THE NATION

The Fall of Spiro Agnew

After the long weeks of buildup, of insisting upon his innocence, of accusing Government officials of plotting his downfall, of vowing that he would fight to the end, the denouement of the Spiro Agnew debacle came with stunning swiftness. His hands trembling slightly and his Palm Springs tan bleached white with tension, Agnew walked into a Baltimore courtroom last week and admitted that he had falsified his income tax in 1967. When he emerged half an hour later, Agnew had been transformed from Vice President of the United States into a convicted felon.

Why had Spiro Agnew so dramatically and abruptly decided to quit? "Because everything he tried flopped," one high-ranking Justice official declares flatly. Indeed, Agnew had tried a lot of things. He had asked the House of Representatives to investigate the charges against him, only to have Speaker Carl Albert send him back to the courts for justice. He had tried to kill the grand jury investigation into his misdeeds by arguing that a sitting Vice President could not be indicted.

He had taken his case to the country, hoping to arouse popular support with a televised speech that claimed he was being framed by the Justice Department and, by implication, Nixon himself. The Republican women in his Los Angeles audience cheered him to the rafters, but no nationwide ground swell of public opinion developed to lift him high. "Everything was downhill after L.A.," says Marsh Thomson, Agnew's press aide. "The point was driven home to him that he was 'dead.' The limb had been sawed off." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.