Bridgegate, babygate, cakegate, pretty much every scandalous thing that happens now gets a "gate" designation, but it was Watergate that started it all. What, exactly, happened on that infamous Saturday Night 45 years ago? Here's how the Washington Post covered it, in an article published on Sunday, October 21, 1973:
In the most traumatic government upheaval of the Watergate crisis, President Nixon yesterday discharged Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.
The President also abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases.
Shortly after the White House announcement, FBI agents sealed off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building on K Street NW.
An FBI spokesman said the agents moved in "at the request of the White House."
Agents told staff members in Cox's office they would be allowed to take out only personal papers. A Justice Department official said the FBI agents and building guards at Richardson's and Ruckelshaus' offices were there "to be sure that nothing was taken out."
Richardson resigned when Mr. Nixon instructed him to fire Cox and Richardson refused. When the President then asked Ruckelshaus to dismiss Cox, he refused, White House spokesman Ronald L. Ziegler said, and he was fired. Ruckelshaus said he resigned.
Finally, the President turned to Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, who by law becomes acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general are absent, and he carried out the President's order to fire Cox. The letter from the President to Bork also said Ruckelshaus resigned.
These dramatic developments were announced at the White House at 8:25 p.m. after Cox had refused to accept or comply with the terms of an agreement worked out by the President and the Senate Watergate committee under which summarized material from the White House Watergate tapes would be turned over to Cox and the Senate committee.
In announcing the plan Friday night, the President ordered Cox to make no further effort to obtain tapes or other presidential documents.
Cox responded that he could not comply with the President's instructions and elaborated on his refusal and vowed to pursue the tape recordings at a televised news conference yesterday.
That set in motion the chain of events that resulted in the departure of Cox and the two top officials of the Justice Department and immediately raised prospects that the President himself might be impeached or forced to resign.
In a statement last night, Cox said: "Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people."
The action raised new questions as to whether Congress would proceed to confirm House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be Vice President or leave Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-Okla.) next in line of succession to the highest office in the land.
Richardson met at the White House in the late afternoon with Mr. Nixon and at 8:25 p.m. Ziegler appeared in the White House press room to read a statement outlining the President's decisions.
The President discharged Cox because he "refused to comply with instructions" the President gave him Friday night through the Attorney General, Ziegler said.
Furthermore, Ziegler said, the office of special prosecutor was abolished and its functions have been turned over to the Department of Justice.
The department will carry out the functions of the prosecutor's office "with thoroughness and vigor," Ziegler said.
Mr. Nixon sought to avoid a constitutional confrontation by the action he announced Friday, the press secretary said, to give the courts the information from the tapes which the President had considered privileged.
That action was accepted by "responsible leaders in the Congress and in the country," Ziegler commented, but the special prosecutor "defied" the President's instructions "at a time of serious world crisis" and made it "necessary" for the President to discharge him.
Before taking action, Ziegler said, the President met with Richardson to instruct him to dismiss Cox, but Richardson felt he could not do so because it conflicted with the promise he had made to the Senate, Ziegler said.
After Richardson submitted his resignation, the President directed Ruckelshaus to dismiss Cox. When Ruckelshaus refused to carry out the President's directive, he also was "discharged," Ziegler said. The President's letter to Bork said Ruckelshaus resigned.
Mr. Nixon then directed Bork to carry out the instruction. Bork did so in a two-paragraph letter to Cox, in which he said that at the instruction of the President he was "discharging you, effective at once, from your position as special prosecutor, Watergate special prosecution force."
Bork signed his letter as "acting Attorney General."
Richardson told the President in his letter that he was resigning with "deep regret." He explained that when named Attorney General "you gave me the authority to name a special prosecutor."
"At many points throughout the nomination hearings, I reaffirmed my intention to assure the independence of the special prosecutor," Richardson said.
He said he promised that Cox would not be dismissed except for "extraordinary improprieties."
"While I fully respect the reasons that have led you to conclude that the special prosecutor must be discharged, I trust that you understand that I could not in the light of these firm and repeated commitments carry out your direction that this be done," Richardson said.
Richardson expressed "lasting gratitude" to the President, under whom he also served as under secretary of state, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and Secretary of Defense. He became Attorney General in May after the resignation of Richard G. Kleindienst, who explained that because of his close association with former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and others involved in Watergate he did not believe he should stay in the post and carry out their prosecution.
"It has been a privilege to share in your efforts to make the structure of world peace more stable and the structure of our own government more responsive," Richardson wrote Mr. Nixon.
"I believe profoundly in the rightness and importance of those efforts, and I trust that they will meet with increasing success in the remaining years of your presidency."
The President replied with a one-sentence letter, addressed "Dear Elliott." It said: "It is with the deepest regret and with an understanding of the circumstances which brought you to your decision that I accept your resignation."
The White House did not release an exchange of letters between Ruckelshaus and the President. But Ruckelshaus wrote a resignation letter and released it.
In a letter to Bork, the President, noting that by law he was acting Attorney General, said that Cox had "made it apparent that he will not comply with the instructions I issued to him."
"Clearly the government of the United States cannot function if employees of the executive branch are free to ignore in this fashion the instructions of the President," Mr. Nixon wrote.
"Accordingly, in your capacity of acting Attorney General, I direct you to discharge Mr. Cox immediately and to take all steps necessary to return to the Department of Justice the functions now being performed by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force.
"It is my expectation that the Department of Justice will continue with full vigor the investigations and prosecutions that had been entrusted to the Watergate special prosecution force."
At the Justice Department, where there were repeated requests by newsmen to interview Richardson and Ruckelshaus, department spokesman John W. Hushen said they had "no desire to come out and talk to newsmen."
