(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Books So Bad They're Good: The Literary Exploits of Spiro T. (ice storm rewind) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-22
Before anyone says, “Hey, that’s a great first line for a fast-paced political thriller perfect for purchase at an airport newsstand just before I board the plane to Strelsau International Airport for the annual Musk Polyp Spawning Festival (Der Laichfest der Moschuspolypen),” know that for once I am speaking nothing but the God’s truth. I was in a hotel room, in a quaint little replica of Barbara Fritchie’s cottage built by America’s favorite industrialist/bigot/square dancer Henry Ford, right alongside my mother and my aunt. We were just outside Detroit, on a summer vacation to Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.
Originally I was supposed to discuss another Book So Bad It’s Good tonight, but between the horror show that is the nightly news, a long week at work, and coping with a nor’easter that turned my driveway into the sort ice field that sent RMS Titanic to the bottom of the North Atlantic, there simply was not time. I therefore bring you a diary from three years discussing a truly terrible book written by a politician who was almost corrupt enough to be in the current administration:
What none of us knew on that long-ago summer night was that as bad as Richard Nixon was, his Vice President was even worse.
Alas for Nixon, he never did burn those tapes. He resigned not quite a year later, what had promised to be a splendid second term in ruins thanks to his own stupidity and corruption. The nation heaved a sigh of relief, Nixon decamped to San Clemente, and what Gerald Ford termed “our long national nightmare” faded into memory.
Mum firmed her lower jaw, then shook her head and headed into the bathroom to get ready for bed. “He’s guilty. And if he has a brain in his head, he’ll burn those tapes as fast as he can, preferably tonight.”
Betty looked up, startled. I paused in the act of reaching for my needlework. There was another pause.
The only noise in the room was soft whisper of the air conditioning. My mother stood up, face set in the grim expression that meant someone was in deep, deep trouble.
There were several seconds of utter silence after he’d finished. My aunt may have shaken her head and popped a couple of Chiclets into her mouth, as she so often did, and reached into her purse for a Kleenex to blow her nose. I’m pretty sure I’d put down my embroidery hoop at the beginning of the speech, and I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up quite yet. What had we just seen?
And why, after roundly denying that he’d done anything wrong, was the President asking for our understanding?
A humble apology, a promise to fire those responsible for the stains Watergate had left on the national escutcheon, a ringing call for the average American to join the President in a re-dedication to national principles such as duty and honor — any or all of the above were expected, and yes, Nixon had certainly touched on them. But a campaign speech that could have come straight from the stump? A recitation of accomplishments straight from the State of the Union? Yet another attempt to blame someone else for raising these allegations in the first place? What was that doing in a speech about Watergate?
With your help, with God's help, we will achieve those great goals for America.
And I ask for your support in getting on once again with meeting your problems, improving your life, building your future.
I ask for your help in reaffirming our dedication to the principles of decency, honor, and respect for the institutions that have sustained our progress through these past two centuries.
I ask tonight for your understanding, so that as a nation we can learn the lessons of Watergate and gain from that experience.
If you share my belief in these goals—if you want the mandate you gave this Administration to be carried out—then I ask for your help to ensure that those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do will not succeed.
These are great goals, they are worthy of a great people, and I would not be true to your trust if I let myself be turned aside from achieving those goals.
This Administration was elected to control inflation; to reduce the power and size of Government; to cut the cost of Government so that you can cut the cost of living; to preserve and defend those fundamental values that have made America great; to keep the Nation's military strength second to none; to achieve peace with honor in Southeast Asia, and to bring home our prisoners of war; to build a new prosperity, without inflation and without war; to create a structure of peace in the world that would endure long after we are gone.
Last November, the American people were given the clearest choice of this century. Your votes were a mandate, which I accepted, to complete the initiatives we began in my first term and to fulfill the promises I made for my second term.
