of course considering that president nixon's long career as a politician and his reputation as a fierce competitor, this is obviously an essential project. as a political scientist at cal state fullerton teaching courses on the presidency and media politics and american government, i have the honor of introducing a panel of three historians to talk about politics. after i give a short introduction to the panelists, each will follow speaking for about ten minutes and we will open it up to you to ask questions and get it going about politics in the nixon presidency. these are three projects that tackle essential aspects of the

nixon era politics, electoral politics, particularly the 1960 election and nixon's relationship with the media and the vice president here at the university of illinois and chicago. a specialty is american history and a concentration on the ideological battles of the 1960s. he is currently at work on i biography of former vice president spiro agnew and a number of different journals, the maryland historical magazine and views in american history.

tim will take and go and she an associate professor of communications at the university of michigan, dearborn. journalism and journalism history. he joined after three decades as a journalist and in 1970 to 87 and later at the detroit news. he's the author of and the most recently in 2009, a newscast for the masses. the history of detroit television journalism. he worked as a producer and a reporter for a cbs-owned all new radio station and where he specializes in exit rolls and election and analysis.

he is an expert on the 1960s and the real making of the president kennedy-nixon in the 1960 election. published in 2 thousand 9 and written another book about kennedy. kennedy and the promise of the 1960s, 2002. we will begin with the professor. >> thank you, scott. to begin, we will use a word that we heard frequently in the last session. the topic for my chapter and the cam pan yon to richard nixon was on the relationship between richard nixon and spiro agnew.

the word that i used in the first sentence was complicated. simply that richard nixon and spiro agnew had a complicated relationship. nixon had a complicated relationship with virtually everyone in his life and it was no surprise with agnew. i teach history and my students had never heard of spiro agnew. i hear about negativism. the story of spiro ag newt and richard nixon is strange. we heard the last talk about

nixon and eisenhower and mix on having been vice president and having gone through the rigors of presidential campaigns. they did not strangely give much or really any thought to who his vice president might be. that was odd because nixon had spent the past six years since losing in 1962 trying to figure out how he could get elected president. in 1968, he settled on spiro agnew who was the governor of maryland. he had a reputation of being a fairly liberal republican.

he was not a conservative. change with agnew or seemingly change although i argue there was not much of a change, mostly in perception. he was elected governor in 1966, he ran against an opportunist. 1967 and 1968, there were race riots in cambridge and later in baltimore and april following the assassination and martin luther king, but came down hard on the protesters and caught the attention of some of the nixon's men, but john mitchell and pat buchanan.

by the late spring of 1968 and summers before the convention in miami, nixon goon decide i have to choose someone. although dix nixon was one of my best friends, we need to make sure he doesn't get the republican nomination. he wrote back saying i am interested in talking to you

about this. if nixon never learned agnew did this, they could be sure he never would have been the running mate. but they are subjected before they are picked by the fbi. never asked any questions or asked anyone in maryland about agnew. perhaps he should have thought about them and chose agnew and the choice was mildly controversial and agnew would be one of the most controversial vice presidents in the country's history.

after they were elected, nixon and agnew never developed any sort of working relationship whatsoever. although he was the first vice president to have an office in the west wing, he rarely saw nixon and nixon never consulted him on any substantive issue from the war in vietnam and any domestic issues and foreign policy, he was out of the loop. he had no idea about the initiative to china and not asked his opinions about the negotiations and all of come he opposed. nixon simply would not accept that agnew had anything to say. in fact in later years, agnew then came up in an interview

nixon granted to michael cramer who was a journalist. he attempted to say something nice about agnew and nixon said agnew was a clown. what they did however share during their years in the pedestrian was a sense and i think this is very relevant to contemporary politics today was that the liberal, what they considered to be the liberal establishment was hostile to that because they were republicans. this idea is still permeating the republican party today. the belief that there is a liberal media that is antagon t antagonistic to conservatives and republicans.

in the fall of 1969 about the networks and speaking to the american public, but not speaking for the american public resonated very strongly within the republican party. there was for the evidence and there still is today. members of the national media and "the washington post" or time or news week or the network anchors by and large are to the left. nixon and agnew believed that those beliefs shaped coverage of how nixon and agnew and other

republicans recovered in the media. this is the one element that nixon and agnew were able to work together in the presidency. there was a thought at the time when agnew gave these speeches that nixon disapproved of them. my research has shown i have gone to the archives and looked and seen that nixon actually gave more approval and that was almost egging agnew on. then the scandals. interestingly enough agnew benefitted when the watergate scandal broke out for not being part of the inner circle. he was never in the oval office or the eob when mix on was talking with them about all of these things. agnew was completely out of the

loop. >> when they resigned, nixon had conversations with people and said i'm thinking of resigning. they said you cannot do this. do you want agnew as president? this was the feeling that reverberated through this administration. it's a very odd thing that people are telling nixon in early 1973, you cannot resign because of spiro agnew. nixon believed as long as agnew remained vice president they are never going to force me out. nixon said no one will assassinate me to make agnew president.

