Any one remember Spiro T. Agnew?
On October 10, 1973, Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore, and pleaded
nolo contendere (no contest) to one felony charge, tax evasion, for the year 1967. Richardson agreed that there would be no further prosecution of Agnew, and released a 40-page summary of the evidence. Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years' unsupervised probation. At the same time, Agnew submitted a formal letter of resignation to the Secretary of State,
Henry Kissinger, and sent a letter to Nixon stating he was resigning in the best interest of the nation.
After the publication of
Go Quietly, Agnew largely disappeared from public view.
[186] In a rare TV interview in 1980, he advised young people not to go into politics because too much was expected of those in high public office.
Levy sums up the "might-have-been" of Agnew's career thus:
It is not a far stretch to imagine that if Agnew had contested corruption charges half as hard as Nixon denied culpability for Watergate – as Goldwater and several other stalwart conservatives wanted him to – today we might be speaking of Agnew-Democrats and Agnewnomics, and deem Agnew the father of modern conservatism.
Spiro Agnew - Wikipedia
