Saturday Night Massacre
In April 1973 in the growing midst of the Watergate scandal, there was a major reshuffling of Nixon administration posts, due to the resignations of White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman. Ruckelshaus's record of success at EPA and his reputation for integrity led to his being appointed Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Later in the same year, he was appointed Deputy Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice. In an event known as the "Saturday Night Massacre", Ruckelshaus and his boss, Elliot Richardson, famously resigned their positions within the Justice Department rather than obey an order from President Nixon to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was investigating official misconduct on the part of the president and his aides.
Read more about this topic: William Ruckelshaus
Famous quotes containing the words saturday night, saturday, night and/or massacre:
“Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends.”
—Nicholas Pileggi, U.S. screenwriter, and Martin Scorsese. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta)
“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)
“Wonderful lovely there she sat,
Singing the night away,
All in the solitudinous sea
Of that there lonely bay.”
—Walter De La Mare (1873–1956)
“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)