Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

Agnew, a master of the rhetorical bob-and-weave, deftly uses his keen understanding of his audience to fend off a criminal investigation that threatens to derail both his career and his extortion side hustle. When investigators close in, finding a long list of witnesses and evidence implicating the vice-president, Agnew’s reaction is not to admit guilt but to go on the offensive. His vehement denials play on the bedrock legal foundation of innocent until proven guilty, a principle deeply enshrined—in theory, at least—in both the American legal system and its cultural mythology. Agnew knows that asserting his innocence will give him short-term vindication. The next prong of his rhetorical strategy is to attack the attackers, vilify them as partisans on a witch hunt, and cast doubt on their motivations as baseless and political. The strategy is effective; a couple from Kansas City writes, “’Give them hell—the press and the liberals are out to get you and all conservatives’” (106).

The final prong is to sow doubt in the news media by portraying them as New York City elitists out to destroy any member of the less privileged working class whose ideals they do not share. This strategy works in several ways: It pits Agnew, a self-described plain-spoken, hard-working “real” American, against the allegedly out-of-touch, college-educated journalists who think they know best. This appeals to a wide swath of Agnew supporters who already believe the press has a liberal bias, and so it makes sense to them that the media would try to take down a man with conservative values. Also implicit in Agnew’s anti-media rants is anti-Semitism. His coded use of terms like “east coast” and “elite” plays on another unfounded assumption among some Americans: that the entire news and entertainment industry is controlled by Jews, and information is therefore filtered through that bias. Agnew is not so secret about his prejudice later in his life when he solicits the crown prince of Saudi Arabia for money to fight “the Zionist conspiracy […] to bleed me of my resources” (247).

These attacks and efforts to obstruct the investigation—by, for example, pressuring George Beall’s brother—have become part of the standard political playbook. Modern politicians routinely use most of these strategies in attempts to fend off investigations. It is common to hear investigations described as a “witch hunt,” and the news media labeled “an enemy of the people.” The parallels between Agnew and modern politicians are too obvious to ignore, and they are an unfortunate testament to the rhetorical power of diversion and victimhood.