Forty years ago, when President Richard M. Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on October 20, 1973 in the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” seeking to shut down Cox’s criminal investigation before it proved Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up, the nation’s system of laws hung in the balance.
At issue was whether the President of the United States, by dint of sheer force, could overpower the rule of law and halt an investigation of his own conduct as Chief Executive, thus defying the Special Prosecutor’s office, the courts, Congress, and 19 ordinary citizens of the federal grand jury who had directed Nixon to turn over nine White House tapes that would prove or disprove his involvement in a criminal cover-up.
Archibald Cox, a mild-mannered Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, had no prosecutorial experience before being tapped to serve in the no-win position of Watergate Special Prosecutor. Yet Cox had established a reputation as a highly-principled lawyer of impeccable integrity. He was a direct descendant of Roger Sherman – signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He was an early law clerk to the famous Judge Learned Hand of the federal court in New York. He was a labor advisor to the young Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts; head of JFK’s “Brain Trust” during the 1960 campaign; and Solicitor General in the Kennedy Administration, arguing many of the landmark civil rights cases of modern time in the Supreme Court.
Cox was viewed with deep suspicion by the Nixon White House, even though he was picked by the President’s own Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, in the swirl of the Watergate scandal. The Nixon defenders saw Cox as a Kennedy Democrat who – like other political enemies -- would do anything within his power to bring down the embattled President.
