Watergate, page 58
Later, as he walked back to the office with his wife and a handful of staff, Cox sighed. “I know there is a regulation against spiritous beverages on federal reservations, but I could do with a drink,” he said. John Barker stopped at a liquor store for beer and a bottle of Old Fitzgerald whiskey. At the office, Cox sipped a beer as he analyzed the press conference with aides; everyone felt it had gone well. Then, the special prosecutor decided it was time to head home. He wanted to go for a hike as the rest of Washington contemplated his fate.
* * *
Across town, the White House was in crisis mode. Haig and Nixon’s team had only imagined three possible paths for Cox—accept the president’s order to stand down, ask the court on Tuesday to find the president in noncompliance, or resign in protest—and hadn’t counted on such a public, sympathetic, and principled stand.
At 2:07, Leonard Garment called Richardson, asking if the attorney general would consider firing Cox and then resigning in protest. He refused. Garment passed along the message to Nixon. “What the hell can I do?” the president asked. “Can I back down?” His aides said no.
Just thirteen minutes later, Haig called Richardson back to inform him that the president was ordering the attorney general to fire the special prosecutor. Richardson replied sadly: “I can’t do that. I guess I better come over and resign.”
Immediately, Richardson summoned his deputy, Ruckelshaus, who confirmed he would stand by the attorney general’s refusal. Next, they summoned the Justice Department’s third-ranking official, solicitor general Robert Bork. Bork, a rising star in the conservative legal world, had only been in office for four months, and his responsibilities had kept him far from Watergate; representing the government before the Supreme Court meant his portfolio focused primarily on a philosophical approach to the law, not an operational one.
As Richardson filled him in and explained that he might have to decide whether to execute the president’s order, Bork grew angry and started pacing. He loved his job—just weeks earlier he’d told a group of antitrust lawyers it was the best one he’d ever had—but this wasn’t what he’d signed up for.I Now he was being pushed into an awful position at the center of the most contentious moment in the entire scandal—and moreover, he would be left responsible for the unpopular opinion. Despite whatever personal moral discomfort he felt, Bork’s view of executive power held that Nixon had the right to fire Cox and so, as an employee of the executive branch, he felt it would be his duty to do so. If Bork quit in protest too, it wasn’t clear who could lead the department—the Justice Department at the time had no clear order of succession beyond the attorney general, deputy attorney general, and solicitor general. Above all, however, one reason to leave stood out above the rest: He had a bright future in Republican politics, and becoming Nixon’s hatchetman could sink his career. “I don’t want to appear to be an apparatchik,” he sheepishly protested.
“Elliot and I will say publicly that we urged you to stay,” Ruckelshaus encouraged.
Later, at the White House, Haig met alone with Richardson, pressuring him with every argument he could deploy to protect the presidency and change the attorney general’s mind. Perhaps, if Richardson felt it necessary to resign, Haig suggested, he could release his resignation letter in a week, once the Middle East crisis had passed. “C’mon, Al,” Richardson replied, dismissively.
Finally, out of arguments, he took Richardson down to the Oval Office, where the attorney general sensed Nixon’s anger as soon as he walked in. The men haggled; Nixon wanted Cox gone, and Richardson to remain until the Middle East imbroglio was over. He couldn’t afford America—or the presidency—to look weak in the face of such a crisis. “Brezhnev would never understand if I let Cox defy my instructions,” he said, citing the Soviet leader he’d faced down all month as the Yom Kippur War unfolded. “I wish you could see it not in terms of your personal commitments but rather in terms of the national interest,” Nixon argued.
“Mr. President, we may not see this in exactly the same terms, but I would like at least to be understood as acting in the light of what I believe is the national interest,” the attorney general replied. They talked for sixteen minutes, from 4:42 to 4:58 p.m., and the impasse held. “I feel I have no choice but to go forward with this,” Richardson told the president.
