RECENT EVENTS HAVE MADE ME DOUBT THE ENTIRE WATERGATE STORY: Reevaluating the Saturday Night Massacre: Recent documents suggest it’s time to challenge the narrative.
According to Haig, Nixon was coming off two huge political victories, saving Israel from the Arab’s Oct. 6 surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War and orchestrating Spiro Agnew’s Oct. 10 resignation, followed by his nomination of Gerald Ford on Oct. 12 to be his successor as vice president. Nixon’s next move, as he saw it, was to address pending Watergate issues by firing Cox as special prosecutor and moving his Watergate Special Prosecution Force back into the Department of Justice. There, while the unit would remain intact, it would report to the career head of DOJ’s criminal division, the highly respected Henry Petersen, who had impressed Nixon in their many meetings leading up to the April resignations of two top lieutenants, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, and the firing of his counsel, John Dean. Kennedy Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had taken Nixon’s idea of a special supervising prosecutor on Watergate and expanded it into what became known as Cox’s Army: 100 specially recruited partisan prosecution staff of Nixon-hating Ivy Leaguers, operating totally independent of the Department of Justice, which had promised investigations into every allegation of wrongdoing lodged against the Nixon administration since its 1969 inauguration. Watergate investigations were one thing where Nixon himself had called for a renewed investigation, but investigating every aspect of his administration by a group whose top 17 attorneys had all worked in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, was simply unacceptable.
The plan, again according to Haig, was first to fire Cox and move the prosecution unit into the DOJ, and then to announce the Stennis Compromise, which would resolve the issue over access to the nine tapes subpoenaed by the grand jury. Richardson, however, urged reversing the timing of these two initiatives, with the idea that Cox could be maneuvered into resigning — or being fired if need be — if he refused to accept the Stennis Compromise.
The compromise was the key, which sounds absurd today, except for one thing: It was virtually an exact copy of the proposal submitted by Cox on Sept. 20. Cox’s central concept was “third-party authentication.” Nixon was adamant about not turning over the tapes themselves. What about producing word-for-word verified transcripts of relevant portions of those tapes and summaries of non-relevant portions, but not the actual tapes themselves? That way, the grand jury’s demand could be satisfied, while Nixon could still claim he had maintained the confidentiality of virtually all Oval Office conversations.
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