Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, season two, a podcast about the presidency.

I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

In the fall of 1969, a thesaurus was weaponized in the office of the vice presidency,

and from its pages issued a torrent of 10-cent words,

a fountain of effluence aimed at the elite, the effete,

and the seat of the ample, comfortable behinds of smug professors, journalists, hippies,

communists, and American sellouts. Spiro T. Agnew struck these hammer blows of aserbic truth.

He was a man, skilled, in the asurvuline aggregation of appellations and alliteration. He, or his speechwriters, anyway, spoke of

the nattering nabobs of negativism, who have formed their own 4-H club, the hopeless, hysterical,

hypochondriacs of history.

They called Agnew Nixon's Nixon.

At about six months into the first term,

the former Maryland governor transformed himself from a directionless appendage to a truncheon

who took on the press and the elites and the intellectuals living in their comfortable little

bubbles making judgments and pressing their opinions on regular people as if those good folk were

too stupid to form their own ideas themselves. Agnew was a defender of the administration, yes,

but he was a defender of far more. He was a defender of a class of Americans outside the cities who were worried about what was going on in those cities and in the universities and in the protest marches. And in the don't call them racists, they were worried about what all this change was doing to their country and the simple truths they believed in. He defended the hard-hat construction workers who couldn't

help themselves and threw rocks at the young hippie protesters. Agnew was Donald Trump before Donald

Trump, railing against political correctness and standing up for the silent majority, a term associated

with Nixon, but which was first used by Vice President Agnew in May of 1969. His success among the conservative

movement spoke to the change that group would undergo between the failure of Barry Goldwater

in 1964 and Ronald Reagan's success in 1980. His proclamations, though, help us not just to

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