Spiro Theodore Agnew was the 39th Vice President of the United States of America. Today the average person knows almost nothing about him. His only real vague claim to fame is that he was forced to resign the Vice Presidency in a long forgotten, unrelated to Watergate, scandal in 1973.
Only recently was he attacked by MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow in her book " Bag Man, the Wild Crimes, audacious cover up and Spectacular downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House"
Well anyone who is familiar with our podcast knows we don't think much of Miss Maddow, nor her far left opinions and predilection for exaggeration and sharing of nonfactual material.
Not that we believe that Vice President Agnew was anywhere near as innocent as we believe President Nixon was of the smears against him. Because we don't. However, there is some level of unfairness in the way his case was portrayed from the very start, and we believe it is fair to say that he fell victim to the age old bug of having risen to far to fast at his given profession.
In just 11 years, Spiro Agnew rose from being an attorney for a Union and serving on the Zoning Board of Appeals, to being elected Baltimore County Executive, and after taking advantage of a feud with in the Democratic Party, finding himself elected Governor of the State of Maryland. Richard Nixon in need of a running mate that did not drag down his poll numbers, turned to the unknown Agnew to be his running mate in 1968 for Vice President of the United States. An amazing rise for anyone to have come so far so fast.
The State of Maryland had a very unusual way of doing business that apparently everyone was aware of and no one really talked about. It involved people looking to do work with various local governments subsidizing the decision making office holders income. Now today that would be considered illegal, and it is rather shocking to me that it was not considered illegal then, but the truth is it wasn't. That basic fact is a part of the story rarely if ever discussed and it is about the only defense available for not only a Vice President forced to give up his office but for the rather large list of other public figures this scandal involved in the state of Maryland.
Over the next two episodes we are going to introduce you to the man, Spiro T. Agnew, who had risen so quickly from obscurity, the intricacies of the scandal that brought him down, and the story of his fall. A fall that was only made possible not because he had continued to take as Governor and Vice President what appears to be kickbacks involving projects he oversaw as a County Executive, but because he, like the gangster Al Capone, had not reported any of it on his Federal Income Tax.
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