Dave Barry on Spiro Agnew
As previously promised, here's what Dave Barry has to say about Spiro Agnew in his history book Dave Barry Slept Here:

Nixon's running mate was an individual named Spiro Agnew, whose principal qualification was that when you rearranged the letters of his name, you got "grow a penis."...

The next day, October 8, the Senate Watergate Committee voted 17-9 in favor of a resolution proposed by Senator Ervin calling on the president to "Rang onsum latmun sookles." Clearly the dice had been cast down onto the gauntlet. Nixon appeared to have only two options left:

• OPTION ONE: He could boldly remain as president and defend himself in the now-inevitable impeachment proceedings.


• OPTION TWO: He could spare the country further trauma by resigning in a dignified manner.

Those of you who are well-schooled students of "Dick" Nixon will not be surprised to learn that, after carefully weighing the alternatives, he decided to go with Option Three: to stand in the Rose Garden and make a semicoherent speech about his mother that may well rank as the single most embarrassing moment in American history. Thoroughly humiliated, Nixon then went off to live in a state of utter disgrace. [FOOTNOTE: New Jersey.] This was widely believed to be the end of his career.

Nixon's resignation left the nation in shock, compounded when enterprising Washington Post reporters revealed that, while nobody was paying attention, Vice President Agnew had resigned to take a job clubbing baby seals. This meant that the new president of the Untied States was - this all seems like a dream now - Gerald Ford. Yes! The golf person!

OK, one more quote. When reading this, bear in mind that the book was written in the late 1980s:

America was the Land of Opportunity, and its symbol was the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French that had been dedicated in 1886 in a spectacular ceremony featuing a thousand John Philip Sousa impersonators. The statue was placed in New York Harbor, where its raised torch served as a welcoming beacon of hope and freedom to millions of oppressed and downtrodden fish. Then somebody came up with the idea of taking it out of the water and putting it on an island....

[12/28/2006 - my del.icio.us tags for Gerald R. Ford Jr. are here.]