He cited as precedent an 1826 House investigation of Vice President John C.
He wrote a novel and a memoir; both defended his actions. ==Early life== ===Family background=== Spiro Agnew's father was born Theophrastos Anagnostopoulos in about 1877, in the Greek town of Gargalianoi.
Spiro Agnew was born 11 months later, on November 9, 1918. Margaret Pollard, born Margaret Marian Akers in Bristol, Virginia, in 1883, was the youngest in a family of 10 children.
The family may have been involved in olive growing and been impoverished during a crisis in the industry in the 1890s.
He accepted their invitation to run for county executive, the county's chief executive officer, a post which the Democrats had held since 1895. Agnew's chances in 1962 were boosted by a feud in the Democrat ranks, as the retired former county executive, Michael Birmingham, fell out with his successor and defeated him in the Democratic primary.
Anagnostopoulos emigrated to the United States in 1897 (some accounts say 1902) and settled in Schenectady, New York, where he changed his name to Theodore Agnew and opened a diner.
Anagnostopoulos emigrated to the United States in 1897 (some accounts say 1902) and settled in Schenectady, New York, where he changed his name to Theodore Agnew and opened a diner.
A passionate self-educator, Agnew maintained a lifelong interest in philosophy; one family member recalled that "if he wasn't reading something to improve his mind, he wouldn't read." Around 1908, he moved to Baltimore, where he purchased a restaurant.
After Pollard died in April 1917, Agnew and Margaret Pollard began a courtship which led to their marriage on December 12, 1917.
After the marriage to Agnew in 1917 and Spiro's birth the following year, the new family settled in a small apartment at 226 West Madison Street, near downtown Baltimore. ===Childhood, education, early career, and marriage=== In accordance with his mother's wishes, the infant Spiro was baptized as an Episcopalian, rather than into the Greek Orthodox Church of his father.
Spiro Theodore Agnew (; November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973.
Spiro Agnew was born 11 months later, on November 9, 1918. Margaret Pollard, born Margaret Marian Akers in Bristol, Virginia, in 1883, was the youngest in a family of 10 children.
My beliefs are his." During the early 1920s, the Agnews prospered.
This period of affluence ended with the crash of 1929, and the restaurant closed.
In 1931, the family's savings were wiped out when a local bank failed, forcing them to sell the house and move to a small apartment.
He refused his father's offer to pay for Greek language lessons, and preferred to be known by a nickname, "Ted". In February 1937, Agnew entered Johns Hopkins University at their new Homewood campus in north Baltimore as a chemistry major.
In 1939 he decided that his future lay in law rather than chemistry, left Johns Hopkins and began night classes at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
The Post in particular had been hostile to Nixon since the Hiss case in the 1940s.
Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, he began basic training at Camp Croft in South Carolina.
They began dating, became engaged, and were married in Baltimore on May 27, 1942.
There, he met people from a variety of backgrounds: "I had led a very sheltered life—I became unsheltered very quickly." He eventually was sent to the Officer Candidate School at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and on May 24, 1942—three days before his wedding—he was commissioned as a second lieutenant. After a two-day honeymoon, Agnew returned to Fort Knox.
He served there, or at nearby Fort Campbell, for nearly two years in a variety of administrative roles, before being sent to England in March 1944 as part of the pre-D-Day build-up.
Agnew returned home for discharge in November 1945, having been awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge and the Bronze Star. ===Postwar years (1945–1956)=== On his return to civilian life, Agnew resumed his legal studies, and secured a job as a law clerk with the Baltimore firm of Smith and Barrett.
Agnew took Barrett's advice; on moving with his wife and children to the Baltimore suburb of Lutherville in 1947, he registered as a Republican, though he did not immediately become involved in politics. In 1947 Agnew graduated as Bachelor of Laws and passed the Maryland bar examination.
He stayed there for four years, a period briefly interrupted in 1951 by a recall to the army after the outbreak of the Korean War.
He resigned from Schreiber's in 1952, and resumed his legal practice, specializing in labor law. In 1955, Lester Barrett was appointed a judge in Towson, the county seat of Baltimore County, Maryland.
Nixon, mindful of the restrictions he had labored under as Eisenhower's running mate in 1952 and 1956, was determined to give Agnew a much freer rein and to make it clear his running mate had his support.
Agnew could also usefully play an "attack dog" role, as Nixon had in 1952. Initially, Agnew played the centrist, pointing to his civil rights record in Maryland.
He resigned from Schreiber's in 1952, and resumed his legal practice, specializing in labor law. In 1955, Lester Barrett was appointed a judge in Towson, the county seat of Baltimore County, Maryland.
