I remember Watergate, but I don't remember Spiro Agnew. Unlike Nixon's crimes, Agnew's were, well, blatant and ordinary. He was a somewhat obscure local official who spent most of his time shaking down developers for bribes. After somehow ending up as the Governor of Maryland, he was picked to be Nixon's 1968 running mate. Like the most recent ex-president, he was crude, combative, and feuded with the press - and a segment of the public loved him for it. Based on the 2018 podcast, Bag Man provide just enough background to explain how, in 1973, we had both a President and Vice-President under investigation for serious crimes. How did we survive the crisis? Three Assistant US Attorneys, Barney Skolnik, Tim Bake, and Ron Liebman, and US Attorney George Beall (the brother of Maryland's then junior Senator) stood up to pressure from Nixon and quietly put together a case that forced Agnew to plead guilty and resign. He didn't go quietly (the last few chapters chronicle months spent slowly winding down his VP office and transitioning to brokering unsavory deals with foreign governments), but he went. He died in 1996, essentially a footnote to history. The attorneys who prosecuted him also escaped fame, each spending several more years working for the Justice Department before moving into private practice (George Beall died in 2017). While Agnew can stay obscure, Beall, Skolnik, Blake, and Liebman deserve to be better known. Their job wasn't glamorous (and parts of the Bag Man are a bit dry because there's only so much you can do to make a financial investigation interesting - trust me, I know), but it's not an exaggeration to say that they may have saved our democracy.
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