In the most trying and tumultuous week of his political life, Spiro Agnew suddenly decided to seek a brief respite in a little afternoon tennis. He asked his press secretary to join him. "Fine," replied Marsh Thomson, "but I'll have to go home and get my gear." Lugging his bag, Thomson arrived back at the Executive Office Building just before 4 o'clock only to find his boss unexpectedly engaged. In the corridor outside Richard Nixon's first-floor hideaway office, he recognized two of the Secret Servicemen assigned to Agnew. The President and the Vice President were having a talk. The two men met alone for an hour and a half and emerged only after agreeing to tell no one what they discussed. Agnew seemed discouraged as he left, a fact that Thomson found completely understandable. "It's a rough ball game," he said, "and the slings and arrows are coming hot and heavy."
The Nixon-Agnew meeting added velocity to the tornado of speculation, rumor, charge and countercharge sweeping through Washington. With a federal grand jury in Baltimore poised to hear evidence against Agnew of bribes, extortion and kickbacks dating from his days as a Maryland official, with almost daily fresh revelations of perhaps not illegal but certainly improper gifts of cash, goods and services to Agnew, the crisis seemed close to some kind of explosive resolution. One version had it that Agnew was about to resign and fight his case as a private citizen, another that Nixon was twisting the screws to persuade him to resign, a third that the Vice President was desperately trying to make a deal with Attorney General Elliot Richardson's Justice Department—and ultimately, of course, with the White House—to resign in exchange for having the case against him dropped.
TIME has learned that the third version is the accurate one, and moreover that the deal fell through. According to sources close to the case, triangular negotiations took place between Agnew representatives and officials in the White House and the Justice Department. What Agnew's men proposed was a simple exchange. If he stepped down as Vice President, the Government would not attempt to prosecute him.
Richardson's aides were willing to entertain a bargain. What Agnew wanted was of course not possible, they said, but would Agnew be willing to plead guilty to a single charge in the case? In turn, the department was prepared to urge the courts to be lenient with the Vice President after his resignation.
Agnew eventually rejected that offer, unwilling to settle for anything less than complete amnesty as the price of yielding office. But the bargaining, say these sources, accounted for the mysterious delay in presenting the Agnew evidence to the grand jury after Richardson had decided that that was the inescapable course of action and had so notified Agnew. All parties to the secret negotiations denied that any such talks had taken place.
But it is difficult in Washington for any major maneuvering ever to be kept totally secret, and enough fragments kept leaking out to make it as wild and woolly — particulary woolly — a week as the capital has known.