John A. Farrell is the author of “Richard Nixon: The Life,” and biographies of Clarence Darrow and Tip O’Neill. He is currently at work on a biography of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Richard Nixon’s presidency was damaged and listing in that fall of 1973, but not yet a lost cause. He had tossed his top aides overboard and survived the first surge of the Watergate scandal. His political base stood firm.

After a summer of contentious hearings, the Senate Watergate committee was viewed by most Americans “as partisan, biased and ‘out to get’ the president,” his congressional liaison reported to him. The special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was slogging in the courts, pleading for evidence. The public seemed quiescent. Republican pollsters found that just 9 percent of the electorate listed Watergate as the top issue confronting the country—far behind the 42 percent who fretted about inflation.


The Democrats in control of Congress had their own, synonymous polls. In mid-September, House Speaker Carl Albert and Majority Leader Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. had joined the president for breakfast. With its classic particular attention to detail, Time magazine reported their chatter about golf, the sausage and eggs that the White House served, and the postprandial puffing on 80-cent Flamenco No. 1 cigars. It was a gathering of “concerned men ready to sit down together and try to make things work,” the magazine proclaimed.

And then, in the blink of a month, Nixon’s presidency was kaput. On October 12, a federal appeals court ruled that the president must surrender White House documents and tape recordings to Cox. Eight days later, misreading the public outrage that would follow, Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor.

The political conflagration that followed the “Saturday Night Massacre”—as the dramatic events of Oct. 20, 1973, soon became known—forced Nixon to retreat; to agree to the appointment of another special prosecutor, and to release the evidence Cox had sought.

“You will be returning to an environment of major national crisis,” the White House chief of staff, retired general Alexander Haig, cabled Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who was on an overseas mission. “The situation is at a state of white heat. … An impeachment stampede could well develop.”

From that point on, the late journalist Helen Thomas recalled in an oral history, Nixon was “a dead man walking.” He would resign to escape impeachment in August 1974. “It was a Saturday night…it struck the whole town,” the veteran White House reporter remembered, in her oral history for the Gerald Ford Foundation. “It was shocking. I think you have to call it trauma.”

“You definitely felt an emptiness, a tragedy … all these things,” said Thomas. “Because it wasn’t us. … These things don’t happen in America.”

More than 40 years have passed since Nixon fired Cox. America, and its politics, have changed. The question now, for Donald Trump and the country, is whether he might orchestrate the dismissal or neutering of the current special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, and escape Nixon’s fate.

Whether—to echo Thomas—such things can now happen in the United States of America.



***

As with all Nixon-Trump analogies, there are both valid and spurious comparisons made between two presidencies so far apart in time—and two presidents, so different as men.

Nixon was cornered. He knew he was guilty. To ensure his victory in the 1972 presidential election, he had conspired with aides to have the CIA curtail the FBI investigation into the May 1972 break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate; to pay hush money to his burglars, and to lie under oath.

The coverup carried Nixon through the election, but not without a feeling of doom. On the eve of the balloting, he had stood on the California shore, staring at an abnormal low tide, and feared it was a portent. In victory he was snappish, churlish. “There is something rancid about the way things are going,” one top aide told another.

The burglars came to trial, and were convicted, in January 1973. U.S. District Judge John Sirica threatened them with draconian sentences if they did not say who ordered the break-in, and they soon beat a path to the federal prosecutors and the Watergate committee—where the White House counsel, John Dean, testified that summer, in public and at length, about Nixon’s misdeeds.

It was Dean’s word against the president, but the committee had stumbled onto the secret of the White House taping system. Nixon knew he was guilty of obstructing justice. He knew that the White House tapes would prove he was lying. And here was Cox, determined to get those tapes.

So Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson refused, and resigned. So did his deputy, William Ruckelshaus. According to the Justice Department’s line of succession, the deed fell to the solicitor general, Robert Bork. “The office of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force has been abolished,” the White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, declared. FBI agents sealed off the special prosecutor’s office and barred the staff from removing their files.