He was a lover of order and an almost compulsive conformist." ==Beginnings in public life== ===Political awakening=== Agnew made his first bid for political office in 1956, when he sought to be a Republican candidate for Baltimore County Council.
Nixon, mindful of the restrictions he had labored under as Eisenhower's running mate in 1952 and 1956, was determined to give Agnew a much freer rein and to make it clear his running mate had his support.
Representative James Devereux before he was appointed to the Baltimore County Board of Zoning Appeals in 1957.
In April 1958, he was reappointed to the Board for a full three-year term and became its chairman. In the November 1960 elections, Agnew decided to seek election to the county circuit court, against the local tradition that sitting judges seeking re-election were not opposed.
In April 1958, he was reappointed to the Board for a full three-year term and became its chairman. In the November 1960 elections, Agnew decided to seek election to the county circuit court, against the local tradition that sitting judges seeking re-election were not opposed.
The 1960 elections saw the Democrats win control of the county council, and one of their first actions was to remove Agnew from the Zoning Appeals Board.
In 1962, he was elected Baltimore County Executive.
According to Agnew's biographer, Jules Witcover, "The publicity generated by the Democrats' crude dismissal of Agnew cast him as the honest servant wronged by the machine." Seeking to capitalize on this mood, Agnew asked to be nominated as the Republican candidate in the 1962 U.S.
He accepted their invitation to run for county executive, the county's chief executive officer, a post which the Democrats had held since 1895. Agnew's chances in 1962 were boosted by a feud in the Democrat ranks, as the retired former county executive, Michael Birmingham, fell out with his successor and defeated him in the Democratic primary.
Since 1964 he had supported the presidential ambitions of Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and early in 1968, with that year's elections looming, he became chairman of the "Rockefeller for President" citizens' committee.
Goldwater's crusade in 1964, at the height of Johnsonian liberalism, came too early, but by the time of Agnew's election, liberalism was on the wane, and as Agnew moved to the right after 1968, the country moved with him.
In 1966, Agnew was elected Governor of Maryland, defeating his Democratic opponent George P.
After the failure of moderate Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton's candidacy at the party convention, Agnew gave his reluctant support to Goldwater, but privately opined that the choice of so extremist a candidate had cost the Republicans any chance of victory. ==Governor of Maryland (1967–1969)== ===Election 1966=== As his four-year term as executive neared its end, Agnew knew that his chances of re-election were slim, given that the county's Democrats had healed their rift.
Instead, in 1966 he sought the Republican nomination for governor, and with the backing of party leaders won the April primary by a wide margin. In the Democratic party, three candidates—a moderate, a liberal and an outright segregationist—battled for their party's gubernatorial nomination, which to general surprise was won by the segregationist, George P.
During the 1966 election, his record had won him the endorsement of Roy Wilkins, leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Both papers had enthusiastically endorsed Agnew's candidacy for governor in 1966 but had castigated him as unfit for the vice presidency two years later.
There were rumors that Agnew might be involved, which Beall initially discounted; Agnew had not been county executive since December 1966, so any wrongdoing potentially committed while he held that office could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.
Several cities exploded in violence, and there were riots in Cambridge, Maryland, after an incendiary speech there on July 24, 1967, by radical student leader H.
On October 9, Agnew visited Nixon at the White House and informed the President of his impending resignation. On October 10, 1973, Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore, and pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to one felony charge, tax evasion, for the year 1967.
Pressman. At the 1968 Republican National Convention, Richard Nixon asked Agnew to place his name in nomination, and named him as running mate.
In March 1968, when faced with a student boycott at Bowie State College, a [black institution], Agnew again blamed outside agitators and refused to negotiate with the students.
on April 4, 1968, there was widespread rioting and disorder across the US.
he thinks like George Wallace, he talks like George Wallace". ==Vice presidential candidate (1968)== ===Background: Rockefeller and Nixon=== At least until the April 1968 disturbances, Agnew's image was that of a liberal Republican.
Since 1964 he had supported the presidential ambitions of Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and early in 1968, with that year's elections looming, he became chairman of the "Rockefeller for President" citizens' committee.
When in a televised speech on March 21, 1968, Rockefeller shocked his supporters with an apparently unequivocal withdrawal from the race, Agnew was dismayed and humiliated; despite his very public role in the Rockefeller campaign, he had received no advance warning of the decision.
At the same time, Agnew denied any political ambitions beyond serving his full four-year term as governor. ===Republican National Convention=== As Nixon prepared for the August 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, he discussed possible running mates with his staff.
