John Volpe could have tempered Richard Nixon's White House, the author says. | AP Photos Volpe might have stopped Watergate

On Aug. 8, 1968, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon made a fateful decision at the Miami convention. In the last hour before he was to announce his choice of a running mate, he switched Secret Service protection from John Volpe of Massachusetts to Maryland’s Spiro Agnew — and lost the partner who could have prevented the Watergate scandal that destroyed his presidency.

After an all-night series of meetings with close political aides and senior GOP leaders, Nixon had narrowed his choice to Volpe and Agnew. Both Northeastern governors met Nixon’s VP criteria: (1) relatively unknown nationally, neither would divert the focus from the top of the ticket, (2) as political moderates, they would not alienate either major wing of the party, (3) they would appeal to important voting blocs and (4) both were proven vigorous campaigners.


Nixon had given veto power on the selection to South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond in return for his throwing the Southern delegations’ support to Nixon over their preferred candidate, California Gov. Ronald Reagan. At the end of their early-morning meeting, Thurmond handed Nixon three lists of names — “acceptable” (conservatives: Reagan and Texas Sen. John Tower); “unacceptable” (liberals: New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, and New York Mayor John Lindsay; and a last-minute handwritten category “no objection” (moderates: Volpe and Agnew).

Both Volpe and Agnew had originally favored the vacillating Rockefeller but soon became convinced Nixon would prevail, and each campaigned in his own way to get on the ticket. Agnew openly played to Thurmond’s “Southern strategy” by dropping his earlier liberal civil rights stance and attacking African-American rioters and antiwar protesters.

Volpe took a different tack, arguing that Nixon was already assured of carrying most of the South but needed to make inroads in the blue-collar Democratic strongholds of the North. Volpe had demonstrated his vote-getting prowess there, winning a third term as governor in a record landslide and with the widest margin of all governors elected in 1966.

Volpe confidently proclaimed to the Nixon camp that he had “won big in Kennedy-land and could do it again” in Catholic, Italian-American and ethnic areas across the Northeast and Midwest.

Volpe and Agnew were each poised to play kingmaker at the Miami convention as favorite-son presidential candidates who would deliver their states’ delegations to Nixon on the first ballot and block any last-minute surge by either Rockefeller or Reagan. Massachusetts had 34 delegates to Maryland’s 17.

For much of the year, Volpe had the clear edge, as Nixon seemed to be grooming him for the vice presidential selection. Republican and Democratic peers elected him chairman of the National Governors’ Conference. In January, Nixon came to Boston to discuss campaign strategy and meet Volpe’s staff. (When we were introduced, he surprised me with a compliment for my open support of President Lyndon B. Johnson on Vietnam.)

Nixon had encouraged Volpe to travel overseas to burnish his foreign-policy credentials. In early April, the two conferred at Nixon’s New York apartment, where they discussed Volpe’s upcoming trip to Asia. Volpe would lead a delegation of U.S. governors to a conference in Japan and then make a brief side visit to Vietnam (where he would be sure to avoid the “brainwashing” comment that doomed Michigan Gov. George Romney’s presidential bid).

Volpe was well on his way to winning Nixon’s nod. After the Asia trip, one piece of Volpe’s plan would remain: The uncontested April 30 Massachusetts GOP primary would give Volpe control of the state’s delegation to direct Nixon’s way when most needed at the convention (even though several delegates, led by Edward W. Brooke, the only African-American in the United States Senate, preferred the undeclared Rockefeller).

But the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, and the divergent reactions of Volpe and Agnew, tilted the playing field. Agnew seized on the ensuing riots in Baltimore and 100 other U.S. cities to step up his fiery law-and-order rhetoric. Volpe, however, had just arrived in Japan and faced a painful dilemma — should he continue the foreign trip that Nixon had encouraged or should he return to Massachusetts? Boston had already experienced some rioting immediately after King’s killing the night before, and that day 100,000 people gathered on the Common adjoining the State House to express shock, grief and anger. Lt. Gov. Francis W. Sargent, now acting governor, had called out the National Guard.

Volpe made a late-night (early morning Tokyo time) call to assess the situation at home. I joined Sargent and a half-dozen other Volpe aides around the governor’s empty desk listening to his speaker phone. The near-unanimous view was that Boston’s streets seemed under control and the governor should continue with his trip. I dissented, believing the governor’s place was at home at this critical time. Volpe decided to stay in Japan.

