Agnew, Spiro Theodore

(b. 9 November 1918 in Baltimore, Maryland; d. 17 September 1996 in Berlin, Maryland), vice president of the United States who resigned and pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion.

Agnew grew up in a Democratic household. His father, Theodore Spiro Agnew, whose name was originally Anagnostopolous, emigrated from Greece in 1897, and his mother, Margaret Akers, was a native of Virginia. Theodore Agnew owned a large restaurant, the Piccadilly, in downtown Baltimore and was a national leader in the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. In his youth Spiro Agnew was a member of the Sons of Pericles, which was affiliated with his father’s Greek fraternal organization.

Attending Baltimore public schools, including Public School 69, Garrison Junior High School, and Forest Park High School, Agnew graduated in February 1937. He then studied as a chemistry major at Johns Hopkins University until 1939, when he transferred to the University of Baltimore Law School, taking night classes while working as a clerk and assistant underwriter for the Maryland Casualty Company.

In September 1941 Agnew was drafted into the U.S. Army. After training at Camp Croft, South Carolina, he attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he was commissioned a second lieutenant on 24 May 1942. Serving as a company commander in the Tenth Armored Division, Agnew spent almost half of the war in combat and earned a Bronze Star. On 27 May 1942 he married Elinor Isabel Judefind. They had four children.

Upon returning from World War II in 1945, Agnew completed his law studies in 1947. He passed the bar in the same year and moved with his family to the Baltimore suburb of Towson, where he opened a law office. Like many other second-generation Americans of this era, Agnew distanced himself from the Old Country. He converted from the Greek Orthodox religion of his parents to Episcopalian. When he moved to the suburbs, Agnew asked others to address him as “Ted” rather than his given name.

It was in the suburbs that Agnew became politically active. At the urging of a senior law associate, who advised that the minority party would offer less competition and more opportunity for political advancement, he switched to the Republican party. He became active in the local Kiwanis Club, the Veterans of Foreign Wars post, and the Towson Parent Teacher Association. In 1956 he played a leadership role in the success of a referendum that established home rule for Baltimore County. As a result of these efforts, in 1957 Agnew was named to the county’s zoning board of appeals, which dealt with the suburbs but not the city of Baltimore. His reappointment to the board in 1961 was denied by the county council’s Democratic majority, but the slight attracted public sympathy for Agnew. Running for Baltimore County executive in 1962, he prevailed despite a Democratic registration edge of about four to one.

As the first Republican county executive in sixty-seven years, Agnew gained statewide prominence. During his four-year term he improved the county’s water and sewage systems, built new schools, approved higher salaries for teachers, established a human rights commission, and enacted a public accommodations law. Agnew ran for governor of Maryland in 1966 and defeated the segregationist Democrat George M. Mahoney to become only the fifth Republican chief executive in the state’s history. Many African Americans and liberal white Democrats crossed party lines to support Agnew.

In his first year as governor Agnew fulfilled most of his campaign promises. He obtained a graduated income tax, enacted the first statewide open housing law south of the Mason-Dixon line, repealed the state law banning racial intermarriage, increased state aid to antipoverty programs, signed a more liberal abortion law, and promoted tough water pollution regulations. He appointed more blacks to senior governmental roles than any previous Maryland governor.

Agnew also became a player in national politics. An early leader of the movement to draft Nelson Rockefeller for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, Agnew was embarrassed when the New York governor dropped out of the race on 21 March without giving him advance notice. After this snub Agnew began positioning himself to the right. In April he had more than 200 black students arrested for refusing to leave the state capitol. During the rioting in Baltimore in 1968 following the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Agnew rebuked the city’s moderate black leadership for their silence. Agnew also renounced the Reverend Ralph Abernathy’s march on Washington, D.C., that year. In the process Agnew moved from liberal Republican to law-and-order conservative.

