CHAPTER 15

WHY’D HE DO IT?

Here’s a question worth considering: Why’d he do it? Not why did he extort and bribe and stay on the take even after he got to the White House. That’s pretty obvious, given the kind of man Spiro Agnew was—tidily summed up by the assessment of one venerable and gimlet-eyed Maryland pol on the occasion of Agnew’s death: “Lightning kept striking this guy who never had a machine, an organization or a record. He was a little hustler out of Baltimore County who made it to the White House, with no anchor, no mooring, no core. Gives politics a bad name.”

The real question worth considering is this: Why did this hustler, this counterpunching political-pugilist tough guy, finally knuckle under and become the first vice president in history to resign in disgrace?

Agnew had his own explanation, which grew increasingly dramatic as the years went on. The story he told centered on the ten days or so after he returned from that rejuvenating trip to Southern California where he played golf with Sinatra and whipped the Republican women’s convention into a proper lathered frenzy.

The federal bribery investigation was closing in on Agnew just then. The grand jury was about to reopen. The threat of indictment was hanging over his neck like a sharp scythe. Solicitor General Robert Bork was in the process of eviscerating his best legal argument—his immunity argument—in federal court. Oh, and Vice President Agnew was barely on speaking terms with the man to whom he owed his place in the White House. Richard Nixon had long since ceased supporting his vice president in public; in private, the president had made it abundantly and increasingly clear that he wanted Agnew to resign.

The way Agnew later told the story, the morning of October 4, 1973, was the turning point for him. That was the day, Agnew later explained, that the White House chief of staff, Alexander Haig, delivered a message that “sent a chill through my body.” Haig summoned a close adviser of Agnew’s, Mike Dunn, to his West Wing office that day. “The clock is running,” Haig said, according to Dunn’s memorialization of the meeting. The evidence the Justice Department now had “was massive”; prosecutors believed they had “an ironclad case for conviction.” Once Agnew was indicted, Haig told Dunn, “it will be too late…to do this gracefully.” The vice president needed to resign, or “we are off to the races and cannot control the situation any longer. Anything may be in the offing. It can, and will, get nasty and dirty. Don’t think that the game cannot be played from here.”

When Dunn briefed him after the meeting, Agnew later recalled, his aide said Haig “also reminded him” exactly who it was that Agnew was disobeying. “The president has a lot of power,” Haig had said. “Don’t forget that.”

Agnew said later he took Haig’s pointed reference to the president’s “power” as a direct threat to his personal safety. “I feared for my life,” he wrote in his memoirs. “If a decision had been made to eliminate me—through an automobile accident, a fake suicide, or whatever—the order would not have been traced back to the White House any more than the ‘get Castro’ orders were ever traced to their source.” He was “close enough” to the presidency to know that a chief executive “could order the CIA to carry out missions that were very unhealthy for people who were considered enemies.”

In so many words, Agnew was alleging that he only resigned the vice presidency to save his own life—because Richard Nixon had threatened to have him assassinated if he didn’t resign. Seriously? “I didn’t know what General Haig meant when he said ‘anything may be offing, things may get nasty and dirty,’ ” Agnew said in a television interview in 1980, years after his resignation. “There’s no doubt in my mind that these things are possible. I don’t say it was a probability, but I do say it was a possibility.”

Asked if he thought “there were men around Richard Nixon—either in the White House staff or in the official mechanism of the CIA—who were capable of killing a vice president of the United States if they felt he was an embarrassment,” Agnew answered somberly, “I don’t doubt that at all.”

Agnew said that he was so fearful at the time that he bought a gun for protection. “I’ve never carried the handgun,” he admitted. “I thought it was sufficient that people would know I had the permit to carry one.”

“I’ve never said it was a probability that my life was in danger,” he hedged in another interview. “I said it was one of the factors that crossed my mind and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back after all the pressures that had been put on me.”

And so, the ridiculous supposed Oval Office murder plot became the story Spiro Agnew would promote about his resignation, in multiple national television appearances, long after he was otherwise gone from public life. It wasn’t enough that he couldn’t admit that his own actions, his own crimes, had brought historic disrepute on the institution he served. He had to go further than that, to try to make himself seem like just another one of Richard Nixon’s innocent victims.

