Quote of the Day (Archibald Cox, on the “Saturday Night Massacre” and Its Resulting Firestorm)

“The most important thing was that the rule of law should prevail; the president must comply with the law. Ultimately, all [the people’s] liberties were at stake.”—Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (1912-2004), quoted by Judge Steve Halsey, “It’s In Your Court: Rule of law, Not Rule of Men,” Press Publications, Nov. 27, 2013

It’s hard to convey, to anyone not born on this date in 1973, the shock and sense of events veering out of control in Washington when the news broke that not only had Cox been fired, but that Attorney-General Elliott Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus had resigned in protest rather than carry out the deed. 

Eventually, the matter fell into the hands of Solicitor General Robert Bork, who considered joining his colleagues in leaving, but decided not to do so when Richardson assured him that the department would descend into chaos.

Richardson and Ruckelshaus had felt honor-bound not to fire Cox for pressing his investigation into Watergate—and, with Richardson, there was an additional consideration: Cox was his old law professor at Harvard.

Cox had pressed Nixon to turn over audiotapes made in the White House during the Watergate period, and a court backed the special prosecutor up. Nixon refused, standing on executive privilege. Instead, he offered the “Stennis Compromise”—i.e., permitting a conservative Democrat from Mississippi to listen to the tapes.

It sounded, on the surface, so reasonable—get a Senate elder with no ideological axe to grind to resolve the matter. 

But the proposal reveals why the President was not known as “Tricky Dick” for nothing—Stennis was in his seventies, ailing and very, very hearing-impaired! Cox refused the Machiavellian offer, and Nixon forced the matter.

The "Saturday Night Massacre" unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Capitol Hill shortly became swamped with impeachment bills. 

Eventually, of course, a new special prosecutor was appointed, who also pursued the tapes; Nixon pursued the matter to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him; Nixon resigned after the tapes showed he had unequivocally told aides to “stonewall”; and, in 1978, Congress passed and Jimmy Carter signed a special prosecutor law that both parties would eventually regard as the work of the devil.