Agnew Resigned

I somehow missed that Spiro Agnew's resignation as vice president of the United States was 50 years ago last week (October 10, 1973). Maybe it's because the disaster underway in Palestine and Israel drove it out of news coverage.

Maybe you know all about what happened, either because you remember it or because you listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast "Bagman." I was barely 14 when he resigned and wasn't paying much attention, or at least I didn't recall the details. I didn't even remember that he had literally been receiving remnant kickbacks from his time as a Maryland politician while he was vice president.

The thing I found most interesting about "Bagman" was how it showed that Department of Justice prosecutors' actions — their nonpartisan refusal to cave to political pressure — were what kept Agnew from surviving the scandal. That definitely wasn't something that was highlighted in the record before, and still isn't reflected in the basic list of facts, for instance on Agnew's Wikipedia page.

That kind of bipartisan ethics work is lacking these days, as we have seen all too frequently.