On Being Asked to Write Spiro Agnew’s Farewell Address

Like some seriocomic Shakespearean play within a play, the brief and piteous case of Spiro T. Agnew overlies the longer-running and larger tragedy of Richard Nixon in a manner almost too rococo to be real, too macabre for any but the most cynical taste.

It is tempting for that reason to put the whole matter out of mind, to dismiss the sideshow now that the main event nears a climax. Indeed, Agnew’s rout from the Vice Presidency last October in a storm of leaks and legal maneuvers has had this air about it from the first. Bracketed as it was by the Senate Watergate hearings of the summer and the stunning confrontation of President Nixon with his own officers of justice later in the fall, the whole affair caught the American people in a sort of brownout—due to overloaded circuits—of the normal political ethical reflexes. And when we came to, Gerald Ford stood in the line of succession where whatsisname from Maryland had been before. We remember some vague unpleasantness about tax cheating, an argument about limousines and bodyguards for the ex-Veep, a plot outline for Agnew’s novel, and not much more.

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Jeffrey T. Bolgiano

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Like some seriocomic Shakespearean play within a play, the brief and piteous case of Spiro T. Agnew overlies the longer-running and larger tragedy of Richard Nixon in a manner almost too rococo to be real, too macabre for any but the most cynical taste.

It is tempting for that reason to put the whole matter out of mind, to dismiss the sideshow now that the main event nears a climax. Indeed, Agnew’s rout from the Vice Presidency last October in a storm of leaks and legal maneuvers has had this air about it from the first. Bracketed as it was by the Senate Watergate hearings of the summer and the stunning confrontation of President Nixon with his own officers of justice later in the fall, the whole affair caught the American people in a sort of brownout—due to overloaded circuits—of the normal political ethical reflexes. And when we came to, Gerald Ford stood in the line of succession where whatsisname from Maryland had been before. We remember some vague unpleasantness about tax cheating, an argument about limousines and bodyguards for the ex-Veep, a plot outline for Agnew’s novel, and not much more.