142 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 79 PART 1 JANUARY 2021
extremely aggressive towards his political opponents, both real and perceived.
“You know how it is with the radical liberals,” he once said, “you zing
one of them—call his hand, cite his voting record, quote his speeches, tell
America the harm he’s done—and he howls like a coyote with his tail caught
in a snake hole!”5
Agnew’s political brand was all about demonizing and offending his real
and imagined opponents—Democrats, minorities, the press. He seemed to
delight in upsetting people. The more he did it, the more it helped solidify
his popularity with an ever-growing segment of the Republican Party. He
was once chastised by a prominent African American congressman,
William Clay of Missouri, for having derided Black civil rights leaders:
Agnew is seriously ill. He has all the symptoms of an intellectual misfit.
His recent tirade against black leadership is just part of a game played by
him called mental masturbation. Apparently, Mr. Agnew is an intellectual
sadist who experiences intellectual orgasms by attacking, humiliating,
and kicking the oppressed.6
But if Agnew was twice elected as Richard Nixon’s vice president, how
was it that Gerald Ford and not Ted Agnew became president after Nixon’s
resignation?
Agnew was a lawyer in Maryland who was relatively unknown in
national politics when Nixon chose him to be his running mate in 1968. He
had been elected as a member of the Baltimore County Executive in 1962
and became governor of Maryland in 1966. By the spring of 1973 he had
been working in the White House for over four years as vice president. The
Watergate scandal was gaining full steam with daily televised (and explosive)
Senate hearings, and all focus was on “What did the president know,
and when did he know it?”7
Meanwhile, three young prosecutors in Maryland were investigating
rumours of corruption in Baltimore County involving a Democrat named
Dale Anderson. Rumours suggested that, at the County Executive level,
Anderson was engaged in some good old-fashioned bribery: taking tens of
thousands of dollars in kickbacks from individuals and companies that
received public contracts in return. It was a straightforward arrangement:
businessmen would put cash into plain envelopes and hand the money over
to Anderson, who would then ensure that a contract for designing local
infrastructure or buildings would be granted. The cash in the envelopes was
usually a percentage of the value of the overall contract. Anderson was
eventually cited on 39 counts involving more than $46,000 in contracting
kickbacks.
Agnew got wind of the investigation taking place in his old stomping
grounds, and while most of the White House was preoccupied with the