After the long weeks of buildup, of insisting upon his innocence, of accusing Government officials of plotting his downfall, of vowing that he would fight to the end, the denouement of the Spiro Agnew debacle came with stunning swiftness. His hands trembling slightly and his Palm Springs tan bleached white with tension, Agnew walked into a Baltimore courtroom last week and admitted that he had falsified his income tax in 1967. When he emerged half an hour later, Agnew had been transformed from Vice President of the United States into a convicted felon.
Why had Spiro Agnew so dramatically and abruptly decided to quit? "Because everything he tried flopped," one high-ranking Justice official declares flatly. Indeed, Agnew had tried a lot of things that had fizzled or seemed about to. He had asked the House of Representatives to investigate the charges against him, only to have Speaker Carl Albert send him back to the courts for justice. He had tried to kill the grand jury investigation into his misdeeds by arguing that a sitting Vice President could not be indicted for a crime, and also by claiming that Justice Department leaks had prejudiced the jurors, and it did not appear that he was going to get very far on either front.
He had taken his case to the country, hoping to arouse popular support with a televised speech that claimed he was being framed by the Justice Department and, by implication, Nixon himself. The Republican women in his Los Angeles audience cheered him to the rafters, but no nationwide ground swell of public opinion developed to lift him high. "Everything was downhill after L.A.," says Marsh Thomson, Agnew's press aide. "The point was driven home to him that he was 'dead.' The limb had been sawed off."
Fist Banging. Desperately, Agnew went back to the tactic that he had first tried and then abandoned: working out a deal with the Justice Department under which he would be accused of a relatively minor charge if he agreed to resign. Known as "plea bargaining"—or, less elegantly, "copping a plea"—the practice is commonly used in all courts. The prosecution settles for a sure conviction rather than going to the trouble or expense of proving a more ambitious— and time-consuming—case in court.
In early September, trying to find a way out of the mess, White House Counsel Fred Buzhardt, almost surely acting at Nixon's behest, had secretly initiated plea-bargaining sessions between Agnew's lawyers and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his top aides. From the outset, the overriding goal of Agnew's lawyers had been to keep their client from going to jail. Held in the huge, red-carpeted room just outside Richardson's office, the bargaining sessions were long and heated, the men often shouting at each other as they maneuvered for a settlement. Even Richardson, a very proper Bostonian who normally keeps himself under control, raised his voice several times and twice banged his fist down on the table.
But while the men were still arguing, the press learned about the bargaining. The resulting stories infuriated Agnew. "That's enough," he said. "There'll be no more negotiation."