Not by the President’s denial of wrongdoing, or knowledge of wrongdoing. No one, even the most committed Democrat, leftist, or even Woodward and Bernstein, had expected him to admit that yeah, it was all his idea. Nor were we particularly surprised that the President quickly turned to justifying whatever he or his aides had done, or that he spoke at length about the internal investigations he’d launched, or that he then attempted to blame everything on the filthy dirty disrespectful hippies who’d taken America down the path of moral degeneracy in the decade just past. His hand-picked Vice President had made a career out of blasting the Left, the Press, and anyone under the age of thirty since his first campaign appearance in 1968, after all. Of course he was going to get in licks in if at all possible.
And so it was that we interrupted our pleasant summer vacation that fateful August to watch President Nixon address the nation to explain just what the heck had been going on ever since a security guard had noticed a taped open door in the Watergate complex.
Which meant that if he had known what his staff was doing (and that was still a big “if”), there was definitive proof of what he’d known, when he’d known it, and who else in the White House was involved.
Then came the report in July of 1973 that the President had taped his private conversations in the Oval Office.
I’m not sure what my aunt thought about all this, or my uncle Lou. Louis kept his own counsel on current events, and Betty rarely gave politics a thought beyond whatever the current First Lady was wearing, doing, or (of course) serving for dessert. But my parents and my uncle Oscar read the local dailies, subscribed to several magazines, and as 1972 and 1973 wore on, they were increasingly disturbed by the revelations of slush funds, dirty tricks by the unfortunately named CREEP, assorted burglaries, and the kidnapping of Martha Mitchell. They’d voted for Nixon, twice, but the idea that the President could possibly have been involved in any of these scandals, let alone been the instigator...that was several orders of magnitude beyond their comprehension.
Now. My family were all Republicans, albeit of the Eisenhower/Rockefeller persuasion that was socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Solid American values, patriotism, good citizenship, obeying the law — those were all baked into the familial DNA along with heavy eyebrows, musical talent, and a love of books and reading. We’d been Republicans pretty much since the first arrivals from German abjured their allegiance to Mad Ludwig of Bavaria in the 1880’s, and there was quite a bit of post-dinner conversation along the lines of “what the heck is going on, has the press lost its collective mind?” as Woodward and Bernstein’s stories went national.
And yes indeed folks, Richard Nixon did lie like the proverbial rug as he desperately attempted to convince the country that hey, that Watergate thing wasn’t so bad, please pay attention to the rest of our agenda and ignore those whackjob reporters from the Washington Post, come on, you elected me and not that Commie-symp McGovern, it’s all lies! lies! lies! I tell you LIES!
Remembered now, if at all, as an oratorical hit man who spewed phrases like “nattering nabobs of negativism” at all and sundry, Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, was one of those politicians that arrived on the national scene with all the grace and subtlety of an atomic bomb.
Originally an obscure lawyer from an obscure state, he’d gone from a relatively liberal Republican to a race-baiting conservative almost overnight, and at the beginning of Nixon’s second term he’d looked fair to be a serious candidate himself in 1976 or 1980. Ronald Reagan, former governor of California, was far more affable, plus the entire country knew him from his years hosting Death Valley Days, but his smoother rhetoric and old-time Hollywood glamor paled in comparison. Nixon didn’t like or trust him much — Agnew came perilously close to upstaging his boss, or at least saying all the nasty ugly racist/sexist/homophobic things that Nixon didn’t dare — but if he sometimes felt like Victor Frankenstein cleaning up after his creation’s temper tantrums, well, Agnew’s incendiary speeches had likely won him the White House in the first place.
What no one knew was that Agnew, who’d touted the virtues of law, order, and good-old fashioned American respect for the law, had been raking in thousands of dollars every year in kickbacks, quid pro quos, and good old-fashioned bribery almost since the beginning of his political career. Baltimore, his home base, had been a cesspool of corruption for years thanks to the booming construction/infrastructure trade, and when Agnew became Baltimore County Executive he was merely the latest high-ranking Maryland politician to enjoy some extra scratch in exchange for steering lucrative road, bridge, and building contracts toward a favorite contractor.