Agnew was not yet a national figure, and a widespread reaction to the nomination was "Spiro who?" In Atlanta, three pedestrians gave their reactions to the name when interviewed on television: "It's some kind of disease"; "It's some kind of egg"; "He's a Greek that owns that shipbuilding firm." ===Campaign=== In 1968, the Nixon-Agnew ticket faced two principal opponents.
Had Nixon lost those five states, he would have had only the minimum number of electoral votes needed, 270, and any defection by an elector would have thrown the election to the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. ==Vice presidency (1969–1973)== === Transition and early days === Immediately after the 1968 election, Agnew was still uncertain what Nixon would expect of him as vice president.
He went to Memphis for the 1968 Liberty Bowl, and to New York to attend the wedding of Nixon's daughter Julie to David Eisenhower.
Nevertheless, many of the commission assignments Nixon gave Agnew were sinecures, with the vice president only formally the head. === "Nixon's Nixon": attacking the left === The public image of Agnew as an uncompromising critic of the violent protests that had marked 1968 persisted into his vice presidency.
The vice president told the press he was anxious to discard the image he had earned as a partisan campaigner in 1968 and 1970, and wanted to be perceived as conciliatory.
Goldwater's crusade in 1964, at the height of Johnsonian liberalism, came too early, but by the time of Agnew's election, liberalism was on the wane, and as Agnew moved to the right after 1968, the country moved with him.
Spiro Theodore Agnew (; November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973.
When in 1969, after his vice presidential inauguration, Baltimore's Greek community endowed a scholarship in Theodore Agnew's name, Spiro Agnew told the gathering: "I am proud to say that I grew up in the light of my father.
Nixon initially gave Agnew an office in the West Wing of the White House, a first for a vice president, although in December 1969 it was given to deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield and Agnew had to move to an office in the Executive Office Building.
Arthur Sohmer, Agnew's long-time campaign manager, became his political advisor, and Herb Thompson, a former journalist, became press secretary. Agnew was sworn in along with Nixon on January 20, 1969; as was customary, he sat down immediately after being sworn in, and did not make a speech.
Still, he urged a firm line against violence, stating in a speech in Honolulu on May 2, 1969, that "we have a new breed of self-appointed vigilantes arising—the counterdemonstrators—taking the law into their own hands because officials fail to call law enforcement authorities.
We have a vast faceless majority of the American public in quiet fury over the situation—and with good reason." On October 14, 1969, the day before the anti-war Moratorium, North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong released a letter supporting demonstrations in the United States.
The attendees at the speeches were enthusiastic, but other Republicans, especially from the cities, complained to the Republican National Committee that Agnew's attacks were overbroad. In the wake of these remarks, Nixon delivered his Silent Majority speech on November 3, 1969, calling on "the great silent majority of my fellow Americans" to support the administration's policy in Vietnam.
The speeches gave Agnew a power base among conservatives, and boosted his presidential chances for the 1976 election. === 1970: Protesters and midterm elections === Agnew's attacks on the administration's opponents, and the flair with which he made his addresses, made him popular as a speaker at Republican fundraising events.
He traveled over on behalf of the Republican National Committee in early 1970, speaking at a number of Lincoln Day events, and supplanted Reagan as the party's leading fundraiser.
Agnew was successful in being heard at an April 22, 1970, meeting of the National Security Council.
Nixon had Haldeman tell Agnew to avoid remarks about students; Agnew strongly disagreed and stated that he would only refrain if Nixon directly ordered it. Nixon's agenda had been impeded by the fact that Congress was controlled by Democrats and he hoped to take control of the Senate in the 1970 midterm elections.
The vice president told the press he was anxious to discard the image he had earned as a partisan campaigner in 1968 and 1970, and wanted to be perceived as conciliatory.
For Agnew, one bright spot was Goodell's defeat by Buckley in New York, but he was disappointed when his former chief of staff, Charles Blair, failed to unseat Governor Marvin Mandel, Agnew's successor and a Democrat, in Maryland. === Re-election in 1972 === Through 1971, it was uncertain if Agnew would be retained on the ticket as Nixon sought a second term in 1972.
In the presidential election of 1972, Nixon and Agnew were re-elected for a second term, defeating Senator George McGovern and his running mate Sargent Shriver. In 1973, Agnew was investigated by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud.
Levy argued that such remarks were designed to attract Southern whites to the Republican Party to help secure the re-election of Nixon and Agnew in 1972, and that Agnew's rhetoric "could have served as the blueprint for the culture wars of the next twenty-to-thirty years, including the claim that Democrats were soft on crime, unpatriotic, and favored flag burning rather than flag waving".
For Agnew, one bright spot was Goodell's defeat by Buckley in New York, but he was disappointed when his former chief of staff, Charles Blair, failed to unseat Governor Marvin Mandel, Agnew's successor and a Democrat, in Maryland. === Re-election in 1972 === Through 1971, it was uncertain if Agnew would be retained on the ticket as Nixon sought a second term in 1972.
Even after Nixon announced his re-election bid at the start of 1972, it was unclear if Agnew would be his running mate, and it was not until July 21 that Nixon asked Agnew and the vice president accepted.
At the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Agnew was greeted as a hero by delegates who saw him as the party's future.
Despite Agnew's efforts, Democrats easily held both houses of Congress, gaining two seats in the Senate, though the Republicans gained twelve in the House. ===Criminal investigation and resignation=== In early 1972, George Beall, the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland, opened an investigation of corruption in Baltimore County, involving public officials, architects, engineering firms, and paving contractors.
Most of the running mates selected by the major parties after 1972 were seasoned politicians—Walter Mondale, George H.
Spiro Theodore Agnew (; November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973.
In the presidential election of 1972, Nixon and Agnew were re-elected for a second term, defeating Senator George McGovern and his running mate Sargent Shriver. In 1973, Agnew was investigated by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud.
In February 1973, Agnew heard of the investigation and had Attorney General Richard Kleindienst contact Beall.
On October 9, Agnew visited Nixon at the White House and informed the President of his impending resignation. On October 10, 1973, Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore, and pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to one felony charge, tax evasion, for the year 1967.
House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, who would be Agnew's successor as vice president (and Nixon's as president) recalled that he heard the news while on the House floor and his first reaction was disbelief, his second sadness. ==Post-resignation== ===Subsequent career: 1973–1990=== Soon after his resignation, Agnew moved to his summer home at Ocean City.
He had hoped he could resume a career as a lawyer, but in 1974, the Maryland Court of Appeals disbarred him, calling him "morally obtuse".
The speeches gave Agnew a power base among conservatives, and boosted his presidential chances for the 1976 election. === 1970: Protesters and midterm elections === Agnew's attacks on the administration's opponents, and the flair with which he made his addresses, made him popular as a speaker at Republican fundraising events.
A public announcement was made the following day. Nixon instructed Agnew to avoid personal attacks on the press and the Democratic presidential nominee, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, to stress the positives of the Nixon administration, and not to comment on what might happen in 1976.
Trying to position himself as the front-runner for 1976, Agnew campaigned widely for Republican candidates, something Nixon would not do.
In 1976 he published a novel, The Canfield Decision, about an American vice president's troubled relationship with his president.
A subsequent thank-you letter implies that Agnew received the requested loan. In 1976, Agnew announced that he was establishing a charitable foundation "Education for Democracy", but nothing more was heard of this after B'nai B'rith accused it of being a front for Agnew's anti-Israeli views.
Agnew was now wealthy enough to move in 1977 to a new home at The Springs Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California, and shortly afterwards to repay the Sinatra loan.
favors the Israeli position and does not in a balanced way present the other equities". In 1980, Agnew wrote to Fahd bin Abdulaziz, at the time Crown Prince and de facto Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, claiming that he had been bled dry by attacks on him by Zionists and requesting an interest-free three-year loan of $2 million, to be deposited in a Swiss bank account, on which the interest would be available to Agnew.
In 1980, Agnew published a memoir, Go Quietly ...
In a rare TV interview in 1980, he advised young people not to go into politics because too much was expected of those in high public office.
In 1981, a judge ruled that "Mr.
After two unsuccessful appeals by Agnew, he finally paid the sum in 1983.
In 1989, Agnew applied unsuccessfully for this sum to be treated as tax-deductible. Agnew also was briefly in the news in 1987, when as the plaintiff in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, he revealed information about his then-recent business activities through his company, Pathlite, Inc.
In 1989, Agnew applied unsuccessfully for this sum to be treated as tax-deductible. Agnew also was briefly in the news in 1987, when as the plaintiff in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, he revealed information about his then-recent business activities through his company, Pathlite, Inc.
When Nixon died in 1994, his daughters invited Agnew to attend the funeral at Yorba Linda, California.
Spiro Theodore Agnew (; November 9, 1918 – September 17, 1996) was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973.
this ceremony has less to do with Spiro Agnew than with the office I held". On September 16, 1996, Agnew collapsed at his summer home in Ocean City, Maryland.
Agnew's wife Judith survived him by 16 years, dying at Rancho Mirage on June 20, 2012. ==Legacy== At the time of his death, Agnew's legacy was perceived largely in negative terms.
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