How Fondly Pols Remember Their Own

If Al Capone had taken a pay cut to become a senator or vice president, there would be a statue of him in the U.S. Capitol.

Maybe with a machine gun under one arm.

Politicians will always whitewash their own, no matter how smarmy.

For evidence, you could hear the Senate’s big shots applaud Wednesday as they ripped the black cloth off a shining bust of Spiro Agnew.

Not the first time Agnew had been busted.

The pure Italian marble (at least something was pure) showed Agnew’s ski-jump nose, Cheshire-Cat eyes and hair swooping back from his temples like a 1939 Buick radiator.

He looked like a Roman emperor instead of a bagman.

Maybe that’s why I was disappointed.

I’d hoped for something more realistic. Maybe a marble figure of Spiro with his hand out. In his open palm, a white envelope. Inscribed in marble, a motto suitable to Agnew’s career: “YOU WANNA PLAY, YOU GOTTA PAY.”

Too harsh? Oh, well, senators laid on praise with a trowel as Agnew was immortalized in the gallery of vice presidents.

There hasn’t been so much amnesia since Richard Nixon’s funeral.

Nobody breathed a word of truth - that Agnew was a swagman who grabbed bribes from Maryland contractors (at least $147,500 in plain envelopes, cash only, please).

In the governor’s office and White House, he palmed kickbacks as smoothly as a bellman taking tips.

Nobody mentioned that had Agnew not resigned, copping a 1973 plea of nolo contendere to charges of extortion and tax evasion, he - not Jerry Ford - would have replaced Nixon.

More proof that Somebody Up There looks after fools, drunks and the U.S.A.

So we were spared President Agnew, the hatchetman who used the phrases of wordsmiths Pat Buchanan and William Safire to lacerate Nixon’s anti-war enemies: “Nattering nabobs of negativism” and “effete corps of impudent snobs.”

Agnew never again spoke to Nixon, whom he blamed for tossing him to the wolves. No love lost between the only president and veep run out of town as crooks.

I was curious how senatorial orators Ted Stevens, R-Alaska; Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. - plus Agnew himself - would finesse his criminal past.

The phony bombast was as thick as lobster bisque.

Stevens, who arranged the $50,000 Agnew bust, said Spiro was great. Why? He voted for the Alaska pipeline.

Dole rhapsodized over Agnew as a veep “who minced no words, a loyal, controversial advocate for Nixon.”

Moynihan’s evasion was more clever.

He praised Agnew as the first Greek-American vice-president: “A strong partisan voice in tempestuous times.”

Agnew, who’s lived comfortably in Palm Springs, Calif., as a Middle East trader, seemed unchanged at 77. Time stood still.

You heard the old Spiro stick-it-in-their-ear feistiness.

“I’m not blind or deaf to critics who feel this ceremony should not take place, that the Senate is giving me an honor I do not deserve,” he said with a ghost of the old snarl. “This has less to do with me than the office I held.”

He didn’t add: “and besmirched.”

Sure, other scoundrels reigned on Vice Presidents’ Row, including Aaron Burr, who killed Alexander Hamilton. But Agnew’s bust is a reminder of the Big Shots Code: He can steal, lie, extort and deface the Constitution, but a pol is a saint to his own kind.

After all, 32 cents will buy a Richard Nixon stamp.

And Agnew’s portrait has been rehung in Maryland.

The governor says, “This isn’t Stalinist Russia; you can’t hide from the past.”

OK, I’ll accept the argument that Spiro Agnew’s bust provides a cautionary lesson for school kids and tempted senators.

But if Agnew’s bust is a marble salute to greed, the Senate should start immediately on a Hall of Shame. Tourists could pass the Abscam Wing, pausing to study a frieze of fake Arab sheiks handing cash to Sen. Harrison Williams and other honorables.

There would be a statue of ex-U.S. Rep. Ozzie Meyers over his famed axiom that “Money talks, bull—— walks.”

The Watergate wing would display the marble casts of Liddy, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson and Cuban burglars, poised by a locked door.

A sculpture of Nixon would be punching a tape recorder.

Then the Iran-contra Wing, feature the usual suspects, Ollie North, John Poindexter and other conspirators, lurking around a monster shredder.

For the moment, though, Spiro Agnew’s bust stands jowl-to-jowl by Teddy Roosevelt, Alben Barkley, Henry Wallace, Ford and George Bush.

Late at night, will some of them wince and edge away?

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