Saturday Night Massacre Pros And Cons

The Break-Ins
And Some Of The Early Cover-Up Attempts
May of 1972, the first break in at DNC’s (Democratic National Committee) Watergate headquarters occurs, as members of President Nixon’s C.R.E.E.P.(Committee to Re-Elect the President) break in stealing copies of top-secret documents and wire-tapping their phones and neither caught nor detected by guards or any other personal on duty. However, the burglars later realized that the bugs they placed in the phones were faulty so they sent a group of 5 men back that same year, on the seventeenth of June, to fix or replace them. But just as smoothly as the first break-in was the second break-in was just as much of a failure. The group was quickly spotted by one of the guards on duty that night

After finding this out the special prosecutor of the case, Archibald Cox would subpoena the tape with Nixon’s reply being a refusal claiming executive order, which would lead up to an event known as the Saturday Night Massacre. The Saturday Night Massacre would occur when Cox would not relent and so Nixon ordered his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox, which he refuses to do and in protest resigns, after this Nixon orders his Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox and he would respond in the exact same manner as his once superior had, but the resignations would stop that night him as Nixon then ordered Solicitor General, Robert Bork, to fire Cox and he obeyed, becoming Attorney General and signing the papers to fire Cox. Later due to public pressure Nixon would be forced to appoint a new prosecutor who was just as determined to secure the tapes as Cox was. So, in April of 1974, Nixon releases some but not all of the tapes. Later in July, the Supreme Court rules that Nixon must immediately relinquish any and all tapes relating to the investigation, and the House votes to move forward with the impeachment

By this, I mean that there were some things that were resolved in positive and negative ways but there were still plenty of aspects of it that were never completely resolved. There a few things that I contribute to my reasoning on this. For example, we found out who did the deed and who was behind it all, but we have never truly found out their reasons for doing it or what their end goal for all of this was. Was the president ever really involved or even had any idea of the possibility of a plan like this being implemented in the plan before the break-in or had he been left in the dark on it and left to take the blame for his White House Aides’ doings and try to clean up after them? The burglars were caught and did their time but who actually hired them, Nixon or his aides? There are so many unanswered questions left-over from this scandal that it really makes it hard to say that it was resolved and even harder to decide whether or not it was resolved in a positive or negative manner. This is also not to say that there weren’t ways in which the crisis was resolved in positive ways. The more positive ways that this predicament was resolved in are still able to be seen today as after all of this happened Congress passed various laws in regards to government ethics, campaign financing, and freedom of information. Although there were many, many