Tensions between American presidents and their vice presidents are natural. Franklin Roosevelt had three vice presidents; his first, John Garner, contemplated challenging Roosevelt for the 1940 Democratic nomination. Nixon himself felt ignored by Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. But nothing in previous administrations matched the pitched battle that began in September between the president’s top aide, Alexander Haig, and the sitting vice president, Spiro Agnew. Haig had not made Agnew’s problems go away; instead, Agnew faced a choice between resignation or conviction and prison. Haig, helped by Fred Buzhardt and Melvin Laird, kept up the leaks to undermine Agnew while also bullying the vice president into resigning and isolating Nixon from the political damage. Agnew already suspected Haig ran the White House. Nothing in the following month would persuade him otherwise.
Nixon and Haig remained focused on the Agnew problem for all of September, but the fate of the vice president was just one of Nixon’s challenges. Energy prices had risen steadily all summer because of high demand and the manipulation of the oil market by the newly powerful Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Rising oil prices pushed inflation higher; controls the administration had started to put into effect in June had not worked. In South America, Chile, where Nixon had tried to stop the democratic election of Marxist Salvador Allende as president in 1970, was melting down after three years of economic sanctions and U.S. interference. By the end of September, Allende would be dead and a military junta in power. The tenuous peace in Vietnam accomplished after four years of secret negotiations by Henry Kissinger threatened to blow apart, as fighting there had never really stopped. Such challenges would bedevil the most secure president. For Nixon, they added more strain to an already overloaded fuse box.
Nixon flew to Washington from San Clemente and arrived early in the morning of September 1 to give Agnew the meeting he had requested days earlier. The meeting started at 10:40 a.m. and lasted for two hours.1 “The strains were beginning to show” in Agnew, Nixon wrote. “I could see that he was no longer as sure as he had been in our first meeting that the charges against him were not provable in court; now he reflected on the fact that no court anywhere near Washington or Maryland could possibly treat him fairly.”2 Agnew knew Haig and Buzhardt were behind the unfair treatment from the White House. Leaks, Agnew said, were destroying his civil rights, something for which he blamed the Justice Department. Just as often, however, these leaks came from the White House, where Laird was spreading negative information about Agnew with his friends on Capitol Hill.
Even with all of the other news, Agnew dominated Nixon’s news conference on September 5. The president would not disclose what he had discussed with Agnew during his September 1 meeting and made a hedged defense of Agnew’s integrity “during the period that he has served as a vice president, during which I have known him.”3 Haig, meanwhile, was continuing to consult with Attorney General Elliot Richardson and with Agnew, who kept complaining that Justice and the White House were not sharing information.
“This is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen,” Agnew told Haig. “All we have is what we see in the newspapers. Why can’t we be leveled with?”4
Buzhardt, Haig told Agnew, was meeting with Richardson again that afternoon and would know more. “All I know is we got kicked in the ass,” Agnew said.5
Once again, this memory from Haig seems incongruous. Agnew did not mention it in his memoirs, although he catalogued virtually every utterance he had with Haig. By September 5 Agnew knew Haig was out to get him because Haig continued to force Agnew to resign. Agnew did not seem to understand the problems he had caused, Nixon told Haig on September 6. “Nixon wanted Buzhardt to read the handwriting on the wall to the vice president,” Haig wrote. “I want Agnew to know, without Buzhardt telling him that I know, what a very strong case there is, so that my rather limited support will be understood.”6
It bothered Nixon that Agnew had never told him that he would step aside if Nixon wanted him to, as Nixon had told Eisenhower during the height of the 1952 presidential campaign. Then, dogged by press accounts of how he spent a secret fund of money donated by political supporters, Nixon told Eisenhower he would quit the presidential ticket if Ike wanted him to.7
Agnew said he was fighting for his life, Haig said.
Maybe so, Nixon said, but Agnew never said, “I want to do what’s best for the country.”8
That was because Agnew, like the president he served, viewed what was best for him as what was best for the country. Agnew believed he represented a constituency of harder-edge conservatives who felt consistently shortchanged by the man they thought represented them—Nixon. Meanwhile, Nixon viewed himself as the leader who had reversed America’s decline and who had scored a series of foreign policy successes—ending the Vietnam War, opening relations with China, and reaching nuclear arms deals with the Soviet Union—of which other presidents could only dream. Nixon still feared that Agnew had enough influence with conservatives to undermine Nixon’s chances of surviving Watergate. He wanted Haig and Buzhardt to make Agnew realize how bad the prosecution’s case in Baltimore looked for him.
