Gerald R. Ford may be best remembered for pardoning Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, but Ford owed his national prominence to the corruption of former Maryland Gov. Spiro T. Agnew.
Agnew resigned as Nixon’s vice president in 1973 after authorities learned he had taken bribes and kickbacks — including free groceries — dating back to his years in Annapolis.
He was only the second vice president in history to resign.
“I think there’s an irony that Nixon brought Ford in to replace a criminal vice president,” said George Washington University law school professor John Banzhaff, who sued Agnew to recover the bribes for the state of Maryland. “He didn’t think that he’d be replaced, too.”
Agnew rose quickly in Republican circles in the 1960s but was relatively unknown nationally when Nixon asked him to be his running mate in 1968. Agnew had won the governor’s mansion by running to the left of a segregationist Democrat, but once in power he took hard lines against the civil rights movement.
Agnew played the role of Nixon’s “hatchet man” to near perfection, and some of his pungent barbs — describing the nation’s media as “the nattering nabobs of negativism” antiwar critics as “impudent snobs” — still sting.
But as Agnew grew in stature in conservative circles, he and Nixon clashed over Agnew’s role in the administration. By mid-1971, according to historian Mark O. Hatfield, Nixon wanted to dump Agnew and use the 25th amendment to bring former Texas Governor John Connally in as vice president.
As the bribery investigation picked up steam, Nixon — already fending off inquiries into the Watergate break-in — asked Agnew to step down. Agnew would plead no contest to tax evasion in 1973.
According to Hatfield, Agnew believed the Nixon camp had “launched a campaign to drive me out by leaking anti-Agnew stories to the media.”
Agnew never forgave Nixon and never spoke to him again. Agnew died of leukemia in 1996.
