Veeps: Profiles In Insignificance

By the mid-fall of 1969, Spiro Agnew’s improbable Vice Presidency was—compared with the duties assigned his predecessors—turning to be very probable after all.  After a campaign relegated to handle the talking points that the ticket needed to woo the lunch pail crowd—law and order; applying a giant, heavy boot to the peaceniks, be it a kick to the collective solar plexus or a slow, quiet crush beneath the heel; the promise of equality for behaved blacks while assuring the whites that no blacks—behaved or not—would follow them on their flight to the suburbs—Nixon didn’t make a prominent role for his new Vice President his highest priority. He didn’t have to. The election was over.

Instead, Agnew dutifully assumed his place in the pantheon of the mundane as did his 39 other Veeps throughout history. The tasks may have changed through the ages and administrations, but the coverage always fell to the same, remote recesses of the newspaper. For his part, Agnew was assigned to walk point on those contentious missions into Native American issues, maritime policy, and urban redevelopment (on the latter, he’d proven he understood the nuances and complexity of the challenges facing America’s cities when he said on the campaign trail, “If you’ve seen one slum, you’ve seen them all.”)

Come October of that first year in office, a nervous President Nixon was seeing the antiwar protests for the first time migrate from the Deliberately Unwashed to the Great Unwashed; from the unkempt, criminally-disruptive Hippies that his fellow California GOP luminary Ronald Reagan said “dress like Tarzan, look like Jane, and smell like Cheetah” to Sam The Butcher and Betty The Housewife—in other words, from the Communist-sympathetic fringe to Main Street Americans. It was all to culminate on October 15, 1969, in a nationwide Moratorium, where young and old, black and white, male and female, grandparents and parents and children, all threatened to take the day off work, take to the streets, and second-guess their President’s commitment to ending the war peacefully but honorably.

This simply wouldn’t do. Nixon counted on the workaday Americans as part of his “silent majority.” God forbid that they were consorting with the dirtmongers with their silly slogans and their flowers in the guns.

To Richard Nixon, every lost voter was a betrayal. But his there was more at stake than his being aggrieved by the turncoats in his flock. His re-election started with the mid-term elections next year, which started with the polls, which started with popular perception in the media, which was controlled by the same Jews and Wasps who had their boots on his neck since he was object of their scorn as a sullen, dirt-poor boy from the bad side of the tracks in Yorba Linda.

So, as it had been his whole life, he had a battle ahead against the sons of bitches. He had to stanch the bleeding and prevent the perception that any more of his base was defecting to the other side—where pink-to-their underwear comsymps and radiclib animals who unhelpfully decried a war that even the President knew was unwinnable (beside the point) and who would or wouldn’t survive it, than about the greater good of defending the integrity of the Presidency. Specifically, Richard Nixon’s Presidency.

Thus, he had his lieutenants manning the war room and concocting every gambit they could to cut the peace offensive off at the knees.

Vice President Agnew was not immediately dispatched in the effort, and was certainly champing at the bit to enter the fray. As it was, the Vice President should have been exhilarated with his new station. After all, Agnew by all rights should have been a little over halfway into first term in the Maryland Statehouse instead of holding the second-highest elective office in the land.

But the letdown and frustration were understandable. After that unexpected anointment and the heady weeks on the campaign trail that followed, Agnew must have been seduced by the same mistress as so many other Vice Presidents—“I know what’s become of the others, but it’s going to be different for me.”

Instead, he discovered quickly that his new job was as thankless as it was toothless. Endless, dispassionate White House talking points; exhortations for money from faceless captains of industry in one unremarkable banquet hall after another; meeting the crowds feting Corn Pageant Beauty Queens and Junior Merit Scholars that Nixon wouldn’t waste his precious waking hours on if there weren’t enough mid-term and ’72 votes in it to make it worth his while.

With every descent into the mundane little different than the one or ten or one hundred that preceded it, that imagined executive order that surely placed this visit or that on the VP’s itinerary must have resonated in his mind louder and louder: “No, goddamnit. Just have Agnew do it.”

With this Moratorium nonsense looming and his public persona shrinking, the Vice President was itching to get some skin in the game. Agnew had been feeling his oats for the last few weeks on the road. He would stray off script but never off the reservation, amplifying both his vim and his venom.

On October 19, amidst the post-Moratorium spin cycle, Agnew was in New Orleans to speak at a party fund-raiser. He was loath to dispense another dismal recitation of the Administration’s goals and messages sufficient to get the attendant donors to get out their checkbooks. Instead, he decided to put a little English on his delivery and show the country, and his President, how he could break a rack of balls.

