Word: agnew
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After Spiro Agnew died last week of acute leukemia at the age of 77, his onetime campaign press secretary Victor Gold said, "We speak of the Ronald Reagan revolution...Spiro Agnew was the John the Baptist for that revolution...
...Agnew was also the forerunner of the Richard Nixon collapse. The Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972, as the Nixon-Agnew ticket was on its way to a landslide victory over George McGovern and Sargent Shriver. A month after the second Nixon-Agnew Inaugural, it came out that a grand jury in Baltimore was investigating Agnew on charges of bribery and tax evasion dating from his earlier career in Maryland...
Rough days for Agnew. An old friend, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, called to commiserate. The allegations were retailed to his old enemies in the press, and after first trying to stop the leaks, Agnew capitulated. In October 1973 he made a deal with the prosecutors: he pleaded no contest to one count of income-tax evasion and resigned his office--the first Vice President ever to be forced from office for legal reasons. The government agreed not to pursue Agnew further. But in a Maryland taxpayers' suit, a civil court found in 1981 that Agnew had solicited...
...Agnew then vanished from public life, maintaining his innocence and resenting the fact that Nixon had done nothing to protect him from his accusers. He did, however, re-emerge briefly to attend Nixon's funeral in 1994. Agnew built a new career brokering international business deals, some of which involved Arab states. He accumulated enough wealth to buy a house in Rancho Mirage, California...
...would see him ghosting through airports from time to time, and when one's eyes would lock on his for an instant, in recognition, Agnew's face would flicker with a secret, wolfish, almost subliminal smile. Then he would turn and disappear...