Anniversary of Agnew's November 13, 1969 Speech in Des Moines Largely Unnoticed
"Pearl Harbor" moment for the news media now mostly forgotten
Last week marked the 54th anniversary of then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s infamous November 13, 1969, speech in Des Moines, in which he attacked the national news media in a way unheard of at the time and sent chills down the spine of every friend of a free press.
The anniversary of Agnew’s speech may have come and gone last Monday, but sadly, nobody noticed.
Agnew’s speech was a huge and long-lasting national news story at the time. All three national TV networks - ABC, CBS, and NBC - pre-empted their prime time programming to carry the speech live from the ballroom in the Hotel Ft. Des Moines, on Walnut Street in Des Moines where Agnew spoke to a meeting of midwest Republican Party leaders.
It generated loud national controversy for months thereafter, and stayed in the national consciousness for decades.
Today, however, hardly anybody remembers it. It has been so thoroughly forgotten that its anniversary came and went with little to no notice taken of it. This, in fact, is likely the only column on that anniversary you’ll find this year.
It’s that “forgetting” that bothers me.
In its day, Agnew’s Des Moines speech was considered a “Pearl Harbor” like moment for journalists and supporters of a free press. That its anniversary could pass unnoticed - even in Iowa - is evidence of just how much things have changed since that cold, dark November night in Des Moines when it comes to bashing the news media.
I certainly remember it.
I was in the audience that night, covering Agnew’s speech as a 15 year old cub reporter for the Dallas County News in Adel. I remember hearing even Republican leaders in the ballroom where Agnew spoke audibly gasping at some of what he said.
The kind of attacks on the news media Agnew made that night were unheard of at the time from an official as high ranking as the Vice President. What he said shocked people.
Agnew’s speech caught the nation’s attention - caught it by the neck, really - because he let loose a full throated attack on the national news media, the three TV networks in particular.
By Agnew’s account, they were all biased against the administration. He implied something needed to be done about it - he didn’t say what or by who, but his tone gave no one who cared about a free press any comfort on those questions.
Agnew had been President Richard Nixon’s Vice President at that point for 11 months. He had, by then, settled comfortably into the role of Nixon’s “hatchet man,” attacking the administration’s opponents
Just a few weeks earlier he’d gone after students protesting the Vietnam War.
“An effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” Agnew called them at a fundraising speech in New Orleans, about a week after anti-Vietnam war protests in Washington, DC drew a quarter of a million people.
Agnew’s attacks on the news media, of course, were at Nixon’s direction and rooted in Nixon’s own longstanding anger and antipathy towards the press.
There was this famous vignette: When Nixon lost his 1962 race to be Governor of California just two years after losing the 1960 presidential election to Senator John F. Kennedy, Nixon lashed out at the press, blaming a “biased” press for his loss.
When the final results came in, Nixon spoke to about 100 reporters gathered to report election night coverage in his hotel. He complained bitterly and at length about the coverage he received from California reporters. An angry Nixon ended the press conference by telling the assembled reporters that, going forward, he was going to feel sorry for them because “you aren’t going to have Nixon to kick around anymore, because gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
Nixon’s anger, suspicion, and resentment toward the press was long standing and stayed with him for the rest of his career.
As President, Nixon dispatched Agnew to do the dirty work of attacking the press. The Des Moines speech was one of Agnew’s first stops on that line of attack.
Agnew was still at it nearly a year later, calling reporters “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history,” at a Republican convention in San Diego in September, 1970.
The point Agnew and Nixon were pushing with every attack was that the news media undermined American values with its reporting on the Nixon administration.
As if either of Nixon or Agnew knew any thing about American values or lived by them.
Agnew would resign from the vice-presidency in October, 1973, after prosecutors documented that he had been accepting bribes - brown paper sacks stuffed with cash - for years, even as vice president, even in the White House. He pled “no contest’ to “tax evasion.”
Nixon himself, on the brink of impeachment, would resign in August, 1974, after even Republican congressional leaders could no longer stomach or ignore the mountain of evidence connecting Nixon to a slew of crimes known collectively as “Watergate.”
During Agnew’s visit to Des Moines, of course, no one knew that Nixon and Agnew were crooks. They only knew that the federal government, with its licensing authority over broadcasters, was in a position to literally destroy broadcasting companies and newspapers that owned broadcasting properties over night if government leaders decided to do so.
Agnew’s attacks were considered a not so veiled, direct threat from the highest reaches of the federal government that they might just do that. Agnew’s speech was interpreted by many as a clear warning to the news media: “Give us favorable coverage or we will destroy you.”
The jitters journalists and news corporations felt - fear, actually - was real, deep and long lasting. Most journalists, to their immense credit, carried on and did their jobs, professionally, without bending. (Which is probably what spawned the rash of Republican billionaires building their own propaganda outlets that would pose as news organizations. Fox “News” anyone?)
It astounds me to think that the anniversary of such a seminal, frightening event - one that took place in Iowa - could go unnoticed and unremarked upon 54 years later.
That “Pearl Harbor” moment for the news media that many thought would “live in infamy?”
It didn’t.
When one reads Agnew’s November 13 speech today, it actually appears pretty tame compared to what Republicans are serving up these days. President Trump routinely calls independent journalists and the news organizations they work for “enemies of the people.” He personally attacks them from the lectern at political rallies and he did the same at White House press conferences as president. Reporters are jeered at Republican campaign events, and some reporters say that don’t feel physically safe at such events.
Iowa’s own congressional delegation, and the Governor - Republicans all - express their on-going, generalized contempt for the news media by ignoring reporters. Press conferences where reporters can ask unscripted questions are rare. Requests for interviews, or even information from staffers, routinely go ignored and unreturned.
Much of this on-going anti-journalist attitude from government officials debuted on the national stage in Agnew’s November 13 speech in Des Moines, in a ballroom at the Hotel Ft. Des Moines. Its belligerence has grown exponentially and it has now trickled down to lesser Republican office holders who have become routine practitioners of it.
With it they are traveling in the path Agnew began in Des Moines.
Its origin story, of course, goes back even further to the resentments and anger Richard Nixon carried around for most of his career.
Leaders - for good or ill - cast long shadows.
The attacks against the press launched by Nixon and Agnew have festered and morphed over time into much more venomous attacks against the press by the likes of Donald Trump and the gang that runs with him.
What Agnew said in Des Moines seems mild in comparison today. That’s not because people mis-judged the threat he presented to freedom of the press in 1969, but because the threat has become so much more grave today.
Great leaders leave behind positive legacies that inspire and lift the generations of that follow them. They strengthen our democracy and the institutions that are vital to the proper functioning of democracy.
Failed leaders, damaged leaders, bad leaders also leave legacies - mostly toxic residues that weaken our democracy and the institutions that are vital to its proper functioning and survival.
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Great post!
Barry, Dave, others in the media: Do you recall how Iowa and national media and political leaders responded to his attack on the media? Did anyone note or ask how attacks on media is a common tactic in authoritarian or communist countries. Or were people just hoping this strike on the media/press would just disappear, esp. after Agnew's own disappearance from public life. Looking back, wasn't Agnew's speech a warning light, just like Pres. Reagans' attack on govt an early warning sign of lessening all value of govt, which also was poorly responded to... Thanks for the column...