A Very Silent Majority

Hartford’s Other Voice/UPS — The radio speech was never broadcast—yet old sho-biz Agnew got 14,000 letters of praise the next day. No one will admit who slipped.

What happened was that UPI, a news service, also makes news tapes used by independent radio stations. A month ago they recorded a full hour of the usual hard hitting, always missing, Agnew diatribe. The schedule said it was to be broadcast over dozens of stations on the weekend. But a foul up occurred—not a single station aired the speech.

Just the same, come Monday morning, the UPI office was buried under a flood of 14,000 letters of fulsome praise. There was not a single letter criticizing the speech. Agnew was praised for once again exposing the effete intellectual snobs that marched in the protest parades.

14,000 American citizens went zap over a speech they never heard.

Come to think of it, that’s the same number of letters that Nixon had on his desk the day after one of his speeches. Makes one think.