Anger toward government is frighteningly similar to 1973, the author writes. Wisdom from Watergate

So you thought the shutdown was scary? Present-day Washington could learn a lot about how to act in a government crisis by looking at the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973.

Today, new generations of Americans have replaced the ones who watched those events glued to their television sets. Yet the climate of fear and anger about a government that has seemingly careened off the tracks is hauntingly similar.


Forty years ago this week, President Richard Nixon took the gamble of his presidency. Dogged by the Watergate scandal and allegations that he was part of the criminal cover-up, Nixon believed he could overpower the rule of law by sheer force. He planned to kill the investigation headed by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had subpoenaed secret White House tapes that would prove or disprove Nixon’s guilt in Watergate.

The president ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than do Nixon’s bidding, as did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Solicitor General Robert Bork carried out the president’s command. In the aftermath of this “Saturday Night Massacre,” a firestorm of public protest erupted that soon drove Nixon from office and changed the political landscape.

But many forget that Nixon actually came frighteningly close to shutting down Cox’s investigation and trumping the rule of law. He failed only because of the force of Cox’s integrity; the fact that there were few football games on television that Saturday, allowing millions of Americans to watch Cox’s historic press conference as he explained why he couldn’t obey the White House order to cease and desist; and because the American people flooded Washington with telegrams of support for Cox and calls for the president’s impeachment.

All three branches of government managed to act responsibly in the face of chaos. Richardson and Ruckelshaus adhered to their constitutional oaths, knowing that it might destroy their own political careers. Members of Congress joined together, Democrats and Republicans alike, to demand Nixon’s compliance with the court order to turn over the tapes; a bipartisan group of legislators even drafted impeachment articles against the recalcitrant president. And the Supreme Court, led by Nixon’s own appointee Chief Justice Warren Burger, wrote a unanimous opinion declaring that Nixon had to turn over the tapes because in America’s democratic system no person – not even the president – is above the law.

Cox became a national hero after the Saturday Night Massacre not because he’d planned it, but because he’d spent his whole life making principled decisions in matters big and small, preparing him for this moment when the spotlight of history shone upon him. This was a man who consistently exercised self-restraint in public service. No matter how much political heat he faced, he put the interests of the nation and its constitutional system ahead of his own career advancement and self-interests.

Today, many of the ambitious measures adopted after Watergate, designed to restore public confidence in our system of government, have been swept away by the tides of history. Campaign finance reform is largely dead. The independent counsel law is gone. The Ethics in Government Act (which Cox helped to draft) has been shaved down. And the vicious partisan battles of the ‘90s, which culminated in the failed impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, have left the nation more skeptical of its public officials than ever, ushering in the hyper-partisan dysfunction we now witness in Washington.

Yet the lessons of the Saturday Night Massacre stand.

Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace in the wake of Watergate because men and women of integrity holding positions of trust in Washington risked their own necks for the sake of the common good.

More importantly, the firestorm of public protest that erupted following the Saturday Night Massacre, forty years ago on Oct. 20, 1973, demonstrated a vital fact about our system of government: Although the American public often underestimates its strength, it has the power to rebuke and discipline even the highest public officials. It was the collective will of the people that drove Nixon from office, more than any court order or impeachment article.

In this October four decades later, the scandalous dysfunction on display in Washington may not constitute an actual crime. But it’s worth pondering what Nixon learned the hard way: Public officials to whom we’ve entrusted the solemn responsibility of governance must grasp that if they refuse to do their jobs properly, they can (and will) face swift and certain repercussions.

After the Saturday Night Massacre, it was a deluge of telegrams and phone calls that brought the government back to its senses. Today, a bombardment of emails, tweets and texts may be the only way to convey the collective sense of outrage average citizens feel about the debt-ceiling debacle. And it may take men and women of unwavering integrity like Archibald Cox, who was willing to risk it all to put the nation’s interests above his own, to carry out the people’s will. It’s time for patriotic Americans who want their elected officials to start playing by the rules, rather than careening from crisis to crisis, to step forward.

Ken Gormley is dean of Duquesne University School of Law and author of Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation , the biography of the Watergate special prosecutor.