The tarnished legacy of Spiro Agnew

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This article was published 01/10/2022 (1124 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before the crude insults, serial lying, “double-downing,” racism and corruption of Donald Trump, there was Spiro T. Agnew, vice-president during Richard Nixon’s administration from January 1969 to October 10, 1973 when he was forced to resign in disgrace.

Because of Nixon’s subsequent resignation as president 10 months later, the climax of the Watergate scandal, Agnew — who died in 1996 at the age of 77 — has been largely forgotten. So have the bribery, secret payoffs and obstruction of justice that embroiled him in one of the most notorious controversies in American history.

I was recently reacquainted with the Agnew saga thanks to MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow’s fascinating 2018 seven-episode podcast, “Bag Man,” which she and television producer Michael Yarvitz turned into a book of the same name that was published in 2020.

The book’s subtitle says it all: “The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House.”

Apart from superbly documenting Agnew’s dishonesty and criminal actions, the podcast and the book leave you with the inescapable conclusion that Trump, whether knowingly or not, is the second-coming of Agnew — only much worse and more dangerous.

When Nixon selected Agnew to be his vice-presidential running mate a few months before the November 1968 election, few Americans had heard of him. A popular joke in the late summer of 1968 was: “What’s a Spiro Agnew?”

At the time, Agnew was the staunch Republican governor of Maryland and had occupied that office for slightly more than a year and a half. Before that, he served as the executive of Baltimore County, somewhat like a city mayor but of a larger area. He was a decorated veteran of the Second World War.

Nixon believed — rightly, as it turned out — Agnew’s brazen style, conservatism and blue-collar roots would appeal to the right-wing members of the party. Agnew’s off-the-cuff racist remarks and his later attacks on “radical liberals” and the press (sound familiar?), who he denounced as “nattering nabobs of negativism” (William Safire, then a speechwriter in Nixon’s White House, came up with that alliteration) resonated with Republicans in Washington, D.C., and across the country.

In Agnew’s view, members of the media were an unelected elite who wielded enormous power. His subtle insinuation that the “little group of men” controlling the press and television networks were Jewish (that was an exaggeration, to be sure) led to an increase in anti-Semitism and phone calls to TV stations about “Jew Commies” on the air.

Agnew’s nastiness merely enhanced his public popularity, as has been the case with Trump.

But Agnew’s closet was full of skeletons. For years, it had been common practice in Maryland, among other states, for builders, engineers and surveyors to give kickbacks, in the form of cash delivered secretly in envelopes, to local politicians in exchange for the awarding of lucrative public contracts. Agnew was one of those officials who reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Even more unbelievably, this crooked practice continued with state contracts while he was governor. And according to Maddow and Yarvitz’s research, he even accepted bribes as vice-president in his White House office.

Eventually, through the diligent efforts of several young lawyers in the department of justice, Agnew’s corruption was discovered and publicized in the media. His response to the investigation and pending criminal charges, as Maddow and Yarvitz explain, was the same as Trump’s has been: “Attack the investigation as a witch hunt. Obstruct it behind the scenes. Attack individual investigators in personal terms. Attack the credibility of the Justice Department itself. Attack the media informing Americans about the case. Punch back. Hard. Until either you are broken or the system is.”

“If indicted, I will not resign,” Agnew proclaimed while declaring he had done nothing illegal. And a majority of Republicans, as they do today with Trump, stuck by him, ardently believing the justice department had concocted the evidence against the vice-president.

Watergate compounded the problem, because DOJ officials were terrified Nixon would be forced to resign, as he did ultimately, and Agnew would become president. That outcome they could not allow. Hence they negotiated a deal with Agnew’s lawyers.

Agnew agreed to resign as vice-president and plead “no contest” in open court to a single charge of tax evasion (which meant he accepted “the conviction but avoided a factual admission of guilt”). He was fined $10,000 and sentenced to three years of probation; he served no time in prison.

It is unlikely that current U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland would ever make Trump such a plea deal, in which the former president agrees to never run for public office again in exchange for avoiding a prison sentence.

A more probable scenario in the coming months will be an indictment for absconding with classified documents. But obtaining a unanimous verdict from a jury and a conviction in a future trial is likely more problematic. Whatever the outcome, a long, drawn out and bitter legal battle is on the horizon.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.