Saturday Night Massacre: Bork, Richardson, Ruckelshaus and Cox's Firing

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On Saturday, October 20, 1973, the top leadership of the Justice Department collapsed in a single evening. Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox had been appointed by Attorney General Elliot Richardson to a post from which he could be fired only for cause, and Richardson had promised the Senate not to interfere. When Cox subpoenaed the Oval Office tapes, Richard Nixon claimed executive privilege, and on October 12 the D.C. Circuit upheld the subpoena. Nixon then offered the Stennis Compromise, under which Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, who was notoriously hard of hearing, would listen to the tapes and summarize them. Cox refused.

Ordered to fire Cox, Richardson resigned, and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned as well. Solicitor General Robert Bork, elevated to acting attorney general, fired Cox, after Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded him not to quit for the sake of the department. The FBI sealed the special prosecutor's office. Within 36 hours, 71,000 telegrams reached the White House and Congress, a poll for NBC News showed a plurality favoring impeachment, and Leon Jaworski was named the new prosecutor on November 1. On November 14, Judge Gerhard Gesell ruled the firing illegal, and Nixon resigned in August 1974.

• The name Saturday Night Massacre appeared two days later in a Washington Post article by David S. Broder, though it is often credited to Art Buchwald.
• The White House claimed it had fired Ruckelshaus, but Nixon's own letter to Bork said he had resigned.
• Cox's statement asked whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men.
• Bork's posthumous memoirs say Nixon promised him the next Supreme Court seat, and the Senate rejected his 1987 nomination.
• The Ethics in Government Act of 1978 created independent counsels appointed by a three-judge panel.