Agnew Afloat

"The Vice President used to be just a heartbeat away; now he's just a subpoena away."

So an Agnew adviser half-jokingly described the Vice President's delicate position amid continuing talk of President Nixon's possible impeachment or resignation. Since Agnew might suddenly find himself President--but can hardly escape from Nixon's shadow now --he must follow a strategy of demonstrating his loyalty while asserting his independence. Yet he must not appear to be talking with a forked tongue--and the Vice President, as everyone knows, likes to talk. "We're in the most sensitive, most sacrosanct area of Government affairs," says an Agnew intimate. "The Vice President has to avoid any suggestion of banana-republic politics, any suggestion that he's trying to push No. 1 out."

So far, Agnew has kept his balance.

The President could not have asked for stronger support last week from his No. 2 man. "I've got total confidence in the President's integrity," Agnew told an interviewer. He denounced Nixon's critics for "an incredible storm of personal abuse." Speaking to the Bull Elephants Club, a collection of G.O.P. congressional aides, he declared: "I believe it is important that we not be stampeded into protesting entirely too much."

At the same time, Agnew kept reminding people that he had nothing to do with Watergate and not even very much to do with the White House. Even today, his aides maintain, he remains an outsider. Though Nixon had promised him a larger role in domestic policy after White House Staffers Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were sacked, Agnew has received only a few calls of consultation from Kenneth Cole Jr., executive director of the Domestic Council. Agnew claims that his role within the White House has still not been defined--and he does not seem to be in a hurry for a definition. Let John Connally--Nixon's acknowledged favorite and slightly uneasy new White House consultant--leap into the fray.

Not that Connally has been around the White House that much. Since he rejoined the Nixon team he has spent only 2 1/2 days in Washington. "That's what is so beautiful about the freeze-out," says an Agnew adviser. "John Connally got all that embrace last year. Thank God, it wasn't us." He added hopefully: "Now Connally is dead. If you're close to Nixon, you're dead."

While the Vice President is keeping a calculated distance from the White House, he is making himself more available to Congress, to party leaders, even to onetime enemies in the liberal press.

In an interview with Chicago Daily News Columnist Mike Royko, Agnew was unusually outspoken. He said that if he became President he could scarcely outperform Nixon in foreign affairs, but on the domestic scene, he had "some ideas." He faulted the Administration for abandoning various programs without devising better ones to replace them.

The Administration might have set up a pilot project for mass transportation in several large cities, he said, or mustered the resources to clean up one of the Great Lakes--showing that Republicans can do a job that Democrats only talk about. "We have to stay on the course the President has elected," Agnew concluded. "That doesn't mean that some day, perhaps given my chance to make my own decisions, I might not go in another direction."

Thus in the week during which Agnew continued his ardent defense of the President, he also made his boldest declaration of independence. Though Watergate may threaten to sink him--innocent as he may be--with the rest of the Administration, he obviously is making plans to stay afloat.

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