Haig and Buzhardt went to Richardson on September 8 to recommend that if he did present the Justice Department’s case to a federal grand jury, then he should do it without angering Agnew and his supporters.9 They did not, and most likely could not, say how to bring a case against a sitting vice president without attracting attention. Richardson said he wanted to make Agnew quit and prevent him from taking the case to the House of Representatives, where Agnew presumed he had enough support to stop an impeachment move.
On September 10 Haig and Buzhardt met with Agnew and his lawyers again, and again the message was the same: resign.10
Buzhardt laid out the legal case against Agnew as dispassionately as possible. He told the vice president about his former associates and employees who had testified against him, how they talked about giving Agnew envelopes of cash in the vice president’s office, and of a culture of kickbacks and corruption that went back to Agnew’s tenure as Baltimore County executive. “I was to be a living demonstration that the President spurned cover-ups, let the chips fall where they might—this was the whole idea behind the White House move to make me quit,” Agnew recounted. Then Haig said Agnew had to quit now. Judah Best, Agnew’s attorney, interceded, telling Haig that Agnew did not deserve to hear such a conversation. Agnew then left the office so that Best, Haig, and Buzhardt could continue the conversation without him.11
Agnew still would not resign, but he let Best crack the door open to resignation. On September 11 Buzhardt told Richardson that Agnew’s lawyers were ready to start talking.12
A day later, Haig and Buzhardt went back to Agnew’s office at 6:05 p.m. to try again. Haig said Nixon had ordered Richardson and Henry Petersen to review the facts in the case again. “The president wants to do what’s right,” Haig said.13 Buzhardt followed with a recitation of what Richardson had told them. Agnew’s longtime friend, I. H. “Bud” Hammerman, had testified that he had collected payoffs from eight state contractors and then given half of the money to Agnew while keeping 25 percent for himself and giving the other 25 percent to Jerry Wolff, another longtime Agnew associate and the Maryland roads commissioner. Agnew was not satisfied and wanted confirmation from the Justice Department itself. He told Haig and Buzhardt he would keep fighting.
“Richardson thinks it’s a strong case,” Haig said. “It’s a hell of a situation. If we go along with the move to the House, Elliot will move concurrently and ask Speaker [Carl] Albert to hold it up. Albert will want to wait.”
How do you know that? Agnew asked.
Nixon had checked with members of Congress. “You won’t be supported,” Haig said. “The President has lost his ability to exercise any power. The House action will take six months. There will be a clamor for a trial.”14
In the Senate, the issue of the FBI wiretaps had arisen in Kissinger’s confirmation hearings to be secretary of state. He denied any serious involvement in the taps, including the selection of the targets. On September 10 Richardson came to his rescue, telling the Foreign Relations Committee that he could not release the FBI’s May report on the taps. “It has been Justice Department policy that this kind of material should not be disclosed unless an overruling public interest makes it essential,” Richardson said. Such a comment and the way Justice dribbled out access to the report to two senators—Democrat John Sparkman of Alabama and Republican Clifford Case of New Jersey—showed how Justice wanted to keep the details from the rest of the committee. Richardson, who had spent much of the summer helping Haig try to persecute Pentagon investigator Donald Stewart, was helping Kissinger cover up the wiretaps. Laird and Bryce Harlow were Nixon’s two best sources of information about the mood on Capitol Hill, where Laird had sabotaged Agnew’s support among House Republicans.15
Agnew finally realized his options had all but disappeared. Best told him that they should at least listen to what the Justice Department and White House had to say. Their one condition was that Agnew not be prosecuted and not do jail time.16
While Haig continually pressured Agnew to resign, he had also succeeded in conning the vice president into believing that the momentum came from Richardson, with whom Agnew had an animosity that dated back to the early days of the first term. Agnew believed Richardson harbored designs on the 1976 Republican nomination for president, a race that would be markedly easier without an incumbent vice president as an opponent. Best, Agnew’s attorney, went to see Richardson and Petersen on September 13. The two Justice officials seemed skeptical that they could negotiate Agnew’s resignation. But Buzhardt had already orchestrated everything. Agnew mistakenly believed that Nixon had agreed to push Agnew out of office to make Richardson feel better when Nixon fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. “So again I was treated like a pawn in the game—the game of Watergate cover-up,” Agnew wrote in his memoirs.17
