Spiro Agnew

Who was Spiro Agnew?

Spiro Theodore Agnew was an American politician who served as the 39th Vice President of the United States from 1969 to 1973, serving under President Richard Nixon.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Agnew was a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and University of Baltimore School of Law. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1941, serving as an officer during World War II, and was recalled for service during the Korean War in 1950. He worked as an aide for U.S. Representative James Devereux before he was appointed to the Baltimore County Board of Zoning Appeals in 1957. He lost election for the Baltimore City Circuit Court in 1960, but was later elected Baltimore County Executive in 1962. In 1966 Agnew was elected the 55th Governor of Maryland, defeating Democratic opponent George P. Mahoney. He was the first Greek American to hold the position, serving from 1967 to 1969.

At the 1968 Republican National Convention, Agnew was nominated for Vice President; he ran alongside the party's presidential nominee, former Vice President Richard Nixon. They defeated incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Edmund Muskie, in the 1968 presidential election. In 1972 Nixon and Agnew were reelected for a second term, defeating Senator George McGovern and Ambassador Sargent Shriver.

Famous Quotes:

• A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.
• Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike -- I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.
• There are people in our society who should be separated and discarded. I think its one of the tendencies of the liberal community to feel that every person in a nation of over 200 million people can be made into a productive citizen. Im realist enough to believe this cant be. Were always going to have our prisons, were always going to have our places of preventive detention for psychopaths, and were always going to have a certain number of people in our community who have no desire to achieve or who have no desire to even fit in an amicable way with the rest of society. And these people should be separated from the community, not in a callous way but they should be separated as far as any idea that their opinions shall have any effect on the course we follow.
• Some of the politicians in this country, in their feverish search for group acceptance, are ready to endorse tumultuous confrontation as a substitute for debate, and the most illogical and unfitting extensions of the Bill of Rights as protections for psychotic and criminal elements in our society. We have seen all too clearly that there are mennow in power in this countrywho do not represent authority, who cannot cope with tradition, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support revolution as long as it is done with a cultured voice and a handsome profile.
• [1. ] The era of appeasement must come to an end. The political and social demands that dissidents are making of the universities do not flow from sound basic educational criteria, but from strategic considerations on how to radicalize the student body, polarize the campus and extend the privileged enclaves of student power. [2. ] A concise and clear set of rules for campus conduct should be established, transmitted to incoming freshmen, and enforcedwith immediate expulsion the penalty for serious violations. [3. ] It is folly for universities confronted with their current crisis in our turbulent times to open their doors to thousands of patently unqualified students. [4. ] No negotiations under threat or coercion. [5. ] No amnesty for lawlessness or violence. [6. ] Any organization which publicly declares its intention to violate the rules of an academic community and which carries out that declaration should be barred from campus. [7. ] We must look to how we are raising our children. [8. ] We must look to the university that receives those children. Is it prepared to deal with the challenge of the nondemocratic Left?[9. ] Let us support those courageous administrators, professors and students on our college campuses who are standing up for the traditional rights of the academic community.
• Some newspapers are fit only to line the bottom of bird cages.
• Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.
• This is the criminal left that belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. The criminal left is not a problem to be solved by the Department of Philosophy or the Department of Englishit is a problem for the Department of Justice. Black or white, the criminal left is interested in power. It is not interested in promoting the renewal and reforms that make democracy work; it is interested in promoting those collisions and conflict that tear democracy apart.
• Freedom of speech is useless without freedom of thought. And I fear that the politics of protest is shutting out the process of thought, so necessary to rational discussion. We are faced with the Ten Commandments of Protest:Thou Shalt Not Allow Thy Opponent to Speak. Thou Shalt Not Set Forth a Program of Thine Own. Thou Shalt Not Trust Anybody Over Thirty. Thou Shalt Not Honor Thy Father or Thy Mother. Thou Shalt Not Heed the Lessons of History. Thou Shalt Not Write Anything Longer than a Slogan. Thou Shalt Not Present a Negotiable Demand. Thou Shalt Not Accept Any Establishment Idea. Thou Shalt Not Revere Any but Totalitarian Heroes. Thou Shalt Not Ask Forgiveness for Thy Transgressions, Rather Thou Shalt Demand Amnesty for Them.
• In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4H Clubthe hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.