Saturday Night Massacre

Based on Wikipedia: Saturday Night Massacre

On a single Saturday evening in October 1973, the President of the United States ordered his Attorney General to fire a man. The Attorney General refused—and quit on the spot. Nixon turned to the Deputy Attorney General with the same order. He refused too, and also resigned. It took three tries before Nixon found someone willing to pull the trigger.

Those few hours would become known as the Saturday Night Massacre, and they marked the moment when Richard Nixon's presidency began its final collapse.

The Man Nixon Wanted Gone

Archibald Cox was a Harvard law professor with a bow tie and a reputation for unshakable integrity. In May 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson had appointed him as special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate break-in—a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters that had occurred the previous June.

The appointment came with an unusual protection. Cox held what's called a "career reserved position," meaning he could only be fired "for cause"—in other words, for gross misconduct or incompetence. Richardson had personally promised the Senate he wouldn't dismiss Cox for any lesser reason.

This arrangement was supposed to insulate the investigation from political interference. It didn't account for a president willing to burn down the Justice Department to save himself.

The Tapes That Could End a Presidency

Here's what made Cox so dangerous to Nixon: he had discovered that the president secretly recorded conversations in the Oval Office. These weren't just any conversations—they potentially captured Nixon discussing the Watergate cover-up with his closest advisors.

Cox issued a subpoena demanding the tapes. Nixon refused, claiming executive privilege—the idea that a president needs confidential communications to do his job effectively. It's a real legal doctrine, but Nixon was stretching it to cover up potential crimes.

On October 12, 1973, a federal appeals court sided with Cox. The tapes had to be handed over.

Nixon proposed a compromise. Senator John Stennis of Mississippi—who was famously hard of hearing, a detail that wasn't lost on Nixon's critics—would listen to the tapes and provide summaries. The actual recordings would stay locked away.

Cox refused. You don't need to be a lawyer to understand why: a summary prepared by a Nixon ally wasn't evidence. The tapes were evidence.

One Night, Three Refusals

The legal maneuvering paused for the weekend. Government offices closed. Everyone expected a few days of quiet.

Then came Saturday, October 20.

Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson had given his word to the Senate that he wouldn't do exactly this. He refused and resigned immediately.

Nixon turned to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Same order. Same refusal. Ruckelshaus also resigned.

The third-ranking official at the Justice Department was Solicitor General Robert Bork. Unlike Richardson and Ruckelshaus, Bork hadn't made any personal promises to Congressional committees about protecting Cox. A White House limousine brought him to the Oval Office, where he was sworn in as acting Attorney General.

Bork wrote the letter firing Cox.

He later said he considered resigning afterward to avoid looking like "a man who did the President's bidding to save my job." Richardson and Ruckelshaus talked him out of it, arguing the Justice Department needed someone competent at the helm during the chaos.

The Lie That Made It Worse

The Nixon White House made a telling mistake. They initially claimed to have fired Ruckelshaus.

The next day, the Washington Post caught them in the lie. The president's own letter to Bork stated that Ruckelshaus had resigned. It was a small detail, but it captured something essential about the Nixon administration: they couldn't even fire people without lying about it.

A Nation Responds

The night Cox was fired, his deputy and press aides held an emotional news briefing. They read a statement from Cox that would become one of the most quoted lines of the scandal:

"Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people to decide."

Americans decided quickly. Telegrams flooded into the White House and Congress in numbers that Western Union hadn't seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The overwhelming message: this was wrong.

Less than a week later, an NBC News poll showed something that had never happened before. For the first time, more Americans wanted Nixon impeached than didn't—forty-four percent in favor, forty-three percent opposed. The margin was thin, but the shift was seismic.

Why It Was Called a Massacre

The phrase "Saturday Night Massacre" appeared in print just two days later, in a Washington Post column by David Broder. But Broder noted that people were already using the term—it had spread that fast.

According to Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn, the phrase was coined by humorist Art Buchwald. There's something fitting about a comedian naming the event. It captured both the horror and the absurdity: a president so desperate to hide his crimes that he was willing to decapitate his own Justice Department.

The Illegal Firing

On November 14, 1973, federal judge Gerhard Gesell ruled that firing Cox had been illegal. The regulations establishing the special prosecutor's office required a finding of "extraordinary impropriety" before dismissal. Nixon had no such finding. He had simply wanted Cox gone.

The ruling didn't undo the damage, but it confirmed what most Americans already suspected: the president had broken the rules to obstruct justice.

The Investigation Continues

Political reality forced Nixon's hand. He had to allow a new special prosecutor to be appointed, and the man chosen was Leon Jaworski, a Texas lawyer with a reputation for independence.

There was speculation that Jaworski might limit his investigation to just the Watergate break-in itself. He didn't. Following Cox's lead, Jaworski expanded his inquiry into other corrupt activities, including the operations of the "White House Plumbers"—a secret unit Nixon had created to stop security leaks, which had conducted its own illegal break-ins and dirty tricks.

The Missing Eighteen and a Half Minutes

Nixon still refused to hand over the actual tapes, but he agreed to release transcripts. His stated reason was national security—sensitive information would need to be removed from any recordings.

Then came another bombshell. On November 7, investigators discovered that eighteen and a half minutes of one tape had been erased.

Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, offered an explanation that became instantly infamous. She claimed she had accidentally erased the tape by pushing the wrong foot pedal on her tape player while reaching to answer the phone. Photographers asked her to demonstrate the position, and the resulting images—Woods stretched awkwardly across her desk in an obviously impossible pose—became a symbol of the administration's desperate lies.

Forensic analysis later showed the tape had been erased in at least five separate segments, possibly as many as nine. This wasn't an accident. Someone had deliberately destroyed evidence.

The End

The Saturday Night Massacre didn't immediately end Nixon's presidency, but it started the countdown. The House began formal impeachment proceedings ten days later, on October 30, 1973.

The investigation ground forward. More evidence emerged. More tapes were eventually released. The picture they painted was damning: a president who had known about the Watergate cover-up from almost the beginning, who had directed his subordinates to obstruct the FBI investigation, who had authorized hush money payments to the burglars.

By August 1974, Nixon faced almost certain impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. He resigned on August 9, the only American president ever to do so.

The Aftermath for Bork

Robert Bork, the man who actually fired Cox, had been promised something in return. According to his posthumously published memoirs, Nixon told him he would get the next seat on the Supreme Court.

Nixon couldn't deliver on that promise—he was gone from office within a year. But in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork for the high court.

The nomination failed spectacularly. The Senate rejected Bork by a vote of 42 to 58, the largest margin of defeat for any Supreme Court nominee in history at that time. His role in the Saturday Night Massacre was only one factor, but it hadn't been forgotten.

What Changed

The Saturday Night Massacre led directly to the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which created the office of independent counsel—a special prosecutor who couldn't be fired at the president's whim. The law was designed to prevent any future president from doing what Nixon had done.

That law has since expired and been partially replaced by other regulations, but the underlying question remains: How do you investigate a president who has the power to fire the investigators?

Echoes in 2025

In early 2025, when six senior Justice Department officials resigned following an order to dismiss all federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, some observers immediately drew the comparison. They called it the "Thursday Night Massacre."

The parallel wasn't perfect—the circumstances differed in important ways—but the nickname stuck because the original Saturday Night Massacre had burned itself into American political memory. It had become shorthand for a specific kind of abuse: a powerful official dismantling the system designed to hold him accountable.

More than fifty years later, Archibald Cox's question still hangs in the air: Are we a government of laws, or a government of men?