Watergate by Keith W. Olson

Author:Keith W. Olson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700623587
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2016-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

From the Saturday Night Massacre to the Tape Transcripts

November 1973 to May 1974

The President Should Resign.

—Time editorial, November 12, 1973

Does anyone believe anything any more?

—Kansas City Times editorial, November 28, 1973

There can no longer be a charge that he was railroaded out of office by vengeful Democrats or a hostile press.

—Chicago Tribune editorial, May 9, 1974

On November 12, 1973, Time, a symbol of Richard Nixon’s middle America, published the first editorial of its fifty-year history, “The President Should Resign.” It opened with the assertion that Nixon “has irredeemably lost his moral authority, the confidence of most of the country, and therefore his ability to govern effectively.” Because Time had “endorsed Nixon for President three times,” its editors had reached their conclusions “with deep reluctance.”

The editorial summarized the pattern of corruption that included the resignation of the vice president, the indictment of two former cabinet members, and the indictment, convictions, or confessions of seven close presidential aides. It then cataloged Nixon’s involvement in the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the misuse of the FBI and the CIA, the job offer to the presiding judge at the Ellsberg trial, and the withholding of wiretap information from that judge. Finally, “as a staggering climax to all that went before,” the editorial recounted Nixon’s initial refusal to obey the court and release the White House tapes, his firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and his “sudden claim that two crucial tapes do not exist.”1 The editorial ended by stating that the president’s resignation “would show the true power of popular government.”

Time’s editorial confirms that Nixon had lost mainstream Republican support, and it gave legitimacy to calls for the president to resign. Nixon launched a public relations campaign to counter the pressure. The pressure, however, continued, fueled in part by a steady stream of news stories of actions that further damaged the president’s credibility. Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Judge John Sirica demanded that Nixon honor the court order to release the tapes while the House Judiciary Committee took initial steps on the road to impeachment. Media attention to these events, in turn, contributed to an atmosphere of tension, revelations, and animosities.

In May the president desperately attempted to blunt the demand for the tapes. Instead of releasing them, he published an edited transcript of them. The coarse language and content of the transcripts appalled most Americans and failed to lessen the demand for the tapes themselves. Rather than resolving the problem, Nixon’s ploy produced a crisis equal to the Saturday Night Massacre.

On the political spectrum, William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review represented the right, just as Time stood in the political mainstream. In its reaction to the Saturday Night Massacre, the National Review stopped short of calling for the president’s resignation, but it maintained that Nixon had been “in direct defiance of the courts” and concluded that “if Mr. Nixon becomes convinced . . . that he has irretrievably lost the support and trust of a solid majority of the people, it will then be his duty to resign.

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