Very Strange Bedfellows

"When the highly insecure and socially awkward W Richard Nixon offered the vice-presidential candidacy to smooth-talking, confident, but virtually unheard-of Spiro Agnew during the presidential campaign of 1968, jaws dropped. "Spiro who?" became a staple of the political lexicon, and while Nixon publicly stood by his choice, he privately kept Agnew at arm's length for the duration of their partnership." "Nixon and Agnew became one of the oddest couples in White House history, their political affair disintegrating over five years into a calamitous denouement. Agnew's divisive rhetoric skyrocketed his popularity, but he grew weary of exclusion from the Nixon inner circle. Nixon, concluding that Agnew was not the man to succeed him, conspired to dump him in 1972 and later to remove him from the line of presidential succession. But before Nixon's presidency collapsed in Watergate, a tawdry scandal of payoffs to Agnew in the White House accomplished the job." "A leading political reporter of that period, Jules Witcover, wrote biographies of both men and co-authored the acclaimed account of the Agnew resignation, A Heartbeat Away. Now, with three decades of perspective, a trove of new material - including Nixon's White House tapes - and interviews with close Nixon-Agnew associates, Witcover has written a captivating narrative that reveals how the foibles, pettiness, and weaknesses of each man destroyed that marriage, and, ultimately, their careers. Written with a keen eye toward just how strange - and ultimately destructive - the relationship between this president and his vice-president was, Very Strange Bedfellows is the definitive account of a bizarre chapter in national politics, told with a historian's breadth of knowledge, by a journalist who was there."--Jacket.