Hushen quoted Bork: "All I will say is that I carried out the President's directive."
Hushen said that Richardson would hold a news conference "within a few days." Beginning about 8 p.m., Richardson spent an hour or so calling "relatives, friends and associates," Hushen said.
White House aides, visibly shocked by the developments, argued that when direct quotations from the presidential tapes are released they will restore confidence in the President.
Sen. John Stennis (D-Miss.), picked by Mr. Nixon to listen to all the tapes, will have "unlimited" access to the pertinent recordings and can decide what should or should not be disclosed.
Stennis is expected to begin listening to them soon, possibly early this week. Those requested by the special prosecutor run 10 hours and one minute. Stennis may decide to listen to all or parts of them more than once. He will be the only one to do so. The President's statement on the tapes and excerpts from them will be delivered to the U.S. District Court here and to the Senate Watergate committee at the same time, officials said.
Every time Donald fantasizes about firing his own Special Prosecutor, Robert Mueller, you know someone calmer and wiser (well, assuming there is such a person in the Trump White House,) reminds him that he really doesn't want his own "Massacre." Superficially and in the short term, Nixon got away with it, but nine and a half months later his transgressions caught up with him and he resigned.
Five years before the Saturday Night Massacre, on October 20, 1968, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in Greece. And six years before that, on October 20, 1962, President Kennedy pretended to have a cold and returned to Washington early, in order to deal with what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Saturday afternoon update: An interesting literary tidbit. In honor of the Saturday Night Massacre, I pulled out my copy of All The President's Men, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. To my surprise, the event on the final page is President Nixon's final State of the Union address, which he delivered on January 30, 1974 and the authors' "Acknowledgments" note is dated February, 1974. In other words, when the book was published, Nixon was still president and the end of the story hadn't played itself out yet. That wouldn't come until August, 9, 1974, when Nixon resigned.
photo credit: AP
Saturday afternoon, update #2: In a story about the 50th anniversary of Jackie's wedding to Onassis, the Washington Post waxes nostalgic:
The series of events that led her to the altar began long before a shot was fired in Dallas. While the Kennedys were in the White House, Onassis was already one of the richest and most successful businessmen in the world. He owned an airline, had amassed a shipping empire, and was a prominent player in the oil, gold and real estate industries. He was also known for his philandering, including an affair with a famous opera singer and, for a time, a rumored tryst with Jackie’s younger sister, Lee Radziwill.
It was Lee who first invited Jackie, one of the youngest first ladies in U.S. history, to take a trip with her on Onassis’s yacht in 1963. Jackie was in the midst of deep depression, caused by the death of her third child, Patrick, who was born prematurely. The president reportedly didn’t like the idea of the trip, fearing it would appear improper. But he relented, despite the grumblings of Congress, in hopes that some time in the Aegean Sea would bring Jackie back to herself.
…By some accounts, Onassis was a vulture waiting to swoop in. Journalist Peter Evans’s book “Nemesis: The True Story,” describes a long-running love pentagon and power struggle among Onassis, Jackie, her sister Lee, the president and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. Lee reportedly had an affair with Onassis. Onassis had a business-related grudge against Robert. Robert shared his brother’s disdain for Onassis. And after the president’s death, Robert and Jackie had become increasingly close — some believe suspiciously so. Then in 1968, Robert, too, was assassinated.
Within four months, rumors about Jackie’s relationship with Onassis were confirmed.
“Not a single friend thought Jackie should marry Onassis,” Evans wrote. “But now that Bobby was gone, there was no one who could stop her.” (Read the story
here.)
And one more thing. Just weeks after Jackie's controversial trip to Greece in October, 1963, Aristotle Onassis was a guest of the Kennedy family at the White House in November, during the week-end between the president's death on Friday, November 22 and the funeral on Monday, November 25. And, no, that's not snarky revisionist 21st century gossip. William Manchester documented the visit in The Death Of A President, published in 1967:
Rose Kennedy dined upstairs with Stas Radziwill; Jacqueline Kennedy, her sister, and Robert Kennedy were served in the sitting room. The rest of the Kennedys ate in the family dining room with their house guests, [secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, Phyllis Dillon [wife of the Treasury secretary,] Dave Powers, and Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the shipowner, who provided comic relief of sorts. They badgered him mercilessly about his yacht and his Man of Mystery aura. During coffee the Attorney General came down and drew up a formal document stipulating that Onassis give half his wealth to help the poor in Latin America. It was preposterous (and obviously unenforceable), and the Greek millionaire signed it in Greek. (From The Death Of A President, by William Manchester, published by Harper & Row/Perennial Library, 25th anniversary edition, 1988, page 555.)
According to Sarah Bradford, writing in America's Queen, Onassis was invited to Washington by Jackie's sister Lee:
Another foreign guest was Aristotle Onassis, invited to join them by Lee. He had been in Hamburg for the launching of a tanker on the day of the assassination and immediately telephoned Lee. When she invited him, he reminded her that he had been told to stay out of the United States until after the 1964 election but, as Lee pointed out, that was hardly relevant anymore. The following day he received an official invitation to the funeral from [Chief of Protocol] Angier Biddle Duke; he was to be a guest at the White House during his stay in Washington. That weekend [Jackie's personal secretary] Mary Gallagher was surprised to see Jackie walking through the Center Hall on the arm of a gentleman she did not recognize and was later told by [Jackie's personal maid] Provi [Paredes] that it was Onassis. In the general outpouring of grief, his presence in the bosom of the Kennedy family passed almost unnoticed. However, he rated a brief mention by the meticulous William Manchester. (From America's Queen, by Sarah Bradford, published by Penguin Books, 2000, pages 278-279.)
