Nixon’s ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ recalled

who relayed the White House’s demands. Haig had periodically called on the Justice Department to try to rein Cox in when it came to certain aspects of the investigation.

Ruckelshaus said his answer was always the same: He could pass the White House objections on to Cox, but he wouldn’t try to order him to do anything.

This time Haig was adamant: Nixon had ordered Cox to be fired. Since the attorney general had refused, the authority now fell to Ruckelshaus.

“He was just insistent that that was my responsibility to carry this out,” Ruckelshaus remembered. “And I said, ‘Not if I think he’s fundamentally wrong, which I do. Then my obligation is higher than just him.’ ”

“Your commander in chief has given you an order,” he said Haig replied.

Ruckelshaus was 41 at the time, with five young children. He’d served as Nixon’s administrator of the new Environmental Protection Agency, then as acting director of the FBI. He worried how he was going to support his family, but in his mind — and in Richardson’s — there was no question what course of action was the right one.

When Cox had been appointed, Richardson had promised he would not dismiss him unless it was for “gross improprieties or malfeasance in office.” Cox had committed neither, and so there was no cause to fire him, they said.

Instead, Ruckelshaus drafted a resignation letter and dictated it to his assistant to type:

“I am, of course, sorry that my conscience will not permit me to carry out your instruction to discharge Archibald Cox,” the letter read in part. “My disagreement with that action at this time is too fundamental to permit me to act otherwise.”

As a courier prepared to deliver his resignation letter to the White House, Ruckelshaus left his office. He and his family had made plans to have dinner at a friend’s house.

Outside, a young television reporter named Sam Donaldson was waiting in the halls of the Justice Department and began yelling questions.

“I got into the car and drove over to my friend’s house,” Ruckelshaus recalled. “I can still see Sam Donaldson chasing me down the hall.”

reports about what happened to Ruckelshaus because Haig announced that Saturday night that the deputy attorney general had been fired. The following day, Nixon said that Ruckelshaus’ resignation had been accepted.

“So I can have it either way, I could either be fired or resigned,” Ruckelshaus said. “Officially, I guess I resigned because the president announced it.”

It was U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork, the third in succession in the Justice Department, who agreed to fire Cox — an act that would play a role in the refusal of the Senate to confirm him for the Supreme Court in 1987. The unprecedented shake-up at the Justice Department would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” The phrase has been used to describe other political beheadings, including President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey last Tuesday.

In 1973, the Saturday Night Massacre triggered a public and political outcry that accelerated the eventual downfall of Nixon.

Cox, the now-ousted special prosecutor, delivered a statement that fateful Saturday night.

“Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men,” he said, “is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.”