Agnew continued this fine tradition during his years as Governor of Maryland — why shouldn’t he, everyone else — and if he hadn’t been foolish enough to import cash bribes to the White House along with loudmouthed yawps and hefty quantities of Old Bay Seasoning, who knows what have happened? Rachel Maddow’s splendid podcast, Bag Man, and the accompany book go into jaw-dropping detail about the entire mess, and if you think that Agnew was merely another casualty of Watergate, prepare to be stunned. Even Richard Nixon was shocked when he found out what Agnew had been doing pretty much under his nose, and it is little wonder that the reason Attorney General Elliot Richardson did everything possible to force Agnew out before America was faced with the spectacle not one but two Presidents in a row resigning under a cloud.
I mean, think about it. Gerald Ford may have been dull, and mediocre, and the epitome of middle American averageness, but he had a spotless personal life, a scandal-free career, and a reputation as one of the best-liked men in Congress. Most important, he had never accepted a bribe in his life, and wasn’t that a refreshing change?
So it was that Richard Nixon resigned, Gerald Ford succeeded him, and America went about its business. And Spiro Agnew, who had come within a heartbeat of the most powerful job in the world, pled guilty to minor charges, packed his bags, and faded from view….
Until he realized that several Watergate figures were cashing in on their notoriety by writing books. And not just memoirs like John Dean’s Blind Ambition or Chuck Colson’s Born Again, oh no! John Erlichman wrote a novel, The Company, that not only hit the bestseller lists, but was optioned for a miniseries. Why couldn’t Agnew do likewise? Especially now that his non-salaried cash flow had come to a screeching halt thanks to those meddling kids Elliot Richardson and his ululating underlings?
A man has to eat, you know, and better a mess of luscious crabs dowsed in tasty Old Bay Seasoning than be reduced to, y’know, Cup Noodles flavored with so much salt one’s blood pressure reaches critical mass about ten minutes after consumption.
And so Spiro Agnew, once the toast of conservative America, sat down and began to write his very own political thriller:
The Canfield Decision, by Spiro T. Agnew — most presidents and vice presidents eventually write a book.
The majority of these are campaign/political memoirs churned out with the aid of one or more ghost writers, and are of interest only to biographers, presidential historians, and diehard completists. There are exceptions — Ulysses Grant, Barack Obama, Teddy Roosevelt, and arguably Jack Kennedy were excellent writers in their own right, especially Grant and Obama — but the best that can be said of most of these works is “competent but colorless.” The average ex-Vice/President is well aware that history will judge them by their words as well as their deeds, so juicy characterizations, snide remarks, and what they really thought of Prime Minister X and Majority Leader Y is reserved for their private letters rather than anything destined for the bestseller lists.
There are exceptions, of course. Hillary Clinton and Barbara Feinman’s It Takes a Village added a phrase to the American vernacular, while John McCain and Mark Salter’s Faith of My Fathers got respectful reviews and told the story of a truly distinguished Naval family. Several other politicians have collaborated on popular novels; Newt Gingrich wrote several books with historian/SF writer William Forstchen, James Patterson teamed up with Bill Clinton for two recent bestsellers, and Hillary Clinton’s recent mystery with Louise Penney has gotten decent reviews and respectable sales.
And then there was The Canfield Decision, which Spiro Agnew wrote all on his own to decent sales and some of the most vitriolic reviews of its day.