For his part, Al Haig told a reporter for The Washington Post that Agnew’s claim “was the most preposterous thing he had ever heard of.”

Agnew’s aide Mike Dunn—who in Agnew’s telling had received and passed on the supposed murder threat—agreed with Haig that the whole thing was laughable. “In my mind, there was never any threat of bodily harm. The idea never entered my consciousness,” he told the same reporter. “In all fairness,” he said, “the man was distraught at the time, as he had every reason to be.” But even years later, this was the story Spiro Agnew wanted to tell: Richard Nixon’s inner circle pressured him to resign, and when he refused to do it, they threatened his life. Sure thing, Ted, whatever you say.

There is, however, a competing explanation for why Spiro Agnew called it quits when he did, declining to even try to fight the charges against him. And the alternate explanation does involve a perceived threat to Agnew from a three-letter federal agency, but not the CIA.

Throughout the time that Agnew was under scrutiny from U.S. Attorney George Beall and his team of young federal prosecutors, a separate Agnew investigation was happening parallel to that federal criminal probe. Special agents from the Internal Revenue Service had been quietly and diligently combing through Agnew’s past, hoping to find the answer to one burning question: How exactly had the vice president been spending all of his ill-gotten gains? These were the same IRS agents who had turned up the first smoking-gun evidence of the bribery scheme against Agnew’s successor, Dale Anderson, back in Baltimore County. These were the same agents whose digging led the U.S. Attorney’s office to Lester Matz and Jerry Wolff and, eventually, Spiro Agnew. They knew Agnew’s cash was coming in as bribes, but they were also looking into how he was spending that bribery money and the potentially crucial question of whether he was evading taxes in the process. Financial records in hand, the agents fanned out across the country to find receipts. “They were looking at every Coca-Cola that he had purchased,” Marty London recalls.

“By nature, it’s a very slow, laborious process,” says Ron Liebman of this kind of “net worth” investigation. The agents slowly documented “where every penny came in and where every penny came out.” Eventually, unsurprisingly, they hit a nerve.

The IRS investigators found what looked to be evidence of a secret life. Nothing fancy. Just the same sort of banal antics that defined the Mid-century Modern Madman: mistresses, sports cars, expensive gifts. “There was jewelry, too,” says Tim Baker. “A woman’s watch which [Agnew’s wife] Judy never got.”

This wasn’t a trail of evidence the Baltimore prosecutors were eager to pursue. “These guys, they have all these personal peccadilloes, you know, they have money and power and they do stupid things,” says Liebman. “And we came across financial evidence of that and we heard some stories. One of them quite bizarre.” He won’t elaborate, but it was the sort of behavior that “involves sex. It involves mistresses. It involves all kinds of bad behavior.

“We investigated it. We confirmed it as much as we could. But we never decided to use it.” There was never even a real debate—which, Liebman knows, might seem odd today. “Pre–Monica Lewinsky—unlike Ken Starr, I guess—we just said, ‘This is not a part of the case.’ ”

Agnew and his attorneys, meanwhile, were very much aware that the tax men had been rummaging around in his personal life. “I knew that there was an IRS net worth investigation; obviously the vice president knew that as well,” Marty London says. “That’s the thing you’re trying to shed. That’s what anyone who is in that tax bind wants to get rid of.”

Agnew was so concerned that he went to Nixon to address this aspect of the investigation. He complained directly to the president, in private, that the prosecutors were tracking down everything he ever bought and every detail of his personal life. “Was Agnew worried that that might all come out? Probably he was,” Liebman says. “Maybe he was worried that we would make it public.”

“He wanted to get on with his life; he wanted to get the hounds off his back,” says London. “He wanted the end of the IRS investigation.” And so maybe that’s what collapsed his defenses and made him decide to quit. Sounds cooler, though, if it was because Nixon was going to send the CIA to fake-suicide him. That would at least sell more books?