Watergate Research Paper

Watergate Paper
April Overstreet
HIS/145
October 24, 2011
Jerome Reilly

Watergate Paper

“On Oct. 20, 1973, in the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” President Richard M. Nixon abolished the office of special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, and accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and fired Deputy Attorney General William B. Ruckelshaus for their refusal to fire Mr. Cox.
The president took the action to prevent Mr. Cox from obtaining audiotapes of White House conversations implicating Mr. Nixon in the attempted cover-up of the Watergate break-in (in 1972, five Nixon campaigners were caught trying to place recording devices inside Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex). Solicitor
The Oct. 21 New York Times wrote: “The president’s dramatic action edged the nation closer to the constitutional confrontation he said he was trying to avoid. Senior members of both parties in the House of Representatives were reported to seriously discuss impeaching the president.”
The president was unable to stop the Watergate investigation, however. The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, continued Mr. Cox’s work and forced the president to hand over the tapes in July 1974. Although 18 minutes of audio had been curiously edited out, the tapes did include a conversation in which Mr. Nixon suggested the C.I.A. shut down the F.B.I. investigation of the break-in. The so-called “Smoking Gun” tape was the final straw for Mr. Nixon, who resigned on Aug.
Clinton, they offered up, unsolicited, the view that the media and other politicians "were being unfair to him," Mr. Kohut said."The public values the watchdog role of the press, but not as much as it once did," he said. Over time, the public "came to see the press as a watchdog that barked too much, and sometimes was out of control."
Watergate, according to Mr. Kohut and others, led some journalists to overreach. "It created a model of journalism that is easily abused and debased," said Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University. "It created generations of people trying to replicate that role by digging in more and more unsavory ways. As much as Watergate is a model of the journalism that we admire, you can also see in it the origins of the distrust we have today."
Robert Dallek, a biographer of Lyndon Johnson, said the news media may have suffered over the years by its own rise in prominence and by the public's general disillusionment in institutions generally. But, he said, "as a presidential historian who gets into the records 30, 35 years after the fact, I know how much manipulation there is, how much spin doctoring there is." Mr. Dallek, who is writing a book about the relationship between Nixon and Henry Kissinger, said that on Friday he taped a television interview with among others, Mr. Buchanan, who repeated his theory that there was a "political coup" against Nixon by the