Boston’s media and the state’s Democrats, already critical of Volpe’s earlier travels, were quick to ridicule his absence. Three weeks later, Massachusetts voters weighed in. On the day of the presidential primary, Rockefeller suddenly announced his candidacy (urged on not only by Brooke and Massachusetts liberals but also, secretly, by LBJ, who detested Nixon and considered Vice President Hubert Humphrey an unworthy successor). In a subterranean write-in campaign organized by Brooke, Rockefeller managed to edge Volpe by a few hundred votes out of 100,000.

In an instant, Volpe had lost his clear advantage over Agnew and was relegated from major player at the GOP convention to little more than a bystander. Though Nixon continued publicly to tout him as a leading contender for the vice presidential slot, he later recounted in his memoir that Volpe’s loss had “embarrassed him, irritated me and given a great boost to Rockefeller.”

Yet, in the final hours before his convention decision, Nixon was still pondering the Volpe-Agnew choice, having received Thurmond’s blessing to go with either. Nixon tapped both men to make nominating speeches on his behalf. But in the end, Volpe’s fate had been sealed three months earlier. When the room was cleared of all the GOP bigwigs, a key Nixon adviser reminded him that “Volpe couldn’t even carry his own state” with his name the only one on the ballot.

History is full of what-ifs. What if Volpe had come back from Japan? What if he had secured the handful of votes needed to defeat Rockefeller’s challenge and retain Nixon’s confidence? And what if he had become vice president?

There are two plausible scenarios. One is that Vice President Volpe would have been unable to prevent or curtail the Watergate mess, Nixon would resigned anyway, and Volpe would have become president. Not only would there have been no Vice President Agnew; there also would have been no Vice President Gerald Ford, no President Ford, and no Vice President Rockefeller. There might have been a Secretary of State Rockefeller and a defense secretary named Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson. President Volpe might or might not have run for election in his own right and might or might not have defeated Jimmy Carter. (Having traveled on a State Department mission to the Soviet Union, where he struggled to find a church to celebrate Catholic Mass, he knew something about Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.)

The more likely course of events, however, is that Volpe as vice president would have been able to head off the Watergate scandal where Agnew could not or would not. Why? First, because Agnew was singularly incapable of raising legal and ethical alarms about the conduct of Nixon aides, let alone Nixon himself, when he was being threatened with indictment by Attorney General Elliot Richardson. (Nixon’s memoir confirms that he knew before selecting Agnew that he had taken payments from Maryland contractors, but Nixon assumed they were routine legal campaign contributions. Receiving bags of cash in the White House was quite another matter.)

Agnew’s slashing partisan rhetoric, moreover, made him so unpopular in Congress that Nixon, on his tapes, called him “my insurance against impeachment,” actually enabling the wrongdoing of others in the White House. Volpe was not only not Agnew — when it came to matters of public morality, he was the anti-Agnew. Deeply religious, Volpe prided himself on his anti-corruption record in private business and public service. As governor, he had created the Massachusetts ethics code and frequently cautioned his staff and State House employees to do nothing they would not want to read about on the front page of the Boston Globe. (As transportation secretary, his warning extended to The Washington Post and New York Times.)

The strongest evidence of the tempering role Volpe would have played in the Nixon White House is his behavior as a member of Nixon’s Cabinet. Like his fellow governors, Romney at Housing and Urban Development and Walter Hickel at Interior, Volpe frequently clashed with Nixon aides Robert Haldeman and John Ehrlichman — but unlike his colleagues, he usually won.

Volpe sometimes saw such policy differences as moral issues. On at least two occasions, he threatened to resign if Nixon followed his aides’ advice to countermand the secretary’s positions: his directive that car manufacturers install air bags on new vehicles and his department’s legislation creating Amtrak (called Railpax). In both cases, Nixon reversed his initial decision and backed Volpe, adding to White House staff resentment of the obstreperous governor.

Volpe was able to succeed in that hostile environment partly because he had a secret White House ally: fellow co-religionist and daily communicant Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary. She had had her own problems with Nixon’s inner circle and saw Volpe as a kindred spirit. At critical times, she was able to get him the direct access to Nixon that his staff denied to all Cabinet officers and even to Agnew. (After the railroad legislation turnaround, an irate Ehrlichman called Volpe to complain, “I don’t know how you got to the president, but he’s decided to sign your bill after all.”)

