The American Vice Presidency (68 page)

Agnew continued his tirade in New Orleans, declaring, “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” He said, “If the Moratorium had any use whatever, it served as an emotional purgative for those who felt the need to cleanse themselves of their lack of ability to offer a constructive solution to the problem.”
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In collaboration with the Nixon speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire, the vice president was reintroducing himself to America. Noting the furor he was creating, he said, “It appears that by slaughtering a sacred cow I triggered a holy war. I have no regrets. I do not intend to repudiate my beliefs, recant my words, or run and hide.”
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Also in that November, shortly after Nixon had made a televised speech in defense of his Vietnam policy, Agnew took on network news analysts who had observed that there was little new in the policy. Agnew assaulted their “instant analysis and querulous criticism,” declaring that Nixon had the right to communicate with the American people without having his words and thought “characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics before they can even be digested.” He questioned the concentration of power “in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by the government” and suggested it was “a form of censorship.”
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His remarks were taken as a declaration of war on the television industry, raising concerns about loss of federal broadcast licenses. The next time Nixon made a televised speech, the network analysts limited themselves to perfunctory recaps of what he had said.

Next, Agnew targeted the print press, particularly the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, and it was clear by now that Ted Agnew was
having a whale of a time making himself “a household name.” He sprayed his audience with alliterations, speaking of “partisans of passion,” “supercilious sophisticates,” and, later, “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” To suggestions that Agnew was going too far, Nixon asked only that his administration leaders remember that “when the action is hot, keep the rhetoric cool.”
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Agnew, however, was emboldened by now to try to assert more influence in the White House, particularly as pushback against Ehrlichman. “We couldn’t program Agnew to leave a burning building,” Ehrlichman wrote later.
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In August 1970, the Nixon speechwriters were told to target Democratic liberals and again worked closely with Agnew on a catchy description of those in their aim. They came up with “radical liberals,” sometimes shortened to “radiclibs,” a catchall that even caught in its web a New York Rockefeller Republican, Senator Charles Goodell, who would lose in November. Agnew was now riding high in the Gallup Poll, running third nationally behind only Nixon and the Christian evangelist Billy Graham.

At one late fall planning meeting, however, he artlessly told Nixon, “Mr. President, as I travel around I get a great many questions about our 1972 ticket.” Nixon merely dodged, telling him, “Of course, this far ahead the President can’t say anything. Just say we’re only thinking about November of 1970. You can say, ‘The President has shown great confidence in me so far, and I hope it will continue.’ ”
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For all the mayhem that Agnew had wrought on his targets, the Republicans picked up only two Senate seats, losing nine in the House and eleven governorships.

At the postelection Republican Governors Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Agnew was dispatched to inform the attendees that Nixon was appointing as his new secretary of treasury a former governor, John B. Connally of Texas—a Democrat. To the Republicans present, including the eleven who had lost in November and were looking for new jobs, the news was not welcome. Agnew also lectured them not to place blame or offer excuses for the losses suffered, “even when it masquerades as constructive criticism.”
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One of the surviving governors, Tom McCall of Oregon, called the vice president’s remarks “a rotten, bigoted little speech” and “the most divisive speech ever given by such a high official.”
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At a private meeting with the governors, Agnew confronted McCall, who replied sarcastically, “I’m not
sure I said ‘rotten.’ ” He denied that he had ever called for Agnew to be dumped from the ticket in 1972 but simply had raised the question of whether Nixon would want to run with someone who had campaigned “with a knife in his shawl.”
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In 1971, when Nixon was in sensitive consultations on opening relations with what was then called Communist China, the subject of Taiwan came up at a meeting of the National Security Council. When UN Ambassador George H. W. Bush reported that the United States didn’t have enough votes to save Taiwan’s UN seat, Agnew spoke up: “Mr. President, I think it’s very simple. The Security Council has every right to do whatever they want, and we have every right to kick their asses out.” The next day, according to the Nixon aide William Timmons, Haldeman informed Agnew, “Your presence won’t be required at NSC meetings henceforth.”
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Shortly afterward, as part of a proposed thaw with mainland China, an American table-tennis team played a vastly superior Chinese team using second-string players as a gesture of friendship, and the Americans still lost. But an end to a trade embargo between the two countries followed, and Nixon was praised for his “ping-pong diplomacy.” Agnew in a late-night bull session with some reporters said he thought the United States had taken a propaganda beating, that relations with Taiwan would suffer badly, and the United States would appear too eager to reach an accommodation with China. According to the White House tapes, when Nixon heard about this, he told Henry Kissinger, “I suppose you saw what our Peck’s Bad Boy did yesterday … where he popped off as he does, on this subject, not knowing his ass from his face.”
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Word was passed to Agnew to leave comments on foreign policy to the president.

