Nixon’s 20 October 1973 temper tantrum, the Saturday Night Massacre, did not stop the release of his secret tape recordings about the Watergate break-in.
On Saturday night, 20 October 1973, President Richard M. Nixon “discharged” Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, an event now known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon “also abolished the office of the special prosecutor.”
Nixon had demanded that first attorney general Elliot Richardson and then deputy attorney General William Ruckelshaus fire Cox. Both men refused. Instead, they resigned. In succession.
Solicitor General Robert Bork, now the acting attorney general (line of succession), obeyed Nixon’s directive. (Fourteen years later, almost to the day, the Senate would overwhelmingly reject Bork’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, 23 October 1987.)
What brought Nixon down, however, was not his actions of 20 October 1973. That temper tantrum did trigger a torrent of outrage, however.
“Three million messages descended on Congress, the greatest outpouring of its kind that had ever taken place,” according to former Attorney General Richardson in December 1973. According to History.com, “21 members of Congress introduced resolutions calling for Nixon’s impeachment.”
I was a freshman in college and remember much of that event as though it were, if not yesterday, perhaps last month.
Forty nine years ago! Four years ago, NPR ran a 45 year retrospective noting that most of the American population had not been alive in 1972, the year of the Watergate break-in.
For the undergraduate students in my classes at the University of Washington, Watergate is further in their past than Pearl Harbor had been during my freshman year. That’s a sobering thought.
What was Watergate?
Local police arrested five men in June 1972 after they broke into Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate hotel and office. That break-in set off a chain of investigations which would reveal “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of the Nixon reelection effort.”
Although Nixon was re-elected by a landslide in November 1972, the break-in story would not die…
Why did Nixon want to fire Cox?
On 16 February 1971, a secret, voice-activated recording system began operating in the Oval Office of the White House. (Its reach would later be expanded.) Former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman recounted the history of that system for the National Archives.
Cox wanted to listen to those tapes to see what Nixon knew about Watergate and the coverup. Nixon did not want to release the tapes to anyone…
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com