Nixon and Agnew: The Odd Couple

How did they ever get along? They didn’t.

When Richard Nixon chose Maryland Gov. Spiro T. Agnew to be his running mate in 1968, he was thinking pragmatically. Agnew looked like a safe choice, an unknown from a small state with few political enemies. But he turned out to be a handful. The two politicians’ clashing styles quickly turned their initial friendship into mutual dislike. As the longtime political reporter Jules Witcover tells it in his fascinating new book, Very Strange Bedfellows: The Short and Unhappy Marriage of Richard Nixon & Spiro Agnew (PublicAffairs, 412 pages, $27.95), Agnew’s flashy rhetoric and prickly personality made him not only one of the most divisive Vice Presidents of modern times but also a thorn in the side of Nixon’s doomed Presidency.

Agnew was a first-term governor of Maryland when he came to the attention of Nixon's campaign team. In April 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee, Baltimore was roiled by race riots, like many cities across the United States. During the unrest, Agnew called out federal troops. Days later, the governor met with local, moderate black leaders in front of a battery of television cameras and castigated them for not publicly condemning the black radicals who had called for violence. He hinted that their appeasement of “the caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-down-America type of leader” made them de facto accessories to the violence of the riots. The black leaders were appalled by the accusation. One minister called Agnew “as sick as any bigot in America.”

The young speechwriter Patrick Buchanan showed Nixon newspaper reports about Agnew’s meeting, and the candidate was impressed. “The boss thought this guy was a very tough guy,” Buchanan would later say. That first impression would last. Several months later Nixon chose Agnew as his running mate.

Witcover points out that Nixon picked Agnew in part because he knew he would be a lively speechmaker on the campaign trail, one able to say things too impolitic for a presidential candidate. Indeed, Nixon had fulfilled a similar function as Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President. On this score, Agnew did not disappoint. During the 1968 campaign he claimed that student protesters against the war in Vietnam were “under control of the Communist Party U.S.A. or of Moscow” and called the Democratic presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, “soft on Communism.” He compared Humphrey to the Nazi-appeasing British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, while portraying Nixon as a Winston Churchill.

Agnew’s speechwriters, Buchanan and William Safire, turned out many tirades for him condemning the liberal bias in the press that many conservatives still perceive today. They came up with the labels “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless hysterical hypochondriacs of history” for Nixon’s opposition. Agnew himself coined the term “radic-lib” (a contraction of “radical liberal”), for congressmen who “applaud our enemies and castigate our friends.”

But his imprudent way with words often got him into trouble. Offhand references to “Polacks” and “Japs” caused uproars in the press. Once he was in office, he proved by no less difficult. He would often deviate from administration positions, embarrassingly and publicly, for example calling for the resignation of a presidential appointee, and telling reporters he had reservations about Nixon’s China policy.

As President, Nixon instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, to “program Agnew”—that is, make him follow the Nixon program. But this was easier said that done, as Witcover recounts. Agnew refused to take orders from Nixon through subordinates, insisting on face-to-face meetings with the President, who preferred to keep his distance. “We couldn’t program Agnew to leave a burning building,” Ehrlichman wrote at one point.

Nixon’s dislike of Agnew grew until he seriously considered replacing him on his 1972 reelection ticket, in discussions amply documented by Witcover’s extensive research of Oval Office tape-recording transcriptions. Surprisingly, Nixon’s first choice for a replacement was a Democrat, the hawkish former governor of Texas John Connally, with whom the President shared a dream of forming a new center-right coalition political party. (Nixon even talked of appointing Agnew to the Supreme Court to smoothly remove him from office.) But the Vice President’s extremely strong appeal in the South and in the right wing of the Republican Party led Nixon to grudgingly accept him for another term.

Agnew’s second term was brief. On January 30, 1973, the same day the Watergate burglars were sentenced in Washington, D.C. (starting a chain of events that eventually brought down the Presidency), Agnew was implicated in an unrelated Maryland case for taking bribes as governor in return for lucrative building contracts. Even more serious was the charge that he had received one $10,000 bribe at the White House, while he was Vice President. He vigorously denied the charges, but the weight of the evidence was crushing, and it became clear he would have to resign. He did so on October 10, 1973. He would go on to plead no contest to charges of tax evasion and be sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation and fined $10,000.

Nixon, knee-deep in Watergate, did little to help Agnew as the bribery scandal blew up. Indeed, Witcover makes it clear that Nixon wasn’t sorry to see his Vice President go. The two had their last meeting the day before Agnew resigned. “As I was leaving, Nixon put his arm around my shoulders, shook his head, and said again how awful it all was,” Agnew later wrote. “Incongruously, I suddenly had the feeling that he couldn’t wait to get me out of there.” He was right. Nixon replaced him with the House minority leader, Gerald Ford, who acceded to the Presidency when Nixon resigned less then 10 months later, in August 1974.

Very Strange Bedfellows is well-researched and highly enjoyable. There may be spots where the author quotes from transcripts of rambling Oval Office conversations longer than some readers might like, but Witcover gives us a vivid study of two complicated, incompatible personalities. It’s a riveting examination of a rarely visited side of the Nixon Presidency.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.