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

While Bag Man focuses on Spiro Agnew’s crimes, the Watergate scandal precedes and engulfs the lesser-known Baltimore Country extortion investigation. Named after the famed D.C. hotel and home of the Democratic National Committee, Watergate is the site of the clumsy break-in and attempt to wiretap the Democrats that is ultimately traced all the way back to the office of the president. Without Watergate, the investigative zeal that swept through newsrooms and district attorney’s offices may never have spurred three young prosecutors to dig into a local corruption scheme—a scheme that moves far beyond its local roots and takes on national significance.

While only briefly mentioned, the GOP’s then-nascent “Southern Strategy” is the driving force behind Nixon’s nomination of Spiro Agnew. The strategy involves appealing to southern racism in the wake of the dismantling of Jim Crow laws. Southern whites, once a mainstay of the Democratic party, are seen as a ripe constituency. And by stoking “racial grievances” in the coded language of “states’ rights,” Republicans successfully lure many former Democrats into their circle with appeals to fear—of crime and of a Black population overly reliant on social programs. Nixon, who was not entirely trusted by the more conservative members of his party, needs a hard-right candidate on the ticket, and Agnew, with his vilification of civil rights protestors, fits the bill. Ronald Reagan was accused of employing the Southern Strategy when, in declaring his candidacy for president in 1980, he used the “states’ rights” rhetoric and chose a site only seven miles from where three civil right protesters were killed 1964.

The Saturday Night Massacre refers to Nixon’s order to his Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire the special Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox. When Richardson and his Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both refuse and resign in protest, the task falls to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who complies. The notorious event is emblematic of Nixon’s overreach and of the ethical defiance demonstrated by members of Nixon’s own Justice Department. It was signaled to the press and Congress Nixon’s attempt to obstruct the Watergate investigation.