CHAPTER 12

“I’M A BIG TROPHY”

At a little after four o’clock on the afternoon of September 25, 1973, just a few hours after President Nixon had discussed the impending criminal indictment of Vice President Agnew with Attorney General Elliot Richardson and the chief of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, Henry Petersen, Agnew himself marched up to Capitol Hill to open a new front in his war. Sporting a conservative dark gray suit and a blood-red tie, Agnew entered the office of House Speaker Carl Albert with a three-page letter in hand. It was the damnedest ask any Speaker had ever received. “I respectfully request that the House of Representatives undertake a full inquiry into the charges which have apparently been made against me,” the letter read. “I shall, of course, cooperate fully. As I have said before, I have nothing to hide….I am wholly at the disposal of the House.” It was a formal request to be investigated by Congress. And impeached, if they saw fit.

The vice president didn’t think he could get a “fair shake” in a Maryland courtroom, see. A “jury” of his actual peers, his political peers, would be more sympathetic to the vice president than the trial jury of regular old American citizens in a federal courthouse. Members of Congress, after all, knew how the game was played. “ ‘All of those guys up there have done the same thing,’ ” Keene remembers Agnew saying. “ ‘I just want them to look me in the face.’ ”

Agnew thought he was setting up a formidable skirmish line. Given his army of Republican support on Capitol Hill—Hang in there, baby!—the vice president judged the impeachment process his best chance at survival. Even if Democrats impeached him in the House, Agnew believed, enough Republicans would stick by him in the Senate that he would be able to escape conviction and removal from office. More important at that moment, if he could get Congress to take up impeachment, Agnew was pretty sure the Justice Department would feel forced to stand down on the criminal grand jury proceedings.

Speaker Albert was noncommittal when he met with curious reporters after the hour-long meeting with Agnew. “Nothing’s ruled out,” the Speaker said, “nothing’s ruled in.”

Albert passed the letter on to Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which would handle the impeachment inquiry. Rodino “read the letter,” recalls David Keene, “and said, ‘Go tell [Agnew] to fuck himself.’ ” There would be no impeachment, not while federal criminal proceedings were gearing up against the vice president. The House wasn’t going to provide that kind of cover for Agnew.

The battle between Agnew and the Justice Department picked up speed after that; two days later, on September 27, 1973, the prosecutors Barney Skolnik, Tim Baker, and Ron Liebman presented the evidence of Agnew’s misdeeds to a grand jury for the first time—seven hours’ worth of witnesses able to provide direct evidence of the vice president’s having committed criminal bribery and extortion. The day after, Agnew filed a motion for a protective order “prohibiting the grand jury from conducting any Investigation looking to possible indictment of applicant and from issuing any indictment, presentment or other charge or statement pertaining to applicant.” Agnew’s lawyers argued in their filing that “the Constitution forbids that the Vice President be indicted or tried in any criminal court….In consequence, any investigation by the grand jury concerning applicant’s activities will be in excess of the grand jury’s jurisdiction and will constitute an abuse.”

The motion paused the grand jury proceedings pending a ruling from the judge, but this cease-fire did not pertain across all theaters of war. Agnew did not pause his battle against the prosecutors; he began to rally his own troops—his own best troops. They were not who you might expect.

The Republican Party that sent Nixon and Agnew to the White House—twice—covered a remarkably wide ideological spectrum. It included the Barry Goldwater libertarian Republicans of the 1960s. It included young right-wingers who would later make up the Reagan Revolution. There were moderate and liberal Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller of New York. And southern whites who fled the Democratic Party over the passage of civil rights laws.

But none of those disparate ideological slivers could provide the energy and legwork it takes to really get stuff done in politics. Inside the party, everybody knew who the real activists, the real soldiers, were: Republican women.

Democrats had labor unions organizing on their behalf and mobilizing their working-class base across the country. Republicans were developing an equally devoted grassroots network in the form of conservative women. “That’s where the ground troops came from,” says David Keene.

And right there on the calendar, already scheduled, September 29, 1973, was Vice President Spiro Agnew’s keynote address to the annual convention of the National Federation of Republican Women. The perfect place to raise the rally cry. At the perfect time.

The convention was in Los Angeles, and Agnew took the opportunity to head west a day early, for an overnight visit with a trusted ally, Frank Sinatra. The two pals got in a game of golf at Sinatra’s home course in Rancho Mirage, then repaired to his private residence a short walk from the seventeenth fairway. Over the course of a pasta dinner (the host made it himself!) and then late into the night, Sinatra’s prodding riled Agnew up to the point where he was seeing red. This was no time to play defense. The vice president had to be on the attack.

At breakfast the next morning Agnew warned his aides he might travel a bit outside the remarks they had prepared for delivery to the Republican women’s conference. He wanted to get a few things off his chest but promised to contain his rage. By the time he stepped onto his Air Force JetStar at the Palm Springs airport, Agnew had received word that the speech would be televised, live, to the entire nation, raising the stakes considerably for the embattled vice president.