he talks about this to make you president. the state of maryland is nicknamed the easy state. i could call it the free and easy state because of the corruption in that state. there was a football game and they announced a special guest who came out running in the orange prison suit. he believed nixon should come to

his defense, but nothing nixon would have done. he would retire in october of 1973. they had a last meeting in the oval office and agnew said nixon was warm to him, but at the same time we believe that nixon couldn't wait to get him out of the office. they never spoke again. they stayed at a hotel once, but didn't speak not a lot had been written about it mostly because agnew was not a substantive player. he wrote a book based on old research and the relationship was complicated and never substantive. agnew did attend the funeral,

but he was never a major player in the administration. when you think about that, we will never know. thank you. >> following up on what we are talking about, nixon's relationship with the press. i am going to sound like an old far for a second. it came out and spiro agnew just resigned which it was -- i still have that piece of paper somewhere. that relationship between nixon and the media was not alwaysaning it niftic in any way, shape, or form. we keep on feeling complex.

very complicate and even more because when you think about years in his public when he started in 1946, radio new his just recently become a fanfare in american life. tv had just begun in 1946. he was using the blunt force instrument and in the l.a. times, they worked that size of the street and begins in 1946. the fellow he had the blessing from was the political editor of the l.a. times. they joke about the l.a. times in this period of time.

he was not the mouth piece for the republican party. that was the mouth piece of the l.a. times. he had a lot of help from kyle palmer. he had a lifelong association with nixon and covered the race that describes how it works as a symphony conductor. they go back and he didn't do a lot of writing on that particular race. he did a lot of behind the scenes kind of work and helped him get elected. in 1950 when he ran, once again the l.a. times was squarely in richard nixon's corner and worked hard getting elected. when he gets to the case and at this point he looked like he was enjoying fairly decent press coverage and in fact as he begins his investigation, a

fellow he chose was a guy by the name of burt andrews. an old guy from the herald tribune. andrews had just won the pulitzer prize for doing a series about how the investigations on communism had ruined the lives of ten people. he wanted somebody who would cast a high on what he was thinking at that time. this was hardly and also by the way, you might want to look at andrews in your corner and the new york herald tribune. bottom line, it does not sound like a guy who was antagonistic to the news media in any way, shape, or form. by 1952, things changed. the new york post does a major

investigation and almost across the way. once again in of -- this is the curious thing about nixon waffling -- going between being zen master of the news media and having a total -- total tin ear about what was going on. he uses the checkers speech to go above and beyond, go around the republican party leadership. it was, by the way, an absolute master stroke on what he did. tv a very early medium. nobody knew what this meant, how this was going to work. i know this guy's work has become -- some people have called into question. but roger morris has an inter t interesting anecdote about the checkers speech in that dwight eisenhower, the last u.s. president, ironically, born in the 19th century, was in a hotel room with his aides watching nixon on the checkers speech, and the aides are laughing and chortling and thinking this is

really funny. they turn around and look at eisenhower who by this time his carotids are starting to stick out. he has a pencil in his hand, cracks the pencil. general, what's going on? he says you guys don't quite understand what just happened. he just -- we can't go against him right now. it was a masterful use of the media. by 1960, he is starting to have a rougher time. herb block, notably, of the "washington post" is doing some fairly funny p nny cartoons whi could not have been at all comfortable for richard nixon. at this point, now, there's an open question of what kind of -- how the news media covered richard nixon. now, in his auto biography, the one in the 1970s that mr. gannon wrote about, nixon was pretty solidly said that everybody was against me in the 1960 race.

