Word: nixon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Spiro] Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration...
...America was angry in the spring of 1968. After Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, there were riots in many American cities, including Baltimore. Governor Agnew called in the city's black civil-rights leaders and gave them holy hell. The tongue lashing caught the attention of Richard Nixon. At the Republican Convention that summer, when it came time for him to pick a Vice President, he surprised everyone by coming up with Spiro Agnew. In Nixon's calculus, Agnew was a safe-bet border-state novice with no heavy baggage and a Greek-immigrant father, which would help with...
Agnew did not remain obscure for long. Every Vice President must invent a life for himself. Nixon and Agnew played good cop-bad cop. Agnew created his role as a menacing though semisatirical rabble-rouser of the much-maligned love-it-or-leave-it Silent Majority of Americans who wished, against their mounting disquiet, to believe in their government's war. The struggle defined itself in cultural conflict. Alabama's Governor George Wallace had gone national as an angry outsider-populist and blue-collar backlasher. Agnew became a kind of insider Establishment populist, attacking "elites," meaning the media and intellectuals...
...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...
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...