October 20, 1973: Massacre at the White House

On the night of Saturday, October 20, 1973, 22 years ago today, the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, received a chilling message. He knew the message was coming, and he knew what it would say, but that didn’t dull the shock of it. President Richard M. Nixon had had the attorney general of the United States fire him. Attorney General Elliot Richardson had refused to do it, and had been forced to resign; Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus had then also refused, and also resigned; finally Solicitor General Robert Bork—who would later be nominated, unsuccessfully, to the Supreme Court—assumed the post of acting head of the Justice Department and carried out the President’s order. The serial firings of that October evening quickly became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. They represented both a profound challenge to the American justice system and a turning point in the downfall of Richard Nixon.

The Saturday Night Massacre was a climax in a drama that had been unfolding for more than a year. On June 17, 1972, five men had been caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Washington’s Watergate office-apartment complex. As evidence slowly emerged tying the President’s close associates to the crime, Congress launched an investigation into the incident and subsequent cover-up. After this led to the resignation of three top Nixon officials—White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, chief domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst—the Justice Department appointed Archibald Cox to the position of special prosecutor, to make possible a fair and impartial investigation of the whole matter. Then, during July 1973, a Nixon aide named Alexander Butterfield told the Senate committee investigating Watergate that the President kept a voice-activated tape recorder in the Oval Office. Both Congress and the special prosecutor jumped on this revelation and launched efforts to obtain all the tape recordings that had been made. With that information, they hoped, they could finally answer Tennessee Senator Howard Baker’s famous question: “What did the President know and when did he know it?”

Nixon and his allies resisted these efforts furiously, but on October 12, 1973, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the White House to comply with Cox’s subpoena demanding the full collection of tapes. In the following week the Nixon administration attempted to negotiate a deal with Cox whereby Democratic Senator John Stennis of Mississippi would listen to the tapes and write summaries of them for Cox. Nixon’s deal, an obvious attempt to circumvent the appeals court’s ruling, was unacceptable to the prosecutor, and he said as much in a press conference on October 19. By rejecting Nixon’s proposal, Cox provided the President with a pretext for a drastic measure of self-defense: firing the investigator. Choosing Saturday as his moment of action because the traditional lack of news coverage that night, Nixon launched a series of events that would spark broad public outcry and accelerate his already quickening decline.

In the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre and the announcement that the White House was abolishing the Office of the Special Watergate Prosecutor, public indignation was so intense that Nixon almost immediately had to backtrack. Millions expressed outrage in telegrams, phone calls, and letters. On November 1 the new White House chief of staff, future Presidential candidate Gen. Alexander Haig, had persuaded Leon Jaworski, a prominent Houston attorney and former president of the American Bar Association, to accept a new special prosecutor position. Jaworski agreed only under the condition that he have complete independence from the White House.

Jaworski’s investigation turned out to be perhaps even more relentless than Cox’s. When Nixon continued to resist handing over his tapes, Jaworski took the President to court in a lawsuit that ultimately landed before the Supreme Court of the United States. In a unanimous 1974 decision the court ordered Nixon to comply with Jaworski’s subpoena. On August 8, faced with the prospect of public humiliation and criminal indictment, Nixon resigned from office in disgrace.

Many historians agree that the most devastating effect of the Saturday Night Massacre was its undercutting of Nixon’s support among all but his most fiercely loyal partisans. Judge John Sirica, who had upheld Cox’s demand that the President comply with his subpoena, commented that when FBI agents barred Cox’s staff from entering their offices, “it began to look as if some colonels in a Latin American country had staged a coup.” This was indeed the prevailing sentiment among Americans, that the administration’s actions were simply un-American. By November only 27 percent of Americans rated Nixon’s job performance positively. Republican Senators Barry Goldwater of Arizona and James Buckley of New York were so appalled that they openly expressed their own discontent, opening a floodgate of criticism from Republicans in Congress. The White House had crossed a dangerous line, and even the President’s own party was in revolt.

Archibald Cox, a Harvard Law School professor who served as President Kennedy’s solicitor general, found it terrifying that the President of the United States had dismissed the man assigned to investigate him, simply because he was coming too close to the heart of a secret. Reflecting on the events of October 1973 Cox later wrote, “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.” And the American people clearly agreed. Taking to the phones and the wires, the post and the streets, they set aside partisan politics and successfully rose up to defend the supremacy of the law. Within months the President was out of office, and a long process of national healing began.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.