New window opens on Nixon presidency with release of tapes from early Watergate days
By APTuesday, June 23, 2009
Another window opens on Nixon presidency
WASHINGTON — Fateful moments from the Watergate scandal that destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency are brought to light in a new collection of papers and tape recordings from that time.
Materials released by the Nixon Presidential Library on Tuesday show aides trying to head off a constitutional crisis and save a presidency after Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor and forced out the two top Justice Department officials in October 1973.
That crisis is known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
A memo from that episode, by Nixon adviser Kenneth Cole, outlines a “game plan” for survival.
The idea: Convince lawmakers that prosecutor Archibald Cox wanted an “unending crisis of the body politic” and needed to be removed. That didn’t work.
