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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993                   TAG: 9302210128
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

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AGNEW TO GET HONOR BY NEWSDAY

Twenty years after he became the first and only vice president to resign while under criminal investigation, Spiro Agnew will be given a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol.

An artist has been commissioned to sculpt a marble bust of the vice president who in 1973 resigned in disgrace and then pleaded no contest to a charge of cheating the government out of $13,551 in income taxes.

The cost of the bust: $40,000, to be paid out of the Senate contingency fund.

Congressional staffers pointed out that the Senate Rules Committee, which authorized the bust, is simply following an 1885 Senate resolution that states that marble busts of all former vice presidents shall be placed in the Capitol.

With the exception of Agnew and Dan Quayle - who is too fresh out of office to be honored - marble busts of vice presidents line the Senate chamber and the second floor of the Capitol. Rogues and heroes are among them, including Richard Nixon, a former vice president who was the only president ever to resign and whose bust, completed in 1967, cost $5,000.

But Agnew, Nixon's vice president, isn't there. "It was just a question of waiting for an appropriate time," said Bill Raines of the office of the Capitol architect. "The climate was not conducive. It's the office that's being honored and not the individual."

Agnew, now 74, resides in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

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