Spiro Agnew

Spiro Agnew resigned the vice-presidency of the United States while pleading no contest to tax evasion, ten months before the president he served resigned too. He was the son of a Greek immigrant restaurateur in Baltimore, served in the war, practised law, and rose quickly through Maryland politics as a moderate Republican - county executive, then governor in 1966, elected partly by liberals who preferred him to a segregationist Democrat. Nixon picked him for the ticket in 1968 as a border-state figure who could speak to voters attracted to Wallace. In office he became the administration's designated attacker, delivering speeches written mostly by Pat Buchanan and William Safire against student protesters, liberals and above all the television networks and the press, whom he called an effete corps of impudent snobs and nattering nabobs of negativism. The phrases were mocked and were also effective; he was, for a period, the most popular figure in the administration with its own voters. Then federal prosecutors in Baltimore found that he had been taking envelopes of cash from engineering contractors since his county days, and had gone on taking them in the vice-president's office. He argued that a sitting vice-president could not be indicted, tried to have the House investigate him instead, and lost. On 10 October 1973 he resigned and pleaded nolo contendere to a single count of tax evasion, receiving a fine and three years' probation. Gerald Ford replaced him under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which is how an unelected man came to the presidency in 1974. Agnew was disbarred and spent his later years as a consultant, unforgiven by Nixon and speaking to almost nobody from the administration again.

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