once again, he also, by the way, points back to the elger hiss case. when you look at six crises which he wrote in 1962, he didn't seem at that point to be so hard edged. he quotes a letter from a "chicago tribune" correspondent, willis edwards saying, look, mr. vice president, i'm really embarrassed to be a reporter at this point because these guys are trying to nail you. nixon doesn't quite sign on to this. i think the big turning point for him was the 1962 gubernatorial race here in california. this is where a couple things happened. the nature of the "l.a. times" which helped create him in the late 1940s and 1950s had undergone a total transformation. brand-new publisher, otis chandler of the chandler family takes over. in 1960 chandler thought at this point we are not going to be a mouthpiece for the republican party. we're not automatically going to

nail democrats. we're going to cover things fairly. apparently richard nixon didn't get the otis chandler memo. and was what surprised when the "l.a. times" started covering him in a somewhat critical fashion. if you look back at his -- the 1970s memoir, what really annoyed him was he had to answer two questions repeatedly in every part of the campaign trail which is, number one, are you a burcher, john burcher which must have annoyed the hell out of him. one of the things they did, they thought dwight eisenhower was a stooge of the communist party. i can't imagine nixon -- why anybody would think nixon would sign on to that. the other thing is they kept on asking him questions about a loan that his brother had gotten from the hughes tool company. the fact he had to ask and answer time and time again annoyed the hell out of this guy. of course, there's that famous

night when, okay, election night he loses and the famous press conference where he says you won't have dick nixon to come around anymore, kick around anymore. john elicman writes this was under the influence of a whole lot of scotch when he made that -- when he made that speech. nixon later on wrote that he never regretted saying that kind of thing. saying that at all. because he thought that was partially responsible for him getting more positive press coverage as he moved back up in the political life in through the mid-1960s. by 1968, he once again starts wearing the hat of the zen master. he has figured out probably before anybody else that tv -- that network tv news had changed entirely in the 1960s. i think it started in 1963 was a huge year. cbs, nbc both went from 15-minute to 30-minute newscasts. that meant a lot more than just another 15 minutes. the nature of what those

organizations was about changed as well. also the coverage of the 1963 kennedy assassination totally changed the way people looked at network news. it was being taken very seriously. and he falls in with a fellow by the name of roger ails. now president of fox news. who designed a brilliant campaign on nixon's behalf. and basically did an enron around the news media. once again, the news media probably didn't get that memo because they were covering this thing as they always covered every campaign, which is, okay, we look at the press releases. we talk with the press spokesmen. they didn't realize they had become irrelevant at that point. as for watergate, it's one of these things where he time and time again, i think, misread the press. he felt from the very day -- in fact, there's a great anecdote from james keogh's book of nixon

meeting in a hotel saying the press is out to get you, out to get me, out to get all of us. he treated the press with basically cool contempt. i think that after a while, as we know, the stakes got raised over and over again. nixon, among other things, for instance, deciding to go -- telling people to go after "the washington post" tv licenses. the minute that happened, "the post" dropped right through the floor, cost "the post" something like a million bucks to challenge those licenses. that's not the action of a guy that is particularly interested in discourse with the press. i think it's -- it's at this point becomes a blood feud. i think at the end of the day when you look at all of this, i don't think anybody came out of this very well. as a lifelong reporter, you read a lot of -- a lot of people like

lesley stall, danieal shore, this became a great party. lesley stahl writes about the watergate parties they were having every night. it becomes, i think, the newspaper -- the news media, and i've been in this for many, many decades, almost breaks their arm patting themselves on the back for bringing this guy down. now, whether he had it coming or not is, of course, another question entirely. but i don't think anybody got out of this unscathed. you mentioned the gnattering nabobs of negtism. that's still definitely part of the national discourse. i don't think fox news or rush limbaugh could get through ten minutes without coming up with something like this. it's part of the national discourse. i think this ushered in an era where reporters and politicians have always had somewhat of an adversarial relationship. i think it got uglier and uglier

during that period and i think it's gotten -- remained to this day -- personally, i'm not sure this is a very healthy thing for the bobby politic. i think a lot of the things that got set in motion during the nixon administration we're still living with. i think exponentially, as a matter of fact, i think it's even gotten worse as time goes on. [ applause ] >> i want to thank the nixon library and also the miller center and timothy neftali for pulling on this conference. especially mel small for arranging this volume that really opens up, i think, a whole lot of interesting possible projects of scholarship for the future. i'm going to talk about the 1960 election. we still live within the framework that ken white laid

down in 1961 in his making of the president volume. teddy white's book sold millions of copies and invented a whole form of journalism reporting the presidential campaign in a package volume as a book. of course, white himself went on to do more volumes, although none as popular as that first one. only in recent years have a number of people come forward, including myself, to offer correctives to white's cheerleading account, really, for jfk's victory. one of the first of these was tom carty, who re-examined the catholic issue in the 1960 election. in a nice way, but maybe not terribly changing the narrative. then dave patriska who offered a journalistic account that had the interesting advantage of surfing the web for newspaper coverage of the