[On May 18th, 1973, the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings began. So for the 50th anniversary of that historic moment, this week I’ll highlight one telling detail each for a handful of the key figures in those hearings. Leading up to a weekend post on a few contemporary echoes of that moment!]
While the
Watergate hearings absolutely shifted public opinion on the scandal and the
Nixon administration, it was a parallel event that provided the most direct
impetus for the possibility of impeachment (and thus Nixon’s preemptive
resignation). When Watergate Special
Prosecutor Archibald Cox Jr. refused to back down from a
subpoena for Nixon’s illegal private recordings, Nixon fired Cox in the
October 1973 event that became known as the
Saturday Night Massacre; it was that unconstitutional firing and the uproar
it produced which truly set the impeachment conversations in motion. Given that
particular context, it’s quite striking and telling that Cox would go to be chair
of the board of directors for a dozen years (from 1980 to 1992) of Common Cause, a groundbreaking and vital
bipartisan organization (founded just three years before the Watergate hearings
and still active to this day) advocating for government reform, transparency
and accountability, and a government that, as their mission statement puts it, “serves
the public interest.” In some ways Watergate was and remains singular, but in
many others it was a bellwether of a great deal of issues and debates to come,
and Archibald Cox continued to be part of those conversations long after his
special prosecuting of Watergate came to a close.
Last
Watergate figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment