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Rockefeller's withdrawal, together with the Baltimore riots that followed Martin Luther King's assassination, profoundly altered Agnew's thinking. Agnew was so certain that Rockefeller would announce his entry into the Oregon primary that he invited reporters into his office to watch the Governor's press conference on TV. Through some incredible oversight in New York, no one had bothered to inform Rockefeller's most ardent admirer that Nelson was about to quit the race instead. Agnew had to bear his disappointment and humiliation in public. Though the New Yorker apologized handsomely, Agnew never forgave him. Nixon became more and more attractive.
The Baltimore riots were even more traumatic for Agnew, who had to call out some 5,700 National Guardsmen and ask for nearly 4,800 federal troops to restore order. Agnew suspected a conspiracy, citing a visit to Baltimore by Stokely Carmichael several days before the trouble—and King's murder—as evidence. Within hours after the shooting stopped, he called 100 moderate Negro leaders into his office and gave them a tongue-lashing for not having counteracted Carmichael's fulminations. "You were intimidated by veiled threats," the Governor told them. "You were stung by insinuations that you were Mr. Charlie's boy, by epithets like Uncle Tom." Before he had finished, 70 of the 100 had walked out, insulted by his top-sergeant tone. "In dignity," editorialized the Baltimore Sun, "they could hardly do otherwise."
Maryland's Negroes had helped boost Agnew to victory in 1966 and generally considered him a firm friend. After April, his black support shriveled virtually to nothing. Today he is anathema to Maryland Negroes. He criticized national "preoccupation with civil liberties" at the expense of security, said that police were justified in shooting looters if they failed to obey commands to halt, assailed President Johnson for allowing the Poor People's Campaign to camp on federal land. He attacked the Kerner Commission for abetting rioting by talking of white racism. There is "an aura of belief," he said shortly before the convention, "that rioting is the inalienable right of the ghetto resident. If one wants to pinpoint the cause of riots, it would be this permissive climate and the misguided compassion of public opinion." He added: "It is not evil conditions that cause riots, but evil men."