When Richardson arrived back at the Justice Department, his staff saw immediately from his face how the meeting had gone. Ruckelshaus knew history was about to bear down upon him. Minutes later, his secretary found him in Richardson’s suite and told him the White House was on the phone. Ruckelshaus headed off to take the call, and Richardson turned to Bork: “Bob, you’ve got about five minutes to make up your mind. Somebody has got to do it. He is going to be fired. You should do it. You’ve got the nerve and the brains.”II
Downstairs, Ruckelshaus received the same talking points Richardson had been fed in the Oval Office: The Middle East was in crisis, and American power hung in the balance. “Your commander-in-chief is giving you an order, Bill,” Haig said. “You don’t have any alternative under your oath of office.” The chief of staff’s voice sounded so normal, Ruckelshaus thought, it was almost easy to forget how remarkable the order truly was.
“Al, this isn’t the first time I’ve given this any thought,” the now acting attorney general responded, before outlining another path through the crisis. “I’ve had a week to think about it, and I cannot do it. If it’s that crucial, why don’t you wait a week to fire Cox? There is no magic in the court of appeals deadline. If you want me to stay around a week, I’ll be happy to do it, but I won’t fire Cox before I go.”
As he listened, Ruckelshaus tried to imagine the scene at the White House. He’d been a lifelong Republican, but having led the FBI earlier that summer he’d come to know the Watergate case intimately. “My assessment, having spent three months running the investigation, was that the president was involved,” he recalled later. He sensed that Nixon’s orders weren’t truly altruistic, a means to protect the separation of powers and the power of the presidency for future occupants. This was a corrupt order from a corrupt man. Haig was speaking so grandiosely, he wondered whether Nixon himself was listening—perhaps even present in the room. “Your commander-in-chief has given you an order,” Haig repeated. Ruckelshaus tendered his resignation, but Haig refused to accept it. Instead, he fired him outright.
As expected, Bork was next summoned to the White House personally, picked up in a limo with Garment and Buzhardt inside. Bork, seeing Garment in the passenger seat and Buzhardt in the rear of the car, joked darkly about whether he was being taken for a ride, Mafia-style. Nobody laughed.
At the White House, Haig got right to the point: “Bob, the stability of the executive branch is in doubt, and the situation in the Middle East right now is one of grave jeopardy. We cannot have the President weakened tonight.”
“I’ve already decided to fire Cox,” the solicitor general replied. “The only question is whether I resign after I do it.” Haig’s office began drafting a letter removing the special prosecutor and ordered the Justice Department to send over stationery; the sheets of letterhead were driven up Pennsylvania Avenue by the same man who had twice already made the trip to deliver resignation letters. Bork read over the brusque and businesslike dismissal. “Dear Mr. Cox: As provided by Title 28, section 508 (b) of the United States Code and Title 28, section 0.132(a) of the Code of Federal Regulations, I have today assumed the duties of Acting Attorney General. In that capacity I am, as instructed by the President, discharging you, effective at once, from your position as Special Prosecutor, Watergate Special Prosecution Force. Very Truly Yours.”
Bork signed.
At 5:59 p.m., just one hour and one minute after Richardson had left, Bork entered the Oval Office as the new acting attorney general. It was only the third time Nixon and Bork had ever met. During their nine-minute meeting, Bork sized up the president; the man had won, but looked defeated. “Well, you’ve got guts,” the president told Bork. “Do you want to be attorney general?”
“That would be inappropriate, Mr. President,” Bork replied.
“All I want is a prosecution, not a persecution,” Nixon pleaded.
As the drama continued, Richardson called Cox to warn him, feeling broken himself. Ever since he and Nixon had met at Camp David at the end of April, he had believed the president truly wanted to find compromise. Now it was clear that the entire process had been a sham; he had never intended to get to the bottom of Watergate, never intended to allow a fulsome investigation, never intended to shake himself free of his aides’ cover-up. And on top of all of that, he had tried to enlist Richardson—and Richardson’s integrity—as an accomplice in his conspiracy.
