Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre of Oct. 20, 1973
With all the talk of "2017's Monday Night Massacre" brewing at present, let us take a look back to 1973, during the Nixon Presidency when the "Saturday Night Massacre" was a "honk for impeachment." The Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, Lancaster, Ohio, dated 12 November 1973, Monday, page 1, reported: "Saturday Night Massacre Produced Miller Mail."
Back in 1973 it took a lot to stir the average American but when they got aroused over public events they mad their feelings known in no uncertain terms.
Ohio 10th District Congressman Clarence E. Miller received over 1,200 communications. The letters, telegrams, postcards and petitions flooded Miller's Capital Hill office in the wake of the "Saturday Night Massacre" when President Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and forced the resignation of attorney General Elliot Richardson.
The overwhelming negative reaction was credited with forcing Mr. Nixon to capitulate and surrender his Watergate tapes and agree to the appointment of a new prosecutor with even wider guarantees of independence than Cox had.
This was a very grave time in American history. Would our Congress be mice or men, Americans or political hacks?
Leon Jaworski was the new special prosecutor. Would he press the investigation of the White House plumbers unit begun by Archibald Cox?
The White House wanted Jaworski to forget about the plumbers, drop Cox's unfulfilled demands for documents concerning the plumbers and quickly get rid of the Kennedy Democrat still in charge of the investigation.
Nixon lieutenants wanted Jaworski to focus narrowly on the Watergate burglary and dismantle Cox investigations into other matters. If that resulted in angry resignations by Cox's task force chiefs, so much the better in the eyes of the White House.
Nixon Aides believed Merrill's investigation of the 1971 burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office intended to implicate Nixon himself. Merrill's task force wanted to expose a pattern of illegitimate governmental powers.
Cox encountered special White House resistance against supplying documents about the plumbers. Cox's request on August 23, 1973 for a long list of such papers were ignored.
Jaworski would be asked by Merrill to renew demands for these papers and subpoena them if necessary. The white House hoped he would refuse, leading to public outburst by Merrill and either his resignation or dismissal. They were hoping to start a chain reaction leading to the departure of Cox's entire senior staff.
Ever since Cox's departure, the White House had laid the public relations groundwork for more dismissals or forced resignations, describing the speical prosecutor's office as a hive of national-Nixon partisans, particularly Merrill.
The curtailing investigation not directly related to the Watergate burglary and disposing of Cox's holdovers would start a new storm in Congress and among the public. To counteract that, Nixon aides hoped Jaworski would move quickly for grand jury action in the Watergate case itself.
They were hoping that would mean indictments of big names: John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman. The White House would argue that Leon Jaworski was cleaning up Watergate while Archie Cox had been fiddling around with irrelevancies in trying to bring down the President. Hoping Jaworski would quitely shut down investigation of the plumbers campaign expenditures and the ITT affair and stop prying into Nixon's personal finances.
An Aspect to Leon Jaworski was he was a man of considerable ego, fellow layers in Houston reported, proud of his many civic endeavors. Jaworski would be sensitive to accusations of coercion-up and could conceivably come around to the investigative course taken by Cox. If so, the White House would then have irrevocably lost all control of the Watergate prosecution.
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