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WillyT

(72,631 posts)
Wed Dec 18, 2013, 10:59 PM Dec 2013

Memories: Back When The Media And The Public BOTH Demanded The Truth.

JOHN CHANCELLOR reporting:

Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history. The president has fired the man you just saw, the Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and he has sent FBI agents to the office of the special prosecution staff and to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General and the president has ordered the FBI to seal off those offices. Because of the president’s actions, the Attorney General has resigned. Elliot Richardson, who was appointed Attorney General only last May in the midst of the Watergate scandals, has quit, saying, he “cannot carry out Mr. Nixon’s instructions.” Richardson’s Deputy, William Ruckleshaus has been fired. Ruckleshaus refused, in a moment of constitutional drama, to obey a presidential order to fire the Special Watergate Prosecutor. The President has abolished Special Watergate Prosecutor Cox’s office and duties, and turned the prosecution of Watergate crimes over to the Justice Department. And the Justice Department is now headed, at the President’s direction, by the Solicitor General Robert H. Bourque, who has held his office only since last June. Bourque issued a terse statement tonight, saying an explanation of his firing of the Special Watergate Prosecutor: “All I will say is that I carried out the President’s directive.”

The series of events that precipitated this crisis began at 8:15 o’clock Friday night when the president announced that he would not obey a court order to surrender the Watergate tapes. Instead, Mr. Nixon said he would make available a summary of recorded White House conversations, which he felt were relevant and, which he personally would edit. He would have the president’s say--the president said he would have the summary authenticated by Senator John Stennis, who would be allowed to hear the full tapes. At the same time, the president ordered Special Prosecutor Cox to stop his efforts to acquire those tapes. The president acted less than four hours before he would have been forced to make one of two choices, either to bow to a circuit court of appeals’ order to surrender the tapes, or to federal--to federal Judge John Sirica, or to appeal that order to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Nixon acted after meeting with the Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin and the Vice Chairman Senator Baker. Both went along with the president’s proposal. That was an important consideration. There was one other. Had the president defied the Supreme Court outright, he knew he faced a movement toward impeachment by some members of the House of Representatives.

So, here is where we stand. The president has offered a compromise designed to circumvent a court order, which would have required him to turn over the secret tapes to a federal judge. He has lost his Attorney General in a dramatic resignation. Mr. Nixon then tried to get the Deputy Attorney General to fire the Special Watergate Prosecutor and when the Deputy Attorney General wouldn’t do it, he was fired. Then Mr. Nixon got the Solicitor General to do the job and named him the acting head of the Justice Department. And half an hour after the Special Watergate Prosecutor had been fired, agents of the FBI, acting at the direction of the White House, sealed off the offices of the Special Prosecutor, the offices of the Attorney General, and the offices of the Deputy Attorney General. That’s a stunning development and nothing even remotely like it has happened in all of our history.

All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the president has set himself against his own Attorney General and the Department of Justice.
Nothing like this has ever happened before, and what it means is that the worst dreams of everyone who has worried about the president’s secret tapes have now become true, become reality.


Link: http://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=5365










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