What Agnew didn’t know at the time was that Nixon and Kissinger were deep in secret dealings on a groundbreaking visit of Nixon’s to mainland China. Nixon was startled when Agnew suggested that inasmuch as he was going to South Korea for the inauguration of the president, he might just pop over to China! A stammering Nixon turned Agnew off without revealing his own plans.
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Soon after, when traveling in Africa, Agnew indelicately told one leader there that he disagreed with Nixon on China, whereupon the president complained to Ehrlichman, “Twice Agnew has proposed that
he
go to China! Now he tells the world it’s a bad idea for me to go! What am I going to do about him?”
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On April 7, 1971, in a taped Oval Office talk with Haldeman, Nixon mused on how he might get Agnew to resign before the 1972 election and then nominating John Connally to replace him as vice president. “We’ve got to do something, but I don’t know what the Christ to do,” Nixon said. “What’s he [Agnew] going to resign for? … Decides to own a television network and so forth? That would be great. Get somebody to buy CBS and have Agnew run it.”
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After further discussion, Nixon suddenly came up with a brainstorm. “Hey, Bob. Let me ask you about the [Supreme] Court.… I’m very much afraid if you put Agnew on, it would raise holy hell in the country, of course.”
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Here was an American president so eager to get his vice president out of the line of presidential succession that he was perfectly willing to shunt him to the highest judicial bench. The notion was dropped for the moment, to be revived soon after.

As for Connally, he saw the vice presidency as a dry hole and continued to resist Nixon’s entreaties. In mid-July, the president took him to the mountaintop, describing how the job would be different for him: “You in the job would be basically the president’s stand-in.… Basically everybody would know it.… If there was something important to do, you would do it.”
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But Attorney General John Mitchell still favored Agnew, arguing that Connally as a Democrat could not win Senate confirmation. “Before long,” Ehrlichman wrote later, “Mitchell had talked with Nixon, and soon most of the Connally-for-Agnew stars had gone out of the president’s eyes.”
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In September, Ehrlichman again mentioned Agnew, and Nixon offered, “Agnew once told me he wanted to be on the court,” referring to the U.S. Supreme Court. Haldeman: “God, that would really rip things up. Talk about your blockbusters. They’ll say, ‘What’s the shoe Nixon’s gonna drop next?’ ” Nixon (defensively): “He’d be a damned good judge.” And moments later: “Agnew’s a red-hot lawyer. I say why not put him on the court?”
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In the end, Nixon dropped the idea, but according to Haldeman’s diaries, “He still thinks he should indicate his support [for Agnew] whether or not he intends to drop him later, and he thinks also it’s a good way to get the P out of the black VP question [nominating an African American] which is sure to arise.”
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Pat Buchanan said later, “By then Nixon realized, ‘Look, if you tear this ticket up, you’re gonna antagonize and alienate the whole conservative movement, for whom Agnew was a tremendous hero
… and why would you do that when it looked like you were playing with a pat hand?”
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Through all this, Agnew was out on the campaign trail hammering the Democrats in general and Ed Muskie in particular as the perceived frontrunner. On the night of June 17 a group of burglars hired by the Committee to Reelect the President broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. They were caught by police, triggering the investigation that ultimately drove Nixon from the presidency.

