November 13, 2006
Spiro Agnew’s Ghost Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:00 PM EST Today marks the anniversary of one of the worst vice-presidential speeches in history. On this date in 1969 Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, issued a stinging rebuke of television network news.
Only ten days earlier, the President had taken to the airwaves to deliver his now-famous “silent majority” speech, in which the he denounced antiwar protesters—several hundred thousand of whom had participated in “moratorium” events that fall—for undercutting the American negotiating position in peace talks with North Vietnam. When the television networks realized that they had been manipulated into giving Nixon free air time under the false promise that he was primed to make an important announcement about the war effort, they spent several days focusing on the administration’s inability to reach a settlement in Southeast Asia. In turn the White House unleashed Agnew, whom Eugene McCarthy once dubbed “Nixon’s Nixon” for his intense negativity and slash-and-burn campaign tactics.
Agnew denounced network news professionals as a “tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one” and slammed them for their alleged liberal bias. A year later he followed up with an even more vicious address in which he said, “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H club—the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’” (Funny that it’s always the vice presidents who are left to alliterate. In 1952, Nixon, as Dwight Eisenhower’s running-mate, denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, as “Adlai the appeaser . . . who got a Ph.D. degree from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Containment.)
Agnew’s speech was the opening shot of a conservative war of words against the so-called liberal media. The themes he sounded remain part of standard conservative lore to this day. Ironically, the year before, in early October 1968, Nixon had garnered 483 newspaper endorsements—five times as many as his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey. But starting in the late 1960s conservatives wove a compelling story about liberal media bias that has stuck, for better or worse. In many ways, Spiro Agnew’s ghost continues to haunt us.
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