Pat Nixon, the president’s wife, also liked and respected Volpe and would have welcomed the personal warmth, decency and humanity he would have brought to the coldly efficient and humorless White House. Volpe would have mitigated the callous staff-imposed separation of the president’s family from Nixon’s official duties.

Volpe would not have countenanced the operating principle of Nixon’s political aides —that the president was surrounded by enemies in the media and Congress who were out to destroy him even before Watergate reared its ugly head. Volpe enjoyed a political fight as much as any politician, and he played to win, but he did not see his political opponents as personal enemies. He played by the rules, and his word was his bond. Both as governor and as transportation secretary, he pushed far-reaching measures in legislative bodies controlled by Democrats and invariably persuaded members of both parties to see the merits of his proposals.

Volpe also refused to see national security issues in partisan rather than patriotic terms. Though he strongly supported Nixon’s policy on Vietnam (as he had LBJ’s), he respected those, like his granddaughter, Joy, who held diametrically opposite views. He saw the Vietnam War as a national tragedy not only because of the lives lost and damaged but also because decent, patriotic Americans were on both sides of the issue.

When White House aides wanted to use Volpe’s strong connections to the construction industry to woo hard-hat support, they sent him a draft speech blasting mainstream antiwar demonstrators, not just the violent few, as anti-American. Volpe saw it as the kind of bitter, antagonistic speech Agnew would make and he refused to deliver it. Instead, reminiscent of the letters he exchanged with his granddaughter, he gave his own defense of Nixon’s policy in reasoned, moral terms while conceding the equally moral motivation of those on the other side. Incidents like this were why someone once called Volpe “a bridge over troubled waters.”

Volpe’s passion on civil rights, stemming from his own experience with discrimination as the son of Italian immigrants and his shock at witnessing legal segregation in the Navy, won him the respect and affection of African-American leaders across America. Clarence Mitchell Jr., head of the Southern Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and influential chief lobbyist of the NAACP, had clashed with Governor Agnew for condemning moderate blacks equally with the rioters after the King assassination. But Mitchell was moved to tears on hearing Volpe’s “ladder story” from his plasterer days — about climbing the ladder of success but remembering to give a hand to the man coming up behind. (Mitchell would honor Volpe by repeating the line, with emotion, in his own speeches.) Charles Evers, brother of the slain Medgar Evers, came out of a meeting with Volpe saying the last man he had heard talk the way Volpe did about civil rights was Bobby Kennedy: “There’s something about you people from Massachusetts.” And yet, Strom Thurmond shared their respect and affection for the man.

Volpe bridled as much at official corruption as he did at racial injustice. Had a Vice President Volpe gotten a whiff of White House plumbers, coverups and destroyed evidence, he would have marched into the Oval Office and blown the whistle. Nixon would have had no choice but to curtail the activities and come clean long before the scandal threatened his presidency. And unlike Agnew, Volpe’s bipartisan popularity in Congress would have made him an acceptable potential president and provided a mind-focusing incentive for Nixon to do the right thing.

Of all John Volpe’s contributions to America, saving Nixon from himself would have been his finest. The great visionary leader would have been spared the petty, sordid business that Watergate became, and freed to focus on the larger issues of war and peace for which he was so eminently qualified.

So much for what might have been. Instead, having extracted the last ounce of campaigning from Volpe and his Cabinet colleagues, the White House fired most of them after the election (Henry Kissinger remained). Volpe was offered the ambassadorship to Italy — which he wanted but only after another year or two to complete his innovative transportation policies. This time, there was no appeal and he was given an ultimatum: Take Rome now or lose it and be gone from the Cabinet anyway. He took it.

Over the next two years, one Nixon aide after another fell from grace, some ending up behind bars. As Nixon’s own end neared, the ever-dedicated, ever-forgiving Volpe secured a personal message to him from Pope Paul VI praising his work for peace and offering prayers on his behalf.

Joseph A. Bosco currently writes on national security issues. He was assistant legal counsel to Gov. John A. Volpe, 1967-1968, and special assistant to U.S. Transportation Secretary Volpe, 1969-1973.