There was no shortage of English when Agnew ran the table that night with his favorite shots—law and order, the liberal media, the would-be intellectual elites.  He spoke of “a spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” He called the Moratorium “an emotional purgative for those who felt the need to cleanse themselves of their lack of ability to offer a constructive solution to the problem.”

As Rick Perlstein recounts in his magnificent Nixonland, the President’s consigliore, H.R. Haldeman, was content to leave their pit bull unleashed for another week or two, dripping some opportune blood from his fangs, and showcasing some of the incendiary rhetorical flourish that would cement long and storied careers for Nixon scribes Pat Buchanan and William Safire.

His command performance was at a Pennsylvania Republican Dinner in Harrisburg on October 30.

A little over a week ago, I took a rather unusual step for a Vice President. I said something… America must recognize the dangers of constant carnival. Americans must reckon with irresponsible leadership and reckless words.

The mature and sensitive people of this country must realize that their freedom of protest is being exploited by avowed anarchists and communists who detest everything about this country and want to destroy it…they prey upon the good intentions of gullible men everywhere. They pervert honest concern to something sick and rancid. They are vultures who sit in trees and watch lions battle, knowing that win, lose, or draw, they will be fed.

Abetting the merchants of hate are the Parasites of passion. These are the men who value a cause purely for its political mileage. These are the politicians who temporize with the truth by playing both sides to their own advantage. They ooze sympathy for “the cause” but balance each sentence with equally reasoned reservations. Their interest is personal, not moral. They are ideological eunuchs whose most comfortable position is straddling the philosophical fence, soliciting votes from both sides.

Alas, of the 39 Veeps who came before him, this wasn’t the stuff of Alben Barkley or Calvin Coolidge—or even Richard Nixon. And of the entire pantheon of VPs, before and after Agnew, not even a seething Voldemort like Dick Cheney could conjure a redressing of his enemies that could so artfully incorporate the words “rancid” and “eunuchs.” All due credit to the evident pen of the young Mr. Buchanan, but Agnew was no amateur at lobbing the bombastic grenade, and it took a gifted orator to deliver an excoriation of such singular, belligerent elegance.

October 1969 was the Vice President’s American Bandstand month.  He would emerge now and again with an ear-catcher that would garner front page mention and cement itself to his increasingly ignominious legacy—“nattering nabobs of negativism,” “vicars of vacillation,” and “pusillanimous pussyfooters.” He was a good soldier in the 1970 mid-terms, doing his part to help destroy the candidacies of Tennessee’s Albert Gore, Sr. and lambasting Nixon GOP enemy Charles Goodell* as ideologically emasculated, calling him “the Christine Jorgenson of the Republican Party”—perhaps the only transgender smear in national politics before or since. As 1972 approached, there were even a smattering of “Spiro Of ’76” buttons and bumperstickers touting Agnew’s ascendance after he and his President dismantled the Democrats.

It was no surprise that, as Rick Perlstein notes, Nixon listed as number six of his seven top priorities in 1972: “The Vice President…must be toned down.”

Had he survived his two terms with Nixon and not been among the first of the President’s men to take an axe in the chest, however, it’s uncertain if Agnew would have had the popular appeal to succeed to the Presidency on his own. A television news crew visited a Baltimore tavern at the height of Agnew’s law-and-order pep rally, and asked the regulars if they were proud of their former Governor and County Executive? Why, they sure were! Would they want him to become President? Well…Said one, “I don’t want the president of the United States to sound like I do after I’ve had a few beers.”

It would be years before America was ready for an independent Vice President, like Mondale or Gore, and decades before they were ready for an angry one. One would have to reach all the way back to the Jefferson White House to find a Vice President of Agnew’s independence, bearing, eloquence, opinion…and indictment. Surely none since Aaron Burr.

Since he was never destined for Mount Rushmore, perhaps it was his legacy’s misfortune that he never shot a Treasury Secretary or attempted a treasonous liaison with a foreign power, and instead only accepted bribes in the basement of the Old Senate Office Building.

His bulldog reputation preceded him in his life after politics: Nixon White House adversary Alexander Haig reportedly told his wife that if he were ever found murdered, Agnew would be among the likeliest suspects. In the 1980s, his influence landed him a job brokering a deal for Saddam Hussein to purchase uniforms for the Iraqi military from Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu.

*Nixon loathed Nelson Rockefeller, who as New York Governor had appointed Goodell to fill the slain Bobby Kennedy’s seat.

