Eighty-eight years ago today, a baby was born in Baltimore who would become arguably the most important man in Alaska history after William Seward: Spiro Anagnostopoulos.
With a single vote, Spiro T. Agnew (he shortened his name; wouldn’t you?) made the trans-Alaska pipeline possible - which made possible the Permanent Fund and a state treasury that frets less about how to raise revenues than how to spend them.
Remember Alaska before petrodollars? Almost everyone worked seasonally or for the government. The state had few paved roads and no four-lane highways. A majority of schools and hospitals were made of wood. Most of the diet of most Alaskans was caught or grown near the spot where it was consumed. On cold days, the air in villages and cities reeked with coal and wood smoke. Even in the biggest settlements, you could expect the power to go out every week or two. With high costs, limited incomes and a tiny tax base, serious people wondered if statehood had been such a good idea.
Anchorage was a small, dirty, hardscrabble place with more bars than churches when Agnew flew in on a campaign swing in 1968. The son of a Greek immigrant had become the governor of Maryland and was now the Republican candidate for vice president.
Local GOP boosters greeted Richard Nixon’s running mate with leis made of plastic snowballs, dancers and a blanket toss.
“I thought you might want get a look at what’s-his-name,” Agnew joked to the crowd, a reference to the fact that, in his own words, his was “not a household name.”
But it was quickly becoming so. An Anchorage Times editorial noted that Agnew had “generated color and excitement - some of which, admittedly, has stirred more controversy than perhaps the GOP managers would wish.”
Today, along with Aaron Burr, his name is probably the best known among America’s veeps who never sat in the Oval Office as commander in chief.
Agnew addressed supporters at West High School. Onstage with him were his wife, Elinor (better known as “Judy”), three daughters and one daughter-in-law; his son was on duty in Vietnam at the time. The candidate expressed regrets that he had to cancel a side trip to Fairbanks because the law required him to be in Maryland on Sunday. National reporters “could recall no such legal requirement,” wrote The New York Times. But aides suggested it “might be the law of the Colts.” The governor, the Times said, was “an avid fan” of the football team, then based in Baltimore.
If that was a snub, Alaskans tolerated it. The new state, feeling its way into national party politics in 1960, gave Nixon just 1,000 more votes than John Kennedy. In 1964, the state handed Democrats a landslide victory. But the 1968 count went 37,600 for Nixon/Agnew vs. 35,411 for Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie and 10,024 for George Wallace and Curtis LeMay.
A few months before Agnew’s visit, oil was discovered on the North Slope. Getting the product to market would require a stupendous pipeline crossing disputed state, federal, Native and private land. Congress approved the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act, removing one obstacle, but environmental issues kept the matter bottled up in the courts.
In August 1972, Agnew made a re-election campaign trip to the state. This time he did get to Fairbanks, where he promoted the proposed pipeline, saying, “There is no reason at all why we cannot preserve the environment and the natural beauty of this state while at the same time ensuring that our nation continues to develop.”
Supporters gave him the gift of a husky puppy named Hero (which became ill from roundworms after leaving the state but recovered). On Election Day, Alaska voters went Republican with gusto, voting nearly
2 to 1 for Nixon and Agnew over Democrats George McGovern and Sargent Shriver, a ratio that has pretty much been repeated here in subsequent presidential elections.
Clearing the way for the 800-mile pipeline literally required an act of Congress. The Trans-Alaska Authorization Act passed the House of Representatives with votes to spare but triggered a brawl in the Senate. Most Republicans and some key Democrats, like Washington’s Henry “Scoop” Jackson, pushed for the all-Alaska line. But Minnesota’s Walter Mondale and others argued for a trans-Canada route - or no pipe at all.
The vote on July 17, 1973, was deadlocked: 49 senators in favor and 49 opposed.
What happened next is why you get a dividend check. Why you don’t pay a state income tax. Why most of us drive to work on four-lane, paved, plowed roads or go to school in a concrete-and-steel building with big windows, a gym and maybe even a swimming pool.
Exercising his constitutional role as president of the Senate, Agnew cast the tie-breaking “yea.” Nixon signed the bill, and as winter came on, the Pipeline Boom hit like a tsunami of money. Alaska’s been flush, more or less, ever since.
Things didn’t work out so well for Agnew, however. That same year, he was accused of taking bribes and pleaded no contest to tax evasion, resigned from office and paid a fine with money loaned to him by his buddy Frank Sinatra.
He slept in Alaska at least one more time before his death in 1996, and it wasn’t on purpose. In 1981, he and 180 other passengers on a commercial jet to Korea were detained in Anchorage after an engine conked out. Spotted at the Hotel Captain Cook, Agnew shied from questions - “I’m not in politics anymore. I just don’t have time to fool with this anymore” - lit his Marlboro and puffed quietly into history.
If Alaskans had any sense of gratitude (and I’m not advocating such sensitivities), we would have thronged the hotel to cheer and serenade him. We would erect statues to the man, declare a holiday, name landmarks and public buildings after him.
He may have picked pockets in Maryland, but he made us rich.
So happy birthday, Spiro. And thanks. For everything.
uE06E When not investing his PFD check in pull-tabs, Daily News assistant features editor Mike Dunham can be reached at mdunham@adn.com.
