Revisiting 2020 duPont-Columbia Award-Winner, Rachel Maddow
Bag Man, hosted by Rachel Maddow and produced by Mike Yarvitz, won a 2020 duPont-Columbia Award.
Rachel Maddow won a 2020 duPont-Columbia Award for her seven part podcast series Bag Man. The series explored an often overlooked piece of recent political history - the crimes of Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro T. Agnew and the efforts of a small group of committed public servants to bring him to justice.
Bag Man brought underexplored history to life.
The series traced Agnew’s political rise as well as the ways he abused his political offices enroute to the vice presidency. While in office, Agnew engaged in bribery and extortion but, as the podcast details, the discovery of his activities came at the height of the Watergate scandal. Young prosecutors in the Department of Justice were left wondering about the ramifications of uncovering crimes that could unseat the vice president poised to take office if the already embattled president was impeached.
The heroes of Bag Man end up being three young prosecutors, Barney Skolnik, Tim Baker and Ron Liebman, who uncovered Agnew’s crimes by following a trail of money from Maryland to the White House. The tension and uncertainty of their struggle is a centerpiece of the series, and by combining archival audio with riveting narration and fresh interviews with the men who investigated Agnew in the 70s, the podcast brought this underexplored history to life.
The investigation into criminality in the White House also had contemporary resonance. On a recent episode of the On Assignment podcast, Maddow commented, “people were surprised and interested to know that there was somebody else in a previous White House who talked like Trump and who picked the same targets and went after them in many of the same ways.”
Maddow and Yarvitz did not stop after the series aired. They continued reporting on Agnew and the men who brought him to justice. After the original podcast came out, they were approached by a source with papers that detailed Agnew’s activities after leaving the White House. Along with interviews and research that didn’t fit into the podcast, that work resulted in the new book Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House.