Hello and welcome to part 6 of our series on the Watergate Crisis. Last time we described the Saturday Night Massacre, October 20, 1973, in which Nixon attempted to override the Constitution, establish an imperial presidency, and end the Watergate investigation all in one day. His efforts shocked a nation that had up to this point generally believed him when he said he didn’t know anything about the Watergate break-in. Firing the deputy Attorney General who refused to fire the Watergate special prosecutor whom the Attorney General had refused to fire, thus leading to the AG himself being fired, and then finding someone at last to fire the special prosecutor was pretty clear evidence of obstruction of justice on Nixon’s part, and seemed to prove that he was, indeed, involved in a cover-up.
The public was furious, and Nixon’s aggressive refusal to admit any wrongdoing only damned him further in their eyes. At a press conference on November 17, 1973, Nixon made his famous statement that “the American people need to know if their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” Few were convinced. The new Attorney General Nixon had appointed—Robert Bork, the man who signed the paper he was told to sign to fire Archibald Cox—was forced to appoint a new Watergate special prosecutor to replace Cox. Leon Jaworski took over that role. He was a Washington lawyer who had believed the Nixon was not guilty of any criminal acts; only his advisors were. But after the Massacre, Jaworski was determined to get the full tapes of Nixon’s conversations. Just as Cox had done, he subpoenaed Nixon for the tapes, and once again, Nixon refused on the grounds of executive privilege. He added his assertion that the special prosecutor did not have the authority to sue the President—another attempt to put the president above the law. Knowing Nixon could drag this argument out for months, Jaworski went over his head to the Supreme Court.
In United States v. Nixon, on July 24, 1974, the Court ruled that the special prosecutor did have the right to sue the president, and that a president’s claim of executive privilege is overruled if he has evidence that is clearly pertinent to a criminal trial. The Justices may have been rankled by a statement made earlier in U.S. District Court by Nixon’s attorney James St. Clair: “The president wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time, and is not subject to the processes of any court in the land except the court of impeachment.”
This is an unbelievably astounding statement. Nixon is not trying to camouflage his intent: he is an absolute monarch while he is in office, and “not subject to the processes of any court in the land”. No wonder St. Clair shamefacedly said “the president wants me to argue” this point. The Court responded to St. Clair’s statement by saying that no president had any claim to “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”
Nixon was forced to give the unedited tapes—all of them—to Jaworski, and the transcripts and some audio were made public. They revealed a Nixon no one was prepared for: perpetually foul-mouthed, hostile, petty, vengeful, racist, anti-semitic, sexist, and criminal. So many four-letter words had to be bleeped out of the released audio and omitted from the public transcripts with the words “expletive deleted” that that phrase became a bitter joke to Americans, used by comedians to refer to the entire crisis. The “Smoking Gun” tape, in which Nixon talked about stopping the FBI criminal investigation of the break-in six days after it happened, which we cover in part 4 of this series, was released at last, and there was no way for even Nixon to pretend he wasn’t involved in the cover-up. Congress moved as one body to vote for impeachment, and there was only one thing left for Nixon to do: resign.
The Historic Present 