Bag Man by Rachel Maddow & Michael Yarvitz

Author:Rachel Maddow & Michael Yarvitz [Maddow, Rachel & Yarvitz, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

From left: Henry Petersen, Ron Liebman, Tim Baker, Barney Skolnik, Elliot Richardson, and George Beall, in the attorney general’s office

“It was extremely emotional and heart wrenching,” says Liebman, who recalls the scene inside the attorney general’s conference room: “I remember the first time sitting across from a bust of Oliver Wendell Holmes and thinking to myself, ‘What would he do?’ ” While the young guns held their hard-line position, the more senior Henry Petersen argued that leniency was the only reasonable solution.

“Henry Petersen was so angry at us, the three prosecutors, demanding jail time,” Liebman says, “that he got out of his chair—and he had this way of shoving his hands under his belt. And he turned to Tim Baker.”

“You just want him to be treated like anybody else. Like any person!” Petersen cried.

To which Baker responded, “You’re damn right I do!”

“We went around and around and around,” says Liebman.

Skolnik fights back tears recalling the pressure they were all under: “It was, without question, the most intense professional experience of my life.”

At one point, the Baltimore trio threatened something close to a full-on rebellion if Agnew was spared fair punishment. After they suggested they wouldn’t be able to publicly support such an outcome, the attorney general responded plainly, as Tim Baker recalls, “You all have to do what you do, and I’m going to do what I do.”

Five days into the negotiations, with the deal still held up on the question of Agnew’s ultimate punishment, Nixon and his team loosed a big barge and sent it downstream to bust up the logjam. Nixon had told Richardson that he was not going to block the Agnew investigation. But he offered that to the attorney general as a kind of bargaining chip. “Once we get his problem cleared up,” Nixon told his attorney general, “we can get rid of Cox.” Nixon would let the Justice Department kill off his vice president, but he’d expect the department to shut off its Watergate probe thereafter.

Nixon was a political realist, which meant he recognized Spiro Agnew as a problem requiring very careful handling. The vice president’s alleged criminality notwithstanding, he remained wildly popular with Republicans across the country. Nixon was wary of any perception that he was sticking a knife in Spiro the Hero’s back. Especially now, with Nixon in need of all the public support he could muster to fight off Watergate. His political operatives in the White House agreed! A strategy memo suggested Nixon take a position that “does not alienate Agnew supporters in the crucial period over the next several weeks.”

“If it had gotten out that Richard Nixon had personally done this,” says Agnew’s aide David Keene, “you’re talking about the base of the Republican Party [turning on him]. Nixon could not afford to let his base know that he’d sold this guy out when he’s asking them to stick with him at a time when he’s in real trouble.”

Defending his ineffectual vice president hadn’t been easy for Nixon in the best of times.

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