As Agnew sped toward the National Federation of Republican Women conference that morning, the Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles was already electric. Not even mealy addresses by the party chairman, George H. W. Bush, and John Connally, rumored to be Nixon’s choice to replace Agnew, could kill the buzz. Attendees told an NBC News correspondent on the floor that they intended to show Agnew that “they’re supporting him in his time of greatest need.”

The crowd’s enthusiasm, noted another reporter, was surpassed only by its hostility for the media there to cover the event. “Some women approached newsmen ready for a fight,” the reporter later wrote. “Several women took notes or tape-recorded the speech [themselves] so they could report on it when they returned [home]—a precaution in case the papers did not tell the entire story.”

Agnew and his wife, Judy, walked into the convention hall just before his 10:00 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time speaking slot—early afternoon on the East Coast. The crowd greeted them with thunderous cheers and applause, waving their signs in front of the network TV cameras: SPIRO IS MY HERO and AGNEW FOR PRESIDENT. The sound system blared Agnew’s “My Kind of Man” campaign jingle, which was almost drowned out by chants of “Fight, Agnew, fight! Fight, Agnew, fight!”

Spiro Agnew took the podium looking like a man rising to his full height, a man unbowed. “I don’t know what it is about [Sinatra’s place],” one of Agnew’s aides told a reporter, “but it seems to charge him up.” The vice president then unleashed a nationally televised tirade the likes of which had rarely been seen before in American politics.

“In the past several months, I’ve been living in purgatory,” he began. “I have found myself the recipient of undefined, unclear, unattributed accusations that have surfaced in the largest and the most widely circulated organs of our communications media. I want to say at this point, clearly and unequivocally: I am innocent of the charges against me! I have not used my office, nor abused my public trust as county executive, as governor, or as vice president to enrich myself at the expense of my fellow Americans.”

Agnew then walked the crowd through the many and splendored ways he had been unjustly wronged and slandered by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Federal prosecutors, he said, had been intentionally and illegally releasing details of their investigation. “Leaks have sprung in unprecedented quantities. And the resultant publication of distortions and half-truths has led to a cruel form of kangaroo trial in the media! The accusatory stories maliciously supplied by ‘anonymous sources.’ ”

The source of all the damaging leaks was not only the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore, Agnew claimed, but also officials at the top echelons of the DOJ. “It was not through my fault that this became a non-secret procedure, but through deliberately contrived actions of individuals in the prosecutorial system of the United States, and I regard those as outrageous and malicious.” When those bad actors are revealed to have “abused their sacred trust and forsaken their professional standards,” he continued, “then I will ask the president of the United States to summarily discharge those individuals!”

With the convention hall hanging on his every word, Agnew started naming names. “I say this to you,” he told the rapt convention attendees, “the conduct of high individuals in the Department of Justice—particularly the conduct of the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Division of that department”—Henry Petersen—“is unprofessional and malicious and outrageous, if I am to believe what has been printed in the news magazines and said on the television networks of this country, and I have had no denial that that is the case.”

Elliot Richardson’s trusted deputy, Agnew continued, had “made some very severe mistakes, serious mistakes, in the handling of his job.” Seizing on Petersen, Agnew launched into detail about his failures as a prosecutor. “He considers himself a career professional in a class by himself, but a recent examination of his record will show not only that he failed to get any of the information out about the true dimensions of the Watergate matter, but that he also—through ineptness and blunder—prevented the successful prosecution of high-crime figures.” Because of these shortcomings, Petersen “needs me to reinstate his reputation as a tough and courageous and hard-nosed prosecutor. Well, I’m not going to fall down and be his victim, I assure you!

“Now, people will say to me ‘Why? You don’t make sense. Why should a Republican Department of Justice and a Republican prosecutor attempt to get you?’ Well, I don’t know all the answers, but I would say this: that individuals in the upper professional echelons of the Department of Justice have been severely stung by their ineptness in the prosecution of the Watergate case…and they are trying to recoup their reputation at my expense, I’m a big trophy!”

Even Richard Nixon, neck-deep in Watergate trouble, had not taken the extraordinary step of attacking his own Justice Department. Not in public. Not like this. But here was the vice president: accusing Justice Department officials of misconduct, accusing prosecutors of leaking information to the press, and naming his antagonists and alleged bad actors and pledging to purge them from the government.

Agnew finished his speech with another jaw-dropping assertion: “I want to make another thing so clear that it cannot be mistaken in the future. Because of these tactics which have been employed against me, because small and fearful men have been frightened into furnishing evidence against me—they have perjured themselves in many cases it’s my understanding—I will not resign if indicted!”

The Republican women greeted this with nearly a full minute of uninterrupted, thunderous applause. Agnew repeated, “I will not resign if indicted!”

The crowd in the hall approached DEFCON-1-level frenzy as the Agnew speech rose to crescendo. “Yelling and waving anything they could get their hands on, the delegates surged forward to greet Mr. Agnew after his speech,” The New York Times wrote of the scene, “and one woman expressed the sentiment that ‘he was fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.’ ”