Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

Why sermonize about the superiority of your ideas and values when it was so much more effective to attack the motives and character of your opponents, to call them names, to question their love of country.

Evidently, he would prefer a different kind of television reporting,” he said of Agnew, “one that would be subservient to whatever political group happens to be in authority at the time. Those who might feel momentary agreement with his remarks should think carefully about whether that kind of television news is what they want.

history really is here to help.

How on God’s green earth could a national figure, a man second in line to the most powerful office on the planet, a sitting vice president of the United States of America, be so dumb, or so venal, to still be pocketing bribes? It couldn’t be.

What Joe McCarthy had done to try to stir up fear and suspicion in the general public about the Commies in the 1950s, Agnew was effectively trying to replicate a decade and a half later when it came to members of the press.

Agnew’s is a tale of a thoroughly corrupt occupant of the White House whose crimes are discovered by his own Justice Department and who then clings to high office by using the power and prerogative of that same office to save himself.

I had turned over a log and exposed to the light a scurrying colony of unpleasant creatures whose only reaction was one of annoyance that I had been so crass as to disturb their settled way of life. (Elliot Richardson)

It is a rare man or woman who is ever really changed by ascension to high office, or tempered by the solemnity of the oaths they have sworn or by the national duties they have shouldered. And Spiro Agnew was certainly not among that rare breed.

Agnew was like Nixon's id -- without the burden of much actual knowledge or curiosity or responsibility to the country at large.

No doubt Agnew felt it helped his cause to get that little bit of fiction out there again in 1980. But he had made a critical error at a critical time. By writing about the conversation with White, Agnew had waived any attorney-client privilege that protected exchanges with his lawyer. And that mistake was a very big reason why Spiro Agnew, finally, would get some measure of comeuppance.

It was just a Latin phrase,” says London, “the translation of which was ‘Grab them by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.’

The efforts of Agnew, Nixon, Haldeman, Haig, George Bush, and others—they failed because Beall had an investigation to pursue, and he had independent public servants to protect and stand up for, and he never once blinked.

And George H. W. Bush did it. He delivered the message to Senator Glenn Beall, who then relayed that pressure to his brother George. George Beall donated his papers to Frostburg State University in Maryland. In those records is an official “memo to file” from July 1973, acknowledging the attempted intervention. “With respect to conversations with my brother Glenn,” Beall writes, “the discussions were most superficial and very guarded. He occasionally mentioned to me the names of persons who had been to see him or who had called him with respect to the Baltimore County investigation. Names of persons that I remember him telling me about included Vice President Agnew, [the engineer] Allen Greene [sic] and George Bush….The only specific information that he passed along to me that I can recall related to a complaint that he had heard from Bush to the effect that attorneys in this office were said to be harassing persons who had been questioned by us in the Baltimore County investigation.

Senator Beall, they believed, owed the White House a favor because Nixon and Agnew had helped him get elected three years earlier. George and Glenn Beall’s father had lost his Senate seat in 1964; when it came up again in 1970, Nixon and Agnew personally helped Glenn avenge the loss by campaigning for him in Maryland, multiple times. And it worked: the Republican Party got that Senate seat back, and so did the Beall family. Now one of the Beall sons was going to try to destroy Spiro Agnew with this investigation? No. Nixon and Agnew decided it was time for Glenn Beall to return the favor and lean on his little brother, the prosecutor.

NIXON: Accuse you of what? AGNEW: Accuse me of— NIXON: Putting the pressure on them to make contributions? AGNEW: No, he may say he gave me a kickback of some kind. Came over here and handed me $50,000. Totally ridiculous. But— NIXON: Oh, God. AGNEW: I mean, they say it. I don’t know what this guy’s liable to say. NIXON: And Ted, they’re— AGNEW: They say he gave a federal judge some money. There are all kinds of rumors. NIXON: Good God, isn’t it awful? AGNEW: But this man is— NIXON: Well, can we destroy him?

Ultimately, Agnew failed to save himself. But he left a scorched-earth battle plan for any corrupt officeholder that followed: Attack the investigation as a witch hunt. Obstruct it behind the scenes. Attack individual investigators in personal terms. Attack the credibility of the Justice Department itself. Attack the media informing Americans about the case.