Spiro Agnew

Spiro Theodore Agnew
39th Vice President of the United States
In office January 20, 1969 – October 10, 1973
President	Richard Nixon
Preceded by	Hubert Humphrey
Succeeded by	Gerald Ford
Personal details
Born	November 9, 1918 Towson, Maryland
Died	September 17, 1996(1996-09-17) (aged 77) Berlin, Maryland
Nationality	American
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Judy Agnew

Spiro Theodore Agnew (November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th Vice President of the United States serving under President Richard M. Nixon, and the 55^th governor of the state of Maryland. He is most famous for his resignation in 1973 after he was charged with the crime of tax evasion.

Early life

Spiro Agnew was born Spiros Anagnostopoulos in Towson, Maryland to Theodore Spiros Anagnostopoulos and Margaret Akers, a native of Virginia. His father emigrated from Gargalianoi, Greece to the United States in 1897 and owned a diner famous for its chicken souvlaki and spanakopita. He became a Baltimore Democratic ward leader and well known in the local Greek community. He was Theodore Agnew's only child; his mother had two children from an earlier marriage that left her a widow.

Agnew attended public schools in Baltimore before enrolling in the Johns Hopkins University in 1937. He studied chemistry at Johns Hopkins University for three years before joining the U.S. Army and serving in Europe during World War II. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in France and Germany.

Before leaving for Europe, Agnew worked at an insurance company where he met Elinor Judefind, known as Judy. Agnew married her on on May 27, 1942. They eventually had four children: Pamela, James Rand, Susan, and Kimberly.

Upon his return from the war, Agnew transferred to the evening program at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He studied law at night while working as a grocer and as an insurance salesman. Agnew received his LL.B. in 1947 and moved to the suburbs to begin practicing law. He passed the bar in 1949.

Early political career

Agnew, raised as a Democrat, switched parties and became a Republican. During the 1950s, he aided U.S. Congressman James Devereux in four successive winning election bids, before entering politics himself in 1957 upon his appointment to the Baltimore County Board of Appeals by Democratic Baltimore County Executive Michael J. Birmingham. In 1960, he made his first elective run for office as a candidate for Judge of the Circuit Court, finishing last in a five-person contest. The following year, the new Democratic Baltimore County Executive, Christian H. Kahl, dropped him from the Zoning Board, with Agnew loudly protesting, thereby gaining name recognition.

In 1962, Agnew ran for election as County Executive of Baltimore County, seeking office in a predominantly Democratic county that had seen no Republican elected to that position in the twentieth century, with only one (Jake Young) earning victory after he left. Running as a reformer and Republican outsider, he took advantage of a bitter split in the Democratic Party and was elected. Agnew backed and signed an ordinance outlawing discrimination in some public accommodations, among the first laws of this kind in the United States.

Governor of Maryland

After choosing not to seek a second term as County Executive, Agnew ran for the position of Governor of Maryland in 1966. In this overwhelmingly Democratic state, he was elected after the Democratic nominee, George P. Mahoney, a Baltimore paving contractor and perennial candidate running on an anti-integration platform, narrowly won the Democratic gubernatorial primary out of a crowded slate of eight candidates. Many Democrats opposed to segregation then crossed party lines to give Agnew the governorship by 82,000 votes.

As governor, Agnew worked with the Democratic legislature to pass tax and judicial reforms, as well as tough anti-pollution laws. Projecting an image of racial moderation, Agnew signed the state's first open-housing laws and succeeded in getting the repeal of an anti-miscegenation law. However, during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Agnew angered many African-American leaders by lecturing them about their constituents in stating, "I call on you to publicly repudiate all black racists. This, so far, you have been unwilling to do."

Vice Presidency

Agnew's moderate image, immigrant background and success in a traditionally Democratic state made him an attractive running mate for Nixon in 1968. His vice presidency was the highest-ranking United States political office ever reached by a Greek-American citizen. Agnew's nomination was supported by many conservatives within the Republican Party and by Nixon. But a small band of delegates started shouting "Spiro Who?" and tried to place George Romney's name in nomination. Nixon's wishes prevailed and Agnew went from his first election as County Executive to Vice President in six years—one of the fastest rises in U.S. political history.

Agnew was known for his tough criticisms of political opponents, especially journalists and anti-Vietnam War activists. He was known for attacking his opponents with unusual, often alliterative epithets, some of which were coined by White House speechwriters William Safire and Pat Buchanan, including:

• "nattering nabobs of negativism," (written by Safire)
• "pusillanimous pussyfoots",
• "hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history",
• "the liberal intellectuals...masochistic compulsion to destroy their country's strength",
• "effete corps of impudent snobs", and
• "radiclib," a blend of "radical liberal".
• "I am not questioning his patriotism, I'm questioning his judgment"

In short, Agnew was Nixon's "hatchet man" when defending the administration on the Vietnam War. Agnew was chosen to make several powerful speeches in which he spoke out against anti-war protesters and media portrayal of the Vietnam War, labeling them "Franco Un-American". Agnew toned down his rhetoric and dropped most of the alliterations after the 1972 election with a view to running for president himself in 1976.