Agnew still had his defenders. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the staunch conservative who lost the 1964 presidential race to Lyndon Johnson, visited Agnew at his home. He told Agnew not to lose heart and that Laird had been on Capitol Hill “trying to cut [Agnew’s] legs off.” It was another example of how Laird worked with Haig and Buzhardt, Laird’s close friend, to protect their interests. In this case, eliminating Agnew in order to get a more politically acceptable vice president served them all. “Hang in there and fight it,” Goldwater told Agnew. “They’re just trying to ride you out. Go to the House, but don’t tell the White House—just go on your own.” Goldwater then called Harlow and complained about Agnew’s treatment.18
At the same time, Richardson told U.S. Attorney George Beall to present evidence to the federal grand jury in Baltimore when it resumed work in two weeks. Haig told Nixon that Justice had given a plea bargain agreement to Agnew’s lawyers, and Buzhardt believed the agreement language would push Agnew to reach a final deal. “If that doesn’t satisfy him, I may have to play tough,” Nixon told Haig.19
Whether Haig believed him is another matter. Throughout the Agnew crisis, from the time Nixon first heard about the grand jury investigation in April to the end game in the fall, Nixon let Haig do his dirty work for him. Not once in his meetings with Agnew did Nixon tell his two-time running mate that he had to leave office, that he lacked confidence in him, or that he considered him a crook. Nixon believed all those things, yet he delegated the duty of being “tough” to his chief of staff, the same man who believed Agnew had to go so Nixon could be forced out.
On September 14, spooked by Goldwater’s call, Buzhardt and Harlow flew to meet the senator in Phoenix, where they showed Goldwater the evidence against Agnew. Goldwater said he did not “give a damn if Agnew was as guilty as John Dillinger.” He would not support the White House’s attempts to deny Agnew his right to defend himself in court. Goldwater knew Nixon did not like Agnew much, so he felt little guilt about telling Agnew to protect himself by going to the House.20
Goldwater’s opposition notwithstanding, the momentum against Agnew continued to build. Richardson and his team conducted a seven-hour meeting on September 15, after which they concluded they could let Agnew resign in exchange for a no-contest plea to tax evasion.21
As Agnew twisted in the wind, Archibald Cox started three days of meetings with Buzhardt on September 17 to find a compromise on getting some of the tapes. The battle in the courts ground on, and while the tide seemed to be in Cox’s favor, there was no guarantee that he would prevail in the end or that Nixon would honor whatever the court decided. Buzhardt could not simply hand over the tapes as long as Nixon opposed giving them up. So Buzhardt had to grind away gradually, creating obstacles to Cox while he and Haig sought other ways to undermine Nixon. Somewhere in the discussions, Cox made the unfortunate mistake of suggesting that a third party might be able to verify transcripts of the tapes. That suggestion, author J. Anthony Lukas wrote, “would soon come back to haunt him.”22
After Richardson’s help on September 10, Kissinger returned to a closed session of the Foreign Relations Committee a week later to testify more about the wiretaps. As he had since the issue first arose earlier in the year, he lied, this time under oath. “First, I never recommended the practice of wiretapping,” he told the panel. “I was aware of it, and I went along with it to the extent of supplying names of the people who had had access to the sensitive documents in question. Despite some newspaper reports, I never recommended it, urged it or took it anywhere.”23
Nixon, Haig, and the few others in the White House familiar with the wiretaps knew that was a lie. Kissinger’s denials about the wiretaps so angered Nixon that he told Haig about the existence of the White House taping system to expose Kissinger. But he now needed Kissinger confirmed as secretary of state. Nixon remained quiet, as did Haig, and they hoped the issue would go away. It did, but not for long.