On October 28, 1893, shortly after giving the closing address at Chicago’s wildly successful Columbian Exposition, popular five-term Mayor Carter Harrison was shot to death in his home by erstwhile campaign supporter and self-styled single tax and rail safety advocate, Patrick Eugene Prendergast.

Prendergast visited Harrison’s home that evening and was allowed in by a maid who went to awaken the slumbering Mayor. Mayor Harrison had been asleep on a sofa in the back parlor, and emerged wiping sleep from his eyes to meet his visitor, only to be met instead by three bullets shot point-blank from his young supporter’s .38 revolver.

Though 30 minutes after the shooting, Prendergast came with the murder weapon to the Des Plaines police station and surrendered, he never offered a consistent motive to the police for the assassination.  He would alternately cite Harrison’s failure to reward Prendergast’s re-election support with an appointment as Corporation Counsel, and Harrison’s failure to elevate local railway crossings, which Prendergast believed, passionately, were essential to the public safety. The latter was clearly the more sympathetic motive if the defendant’s counsel had to produce a reason why the beloved “People’s Mayor” was a dangerous fraud who needed to be murdered, half-asleep, in his home.

Whatever his motivation, the assassination shook the city to its core. Especially disturbed was a recent Polish émigré and the priest of St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church in Chicago’s Pulaski Park neighborhood, Father Casimir Zeglen.

Assassination was a relatively new phenomenon in American politics, but already had a deep impact on the national psyche with the murder of two Presidents in less than thirty years: Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth in 1865 (in a plot that also intended the killings of Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward), and James Garfield in 1881 by Charles Julius Guiteau—the first “disgruntled office seeker” if Prendergast’s other motive was to be accepted.  And now the Mayor of America’s second-most-populous city.

One can only imagine that this could have a profound impact on someone like Father Zeglen, so recently invested in the American Dream. He had already been experimenting with the invention of a garment that could withstand the impact of a bullet without penetrating and shredding the vital organs of its target. Mayor Harrison’s assassination encouraged him to redouble his efforts, and he eventually found success with a densely woven silk vest that even a bullet fired at close proximity could not fully penetrate.

After firing tests on a medical cadaver and then a Great Dane who unfortunately had to be sacrificed in the interests of his fellow canines’ current and future masters, Zeglen felt comfortable enough to don the vest and let himself be shot by live fire from an assassin’s distance to prove the efficacy of his invention.

With his wildly popular public demonstrations, Father Zeglen left one cloth vocation for another, founding the Zeglen Bullet Proof Cloth Company. In a world where democracy was increasingly being conducted from the trigger of a gun, this was an idea whose time had come.

Working with fellow Pole and the inventor of bulletproof armor, Jan Szczepanik (whose armor saved the life of King Alfonso XIII of Spain when a bomb exploded near his Szczepanik-armored carriage), Zeglen continued to improve his personal bulletproof garment and market it to vulnerable heads of state.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was wearing a Zeglen vest on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo when he was shot by Gavrilo Princip. Unfortunately, the Archduke was shot in the jugular, illustrating the unfortunate limitations of the Zeglen vest.

In his initial marketing push some 13 years earlier, however, Zeglen has approached the White House offering one of his signature vests for President William McKinley. McKinley’s team thought Zeglen’s vest a very worthy consideration for protecting their President.

They assured Casimir Zeglen that they would address the issue personally with the President just as soon as he returned to the White House from his Labor Day New York visit.

When the President did return to the White House from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, it was in a casket. Another Pole, Leon Czolgosz, had gotten the President’s attention first, with a bullet in his unprotected abdominal area. Doctors treated the first superficial bullet wound that grazed the President’s rib cage, but were unable to locate the bullet that had passed through his stomach, kidney, and pancreas, and lodged somewhere in his back.

While the Zeglen vest didn’t come to the President soon enough, another new invention that could have saved the President’s life was available that dark day at the Exposition in Buffalo: Thomas Alva Edison’s new X-ray machine.

Use of the machine to find the missing bullet was rejected, however, because the technology was new and untested. The President would die days later of sepsis from the contaminating bullet, dramatically altering the history of the 20^th century, as well as the geography of South Dakota, as Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became the 26^th President of the United States and, later, one of four faces on Mount Rushmore.

I didn’t imagine it possible, but I think he was considerably more statesmanlike when he was telling Senator Leahy to go fuck himself.

For a man who spent the previous eight years lurking in the shadows, the former Vice President has spent the last nine-plus months desperate for attention. He could have had all his current face-time and more when he was running the country in absentia. Now he’s treating the bully pulpit like a train that he forgot to catch.

