Very Strange Bedfellows

by Jules Witcover

"When the highly insecure and socially awkward W Richard Nixon offered the vice-presidential candidacy to smooth-talking, confident, but virtually unheard-of Spiro Agnew during the presidential campaign of 1968, jaws dropped. "Spiro who?" became a staple of the political lexicon, and while Nixon publicly stood by his choice, he privately kept Agnew at arm's length for the duration of their partnership." "Nixon and Agnew became one of the oddest couples in White House history, their political affair disintegrating over five years into a calamitous denouement. Agnew's divisive rhetoric skyrocketed his popularity, but he grew weary of exclusion from the Nixon inner circle. Nixon, concluding that Agnew was not the man to succeed him, conspired to dump him in 1972 and later to remove him from the line of presidential succession. But before Nixon's presidency collapsed in Watergate, a tawdry scandal of payoffs to Agnew in the White House accomplished the job." "A leading political reporter o