I'm glad I'm a conscientious teacher. Had I not been, I would have found the column George Will wrote last Tuesday (WaPo isn't dating articles on the web for some odd reason) about his "recollection" of Watergate all by myself, although I'm happy to h/t Jeremy Holden at Media Matters for his evisceration of Will's attempt to redefine what we know as the Saturday Night Massacre in the history of the Watergate Affair. This is part of how I teach it, so I don't mind claiming some of this as my own, especially if I have the support of the memory of Richard Ben-Veniste, head of the Watergate task force, from Holden's blog.
It seems that Robert Bork had completed a book before he died. We'll parse this below, as I learned from a template in the queue of one of the groups I belong to, the great orange divider doodle (that's its name).
With Bork, there was a whitewash going on already, as it happens. You've heard the term "Borking." Dictionary.reference.com defines it thus:
1987, "to discredit a candidate for some position by savaging his or her career and beliefs," from name of U.S. jurist Robert H. Bork (b.1927), whose Supreme Court nomination in 1987 was rejected after an intense counter-campaign.
Well, no, because there was a specific reason that Bork was rejected: the part he played in what has been called the "Saturday Night Massacre." I was going to link the Washington Post Watergate timeline but THAT even gets it wrong.
October 20 - Saturday Night Massacre: Nixon fires Archibald Cox and abolishes the office of the special prosecutor. Attorney General Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resign. Pressure for impeachment mounts in Congress.
Fortunately, the Washington Post Archives contain a REAL story that gets what happened correct. As
Carroll Kilpatrick wrote on Sunday, October 21, 1973 Nixon, frustrated that the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was getting too close to what actually happened, demanded that his attorney general, Elliott Richardson, fire Cox and abolish the office of the special prosecutor. Richardson refused and "resigned." The Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus, also refused and also "resigned."
Finally, the President turned to Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, who by law becomes acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general are absent, and he carried out the President's order to fire Cox. The letter from the President to Bork also said Ruckelshaus resigned.
I have "resigned" in scare quotes because
Shortly after the White House announcement, FBI agents sealed off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building on K Street NW. An FBI spokesman said the agents moved in "at the request of the White House."
Agents told staff members in Cox's office they would be allowed to take out only personal papers. A Justice Department official said the FBI agents and building guards at Richardson's and Ruckelshaus' offices were there "to be sure that nothing was taken out."
Now we have Bork's book, and Will's stenography.
On an October Saturday, when Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, Richardson and his deputy resigned, urging Bork to execute Nixon’s lawful order, which he did. By the two resignations, Bork became acting attorney general, in which capacity he protected the ongoing investigation of Nixon.
Resigned, not fired. Okay, that's not SO bad. But this is:
Bork deserves to be remembered by a grateful nation for the services he rendered in preventing disarray in the Justice Department at a moment of unprecedented assault on the rule of law, and for facilitating the removal of a president during Washington days that were darker than most people today can imagine. His book confirms the axiom that our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times.
Does it, now, Mr. Will? Doesn't making stuff up libel our own times even more completely?
Here's Richard Ben-Veniste in the Washington Post March 11. His op-ed piece is called Revisionist History on Watergate:
Without the tape-recorded evidence demonstrating irrefutably, in Nixon’s own voice, his knowledge of and active involvement in obstruction of justice, it is likely that Nixon would have escaped impeachment and removal from office. But the next special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, with a charter virtually identical to his predecessor’s, continued Cox’s pursuit of the evidence — and the rest is (unrevised) history.
Yes, whitewash. But there's also historical precedent, and I even get to discuss this in the FIRST half of the U.S. Survey. Andrew Jackson wanted the National Bank of the United States, which he called the "Monster Bank," to be dissolved, but it wasn't so easy, as the Bank's director, Nicholas Biddle, had been doing an excellent job. From
the Dickinson College website, House Divided:
09/23/1823
The Bank of the United States' charter is due to be renewed, and Taney advises Jackson to let it expire, which is exactly what Jackson wants to hear. Two consecutive Secretaries of the Treasury, Lewis Lane and William J. Duane, support the bank and refuse to remove federal money from it. Jackson finally appoints Taney [in a recess appointment] as Secretary of the Treasury because he trusts Taney to help him kill the bank. Taney will obligingly do so.
Taney. That would be Roger Brooke Taney, the author of
Dred Scott. The Senate refused to confirm Taney as Secretary of the Treasury, and when Jackson tried to appoint Taney to an Associate Justice position, the anti-Jackson Whigs in the Senate refused to act on the nomination, thus killing it. But Jacksonian Democrats gained control of the Senate in the 1834 elections, and when John Marshall died in 1836, these Democrats were happy to confirm Taney as Chief Justice.
I'm sorry that history was so unkind to Robert Bork. But nothing is gained by attempting to whitewash the actions that put him in the position he ended up in when he faced the Senate. It wasn't his conservatism, it was the Saturday Night Massacre.
1:53 PM PT: I haven't been outside today, really, so I'm going to run some errands and I should be back in 90 minutes or so. No, I'm not ignoring you!