Just why Agnew wrote this book isn’t clear. He wasn’t known for his love of books in general, let alone a particular taste for thrillers, and he reserved much of his spleen for his political enemies in his later memoir, Go Quietly...Or Else! There is also little to no evidence that he had ever planned to become a writer (Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama’s original career path), or that he’d lived a colorful enough life to justify a rip roaring adventure tale like Ted Roosevelt. There’s some internal evidence that this may be the middle aged politician’s equivalent of what fanficcers call a Mary Sue story, where an impossibly beautiful, intelligent, talented, sexy, and heroic original female character comes to Tatooine/the USS Enterprise/Hogwarts/Panem/221b Baker Street/Avengers Tower and outshines the canonical character, but this is only a guess on my part. I’ve been wrong before and it’s entirely possibly I’m wrong about this...but describing the Vice President, Porter Newton Canfield, a cum laude member of the Princeton class of 1957, as “handsome, with aristocratic features” and a brilliant career in government with nary a whiff of scandal is, shall we say, just slightly suspicious.
Most likely Agnew wrote this for the money, though, and for the money alone. He had legal bills to pay after he resigned, and despite generous loans from buddies like Frank Sinatra, he faced the prospect of having to repay all those bribes he’d taken while governor and county executive. A sexy, racy, spicy, exciting political thriller promised to tide him over until he could set up a consulting business or find some other way of making money that didn’t involve standing on the docks or hanging out at truck stops holding up a sign that said “Get it here, big boy.”
The fact that Spiro Agnew had less literary talent than the average fifteen year who writes a Mary Sue story about saving Captain America and Bucky Barnes from Thanos, then celebrating with an orgy in Iron Man’s penthouse doesn’t seem to have factored in.
I mean, just look at this first paragraph:
"Far off in the west, the Sierra Nevadas made the horizon a jagged blue-gray pencil line. It reminded Galardi of a sales graph, with Mount Whitney being a very good week."
As Christian Science Monitor writer Randy Dotinger wrote in a scathing review from 2012, the average person simply doesn’t compare a majestic mountain range to a sales graph. Ever.
And lest one think that Dotinger’s opinion of The Canfield Decision (“a page-turner because you'll turn the pages in search of something worth reading”) was colored by the subsequent forty years of revelations about Watergate, Nixon, and of course Agnew’s post-White House career, here’s a contemporary take from, God help us all, the Harvard Crimson:
“..the former Vice President’s first work of fictio[n] leads one to believe that Agnew’s career as a writer will be about as successful as his career as a politician.”
The Crimson also pointed out that North Philadelphia, the alleged home town of Gary Stu protagonist Porter Newland Canfield’s boring socialite wife, was not part of the Main Line as Agnew seemed to believe, but a crime-ridden ghetto.
Oops.
Now, there are plenty of badly researched books that make plenty of mistakes on their way to making plenty of money (ask me sometime about the romance novel set in the 1830’s where a character is making a quilt using a pattern from the 1920's. Better yet, don’t). There are even more otherwise decent books that contain the occasional gaffe like a minor character having green eyes on one page and brown eyes two chapters later, or an unerotic sex scene that rhapsodizes on how Character B’s bodily fluids smell like fine old tobacco. But there is something very special, and very, very bad, about an author who thinks that
The cloth clung to and outlined her shapely legs with every sinuous stride
or
sexy, but more heavenly sexy than earthy sexy
are acceptable ways of describing a sensual woman, or that “Twiceweek” is a clever way to disguise the identity of a well known news magazine.
Nor does the average thriller author, even an amateur, wait to have anything important interesting happen until about fifty pages before the end, when suddenly the plot erupts with blackmail, hidden tape recorders, lots of innocents dying for no particular reason, and of course the long arm of coincidence getting a real work out.
And then there’s perhaps the worst thing about an already terrible book: it’s incredibly anti-Semitic.
I don’t mean the polite sort of anti-Semitism one finds in, say, Gentlemen’s Agreement. No, I mean actual, genuine, for-real, foaming at the mouth atrocities like:
American Jews exert an influence on American opinion that is far heavier than their numbers would indicate. They are the strongest single influence on the big media...financial community...large segments of the academic community….
or
One thing the Jews understand is the power of money.