When Rockefeller changed his mind and became an active candidate, Agnew shunned him and delivered the nominating speech for Nixon at the Republican National Convention on 7 August 1968. His speech hailed Nixon as “the one man whom history has so clearly thrust forward, the one whom all America will recognize as a man whose time has come.” The next day Nixon chose Agnew as his running mate. Agnew acknowledged that his name was “not exactly a household word” and said that Nixon’s phone call was “a bolt from the blue.” Agnew, tall and well-groomed, was chosen partly because of his ethnic background and crossover appeal to traditionally Democratic constituencies.

In the fall campaign Agnew was Nixon’s hatchet man. Agnew attacked the Democratic presidential nominee Hubert H. Humphrey as “soft on communism” and “squishy soft” on Vietnam. Agnew, who was unaccustomed to national press coverage, was embarrassed by reports that he used ethnic slurs while traveling on his campaign plane. The Democrats, seeking to make Agnew’s inexperience a campaign issue, aired a television commercial in which a voice asked, “Spiro Agnew for vice president?” This was followed by laughter, then the narrator’s voice said, “This would be serious if it wasn’t so funny.”

After Nixon’s victory, Agnew became the administration’s most visible and controversial spokesperson. Law and order was a recurring theme in his speeches. “I will not lower my voice until the restoration of sanity and order will allow a quiet voice to be heard again,” he told a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, audience in November 1969. That same month he delivered a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, that labeled television commentators “a tiny fraternity of privileged men elected by no one and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government.” He later referred to critics of the Vietnam War as “an effete corps of impudent snobs” and “sunshine patriots.”

Agnew’s attacks on political opponents were harsh and personal. During the 1970 midterm election he referred to the liberal New York senator Charles E. Goodell as “the Christine Jorgensen of Republican politics” (Jorgensen had gained notoriety for a sex-change operation). He denounced the Republican representative from California Paul Mc-Closkey as “a Benedict Arnold” for challenging Nixon’s renomination in the 1972 New Hampshire primary. In November 1972 Nixon and Agnew were easily reelected. As Nixon became entangled in the Watergate controversy, Agnew loomed as the heir apparent.

Early in his second term, in 1973, Agnew became the subject of a federal investigation. The Justice Department obtained evidence that Agnew had been accepting illegal cash payments from contractors for more than a decade, while he was county executive, governor, and vice president. With Nixon’s future in doubt because of Watergate, Attorney General Elliot Richardson plea-bargained with Agnew to prevent him from moving up to the presidency. On 10 October 1973 Agnew resigned as vice president. He soon pleaded no contest to a single count of tax evasion in a federal courtroom in Baltimore. Agnew was placed on three years probation and was fined $10,000. He was disbarred in May 1974. Even though the government released overwhelming proof that he took bribes and kickbacks, Agnew vehemently denied all charges except tax evasion.

“My decision to resign and enter a plea of nolo contendere rests on my firm belief that the public interest requires swift disposition of the problems which are facing me,” Agnew said in the courtroom. “I admit that I did receive payments during the year 1967, which were not expended for political purposes and that, therefore, these payments were income taxable to me in that year and that I so knew.”

Agnew blamed Nixon for his downfall. “We were never close,” he said in 1976. “I haven’t seen him and have no desire to see him.” But when Nixon died in 1994, Agnew went to his funeral. “I decided after twenty years of resentment to put it all aside,” he said.

After leaving office Agnew split his time between homes in Rancho Mirage, California, and Ocean City, Maryland, working as an international business broker. Among his chief benefactors was King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. In May 1995 Agnew returned to the Capitol for the unveiling of his vice presidential bust outside the Senate chamber. He said he understood that some people felt it was “an honor I don’t deserve.” But, he continued, the sculpture “has less to do with Spiro Agnew than the office I held.” Agnew died of leukemia at the age of seventy-seven and is buried in Delaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium, Maryland.

Agnew’s political memoir is Go Quietly … or Else (1980). Jules Witcover, White Knight: The Rise of Spiro Agnew (1972), is the most authoritative biography, and Richard M. Cohen and Wit-cover, A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew (1974), is the best study of Agnew’s fall from grace. Agnew is profiled in the Philadelphia Inquirer (11 Oct. 1973). An obituary is in the New York Times (18 Sept. 1996).

Steve Neal