Two Justice Department chiefs quit in one night rather than fire the Watergate prosecutor
Archibald Cox had subpoenaed Nixon's Oval Office tapes, and a federal court had just rejected the president's claim of executive privilege. On the night of October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon turned to Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, who also refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork, now the department's senior official, carried out the order.
Two Senate-confirmed law enforcement chiefs chose unemployment over an order they considered unlawful. The precedent they set, that cabinet officials answer to the law before the Oval Office, has outlasted both their careers. The episode flipped public opinion: a plurality backed impeachment for the first time, and journalists and lawmakers still reach for it whenever a president is accused of pressuring the Justice Department.
QHow did the White House first misreport Ruckelshaus's departure?
The Nixon White House initially told reporters that Ruckelshaus had been fired, not that he had resigned. The Washington Post ran a correction the following day, setting the record straight that Ruckelshaus had refused the order to dismiss Cox and resigned on his own terms rather than being dismissed himself. The error briefly cast Ruckelshaus as compliant rather than defiant, the opposite of what had actually happened that night. The correction helped cement the public record of two officials walking out voluntarily rather than being purged, a detail that shaped how newspapers across the country characterized the night in the days that followed.
QWhat ceremony did Bork go through before he could fire Cox?
Before carrying out the dismissal, Robert Bork was driven to the White House by limousine and sworn in as acting attorney general. Only after taking that oath did he hold the legal authority to remove Cox, since Richardson and Ruckelshaus had already resigned and the office was otherwise vacant. That meant the firing carried the authority of a properly sworn attorney general, not an improvised stand-in. Bork completed the swearing-in and the dismissal within the same night, a sequence that made him, for a few hours, both the newest attorney general in American history and the man who carried out one of its most contested orders.
QHow far did Nixon's approval rating fall after that single night?
Nixon's public approval rating dropped to 27 percent in the aftermath, a collapse that registered within days of the firings becoming public. Telegrams and calls to the White House and Congress spiked to volumes unusual for the period, and for the first time a plurality of Americans told pollsters they favored impeachment. The drop reversed months of relatively steady, if eroding, support and gave congressional Democrats room to move from quiet investigation to open impeachment drafting. Within ten days, on October 30, the formal impeachment process against Nixon had begun, a sign of how quickly the ground had shifted under Nixon.