By September 18 leaks about Agnew’s resignation had started to appear in the press, and the White House did little to stop the speculation that Agnew was on the outs. Gerald Warren, Nixon’s deputy press secretary, said the president stood by his September 5 assertion that he believed in Agnew’s integrity as vice president. Still, Agnew’s supporters believed the damage was done. “This is calculated by the White House to keep the Agnew story alive,” said Victor Gold, Agnew’s former press secretary. “I blame the staff at the highest level, by which I mean Melvin Laird and General Haig.”24
In response, Haig and Laird lied and told the Post they had nothing to do with trying to get Agnew to resign.25
Agnew’s lawyers met with Richardson, Henry Petersen, and George Beall at the Justice Department on September 19 to begin negotiations in earnest. Richardson, Agnew wrote, shared his concern that Nixon might end up leaving office before Agnew.26 Nixon’s sudden admission to Bethesda Naval Hospital in July for viral pneumonia spooked Richardson, who wondered if Nixon had more serious health problems. Maybe the stress had caused Nixon to have a stroke. “There could be speculation about the pressures on the vice president to resign,” Agnew wrote that Richardson told him. “Indeed so! And who would know more about those pressures than he, himself—unless it might be General Haig?” Agnew also met again that day with Haig, who again pushed Agnew to resign. He told Agnew that prosecutors in Baltimore would try to have the grand jury indict Agnew and make their case public. Immediately after that, Haig said, Nixon would call on Agnew to resign. Agnew continued to wonder just how much of what he heard from Haig came from Nixon and “how much was dictated by Haig.”27
Nixon left the White House on September 19 to spend the night at the Bethesda, Maryland, home of his daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, the grandson of the former president. He returned the following morning and huddled or spoke with Haig five times before he met with Agnew in his hideaway office in the Old Executive Office Building. During their eighty-two-minute meeting, Agnew told Nixon he had not violated the public trust, and Nixon said he believed him. Richardson, Agnew said, was being completely vindictive and was out to get him, but he would resign if Richardson pledged not to prosecute him for a felony. “The President must have realized that a long, drawn-out trial not only would be ruinous for me, it would also be disastrous for him,” Agnew wrote. “His overpowering desire was to save himself in his struggle for survival against the Watergate special prosecutors who were relentlessly closing in on him.”28
Nixon called Haig as soon as Agnew left, and the two met for almost an hour before they walked to the Oval Office, where they talked for another half hour.29 Haig then brought in Buzhardt, and together they called Richardson. They told the attorney general he could not force Agnew into a trial, and Richardson pushed back. He would not agree to let Agnew simply plead no contest to federal tax evasion charges and resign without admitting he had done anything wrong. After all, why would Agnew resign if he had done nothing wrong? There had to be an admission, and without one, Richardson would not agree to drop charges in exchange for a guilty plea. Haig and Buzhardt pushed back even harder; Agnew had to go, and the sooner the better. Richardson could not stand in the way. But Richardson would not budge.30
Richardson called Buzhardt on the morning of September 21 to say that he had not changed his mind about the need for Agnew to admit guilt, and to his surprise, Haig called him back and said Nixon had reconsidered and decided he would rather force Agnew to acknowledge guilt than have Richardson resign in protest, particularly as the White House continued to negotiate with Cox about the fate of the White House tapes.31 Buzhardt told Nixon at 3:45 p.m. that there seemed to be a breakthrough with Agnew.32
Starting on Saturday, September 22, Richardson spent the weekend talking with Haig and Buzhardt about the shape of a deal with Agnew. Also that Saturday, Nixon welcomed Kissinger to the White House for his swearing in as secretary of state, an event that attracted celebrants who reflected Kissinger’s wide swath of friends and supporters: New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, actor Kirk Douglas, members of the National Security Council staff, and two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kissinger had withstood the scrutiny of his involvement in the FBI wiretaps with Haig, a relief to both men, but the Senate did not look that hard. By the time they voted 78–7 to confirm him on September 21, most senators saw Kissinger as the island of stability in the roiling seas of the Nixon administration.
The deal with Agnew started to blow up even as Richardson tried to negotiate Agnew’s plea and resignation. The Washington Post reported accurately, through leaks, that Agnew was negotiating for a resignation. Henry Petersen told CBS News, “We’ve got the evidence” against Agnew. “We’ve got it cold.”33 By Sunday, September 23, Agnew was no longer willing to plead no contest and quit: he wanted to fight. “If we have to go to war,” Agnew told Judah Best, “we will blow a lot of people out of the water.”34
Agnew scheduled a meeting with Nixon for the morning of September 25. Before the president saw Agnew, Nixon huddled with Haig and Richardson for ninety minutes and then with Petersen for another twenty-seven minutes.35 Richardson and Petersen had met with Nixon before Agnew got there. Richardson told Nixon he would take the case to the grand jury in Baltimore that day. They thoroughly prepared Nixon for another session with the increasingly bitter Agnew. Nixon’s aides had worked with him long enough to know how much he hated confrontation, even with his subordinates, like Agnew. They were right to be worried. Agnew told Nixon he never received any money while vice president—which Nixon had to know was a lie after meeting with Richardson and Petersen—and that the charges being pushed by Richardson were just another attempt to ruin him politically. He would only resign if granted complete immunity from prosecution.
