Most people who shoot themselves in the foot only pull the trigger once, but Richard Nixon was not most people, and in October of 1973 the pressures he faced as president were decidedly different from those of most presidents. He was, in fact, waist deep in the Watergate break-in scandal and the waters were rising.
Nixon’s immediate problem that October was Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor Nixon himself had appointed, who was demanding that the president release tape recordings that he, Nixon, had made of his conversations in the Oval Office. Earlier in the year a White House aide revealed that Nixon secretly taped his Oval Office conversations, which meant that if Nixon had any involvement in, or knowledge of, the Watergate burglary and cover-up, he almost certainly would have discussed it with aides and those discussions would be on the tapes.
Nixon refused to even consider Cox’s request, prompting Cox to ask the judge overseeing the Watergate trial, John Sirica, to order Nixon to release the tapes, which Sirica did. The U.S. Court of Appeals then upheld Judge Sirica’s ruling, but Nixon defied them all. He intended to go to the Supreme Court, if necessary, to protect his right to keep those tapes, which so infuriated Cox that he gave a very public speech assailing Nixon and demanding that the tapes be released.
It was at this point that Nixon, whose P.R. skills were so-so at best, thought to himself, “Wait a minute. I hired this guy. I can fire him.” And so this week (Oct. 20) the president set about to do just that. He ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson, with a better take on what the public’s reaction to that move would be, refused — and then resigned.
So Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused — and also resigned.
Finally, late on Saturday night, Nixon got Robert Bork, the solicitor general (and later defeated Supreme Court nominee), to fire Cox.
Thus did the public wake up Sunday morning to find that two key members of the Nixon administration had resigned, and the Watergate special prosecutor had been fired. It was immediately dubbed “The Saturday Night Massacre,” and it sent a clear message to the public: President Nixon was trying to obstruct the Watergate investigation.
And it was all for naught. Public pressure forced Nixon to appoint another special prosecutor, and when the Supreme Court did rule on the tapes it unanimously ruled that Nixon must release them.
Those tapes, of course, revealed “The Smoking Gun” — Nixon’s full knowledge of the Watergate cover-up — which shot him both in the foot, and, politically speaking, in the head.