There may be something greater at work here, though.

It would be ungentlemanly to speculate on the former Vice President’s mortality, but I think it’s a safe assumption that when that much-depleted heart finally does approach its living end–when the Heritage Foundation will prepare to store it in a jar, with his brain, until medical science discovers how to reanimate them–Mr. Cheney has no intention of going gently into that goodnight.

Maturity’s apex should be a happy time. If you’re fortunate, you’ve successfully navigated the stormy seas of life and now get to watch the sunset in still waters–proud of your accomplishments, surrounded by people who love you, whom you’ve maybe borne and nurtured into warm, decent human beings who work every day to make the world a better place, and credit your tutelage and example. Hopefully, you’re blessed to share life’s final act with someone who has been at your side through your long voyage. It should be a time when you’ve earned the opportunity to put your feet up and ruminate on your contribution to this earth, at peace with whatever the future holds.

But the twilight is clearly not golden for all of us. It isn’t surprising when some of our most senior citizens get churlish, even hostile in their advancing years. The end of days is in sight, but maybe not close enough to alleviate your general distress at your diminished capacity and a once-formidable body that every year seems to require another application of bungee cords and duct tape. You resent your spouse, if you still have one, of being indifferent to your needs or simply still being around, constantly, with all of their habits and idiosyncrasies that started annoying you lifetimes ago. Your children may have betrayed or, worse, disappointed you, and every day you simmer about what that investment cost you in money, time, and dreams. You ruminate on power lost, opportunities missed, enemies not destroyed, and wonder what, in the end, is the true measure of your time on Earth, if you aren’t departing with the biggest treasure chest of skulls and doubloons.

That’s not an easy account to settle.

The elderly surrender a good measure of their dignity when they attempt to eat spaghetti after too many glasses of wine, and when they attempt to pick fistfights on national television.

Former Vice President Cheney has devoted much of the last year to Super Sizing the “get off my lawn” stereotype. He’ll sit with nearly anyone who will clip a microphone on him and not call him a war criminal, and with his trademark scowl and occasionally twitching crazy eye, unload both barrels on everything from Obama’s sissified dithering in Afghanistan to the inevitability of another terror attack to the mollycoddles who have the temerity to question anything we’ve done in Iraq (at least up to January 21st of this year).

At least George W. Bush had the good sense to, for the most part, go away quietly. He surfaces now and again defending his Presidency, but he accomplished a rare feat not once, but twice, and while he’s no student of history, he most certainly knows that even Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover have had landmarks and schools named after them.

We don’t expect much dignity from our sitting Vice Presidents, though, so I suppose it’s unfair to impose any such standards after they leave.

That said, and even factoring in Mr. Cheney’s notoriously sour disposition, the constant fusillades bursting from the former Vice President have been curious.  Last January, while Lynne was presumably doing most of the packing, he spent the waning days of his tenure and the first weeks of his retirement assailing W. for refusing to pardon Scooter Libby.

By March, he started on the talk show circuit, claiming that Obama’s policies were putting America at risk of another 9/11-style attack, which he continued into spring, to the chagrin of a number of his party, who were hoping not to have their heads handed to them again in 2010. In May, he publicly peppered Gulf War 1 superstar and his Administration’s Secretary of State for having betrayed the party.

By June, he was so relentlessly lambasting the Obama Administration’s anti-terrorism policies that CIA Director Leon Panetta snapped and suggested that perhaps the x-Vice President was hoping for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch.

And on through the summer, until the autumn attacks shifted to Obama’s “dithering” policies in Afghanistan.

It’s just institutional courtesy to temper the attacks on your successor, at least until an appropriate amount of time has passed. If I recall correctly, it was at Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral where Walter Mondale finally lost it and punched George H.W. Bush into the reflecting pool outside the House Of Trade Unions in Moscow. That was over two years after Mondale and Jimmy Carter lost the White House to Bush and Reagan. (I’ll have to look that up to be sure, though.)

But it’s getting interesting now, at least, that Cheney’s successor and the current Curmudgeon General is letting his tongue slip and firing back at his predecessor’s relentless sideline taunts. After Cheney said in a speech at the Center for Security Policy that the Obama Administration was “absolutely wrong” on Afghanistan, Biden snapped to reporters accompanying him on a three-day trip through Eastern Europe, “Who cares what…?” He stopped and laughed, catching himself (“I can see the headline now…I’m getting better, guys.”). Yes, but he’s still Joe Biden. He was immediately back on all cylinders. “Is (Cheney’s) review relevant…today in light of the changes that have taken place in the region, in Afghanistan itself? So I think that is sort of irrelevant. Not sort of–I think it’s irrelevant.”