File:Spiro Agnew at NASA.jpg

Spiro Agnew congratulates launch control after launch of Apollo 17 in 1972.

Resignation

On October 10, 1973, Spiro Agnew became the second Vice President to resign the office. Unlike John C. Calhoun, who resigned to take a seat in the Senate, Agnew resigned and then pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to criminal charges of tax evasion and money laundering, part of a negotiated resolution to a scheme wherein he accepted $29,500 in bribes during his tenure as governor of Maryland. Agnew was fined $10,000 and put on three years' probation. The $10,000 fine only covered the taxes and interest due on what was "unreported income" from 1967. The plea bargain was later mocked as the "greatest deal since the Lord spared Isaac on the mountaintop" by former Maryland Attorney General Stephen Sachs. Students of Professor John Banzhaf from The George Washington University Law School, collectively known as Banzhaf's Bandits, found four residents of the state of Maryland willing to put their names on a case and sought to have Agnew repay the state $268,482 - the amount he was known to have taken in bribes. After two appeals by Agnew, he finally resigned himself to the matter and a check for $268,482 was turned over to the Maryland state Treasurer William James in early 1983. Agnew was also later disbarred by the State of Maryland.

His resignation triggered the first use of the 25th Amendment, as the vacancy prompted the appointment and confirmation of Gerald Ford as his successor. It remains one of only two times that the amendment has been employed to fill a Vice Presidential vacancy. (The other time was when Ford, after becoming President, chose Nelson Rockefeller to succeed him as Vice President.)

After the 1972 landslide Agnew was seen as Nixon's natural successor in the 1976 Presidential Election. With the strong support of the party's conservative wing, he had planned to decide on running only after the 1974 midterm elections. He had also hoped to build on his foreign policy credentials by visiting the Soviet Union. However the scandal broke and damaged him. Nixon was also not supportive of Agnew replacing him and in April 1973 his staff was cut back and duties trimmed. Privately, Agnew blamed Nixon for releasing the accusations of bribes and tax evasion in order to divert attention from the growing Watergate scandal that was engulfing Nixon's administration.

As fate would have it, Nixon was forced from office but Agnew's earlier resignation and criminal charges ruined any hopes of an Agnew presidency. The two men never spoke to each other again. As a gesture of reconciliation, Nixon's daughters invited Agnew to attend Nixon's funeral in 1994, and Agnew complied.

Later life

After leaving politics, Agnew became an international trade executive with homes in Rancho Mirage, California; Arnold, Maryland; Bowie, Maryland; and Ocean City, Maryland. In 1976, he briefly re-entered the public spotlight and engendered controversy with anti-Zionist statements that called for the United States to withdraw its support for the state of Israel beacause of Israel's bad treatment of Christians, as well as what Gerald Ford publicly criticized as "unsavory" "remarks about Jews" [1][2][3]. [4]

In 1980, Agnew published a memoir in which he implied that Nixon and Alexander Haig had planned to assassinate him if he refused to resign the Vice-Presidency, and that Haig told him "to go quietly … or else." Agnew also wrote a novel, The Canfield Decision, about a vice president who was "destroyed by his own ambition."

Nixon reportedly made negative comments about Agnew. When John Erlichman, the President's counsel and assistant, asked him why he kept Agnew on the ticket in the 1972 election, Nixon replied that “No assassin in his right mind would kill me. They know that if they did that they would wind up with Agnew.”

Agnew died suddenly on September 17, 1996, at the age of 77 at Atlantic General Hospital, in Berlin, Maryland in Worcester County (near his Ocean City home) only a few hours after being hospitalized and diagnosed with an advanced, yet to that point undetected, form of leukemia. He is buried at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, a cemetery in Timonium, Maryland in Baltimore County.

Trivia and pop culture

• Agnew's anti-discrimination ordinance led to the demise of Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show in 1964 when Dean refused to allow black and white teens to dance together. This event was the factual basis for John Waters' film Hairspray and the subsequent Broadway musical.
• Agnew was granted a coat of arms by the short-lived American College of Heraldry and Arms in 1968.
• A joke about Agnew ("What kind of watch does Mickey Mouse wear? A Spiro Agnew watch.") inspired companies to manufacture Spiro Agnew wristwatches. The watches were sold during the Nixon presidency. [5] Photo of a Spiro Agnew wristwatch
• In Yippie phone phreaking newsletter TAP Issue #22 (October 1973) it is noted that Spiro Agnew's name is an anagram of "Grow a penis." This fact was also mentioned by Dick Cavett in his 1984 Tonight Show interview with Dave Barry, who repeated it in his book Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989). The observation is often included in Unix fortune collections.
• A character in the Futurama series is referred to as "the headless body of Agnew". He figures as a sort of mindless slave of Richard Nixon's head (since the series are set in the year 3000 and all important persons from the 20th and 21th century only remain as living preserved heads in jars.) until he is given away to a professor as payment for solving the global warming problem.

External links

• Spiro Agnew biography on U.S. Senate website
• The 30th Anniversary of Agnew's Resignation As Vice President (University of Maryland)
• Papers of Spiro T. Agnew at the University of Maryland Libraries
• The Archives of Maryland collection of speeches, messages and other public papers during Agnews governorship 1967-69