the voices raised so far in the civil rights controversy are either militantly integrationist or militantly segregationist. There is a great need to hear voices from calm moderates of both races,” the implication being, like his own.3

  Agnew had barely gotten into harness as the county executive in June 1963 when he decided to take a hand in presidential politics. He decided that in 1964 neither the ultraconservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona nor the ultraliberal governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York would be able to unite the Republican Party and defeat President John F. Kennedy, expected to seek reelection. So he went to Washington and, in vain, urged the surprised moderate senator Thomas Kuchel of California to seek the 1964 nomination.

  In 1964, when Rockefeller’s candidacy crashed and Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania was induced to try to save the party from Goldwater, Agnew became his Maryland chairman and was with a loser again, but the brief association boosted his reputation as a progressive. In 1965, when he first met Rockefeller, Agnew was impressed with his commanding personality and organizational skill and began to see him as the party’s 1968 standard-bearer after all. Agnew also wrote Richard Nixon, not yet personally known to him, to sound him out on his political plans. Nixon was now practicing law in New York after his failed bid for governor in California but didn’t answer for months, leading Agnew to tell a political associate, “That damn Nixon, he won’t even answer your letters. No wonder he can’t get elected.”4

  It was clear that Ted Agnew was getting restless in his job as a county executive, and as he approached the end of his four-year term he decided to run for governor. The Republican nomination in the strongly Democratic state of Maryland was not in great demand, and Agnew, as the highest-ranking Republican statewide officeholder, had no serious primary opposition in 1966. In the midst of all the racial turmoil at that time, the Democratic voters handed Agnew a huge gift by nominating a blatantly segregationist perennial also-ran named George Mahoney, a wealthy paving contractor. Taking dead aim at the talk of open housing, Mahoney adopted as his campaign slogan “Your Home Is Your Castle—Protect It!” and won the nomination on the strength of a white backlash vote.5

  In the general election, Agnew challenged Mahoney to a debate, but Mahoney refused, whereupon Agnew made much of a Mahoney rally at which Ku Klux Klan stickers were seen. Despite some allegations of a shady Agnew deal connected with the proposed construction of a bridge to be built parallel to the existing one across the Chesapeake Bay, which were raised again later in his career, Agnew won the general election over the outspoken segregationist, further enhancing his own reputation as a civil rights stalwart.

  Taking office in January 1967, Agnew inherited a Democratic-con-trolled legislature in Annapolis. He supported and passed a limited open-housing plan that would apply only to new houses and new apartment units, still defending the right of the individual owner of an existing home to sell to a buyer of his choice—apparently his version of Mahoney’s “Your Home Is Castle” slogan. It was the first open-housing legislation passed in Maryland history, further embellishing his pro–civil rights record.6

  Early on, Agnew also called on the General Assembly to authorize three new bridge sites across the Chesapeake, and one was eventually chosen after he had disposed of his share of the land involved, supposedly settling the matter. In time, however, his aloofness and jibes at uncooperative Democratic legislators wore thin. When a young state delegate, Paul Sarbanes, later a U.S. senator, balked at Agnew’s education cuts in “the East Coast version of the Ronald Reagan budget” in California, Agnew dismissed his criticism as “a Sarbanality.” It was a demonstration of his way with words that soon would become his trademark.7

  Meanwhile, Agnew’s interest in presidential politics and his efforts to bring more progressive leadership to the Republican Party had not waned. In April 1967 he brushed aside Rockefeller’s declaration that he was strongly backing Governor George Romney of Michigan for the 1968 party nomination and began to court him anyway. In May, Rockefeller agreed to see Agnew in his Manhattan office but would not budge in his disinterest in running. In July, however, Romney made his infamous remark of having received a “brainwashing” from the American generals in Vietnam and his candidacy began to go south. Soon after, in response to a Time magazine cover touting a Rockefeller-Reagan “dream ticket,” Rockefeller declared flatly, “I am not a candidate, I’m not going to be a candidate, and I don’t want to be President.”8

  Romney’s campaign meanwhile collapsed so thoroughly that he was forced to withdraw from the race two weeks before the opening 1968 primary in New Hampshire, won overwhelmingly by Nixon. Soon after, though, Rockefeller gave a go-ahead to the presidential draft Agnew had been pushing. Rockefeller scheduled a televised news conference ostensibly to declare his candidacy, and Agnew invited the Annapolis press into his office to share the great moment with him. As all eyes were glued to the television set, the blow came. “I have decided,” Rockefeller said, “to reiterate unequivocally that I am not a candidate campaigning directly or indirectly for the Presidency of the United States.”

  Agnew sat there, frozen and humiliated, as Rockefeller explained that “a considerable majority of the party’s leaders” had made clear
they wanted Nixon as their nominee. Nixon agents swiftly fielded the disappointed Agnew on the short hop, recruiting him to their cause.9

  Two developments in Maryland now crystallized Agnew’s political thinking and sharpened his view on law enforcement in dealing with racial protest in a way that coincided with Nixon’s own. First, students at Bowie State College, a predominantly black school in the state university system, complained about decrepit dormitories, triggering a boycott and demanding that Agnew come to the campus. He refused and ordered Bowie State closed. Then, just as news broke of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, all hell broke loose in Baltimore among its black population. Fires and vandalism spread, killing six and injuring seven hundred, with thousands more arrested. Local black moderate leaders took to the streets to cool the rioting, but to little avail.

  On the night before King’s assassination, Stokely Carmichael, a young evangelist of Black Power, had shown up in a tough black Baltimore neighborhood allegedly preaching, “The only way to deal with a white man is across the barrel of a gun.” When Agnew heard this, he was furious.10 He summoned a hundred moderate Baltimore black leaders, who sat stunned as he read them the riot act, with uniformed, armed state troopers at his side. He charged that these well-respected moderates “ran” in the face of intruding Black Power rabble-rousers. They angrily walked out, declaring that when “the chief executive [of Maryland] should be calling for unity, he deliberately sought to divide us.”11