I said when Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate that the man from Delaware was going to be “a one-man Rapid Response team.” After nearly a year of listening to the former Vice President lob turd after steaming turd at his successors, I certainly don’t see it below the Vice President’s pay grade to leave the field and go duke it out with the loudmouth in the stands. It wouldn’t be Lincoln-Douglas, and probably not even Dole-Mondale, but in an age where “You lie!” and “Go fuck yourself” pass for political discourse, it would practically be Khrushchev and Nixon in the Kitchen Debate.

Buffoon For Thought

Well, nothing like having your life’s thesis eroded in a matter of months. I’ve devoted years of my life and owe the lion’s share of my four-figure fortune to one truism that I had studied to believe was unimpeachable: Our Vice Presidents don’t have a useful thing to say.

I have to admit that I was wary of Joe Biden’s selection as Barack Obama’s running mate. The man had been in Washington for nearly 36 years. He knew the game.

But then I remembered his highlight reel. The Indian convenience store joke. Barack Obama as the “clean, articulate” Negro, months before he called his running mate “Barack America.” And just days after his nomination telling the paraplegic Missouri State Senator to “stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see you!”

He had unlimited potential to be as bad as the job required, and then some. Sure, he had his moments of sense and clarity, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. And in his mid-60s, about to be promoted from a position voters had returned him to six times, he was no more likely to suddenly take up tact than he was mixed martial arts.

I don’t know what we’re going to do now. I mean, Squeaky Fromme is out, but she’s probably not going to want to complicate her life with this kind of drama again.

I felt fine for the first months of the Obama Administration when he was laughed at and marginalized. You could practically hear Obama grab his temples with thumb and middle finger and shake his head when his Vice President panicked a nation and sliced the already-hobbled travel industry’s hamstring by declaring that as long as there’s swine flu he wouldn’t encourage anyone to get on a plane, or when he conjectured about FDR’s televised response to the stock market crash–in 1929, before television, and before FDR was President.

Obama had himself and his entire staff to put the Administration’s best foot forward. It was his Vice President’s job to regularly put a bullet in the other one. That was his place, and his expectation.

It was both disappointing and alarming then when he insisted on loudly expressing his opinions in an Obama Administration that enthusiastically encourages their Vice President to express his opinions. That’s what almost every President asks of his Vice President, with the same sincerity that the rest of us commonly deploy, “Let’s have dinner sometime” or “Let’s stay in touch.”

I should have known, though. For all his caricatured buffoonery, Joe Biden has always been a force of nature, for good or ill, and the kind of jocular duffer who will get a couple of scotches in him and let you have it, with the smile never leaving his face.

Ask Rudy Giuliani. The GOP’s early anointed for 2008, “America’s Mayor” was tagged and bagged by Super Tuesday. For all the long-winded rhetoric his opponents pummeled him with, the most lacerating, reductive, and memorable broadside came from the other party, when Biden said, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence—a noun, a verb, and 9/11.” The Giuliani campaign was notably less tumescent after that rabbit punch.

It was never realistic to expect  that Biden was going to be an ineffective clown for the administration. In fact, he’s turned out to be a very effective clown. While the Obama team is timidly swinging at the health care piñata and letting themselves stumble into the tried-and-true superpower strategy of an entrenched war in Afghanistan, Biden isn’t bashful about asking anyone why their baby is ugly or about that unpleasant odor they brought into the room with them.

And Newsweek suggests that the Vice President is more disciplined than he appears and is asking the difficult questions that Obama won’t ask for fear of exposing his own position.

Biden exudes what we all aspire to with age and experience: The moral authority and self-assuredness to scold, threaten, and condescend when necessary, always with a  signature smile and a big slap on the back.

All useful skills, of course, but Biden may be at his most effective wrestling that snarling Cthulhu that is the U.S. Congress, and especially the Senate, where Biden served for longer than most Americans have been alive.

Some compare his efforts to those of Lyndon Baines Johnson when he was JFK’s Vice President. Johnson, though, found himself sawed off at the knees when he assumed the Vice Presidency. He had been the most powerful Senate Majority Leader in history—his arm-twisting was the stuff of legend; he could corner you in a hallway or the cloakroom and, before you realized what happened, you’d promised to vote for his bill to have Vice President Nixon dragged onto the floor of the Senate and pelted for two hours with rotting melons.

