(6 of 6)
For Agnew, the need for money is a familiar one. He was always an "ethnic" kid from Baltimore on the way up, but painfully slowly. His setbacks, his false starts must have gnawed at him—-withdrawing from Johns Hopkins University with poor grades. In World War II, he proved steady under fire, but he was always passed over for promotion. Back in Maryland after the war, he got a degree from the nonaccredited law school at the University of Baltimore, practiced law intermittently and with little success, tried his hand as an insurance adjuster, even fetched up at one point as an assistant manager of a supermarket. Nothing seemed to click until, at the age of 38, he was appointed a member of the Baltimore County board of zoning appeals, a body with great power over the builders in the area.
Suddenly politics became a way to security. Agnew was operating in a state where, as he himself pointed out in court last week, payments of businessmen to politicians were so common that no one thought much about them. The prudent contractor simply budgeted for payoffs the way other businessmen put money aside for taxes.
Hard on Race. Agnew got his big chance in 1966 when he was elected Governor, winning because he then was relatively liberal, and running against a reactionary. But when ghetto riots hit Baltimore in 1968, Agnew met with the leaders of the state's black moderates and, before the TV cameras, dressed them down for not controlling the rioters. The incident established Agnew as a hard-liner on race and helped catch the eye of Richard Nixon.
In 1968 Candidate Nixon was presiding over a brainstorming conference on possible running mates when Agnew's name came up. Someone in the room warned that the Governor's record in Maryland looked suspicious. Nixon brushed the remark aside. As it turned out, he had already decided to pick Agnew.
The tough talking and law-and-order pose of Agnew may have helped Nixon win two elections, but the former Vice President contributed precious little to the Nixon Administrations, except to serve as a willing hatchet man, warring with the "irresponsible" press and firing off salvos of alliterative tongue twisters at weak-kneed liberals—those "nattering nabobs of negativism." But the plain fact was that Agnew was less at home with politicians than he was with celebrities and millionaires. He never seemed very happy in his work. But it takes money to play in the Frank Sinatra league—money or a title—and now Agnew has neither.
Perhaps Agnew would not seem to have fallen so far if he had not held himself up so high to the nation as the advocate of law and order. But fall he did, and the change was instantaneous. The day after his resignation, Agnew was attending the funeral of a half-brother when someone solicitously asked his wife, "What about the Vice President?" Quickly, Mrs. Agnew made the correction. "You mean the former Vice President," she said.