He closed his call to the special prosecutor by quoting a verse of The Iliad that had been a favorite of Judge Learned Hand, whom they had both clerked for early in their careers: “Now, though numberless fates of death beset us which no mortal can escape or avoid, let us go forward together, and either we shall give honor to one another, or another to us.”
I. In fact, Bork had actively tried to steer clear of the controversy: he’d refused an offer from Haig that summer to head the president’s defense, in part because Haig had refused to allow him to listen to the tapes if he took the job. “[Haig] was great at waving the flag and telling you the republic depended on you,” Bork recalled of the job pitch. At that time, in July, Haig had promised, “If [Nixon] is ever forced to turn over those tapes, he will burn them first and then resign.”
II. Later—much later, when the true cost of the looming professional decision became clear to Bork—he’d note that Richardson’s advice was both more ambiguous and less complimentary than it might have appeared to him in that moment.
Chapter 42 “We Have No Functional President”
In the wake of the Justice Department debacle, the president retreated to the White House residence, with Bebe Rebozo. After calling Haig seemingly every few minutes for updates, he settled into the White House movie theater around 8:25 p.m. to watch The Searching Wind, a 1946 film about the mistakes of an American diplomat in Europe.
At almost the same time, Ron Ziegler announced the day’s dramatic developments to the world: “The office of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force has been abolished.” The news rocked Washington. “The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history,” John Chancellor declared on NBC News. Reports from the capital sounded as breathless and anxious as any from the front lines of Vietnam—and as the very practice of democracy appeared under threat, the country still lacked a vice president and the opposition stood next in line to the presidency.I
What was instantly dubbed the “Saturday Night Massacre” interrupted long-weekend getaways and dinner parties, one of which was being held for columnist Art Buchwald’s birthday; the backyard steadily emptied as news spread. All across town, members of the Special Prosecution Force began to rush back to their offices. That evening, as the investigation’s FBI case agent, Angelo Lano, pulled into his driveway—his kids were asleep in the backseat of the car—he and his wife could hear the phone ringing from outside as they opened the car doors. The head of the bureau’s Washington Field Office was frantic; Lano had to rush to the Special Prosecution Force’s Office and secure the premises. “Nothing in or out,” the special agent in charge told Lano; the orders evidently came direct from Haig himself. “The people can come and go, but no outsiders.”
Lano arrived at the K Street offices at 9:05 p.m., and quickly found himself in a standoff by the elevators with prosecutors. “Please, just don’t take anything out of here,” Lano begged. Henry Ruth, Cox’s deputy who suddenly found himself pushed into the top job, arrived soon after and began negotiating with the agent; together, they called Henry Petersen at the Justice Department for guidance. Prosecutors began slipping key documents out of the office even as the agents debated their correct course of action.
Next, Ruth and Phil Lacovara, the office’s in-house counsel, telephoned Bork. As best as anyone could determine, Nixon had abolished the Special Prosecution Force, but he hadn’t fired the attorneys—they remained employed by the Justice Department, able to pursue the investigation under new supervision. “The president’s failure once again to do his dirty work artfully would come back to haunt him,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled. “It was the same pattern we had seen over and over again in the White House containment of Watergate—equal measures of corrupt intent on the one hand and incompetence on the other.”
One of the last to know what had happened, officially at least, was Cox. Around 8 p.m., a White House aide had called to ask his address; the aide didn’t say why, but Cox guessed. He called Jim Doyle, talked briefly, and dictated a statement for the press: “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”
At the Special Prosecutor’s Office, Ruth held an impromptu press conference in the library. “Everything has happened so suddenly that I can’t think through what it all means for the country,” he said. Tension was high, uncertainty defined the evening. Late in the evening, the staff gathered; no one was sure who was in charge, or even whether any of them had jobs. “Welcome to Moscow,” Ruth told them, darkly. “I assume all of you will be here Tuesday morning so we can try to continue. We will have to take things one day at a time for awhile.”