When he assumed the Vice Presidency, though, he attempted to preside over the Senate with the same brusque authority he’d wielded as Majority Leader, and the Senate bucked. From that point forward, Johnson was sulky and sullen (Kennedy complained about LBJ’s “damn long face” when he came to meetings), and an even more unhappy Texan to hold the office than the one who would liken it to a “warm bucket of piss.”

Biden’s liaison role is more akin to that of McKinley’s first VP, Garret Augustus Hobart. While lacking LBJ’s and Biden’s legislative experience, Hobart’s easy-going charm and bonhomie worked wonders with men from both sides of the aisle. His weekday afternoon “smokers” were the stuff of legend in Washington and no small portion of McKinley’s legislation was passed by lawmakers entertained, fed well, and liquored up at the hands of Gus Hobart.

That might be Biden’s biggest gift to the President if he’s able to meaningfully communicate with the reptilian likes of David Vitter, Mitch McConnell, James Inhofe, and Richard Shelby.

In any event, Biden is taking what Hobart, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and, in his own way, Dick Cheney started in rendering the Vice Presidency meaningful. As an American, I know that’s a very good thing for our country.

As a Vice Presidential historian, it depresses the hell out of me.

As long as he continues dedicating train tunnels as automobile tunnels and misidentifying Supreme Court justices, though, I suppose there’s at least a shred of hope that Veeps won’t be an anachronism by the time our next printing goes to press.

I suppose looks are deceiving. My grandmother seemed harmless, but she used to lock my sisters in the basement if they screwed up their Acts of Contrition. And that was when she was in her bridge club and support hose years. Lord only knows what she was capable of  in her Joan Crawford/Aileen Wuornos prime. It’s a wonder my happy-go-lucky grandfather lived long enough to bury her.

I had to remember that last week when I watched Matt Lauer interview the adorable Sara Jane Moore. It’s become a cliché that the 1970s were “a very different time.” Indeed. I was in grade school, but I had two police citations and a few dozen drunks under my belt by the time I was nine, some recreational drug usage by eleven, my teenage sister dated her high school English teacher, and my best friend’s sister got pregnant at 13 by her 27-year-old cousin. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of gunplay at school, but on balance, it really was a very different time.

Still, even by the standards of an age where smoking was allowed in hospital rooms and a sandwich was something that occasionally accompanied one’s business lunch martinis, the thought of a matronly 45-year-old accountant and mother packing a .38 revolver and attempting a kill shot on the President Of The United States was fairly remarkable.

As a country, we weren’t used to our ladies being such public lunatics back then. It just wasn’t proper. The Sara Jane Moore-President Ford Assassination Attempt was one of the more extreme manifestations of this bizarre trend called “feminism,” to which Old School America was struggling to acclimate.

If this strange new breed of woman insisted on not being like our wives and mothers and sisters of yore–all gin and benzodiazepine during the day, and gin and tranquilizers at night when the husband and kids were home, and pliable and obedient all the time–then hopefully they’d limit this “Women’s Lib” thing to reading Cosmo and watching Maude on the black-and-white in their sewing rooms. We had certain expectations of our women of a certain age. It was hard enough listening to Bella Abzug or that mouthy Betty Friedan, but at least they looked like middle-aged women.

A traditionally masculine society wasn’t used to fearing its women. Men were still coming to grips with the surreal horrors of the next generation of the femme fatale–the Homicidal Sex Kitten. With the Patty Hearsts and Manson Girls of America, men were learning, if not to be utterly terrified of any woman under 25 who wasn’t Karen Carpenter, at least to recognize the warning signs that could save their lives. X carved in forehead = Stranger Danger. Beret and sub-machine gun? Sexy but smells like trouble, maybe.

In 1975, it was because of this perceptional evolution that none of us were all that surprised when waifish, crazy-eyed redhead Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme–herself a Manson Family alum–was arrested for dressing like a nun and drawing a Colt .45 on President Gerald Ford in a park in Sacramento.

But when a woman Time magazine described as “dumpy, determined” drew down on the President in San Francisco just a few weeks later (it was a rough September for Ford) it was a wake-up call that we really weren’t safe anywhere, from anyone. If a plump, middle-aged clone of your Aunt Lavelle could brazenly go after a President, then no man could be sure he was safe from any member of the fairer sex. Agnes from the checkout counter at the Piggly-Wiggly? Kindly Mrs. Farquar from your daughter’s Sunday School class? The widow Carnacky who sold handmade wind chimes for charity and read to the blind Wednesday afternoons at the VA hospital? Bets off. Suddenly, it was conceivable that any one of them was capable of planting a machete in your skull when you weren’t looking.