For once, the freezing out of Agnew from the Nixon inner circle was serendipitous for him, keeping him free of an involvement in the break-in itself and the cover-up. The yet-to-be fully investigated episode did not inhibit the landslide reelection of Nixon and Agnew in November, when the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator George S. McGovern, and his running mate, R. Sargent Shriver, carried only the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

A week after the reelection, Nixon was already fretting about Agnew’s expected bid to take over the presidency in 1976. “I’m not sure he’s the one to succeed me in 1976—but we may be stuck with him,” he told Ehrlichman. “By any criteria he falls short. Energy? He doesn’t work hard; he likes to play golf. Leadership? Consistency? He’s all over the place.” Haldeman suggested, “Maybe the Vice President needs your ‘benign neglect.’ ” Nixon agreed, “Yes, that should be our strategy.”
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Before long, there would be nothing regarding Agnew for Nixon to joke about. Five days before the second Nixon-Agnew inauguration, a Baltimore County contractor showed his lawyer a subpoena calling him before a grand jury investigating construction kickbacks to Baltimore County officials. When the lawyer told him he would have to tell what he knew or lose immunity against prosecution, the contractor blurted out that he could not do that, explaining, “Because I have been paying off the vice president.”
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Thus began a long and dramatic episode that ended nearly nine months later with Agnew’s resignation in disgrace after pleading nolo contendere to multiple charges of taking bribes as the Baltimore County executive, the governor of Maryland, and even as the vice president. The contractor told of making payoffs to Agnew for county and state contracts that Agnew had steered to him back in Maryland and were still generating income for his
firm. These were made in the basement of the White House, including one of about ten thousand dollars in cash.
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As the case developed, Nixon and his chief confidants began to think of Agnew’s troubles in relation to Nixon’s own Watergate dilemma, and the beleaguered president began to entertain thoughts of giving up. On April 17, 1973, a White House tape caught him telling Kissinger, “I’ve even considered the possibility of, frankly, just throwing myself on the sword, and letting Agnew take it. What the hell.”
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And eight days later: “You know, people say, ‘Impeach the president.’ Well, then, they get Agnew.”
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When someone raised the question of Nixon’s physical safety, he called Agnew his “insurance policy,” adding, “No assassin in his right mind would kill me. They know that if they did they would end up with Agnew!”
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In mid-May, the first stories on the Baltimore investigation of the contractor broke in the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Washington Post
without implicating Agnew. On July 16, Alexander Butterfield of the White House staff jolted the Senate Watergate investigating committee with the existence of the recording system in the Oval Office. The noose was getting tighter on Nixon and also on Agnew. White House chief of staff Alexander Haig was informed that prosecutors had enough evidence to charge the vice president with “forty felony counts for violations of federal statutes on bribery, tax evasion and corruption.”
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Questions were raised, however, whether under the Constitution a president or vice president could be indicted and removed by any measure other than impeachment—trial by the House and conviction by the Senate. The White House lawyers reasoned that if Agnew as vice president could avoid indictment, so could Nixon as president. By this time, however, the insurance policy theory had worn thin, and Nixon wanted Agnew out. He sent Haig and the political adviser Bryce Harlow to tell Agnew he wanted him to resign. Agnew later characterized them as having “brought the traditional suicide pistol to my office and laid it on my desk.”
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He refused without a chance to make his case directly to Nixon, to no avail.

In the end, Attorney General Elliot Richardson agreed to remove a prospective felon from the line of presidential succession and to enter into plea bargaining with Agnew’s lawyers before the federal judge in the case. He recommended that Agnew not be imprisoned but did not stipulate it as a condition of the plea bargain. The judge sentenced Agnew to three
years of unsupervised probation and a fine of ten thousand dollars. After resigning, Agnew read a summary statement of guilt, in which he admitted taking payments that he did not report on his income tax returns but insisted they had not influenced his official actions.
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Then he walked out of the courtroom a free but disgraced and bitter private citizen.