Finally, out in Virginia, the White House messenger arrived, after crisscrossing the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of Cox’s house. Cox looked at the man on the doorstep, carrying a sheaf of papers, wearing an open-necked shirt. It was official: He was fired. After signing for the message, Cox turned to his wife: “Couldn’t they have sent a chap with a proper necktie?”
* * *
Watching the press coverage that Sunday at the Justice Department, now acting attorney general Robert Bork lamented just how ill-executed the whole operation had been. The Nixon White House’s general approach to governing had long been “studied ambiguity,” but the lack of follow-through planning had proved fatal. The media’s use of the word “massacre” seemed more deliberate than any of the main actors felt the decision-making had actually been—“I suppose ‘Saturday Night Involuntary Manslaughter’ didn’t have the same ring,” Bork rued. Bork himself was traumatized by the events; his deputy solicitor general, a woman named Jewel Lafontant, had called to congratulate him on becoming acting attorney general, only to hear Bork all but wail, “Catastrophes don’t call for congratulations.”
His first telephone call after firing Cox had been to Henry Petersen—White House operators had managed, somehow, to locate him on his boat on the Chesapeake Bay and get him ashore to a phone. Bork had explained that Cox had been fired, and both Richardson and Ruckelshaus had resigned. “[Petersen] was flabbergasted,” Bork recalled later.
As Sunday unfolded, the “ferocious intensity” of the public response startled Nixon as well; he recalled later in his memoirs that while he’d been prepared for a “major and adverse reaction,” the tidal wave of opprobrium made the White House instantly reconsider its position. Condemnation of the president’s actions flowed from political allies and foes alike, and even from church pulpits across the country. Oregon Republican senator Mark O. Hatfield told the Washington Post over the phone, “It seems to me the President is almost intent on committing political hara-kiri.” Telegraph offices found themselves overwhelmed; telephone switchboards were swamped; Congress was deluged with mail. Nearly a half-million mailgrams and telegrams flooded Washington, quadruple the previous record. Cox had come across in Saturday’s press conference as the ultimate sympathetic figure, and America responded en masse to his firing. The TV correspondents reporting from the White House lawn on the crisis were all but drowned out by passing cars honking on Pennsylvania Avenue, as protesters along the street there held signs urging “Honk to Impeach Nixon.”
The Nixon team reeled, even as they maintained they’d acted correctly. “Every action that the president took was completely within his legal right and prerogative,” White House communications director Ken Clawson told the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew. “What crime or misdemeanor did he commit this weekend?”
That afternoon, James Doyle hosted a press briefing, forcing the reporters camped outside the Special Prosecutor’s Office in past the FBI agents standing watch. In no uncertain terms, Doyle explained that the office planned to keep working. “We have reason to believe that some very serious crimes have been committed and we are a criminal prosecution force,” he said. “Most of the people who work here are part of the civil service system. There are rules that apply before you can abolish an agency,” he continued. “The White House announced we were abolished, but you know if they announce the sky is green and you look up and see the sky is blue…” He let his words hang in the air. Watching Doyle’s remarks, his colleagues appreciated his projected confidence, but few felt it would help.
Monday morning, worried that their offices had been bugged, the senior staff of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force convened for a meeting in the conference room of a nearby law firm. They were dejected and unsure what sanctions they could push against the president, if any. Someone suggested asking New York and California to disbar Nixon, but the idea was dismissed as a fool’s errand. As the day progressed, however, the prosecutors began to feel buoyed by the building public outrage; the head of the American Bar Association, an organization not known for its quick reactions or for its backbone amid public controversy, accused Nixon of attempting to “abort the established processes of law.” Oregon Republican senator Bob Packwood made a public statement that “the office of President does not carry with it a license to destroy justice,” and Virginia representative William Whitehurst, a loyal Republican, complained, “I’ve carried Nixon’s flag faithfully for five years, and it’s getting pretty heavy.” Fresh polling showed the president’s approval rating, which over the summer had already been lower than the worst numbers Lyndon Johnson ever saw at the height of the Vietnam War, down to just 24 percent.
