Role in Nixon Administration's "Saturday Night Massacre"
On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was instrumental in the "Saturday Night Massacre", U.S. President Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, following Cox's request for tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon initially ordered U.S. Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson's top deputy, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, also considered the order "fundamentally wrong" and also resigned, making Bork the Acting Attorney General. When Nixon reiterated his order, Bork complied and fired Cox, an act later found to be illegal in November of that year in a suit brought by Ralph Nader. Bork remained Acting Attorney General for approximately eight weeks, until the appointment of William B. Saxbe on December 17, 1973.
Read more about this topic: Robert Bork
Famous quotes containing the words role in, role, nixon, saturday, night and/or massacre:
“My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”
—John Lennon (1940–1980)
“The addition of a helpless, needy infant to a couple’s life limits freedom of movement, changes role expectancies, places physical demands on parents, and restricts spontaneity.”
—Jerrold Lee Shapiro (20th century)
“I played by the rules of politics as I found them.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“The return of the asymmetrical Saturday was one of those small events that were interior, local, almost civic and which, in tranquil lives and closed societies, create a sort of national bond and become the favorite theme of conversation, of jokes and of stories exaggerated with pleasure: it would have been a ready- made seed for a legendary cycle, had any of us leanings toward the epic.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I was so sick last night I
Didn’t hardly know my mind.
So sick last night I
Didn’t know my mind.
I drunk some bad licker that
Almost made me blind.”
—Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)