The Grand Old Party: An Intimate Autopsy of how Paranoia, Prejudice, and Criminal Conspiracy Corroded American Democracy, One Year at a Time

Part Two: How a Michigan Football Player Fumbled Away Justice and Gave Every Future Criminal President a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Note: This is part one of five articles looking at the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bulling and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP. You can read Part One on Nixon by clicking here.

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1974-1977: The Pardoner’s Tale

The first domino fell not with Nixon but with Spiro Agnew—that sweating, snarling pit bull of a vice president who turned out to be exactly what he looked like: a crook. While America was fixated on Watergate, Agnew was conducting his own criminal enterprise from the vice president’s office, taking bribes in literal paper bags like some third-rate mob enforcer shaking down contractors in Baltimore. Cash in envelopes. Paper bags of money. This was the Vice President of the United States conducting business like he was running a protection racket in Little Italy.

Agnew’s resignation in October 1973 should have been the first major red flag—not just about Nixon’s judgment in choosing a running mate, but about the rot that had infected the entire administration. If the vice president was this corrupt, this brazen, this criminally stupid, what did that say about the man who’d selected him? What did it say about the Republican Party that had twice nominated this ticket? But Washington, in its infinite capacity for denial, treated Agnew’s crimes as an isolated incident, a regrettable footnote, when it should have been seen as the opening act of a much larger tragedy.

Spiro Agnew

Into this void stepped Gerald Rudolph Ford—appointed, not elected, the first vice president chosen under the 25th Amendment. Here is history’s cruel joke, its warning written in neon that we chose to ignore: Ford became the 38th President of the United States without receiving a single vote for national office. Not one. Not for president, not for vice president—nothing. It was as if the political gods themselves were trying to warn us, sending us a leader through the back door of constitutional succession like a thief in the night, though Ford was no thief. He was something worse: an enabler of thieves.