It’s not a widely-lauded event in the canon of women’s studies, but Ms. Moore’s attempt on the President’s life was a defining moment in female empowerment no less significant than Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs “Battle Of The Sexes.” That a member of society who only a little over a half-century before wouldn’t have been allowed to vote for a President could now attempt to kill one is an achievement that gets short shrift in the pantheon of feminist accomplishment. Women had fought long and hard to earn the respect of a male-dominated world. To be capable of inspiring fear as well was something that their mothers and grandmothers could only dream of.

Released from prison in late 2007, a little over a year after the passing of Gerald Ford, Ms. Moore says she’s glad that she didn’t kill the President and concedes that attempting to murder the leader of the largest country in the free world was probably “wrong,” and attributes her action to “the tenor of the times.” (It’s a puzzle to imagine that it could be anything else. An accidental President and generally lovable bumbler, Gerald Ford was not a man who inspired any extreme degree of emotion, much less blood hatred, and two assassination attempts in a single month. To plan to stalk and slay this affable, soft-spoken President would be like setting out to murder Tom Bosley.)

Still, Ms. Moore says she has no regrets; that if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else. White haired and bespectacled, she is as pleasant and benign as one would expect from a woman entering her ninth decade. She accepts her notoriety, and save for an ill-fated escape attempt in 1979 (“If I’d known I was going to be caught so fast I would have stopped somewhere for a burger and a beer”), she served her sentence without complaint.

As a society, though, we tend to frown on things like attempted murder, especially the kind that get the Secret Service involved. So while Ms. Moore has earned her paragraph in the history books, that shout-out from Helen Reddy might not come in her lifetime. If they took a poll, though, she’d probably be America’s favorite female would-be Presidential assassin.

FUN FACT: Had Ms. Moore succeeded in murdering the President, she would have been responsible for a milestone in Vice Presidential history—Nelson Rockefeller would have have been the third consecutive President who had a stint as VP on his resume.

As much of an empathetic posture he managed to present, no one really expected him to spend his retirement building houses with Jimmy Carter, but after the bypass it was hard to see him chasing poon again. Elective office was probably out of the question, Hillary lost the nomination, and the only cooter he was going to get from now on would have to be under heavy medical supervision and promise a greater-than-average chance of a state funeral and decades-long rumors of a 25-year-old secretary with no secretarial skills getting a lifetime stipend from the Clinton Estate.

So what to do with a randy ex-President in his pasture years–too old for stud but still too young for the glue factory, and that last, glorious Preakness so far behind him that people recall it in the grainy Super-8 film of their memories? What is the passion, the life force that’s going to sustain him in the decades to come, where his posterity, his library, his grandchildren, and his national monuments await?

Anger, perhaps. Targeted, committed, methodic anger.

It’s a mood that once seemed ill suited to the notoriously smooth and seemingly imperturbable Clinton, from his days as baby-faced party wunderkind to 42nd President of the United States to much-beloved elder statesman. That unruffled countenance burst into flames mid-air about the time that the aftereffects of his heart surgery began and, presumably, the extra-marital blowjobs ended.

The new volatile Bill wasn’t widely noted at first. There was a nearly bottomless reservoir of goodwill the ex-President could draw on. When he pulled away from Washington, D.C. that bleak January day in 2001 was the last anyone could remember of peace and prosperity. His Republican successor was daily turning a once proud and generally well-liked country into an emotional, political, and diplomatic Superfund site. Two Democratic standard bearers would have been better with Marcia Clark and Chris Darden running their campaigns, turning two elections that should have been home run derbies into an embarrassing series of flaccid ground balls easily fielded by a small posse of angry pretend Christians with big bank accounts, an egomaniacal consumer advocate 30 years past his prime, and a nation taught to be terrified of a cave-dwelling diabetic its leaders were too disinterested to catch.

Clinton nostalgia was all the rage in 2004, and there was even wistful debate about whether John Kerry could appoint Clinton as his running mate. The fantasy baseball scenario was even more tantalizing to Bill Partisans with the added hypothetical of Kerry resigning on January 22, 2005 and handing the reins back to the Man from Hope. (Technically, it would probably have been Constitutional, but the Republicans would have been literally apoplectic, and a GOP body count of 1,000 Jonestowns might have given the Dems a numbers advantage in the mid-terms but would have started the kind of blood feud that has brought down entire civilizations).

