Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew had never gotten along well. It likely didn’t pain the president much to acquiesce in the ousting of his vice president over illegal kickbacks while the president struggled to keep his own job. It was 1973, and Nixon still gave every indication that he wanted to beat the Watergate rap. But that left the problem of who would fill the vacancy.
The vice presidency had frequently sat vacant. The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, changed that and prevented a unified Democratic government for a few years. Given the radicalism of the 94th Congress, which brought a Democratic wave of new faces into both chambers to push for regulatory expansions on several fronts, that was probably a good thing!
Nixon didn’t precisely cherry-pick then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. As Democratic House Speaker Carl Albert bluntly told the New York Times, “We gave Nixon no choice but Ford.” He was a known quantity and had been around forever, having first entered Congress in 1949 from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