On the telephone to Cox, Richardson quoted lines from the Illiad: “Now, though numberless fates of death beset us which no mortal can escape … let us go forward together, and either we shall give honor to one another or another to us.”

Bulletins interrupted the primetime TV lineup. “The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history,” NBC’s John Chancellor told his audience, somehow neglecting the Civil War. There was talk of banana republics, of coups d’état and the Reichstag fire. It was that kind of time.

A series of revelations, in the days to come, would accelerate the erosion of Nixon’s political standing: The White House admitted that some of the tapes Cox sought were missing; that others had suspicious gaps, that the government had paid to improve the president’s vacation properties, and that he appeared to have cheated on his taxes. Sturdy journals of the heartland, like The Denver Post, called for Nixon to resign, as did Time magazine in its first-ever editorial.

In his memoirs, Nixon said he was stunned to discover “the depth of the impact Watergate had been having … how deeply its acid had eaten into the nation’s grain.” The old pol was being disingenuous, or his ear had failed him. Either way, he had terribly miscalculated his chances of survival. The public looked at the Saturday Night Massacre and saw the flailing of a guilty man.

By then, after months of news coverage and the summer of Watergate hearings, Americans knew what Nixon was alleged to have committed. They had studied Dean and the other witnesses, heard the conflicting testimony and placed their faith in the American system: If the Constitution so allowed, the courts would order Nixon to give Cox the tapes, and the tapes would tell the tale.

They had faith that the truth would come out. And that was why, when Nixon fired Cox, it triggered such a reaction: The president’s motives were obvious. He was out to save his skin.



***

Some readers of history, especially the more hopeful Trump critics, believe that if he stages his own Massacre—dismissing Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to open a path to firing Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller—the public will react with an outrage akin to that we saw in 1973. Millions would take to the streets. Republicans would join Democrats in calling for Trump’s resignation. A bipartisan push for impeachment would begin. These critics have confidence that the invigorating lesson of Watergate—the system worked—will prevail once more.

We can’t be sure. The constitutional checks and balances are not lined up in 2018 the way they were when Cox was fired. Nixon faced a Democratic House and Senate, while Trump has a Congress ruled by his own party, taking extraordinary steps (like the release of the recent House Intelligence Committee memo, which the FBI says is misleading) to protect him.

Within days of the Saturday Night Massacre, a Democratic House voted to begin impeachment proceedings. The best that Trump’s foes may hope for is a Democratic takeover of the House in next fall’s election. And even that is no sure bet.

A massive public outcry, and demonstrations, could compel Republicans to take some sort of remedial action. But if Rosenstein or Mueller are dismissed, would the outrage be as strong as it was in 1973? After the Watergate summer, Americans had a clear understanding of what was at stake when Cox was fired. Today we have just snippets, mainly from leaked conversations, alleging that Trump tried to contain the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016. Trump’s allies in the media have done a fine job assuring his base that Mueller’s investigation is a partisan witch hunt.

“The public, the Congress, the press, Wall Street and Main Street don’t know where the investigation stands,” notes James Doyle, who served as Cox’s spokesman. “The press has been unable to avoid speculation, guessing and … distortions.”

Trump insists that he is playing on a tilted field—that a hostile press is contorting the political terrain. He contends (as do some of Nixon’s defenders, to this day) that political containment and self-defense are not crimes. “You fight back,” the president has grumbled, and then the liberal media declares, “It’s obstruction.”

As Dean has noted recently, Trump has the ferocious right-wing commentariat on his side. Nixon didn’t have such allies as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson at Fox, Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and a powerful internet army to malign the special prosecutor and his team. Nor did Nixon have Trump’s ability to speak past the mainstream press, or his massive Twitter following.

“We got lucky with Watergate—good prosecutors, and tapes!” Doyle says. This time around, the debate is less clear cut, and the evidence murky. Republicans are making concerted efforts to taint the work, and challenge the motives, of the watchdogs.

“The firestorm of outrage is missing, replaced by the incoherence of cable news,” Doyle says. “My guess is: The system fails.”