As the 2008 elections drew near and the Bush Administration was running out of America to break, when it looked as if the Democrats couldn’t lose unless they nominated Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, the country seemed ready to stencil “The Clintons” back on the White House mail box. Of course, they couldn’t have Bill back, but with a term and change in the Senate under her belt, Hillary was newly beloved, and with Bill tagging along the country would be getting, again, “two for the price of one.”

But then that scrawny upstart from Chicago had to go and ruin everything. So recently adored, Bill Clinton was suddenly the favorite uncle letting the kids see him drunk for the first time. “Managing Bill” became a recurring, nearly daily theme on a mortally wounded Hillary campaign that for months refused to accept last rites. The once rock-solid President who endured years of battering at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Richard Melon Scaife, Kenneth Starr, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and a million fellow travelers with an ever wink and a smile, was suddenly lashing out at the slightest provocation–the media, Hillary’s staff, Barack Obama. Some say he even cost Hillary the VP nomination because the last thing Barack Obama wanted to find in his office the first thing every morning was a stack of hectoring, second-guessing emails and text messages from Bill.

With a confused Democratic electorate grasping for answers of why their beloved Babe Ruth had turned into Ty Cobb, Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum issued a scathing prognosis in a 10,000 VF piece last year that Clinton’s 2004 bypass surgery changed him irreparably, manifesting itself first in a sort of “post-partum depression” common among bypass recipients, and exacerbated by the powerful repertoire of mood-altering medications that ruled the President’s days.

In an effort to refute Purdum’s thesis about the former President’s anger issues, Clinton offered an immediate rebuttal–a spitting, livid rebuttal.

For a nation of erstwhile fans desperate for answers that weren’t there, it was easy, albeit heartbreaking, to resign themselves to the reality of their once-revered President beset with ever-worsening fits of distemper, sure to devolve, into seething hatred, paroxysms of rage, and finally, madness and death.

What no one really considered, though, was that this might not be self-destruction, but reconstruction. Where many saw a downward spiral, few saw a man in flux, adjustment, learning to live with the New Him like any other man, woman, or child who has been confronted with a life-altering condition. The President was simply trying to find his new level.

To anyone really paying attention, it seems like his years of unmanaged fury are behind him. Don’t believe pie-eyed Pollyanna jobs like Peter Baker’s upcoming New York Times magazine profile on the former President, “The Mellowing of Bill Clinton.” Read between the lines and you’ll see that this isn’t a man mellowed, but a man recalibrated and rejuvenated. Bill Richardson has already been put on notice that his disloyalty in endorsing Barack Obama in last year’s primary will not be forgotten–ever. And Ted Kennedy? He’s going to have to do a lot better than a brain tumor to win any sympathy from the former President after the knife he planted between the Clinton shoulder blades with his own Obama endorsement.

To the uneducated, anger seems contra-indicated to living a long and healthy life after a very real episode of heart trauma, but there is a school of thought that says anger, properly managed, can be a force as restorative, enriching, and life-giving as tai chi, yoga, reiki, or any of the so-called “healing arts.”

Regardless of what the many psychologists and cardiologists say, it’s not a bad way to live, really. Buddy Rich carried a rage that caused miscarriages and ear-bleeding headaches within a four-county radius, and he practically achieved the male life expectancy of his day. Imagine if he’d learned how to tap that seething hatred and use it for good.

It’s not an easy haul, of course. It’s still a nascent science. Due to time constraints in posting this piece, I was unable to solicit the opinion of the former President or his staff on my own assessments of the President’s dispositive turnaround. I can only appreciate what I observe and what I know of the President’s hardscrabble political underpinnings.

Of course, it’s highly improbable that he’ll take his grudge with Ted Kennedy to a physical extreme, but it’s unfashionable, impolitic, and even of questionable humanity to speak ill of the lion of the Senate, the last stalwart of Camelot. With his upcoming comments in the Baker NYT piece, the President has crossed a verboten line with restraint but resolve, and is demonstrably in control of his bile in a way that he wasn’t on the campaign trail last year. Yet by that very control, he’s clearly indicated that not only does he have no intention of mellowing, but he’s going to take his anger and make it his cudgel.

And he’s only teed off on the terminally ill Kennedy and doughy but benign turncoat Richardson. Imagine what he has percolating for the likes of Starr, Gingrich, and company.

“Mellow”? Hardly. Surly to bed, surly to rise, and sleeping with the enmity all the while have reinvented Bill Clinton.