Mid-1971 and Beyond: Agnew Refuses to Resign from Vice Presidency

By the summer of 1971, President Nixon and his senior staffers, particularly John Ehrlichman, have come to view Vice President Spiro Agnew as more of a liability than an asset (see Mid-1971). Agnew, who has served the president well as a conservative “stalking horse” who could lambast antiwar protesters and foreign leaders in a way that might be unsuitable for a president (see 1969-1971), has in recent months begun complaining about being kept away from real decision-making, particularly on foreign affairs. (Agnew has not made himself popular by attacking Nixon’s recent overtures to the Communist Chinese and complaining to anyone who would listen about his “poor” treatment at the hands of Nixon and his aides.) All of this has made Nixon unwilling to spend a lot of political capital in defending Agnew from bribery charges (see April 10, 1973). Nixon aides ask Agnew to voluntarily resign, a request he resists. In return, Agnew levels accusations that White House staffers began a media leak campaign designed to drive him from office. Agnew waffles on the question, offering to resign if Nixon would promise to grant him immunity from prosecution, then thundering to one receptive audience, “I will not resign if indicted!” By September, Nixon’s new chief of staff, Alexander Haig, brought in to keep the Nixon administration intact under the specter of the Watergate investigations, begins pushing Agnew to resign, threatening that the Justice Department would prosecute him for income tax evasion on the bribes he had taken unless Agnew resigned. Agnew will later say that he felt Haig was implicitly threatening his life if he didn’t “go quietly”; for his part, Haig finds Agnew so menacing that he tells his wife if he disappeared, she “might want to look inside any recently poured concrete bridge pilings in Maryland.” [US Senate, 2007]