The Saturday Night Massacre actually sped up Nixon’s political demise
Firing the man investigating Watergate seriously backfired
By October of 1973, Richard Nixon could feel special prosecutor Archibald Cox closing in. Cox had just asked Nixon to turn over recordings of Oval Office conversation — the infamous Watergate Tapes — and the president was desperate to save himself.
As Cox left his office at the end of the workday on Friday, the 19th of that month, a reporter rushed the Justice Department special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal to ask him if he would resign, given the extreme circumstances. Cox shot back: “No — hell no.”
In recent weeks, the already tense investigation had gone full nuclear with President Richard M. Nixon on one side and Cox and the Department of Justice on the other. Publicly, Nixon was saying he wanted the inquiry to go as deep as it needed to get to the bottom of the scandal. Privately, the president was doing all he could to stymie the probe, including attempting to conceal secret recordings he made in the Oval Office that implicated him in the misconduct.
Cox, a Harvard law professor and former U.S. solicitor general under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had been brought to Washington by Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson in May to investigate the notorious June 17, 1972 break-in at the Watergate complex, where five Nixon operatives were caught trying to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Cox’s appointment to investigate “all offenses arising out of the 1972 election…involving the president, the White House staff or presidential appointments” required special approval of the House Judiciary Committee and only the attorney general had the authority to fire him.
For months, Cox inched closer to the “smoking gun” he was looking for and Nixon was growing increasingly agitated and backed into a corner.
After refusing to comply with the subpoena for the tapes, Nixon made his final offer that Friday: a proposal to have Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, who was famously hard of hearing, to review and summarize the tapes for the purpose of the investigation.
Immediately, Cox dismissed the so-called compromise and viewed the weekend as an opportunity for both sides to cool off.
But Nixon had had enough.
Less than 24 hours later, at 2:20 p.m. on Saturday, Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. And when Richardson refused, Nixon forced his resignation. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, who also refused and resigned.
Nixon then ordered Solicitor General Robert Bork, who had been brought to the White House by limousine on Saturday to be sworn in as acting attorney general, to fire Cox. Bork quickly dashed off a two-paragraph letter terminating Cox as special prosecutor.
But the officeholders were not the only casualty on that evening, which became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon also ordered the FBI to seal the office of the special prosecutor and eliminated the office within the Department of Justice, a place where a White House spokesperson said the investigation would be “carried out with thoroughness and vigor.”
“It had been been clear in my mind for a couple of days that I wouldn’t do it,” Ruckelshaus later said of Cox’s dismissal. “And when it became clear to both Elliot [Richardson] and me that the President was going forward with his determination to fire Cox, we both sort of simultaneously said, ‘Who’s next?’ And it was clear then that Bork was the next in line.”
Ruckelshaus said that Bork “ultimately decided that the President had the power to fire Cox, and he had the right to ask him to be the instrument of that power. He had no personal scruples against firing Cox.”
But Ruckelshaus also said that Bork may not have fully understood the gravity of the tapes, noting, “He didn’t have any of that information, he didn’t have any of the flavor, the feel of what had been building up over several months, so his perception of what he was being asked to do was much different from mine and Elliot’s.”
“I think that as a matter of principle, Cox should not have been fired,” Richardson said, adding, “I thought Bork was simply taking the position that the President was entitled to have him fired” for not following White House orders.
Bork said as much the year of the Saturday Night Massacre. He said he “was thinking of resigning not out of moral considerations” but rather because he “did not want to be perceived as a man who did the President’s bidding to save my job.”
In some ways, Bork saw himself as the person who kept the Department of Justice together at a moment of turmoil.
“The President and Mr. Cox had gotten themselves, without my aid, into a position of confrontation,” said Bork. “There was never any question that Mr. Cox, one way or another, was going to be discharged. At that point you would have had massive resignations from the top levels of Justice.”
He added: “If that had happened, the Department of Justice would have lost its top leadership, all of it, and would I think have effectively been crippled.”
In his posthumously published memoirs, Bork wrote that Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court for following orders on firing Cox. Nixon was unable to carry out the promise because of his resignation, but Ronald Reagan nominated Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987. He was notoriously unable to pass the Senate confirmation hearing.
But Nixon’s attack on the Department of Justice seriously backfired. Around the country, citizens sent hundreds of thousands of letters and telegrams of protest to Washington. NBC News showed that for the first time, a plurality of U.S. citizens now supported impeachment of Nixon, with 44 percent in favor, 43 percent opposed and 13 percent undecided. With that imperative, 21 members of Congress introduced resolutions calling for Nixon’s impeachment.
Nixon attempted to quell dissent by lending his support to another independent prosecutor. In November, Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as the new Watergate prosecutor. Jaworski resumed Cox’s investigation and eventually secured the release of the Oval Office recordings in July 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled that the tapes did not fall under executive privilege. With too much evidence mounting against him, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 8, 1974.
On November 14, 1973, federal District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell ruled that the dismissal of Cox was illegal.
For Cox, the Saturday Night Massacre was about more than his job or an attempt by a president to cover up illegal activity — it was a critical moment where the United States could lose its rule of law, observing, “Whether we shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”
