Judy Agnew, Wife of Vice President, Dies at 91 (Published 2012)

Judy Agnew, who went to Washington after Richard M. Nixon plucked her husband, Spiro, from relative political obscurity to make him vice president and who later stood by him when he resigned in 1973 because of criminal charges, died on June 20 in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 91.

Her family announced the death.

As Vice President Spiro T. Agnew seized America’s attention with hot, alliterative rhetoric — calling Nixon’s critics “pusillanimous pussyfooters” and “nattering nabobs of negativism” — Mrs. Agnew radiated the practical, plain-spoken perspicacity of a superbly competent suburban housewife. Magazines and newspapers flocked to interview her.

As the nation’s second lady, Mrs. Agnew, a former PTA president and an assistant Girl Scout leader, continued to cook kettles of spaghetti, buy her clothes off the rack, pack her husband’s bag and do needlepoint, just as she had previously done in Annapolis when her husband was governor of Maryland.

She was fluent in the language of the “silent majority,” the bloc of middle-class, mostly conservative, mostly white voters whom Nixon courted. When a reporter asked what she was up to, she said in an accent she called Baltimorese, “I’ve been trying to keep the ashtrays clean.”

“I don’t take stands on anything,” she said in an interview with Parade magazine in 1970. “I stay out of the political end of it. When people ask what I majored in, I proudly tell them — ‘I majored in marriage.’ ”

She did have opinions, however, and they occasionally slipped out. She rejected feminism as “silly,” saying she was already liberated. She told The New York Times that she had “no use” for hippies, “although I don’t know any, really.”