AH Challenge: President Spiro Agnew

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Spiro Agnew elected President by 1976, with a POD after 1969. Nixon may be assassinated, but only after the '72 election.
 
From what I've read, the people in power didn't want Agnew as President. They forced him to resign so somebody more suitable would become president. The bribe thing was just an excuse.

ELECTED President?? I doubt it.

With the specified POD--
No Watergate, and/or the president keels over unexpectedly from a heart attack before Agnew gets around to resigning.

Who might have been VP instead of Agnew?

Agnew either doesn't take the bribes, or he gives the money back, he is never VP, and then runs for President on his own.

But you'd also have to kill off Ford, Reagan, Rockefeller, Dole and several other likely candidates.
 
Agnew would never be elected: he was a mediocrity from Maryland who couldn't even carry his own state for Nixon in 1968. The only reason he won the governorship is because the Dems nominated a Wallace clone, George Mahoney. Even if Nixon serves two terms, he was engineering a Connally nomination in 1976, or perhaps Ronald Reagan if nominating a former Dem proves too difficult. Nixon wanted to dump Agnew in '72, but thought he'd need Agnew against Wallace. Everyone thought Agnew was a joke on both sides of the aisle.
 
At the beginning of the administration Nixon tired to school Agnew in foreign policy and other areas, but found him to be hopeless and gave up.

Agnew's only hope would have been if the Maryland bribery and tax evasion charges hadn't come up, and he'd still been VP in 1974 when Nixon resigned. I don't see him lasting against a Reagan challenge for the nomination in 1976, and I'd have my worries on what effect people like Rumsfeld and Cheney would have on him during his time in office.


John Erlichman said:
"I'm sort of afraid to have him [Agnew] go too [on a trip to Asia]," Nixon said deadpan, repeating his joke about the assassin's dilema. "If they kill Nixon, they get Agnew. I'd hate to have anything happen to him."

John Erlichman said:
I concluded that the man [Agnew] was exceedingly narrow; new thoughts were uncwelcome to him.

John Erlichman said:
Nixon found early that personal meetings with Agnew were invariably unpleasant. The President came out of them amazed at Agnew's constant self-aggrandizement.

John Erlichman said:
...in late July 1971, the President interrupted our daily meeting to tell me his latest Agnew problems. The President had recently announced that he would be making his historic trip to China. Now Agnew, in Africa on a tour, had told the leader of one nation that he disagreed with the President's China policy. Agnew said he didn't think the forthcoming trip was a good idea. The President was very agitated. "It is beyond my understanding," he said. "Twice Agnew has proposed that he go to China! Now he tells world its a bad idea for me to go! What am I going to do with him?"

Agnew was not the kind of guy to command a lot of support once people got to know him. He flirted with the Rockefeller camp in 1968, and later he became Rocky's contact in the White House. But it didn't take long for Rocky to abandon that realtionship. Ditto for Gov. Ronald Reagan.
 
IMO, Nixon should've dumped Agnew in 1972 and replaced him with Reagan. Agnew has a Bidenesque mouth and a Palinesque intellect if Ehrlichman is to be believed.
 
Well it would be rather simple to just not have him either accept the bribes or have the bribes not come to light until later.

Agnew's wrongdoing started before he was elected VP in 1968. So not having them come to light means the Dems don't look very hard. Given the mood of Watergate, that is not likely. From Wikipedia:

In October [1973], he was formally charged with having accepted bribes totaling more than $100,000, while holding office as Baltimore County Executive, Governor of Maryland, and Vice President of the United States.
 

sprite

Donor
Monthly Donor
IMO, Nixon should've dumped Agnew in 1972 and replaced him with Reagan. Agnew has a Bidenesque mouth and a Palinesque intellect if Ehrlichman is to be believed.

As i understood it Nixon did not like Reagan at all. They weren't that politically aligned either.
 
Not really: Nixon was a centrist Republican who governed as a domestic liberal. He and Reagan disagreed on ideology, and were allies, but were never personally close. Nixon would sometimes go on important foreign policy missions for Reagan when Reagan was President.
 
Top