“Then, for a moment, his manner changed, and in a sad and gentle voice he asked for my assurance that I would not turn my back on him if he were out of office,” Nixon wrote.36 Agnew told Nixon he would take his chances with an impeachment investigation by the House of Representatives, where the elected officials who would judge him had a more nuanced view of campaign contributions and relations with donors than the members of any federal grand jury in Baltimore. Although he said he wanted Agnew to resign and was frustrated with his refusal to do so, Nixon told Agnew he had to wait until later in the afternoon to announce his plans to go to the House, because Nixon wanted to make sure Agnew did not spark any sudden moves by federal prosecutors in Baltimore.37
Agnew reached out to House Speaker Carl Albert that afternoon with his plan to have the House of Representatives begin a full impeachment inquiry. Richardson had already talked to Albert and told the Oklahoma Democrat that Agnew would be indicted. Haig wrote that Albert wanted to get rid of Agnew so he could become president once Agnew and Nixon were gone.38 That is sheer fantasy concocted by Haig for his memoirs to justify his pushing Agnew out. There is no evidence that Albert, an unassuming man of sixty-five, ever coveted the White House. He believed that as a Democrat he had no claim on the office that had been won twice by Nixon, a Republican. Albert said that if anything had happened to Nixon and Albert somehow became president, he would appoint a Republican vice president and then resign.39 Plus, as Haig also wrote, Nixon had no plans to let the office of vice president stay open long enough for Albert to fill the breach.40 Nixon asked Haig to call John Connally and prepare him for a call to be nominated as vice president when Agnew resigned.
Albert quickly rejected Agnew’s impeachment gambit on September 26. Agnew now faced the grand jury in Baltimore, and his legal team moved on September 28 to block the grand jury, claiming that the saturation news coverage of his case meant he could not get an impartial jury. Agnew also had another plan. On September 29 he traveled to Los Angeles, where he played golf with his friend Frank Sinatra and gave a belligerent speech before a convention of Republican women in which he pledged not to resign even if indicted. The Justice Department, Agnew said, was trying to frame him through a series of “malicious leaks” and perjured testimony.41 The supportive crowd roared, and Agnew felt emboldened. The speech, he wrote, “touched off a wave of anger and fear inside the White House.”42 This reaction prompted Haig to call Nixon at Camp David, where the president was trying to determine what to do about the tapes that Cox had subpoenaed.43
Agnew also feared Haig was behind leaks that claimed Agnew had a four-stage plan to attack the prosecution against him, starting first with Petersen, then moving to Beall, then to Richardson, and finally to the president. Agnew believed this plan gave Haig the justification he needed to tell Nixon they had to give Agnew an offer he could not refuse, after which Agnew would resign. By this point, it was hard to determine who wanted Agnew to resign more, Nixon or Haig. While Haig had his reasons to get rid of Agnew, because his resignation would make it easier to remove Nixon, the president had also tired of the drama surrounding the vice president he had reluctantly picked in the first place.
In Camp David, Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had started to transcribe the tapes that Cox had subpoenaed, even as the White House fought turning the tapes over. They ran into a problem on September 30, when they went to look for the tapes of conversations from June 20, 1972, involving aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. They could not find one of the tapes, and Steve Bull called Haig for guidance. Haig talked to Buzhardt, who told him that only the conversation with Ehrlichman was included in the subpoena.44
By the end of September, Haig had cleared the hurdle of Kissinger’s confirmation hearings without damaging disclosures about the FBI wiretaps. Kissinger had perjured himself, but he had lied before and gotten away with it. He seemed to have done that again. Agnew was finally getting the message and was close to resigning, which would let Nixon fire Cox and close the special prosecutor’s office. Haig’s plans were aligning, but problems he could not see were building beyond the horizon.