Passed Vice Presidents - # 39 - Spiro T. Agnew

Grave of Spiro T. Agnew (27 September 2021)

Served under Richard Nixon

20 January 1969 – 10 October 1973 (resigned)

Preceded by # 38 – Hubert Humphrey

Succeeded by # 40 – Gerald Ford

Born – 9 November 1918

Died – 17 September 1996 (age 77)

Buried – Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, Timonium, MD

Date Visited – 27 September 2021

How to begin a new year of posts? Let’s set the scene. It’s very wintery out there…few living or green things to appreciate. The nation’s politics are awful. Covid continues to dominate society thanks to the ignorant and gullible…and their enablers in government and the media. Our cooktop blew up on Christmas and will take about eight weeks to replace. The resulting foul mood seems the perfect setting for a visit to the grave of Tricky Dick Nixon’s vice president, Spiro T. Agnew.

Bright September day. I finally take the time to visit the vice president grave that was always the closest one to me. Just north of the Baltimore beltway is Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, one of those updated cemeteries where almost all graves are marked with ground-level plaques…easier to mow and maintain as long as you don’t imagine the old John Deere regularly rolling over Grandma.

To balance the ill will caused by visiting Nixon’s hatchet man, I also paid my respects to Johnny Unitas, the Hall of Fame Baltimore Colts quarterback who ushered in the modern pro football era and ‘Billy Don’ Schaefer, Maryland’s quirky former governor.

Grave of John Unitas

Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, Baltimore (27 September 2021)

Unitas was the Hall of Fame quarterback for the Baltimore Colts.

They won the 1958 NFL championship game against the

New York Giants. It was considered the greatest game

ever (until last weekend’s playoffs) and it heralded the

arrival of pro football as the country’s new national pastime.

Son of a Greek immigrant father, Spiro Agnew grew up in Baltimore, earned a law degree after WW II, and entered politics as a somewhat progressive Republican at a time when Democrats in this border state included hard-core segregationists. This allowed him to win enough crossover votes and rise from Baltimore County Executive to governor to vice president.

Mausoleum Interior

Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens (27 September 2021)

1968 was the first year I could vote. As the Viet Nam war raged, I could not bring myself to vote for LBJ’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. In the first of my electoral choice mistakes, I pulled the lever for the guy who said he would end the war…sort of…maybe. When Nixon/Agnew ran for re-election in 1972 and the war continued, I knew better. But George McGovern was way too liberal for the nation then and he was steamrolled. We returned the two crooks to office before Watergate blew it all up.

Spiro did as little as any VP did in those days, but he was especially good at being Nixon’s pit bull. He was the guy who attacked the administration’s enemies, real and perceived. He famously referred to the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” The man had a way with words.

By the time Agnew was vice president, his criminal ways finally caught up with him. The U.S. Attorney in Maryland was homing in on charges of conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud. Our vice president took kick-backs from contractors when he was Baltimore County Executive and the payments continued while he was governor AND Vice President (!?!).
(“Oh, Doris, if a guy from Baltimore comes in with a fat envelope, send him right in.”)

The Last Resting Place of Governor William Donald Schaefer

Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens (27 September 2021)

The popular Baltimore four-term mayor succeeded Nancy

Pelosi’s father in that position. He went on to

became a popular two-term governor of the state.

What made this case so disturbing at the time was the fact that the president was also deep in the soup over Watergate. People behind the scenes understood the situation…the Chief Executive was close to impeachment/resignation and the guy slated to take his place could soon be a convicted felon. Not a good scenario for the Exceptional U.S. of A and the Republican Party. The powers that be needed to get him out and replace him with someone squeaky clean…pronto.

That’s when many of us learned the word ‘nolo contendere’, the Latinization of ‘No contest.’ It’s a high-brow, vague, slippery way of saying you’re guilty without having most of the mess associated with being guilty. And the charge he copped to was tax evasion. He extorted and bribed a fortune but we got him because he didn’t declare the extra income. Give me a break.

As we stumble through today’s version of ‘We are a nation of laws…Nobody is above the law’ (unless you are rich and powerful, then never mind), it is dismaying. Rachel Maddow’s new book, ‘Bag Man’ quotes one of the prosecutor’s motivation at the time…”People who do this shit go to jail.” Unless you’re a big shot.

(From Google Images)

‘Nolo contendere’ means the defendant must accept the punishment for the charge but does not accept or deny responsibility for it. True to form, Agnew continued to say, as the delinquents in my old Bronx neighborhood did, “I didn’t do nothin’.” He returned to private life with three years of unsupervised probation and a $10,000 fine…probably the contents of one of those envelopes. Is this a great country or what?

In 1973, he became the second and most recent vice president to resign the position, the other being John C. Calhoun in 1832. Calhoun left the Jackson administration to return to the Senate and defend his ‘nullification’ nonsense…that antebellum position that a state can disregard any federal law it doesn’t like. While that reason is absurd, at least it wasn’t because he was convicted of a felony.

Agnew spent the rest of his days apart from the political/media scene. For most of those years, he held a grudge against Nixon for not protecting him more when things got dicey. In 1994, after twenty years, Mr. “I am not a crook” went to his reward and Mr. “I am a crook but what’s it to ya?” finally let it go and attended the funeral. Two years later, Agnew joined him in that special place reserved for (you decide).

Grave of Spiro T. Agnew

Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens, Baltimore (27 September 2021)

It’s not surprising that Agnew’s grave continues to receive trinkets from admirers. The picture on top with its autumn finery helped me find him in a field of ground-level plaques. It’s hard for my generation to forget this guy. He was a perfect match for Nixon…mean-spirited, superior…and also a crook. He represented the privileged White law-and-order crowd. I wanted to bring a fake, novelty turd to photograph here but decided that was in poor taste for a classy forum like Images and More.