That the editors at Playboy Press (yes, Playboy Press, just think about that for a minute) let this stay in at all is bad enough. That they let it stay in during a time when the bitter fruits of such attitudes had been exposed by literally dozens of previous books, from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to The Winds of War, is beyond comprehension. The only explanation I can think of is that Agnew had a “no edit beyond proofreading” clause in his contract, but even so it’s hard to believe that he was writing in 1976 and not 1936.
Then again, we are talking an author who thought that Las Vegas was in Arizona, or that
"His inexperienced, blundering early crescendo mortified him and might have left him with much to overcome in the future, but her matter-of-fact patience and experience re-erected the fallen structure.”
was an elegant way to describe intercourse. So it’s entirely possible that the editors skimmed the manuscript to make sure it was in something that resembled English, said “yeah this sucks but someone’ll buy it,” and shipped it off to the linotype operators as quickly as possible before turning to the actual slush pile.
Regardless of its literary quality (or lack thereof), The Canfield Decision did sell well enough to make the bestseller lists, at least for a little while. Unfortunately for its author, but fortunately for American letters, the book was not nearly enough of a success for him to make a permanent career change. Neither could he count on his great and good friend, Frank Sinatra, to continue sustaining him in the style to which he’d become accustomed. Even an attempt at consulting in the Middle East (where his great and good friends the Saudis probably swooned over the descriptions of the Jewish-controlled press) did not bear much fruit, at least at first.
So he decided to follow up the adventures of the handsome, aristocratic Porter Canfield with a far more traditional literary endeavor: a political memoir.
To say that Go Quietly...Or Else! was not an average political memoir was as vast an understatement as saying that the U.S.S. Enterprise t he aircraft carrier, not the spaceship even though that one’s pretty big, too was just a teensy bit larger than the average wind-powered fishing smack. Oh, there’s all the usual bushwa about public service and making hard decisions, and of course Agnew denies that he was corrupt or took bribes or did anything ethically questionable. No, it’s the startling revelation of why he resigned the Vice Presidency that elevates this otherwise forgettable book into the empyrean heights of Political Memoirs So Bad They’re Good:
He accuses Richard Nixon of planning to have him murdered if he didn’t resign.
That’s not the only problem with the book — an old friend was so poorly treated he sued Agnew for over $17 million, which is more than he could have possibly realized from either this book or The Canfield Decision by a factor of ten or possibly twenty — but the idea that Nixon would have mysterious master spies whack his own Vice President rather than, say, flinging Woodward and Bernstein’s lifeless husks into the Potomac or fire-bombing Daniel Ellsberg’s office is so ridiculous that it’s hard to believe that whomever typed the manuscript could keep a straight face.
Needless to say, the national press fell upon this juicy tidbit like Lord Byron upon a chambermaid. Agnew quickly backpedaled, admitting that he might have misinterpreted a comment by Alexander Haig about not disobeying the president. The reviews for Go Quietly...Or Else! were terrible, and soon Agnew had retreated to private life. He did attend Nixon’s funeral at the invitation of the family, but otherwise he engaged in a series of bad business deals, headed up a financially questionable consulting firm, and stayed out of the public eye.
Agnew finally died of a previously undiagnosed blood cancer in 1996, and it’s only recently that he’s been recognized as the spiritual forerunner of the Angry Bigoted Populist Politicians who’ve crawled out of the depths in the last few years. Whether any of his latter-day equivalents will go on to write terrible thrillers or memoirs accusing their colleagues of attempting to assassinate them remains to be seen.
%%%%%
Have you ever read a book by Spiro Agnew? Did you even know one existed? Has one surfaced in your recently renovated knotty pine rumpus room? Would you admit it if one had? It’s an icy night here in Massachusetts, so gather ‘round the crackling fire and share….
%%%%%
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
If you’re not already following Readers and Book Lovers, please go to our homepage (link), find the top button in the left margin, and click it to FOLLOW GROUP. Thank You and Welcome, to the most followed group on Daily Kos. Now you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/22/2198150/-Books-So-Bad-They-re-Good-The-Literary-Exploits-of-Spiro-T-ice-storm-rewind?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
