On October 10, 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned by one-sentence letter and, within the hour, pleaded no contest to a tax charge in a Baltimore courtroom; the deal closed a bribery case reaching back to his first term running a Maryland county

Spiro Agnew spent the fall of 1973 telling reporters that the corruption case against him was "a damned lie." On October 10 he stood in a Baltimore courtroom and admitted, in the only way the deal allowed him to, that it was not.

How the kickbacks started in Baltimore County

Agnew was born in Baltimore in 1918, the son of Theodore Anagnostopoulos, a Greek immigrant who ran a restaurant and had shortened the family name, and Margaret Akers, a widow from Virginia. He practiced law in the suburbs for over a decade before winning the county executive's office in 1962, the top administrative job in one of Maryland's fastest-growing suburbs.

Engineering and architecture firms bidding for county contracts learned quickly that a cut, paid in cash, kept the paperwork moving. The Baltimore Sun later reconstructed the mechanism in detail: envelopes, handed over in his own office, sometimes counted out in his presence.

The payments did not stop when the job changed. Agnew was elected governor of Maryland in 1966, and prosecutors said the same engineers kept paying, now for state highway and building contracts instead of county ones. By his own account he never asked where the money came from, and he never gave any of it back.

What Elliot Richardson put in the record

Nixon put Agnew on the 1968 ticket for his tough-talking contrast to a soft-seeming vice presidential field, and the persona sold. Agnew's speeches (mostly written by William Safire and Pat Buchanan) turned phrases like "nattering nabobs of negativism" and "pusillanimous pussyfooters" into national catchphrases, aimed at antiwar protesters and network newsrooms in roughly equal measure.

The corruption case reached him anyway. U.S. Attorney George Beall's office in Baltimore had opened a routine contractor-kickback investigation in 1973 that was not aimed at Agnew at all; engineers cooperating with it began naming him as the recipient. By August the story was public, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson was overseeing a Justice Department building a file on a sitting vice president.

That file became a forty-page document Richardson filed in federal court on October 10: a chronicle of cash payments, he said, that ran past $100,000 and continued into the vice presidency itself.

Could a sitting vice president even be indicted?

Agnew's lawyers tried to stop the case before it reached a courtroom, arguing that a vice president enjoyed the same practical immunity as a president and could only be removed by impeachment. Solicitor General Robert Bork disagreed in a brief filed October 5, telling the court the Constitution treated the presidency as the singular exception; every other officer, including the vice president, remained answerable to ordinary criminal process.

Bork's brief did not resolve the case on its own. It removed Agnew's best argument for delay, and the plea talks that had been running quietly for weeks accelerated once it did.

What he actually pleaded to

Every judge in Maryland's federal district had recused, so Judge Walter E. Hoffman came over from Virginia's Eastern District to hear it. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere, no contest, to a single count of federal income tax evasion: failing to report $29,500 he had received in 1967, his first year as governor. Hoffman fined him $10,000 and imposed three years of unsupervised probation. No prison time, and no admission of the bribery scheme Richardson had just described in open court.

Minutes earlier, a one-sentence letter had gone to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: "I hereby resign the office of Vice President of the United States, effective immediately." Under the Constitution a vice president's resignation takes effect the moment the secretary of state receives it, and Kissinger's office logged the time before Agnew ever walked into Hoffman's courtroom.

What the deal left unsettled

Nolo contendere let Agnew accept a criminal sentence without formally admitting guilt, and he spent the rest of his life describing the plea as a forced surrender rather than a confession. Historians who have gone back through Richardson's evidence generally don't share that reading; the volume of testimony from engineers who said they personally handed him envelopes is hard to explain away. It is fair to say, though, that the full scope of what Agnew took, and for how long, rests on prosecutors' accounting rather than on anything he ever admitted in his own words.

What happened to Agnew afterward

Maryland's highest court disbarred him in 1974. He wrote a bitter memoir, Go Quietly...Or Else, in 1980, still insisting Nixon's own White House had pushed him out to save itself, and a spy novel two years before that sold better than the memoir did. He died in 1996 at seventy-seven, in Berlin, Maryland, of what turned out to be a long-undiagnosed leukemia.

Nixon, meanwhile, needed a successor fast. Gerald Ford was confirmed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment and sworn in on December 6, 1973, the first vice president installed by that process rather than by election. Ten months later Nixon resigned too, and the amendment moved the same untested machine a second time in a single year, this time straight into the presidency.

Why it still matters

Agnew remains only the second vice president to resign, after John C. Calhoun walked away from Andrew Jackson's administration in 1832 over tariffs and states' rights. He is the only one whose exit was a plea deal instead of a policy dispute, and the distinction has aged into something like a floor: every later scandal touching a vice president gets measured, at least in passing, against how fast Richardson's Justice Department moved once the evidence became undeniable. Whether that standard holds the next time it is tested is still an open question, not a settled one.

Sources

• U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, "A Sitting President's Amenability to Indictment and Criminal Prosecution" (discusses the 1973 Bork brief in the Agnew matter)
• Encyclopædia Britannica, "Spiro Agnew"
• HISTORY.com, "Vice President Agnew Resigns"
• The Baltimore Sun, "Agnew took hundreds of thousands of dollars in contractors' kickbacks" (1996)
• Lawfare, "Indicting a President Is Not Foreclosed: The Complex History"
• U.S. Senate Historical Office, biography of Spiro T. Agnew, 39th Vice President