Richard Nixon also fired the person investigating his presidential campaign

On Tuesday evening, after President Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Americans suddenly grew much more interested in something that happened 43 years ago — the Saturday Night Massacre.

The massacre kicked the Watergate scandal — concerning associates of Nixon’s who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate office/residential complex in Washington, DC — into high gear. At the time, Congress was already looking into the break-in and investigating Nixon’s potential involvement and cover-up efforts. So was Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor appointed by the attorney general.

On the night of Saturday, October 20, 1973, President Nixon ordered Cox’s firing. However, the person with authority to dismiss Cox, Nixon’s Attorney General Elliot Richardson, refused to carry out the order.

Instead, Richardson resigned. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, then became acting attorney general, and also refused to obey the order. Ruckelshaus resigned too. That left Robert Bork, the solicitor general, as the highest-ranking official in the Justice Department. Bork finally carried out Nixon’s order and dismissed Cox.

That hardly solved Nixon’s problems. Instead, it only accelerated public interest and outrage at the brewing scandal over the Watergate cover-up; while Nixon had acted privately in the past to try to keep his team’s break-in to the DNC’s offices in the Watergate under wraps, this was a very public, and very brazen, attempt to derail efforts to investigate the crime.

The public reaction to the massacre would force Nixon to appoint another special prosecutor to replace Cox, and accelerated congressional interest in impeaching the president. While Nixon’s actions had been meant to keep the scandal from ending his presidency, less than 10 months later he resigned.

The massacre was shocking — a president had never brazenly fired an official charged with investigating the president’s conduct before. So when Trump fired Comey, who was charged with investigating Trump’s presidential campaign just as Cox was charged with investigating Nixon’s, Americans suddenly got very interested in the events of 1973:

There are obviously many differences between the two situations, both in the way the investigations were conducted and in the underlying conduct being investigated. But the parallels are there, and it’s important to understand exactly what happened 44 years ago.

The Watergate scandal had been simmering for almost a year when Cox was named special prosecutor in May 1973. The break-in occurred on June 17, 1972, the actual burglars were caught at the scene, and within weeks the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward had tied the burglars to the White House. The scandal didn’t become prominent enough to hurt Nixon’s reelection (he beat George McGovern in every state but Massachusetts and DC, and won the popular vote by 23 points).

But the following January, Judge John Sirica, who prosecuted the burglars and their supervisors G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, said he was “not satisfied” that the whole story of the break-in had been told, and so in February 1973 the Senate launched a temporary (“select” in Congress jargon) committee to investigate. It wasn’t long after that that senior administration officials started resigning. On April 30, 1973, the attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman all resigned, and Nixon fired White House counsel John Dean.

Nixon denied that any of the three had done anything wrong. He said Kleindienst left because the Justice Department needed an attorney general who could investigate Watergate. Kleindienst had a conflict of interest because his predecessor, John Mitchell, had left to run Nixon’s reelection campaign (which had hired Liddy, Hunt, and the burglars to conduct the Watergate break-in).

Nixon then appointed Elliot Richardson, his secretary of defense, to succeed Kleindienst as attorney general. He gave Richardson open-ended authority to “make all decisions bearing on the prosecution of the Watergate case and related matters.”

Nixon didn’t intend for Richardson to use that power to name an independent prosecutor; he thought creating such a position was unnecessary. But in May Richardson, appointed Cox, a professor at Harvard Law School who had served as solicitor general under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, anyway.

Cox was a Democrat, but he had taught Richardson at Harvard Law, and he had supported Richardson’s Republican bid for attorney general of Massachusetts in 1966. Besides, basically everyone on Richardson’s initial list of candidates for the job had turned it down.

“Nobody with a nationally recognized name wanted to attach that name to the Watergate special prosecutor’s position,” the legal scholar Ken Gormley writes in his biography of Cox. “It was an untested, risky job with little chance of building a more prestigious career from it.” One Richardson aide told Gormley, “It is a terrible thing to say, and I am sure Archie Cox would take it in good spirits, but we were getting desperate.”

Many in Washington worried that Cox would not be aggressive enough, or lacked the proper investigative chops. But no one was less pleased with the pick than Nixon himself. “If Richardson had searched specifically for the man whom I would have least trusted to conduct so politically sensitive an investigation in an unbiased way, he could hardly have done better than choose Archibald Cox,” the president seethed in his 1978 memoirs. Cox’s ties to the Kennedy family, in particular, grated on Nixon, who really had never gotten over losing to JFK in 1960.

The events that would lead to Cox’s dismissal began with the July revelation by former White House aide and then-Federal Aviation Administration chief Alexander Butterfield, in testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee, that the White House had an extensive, secret tape-recording system that was activated by sound. Nixon had secretly been recording conversations in the White House since 1971. Few people in the White House other than Nixon knew about it, and it remained secret from the public until Butterfield’s testimony:

While the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses had sometimes taped presidential meetings, the Nixon administration was the first and only one to record the president’s activity so completely (though his bedroom and residences in San Clemente and Key Biscayne were not taped). So the tapes represented the single best source of evidence into the White House’s involvement in the break-in.

The administration tried desperately to prevent either Cox or the Senate Watergate Committee from getting ahold of them.

Cox secured a subpoena against the administration that would force it to release the tapes. But Nixon refused to comply. He seriously considered destroying them entirely, and invoked the principle of executive privilege to argue that he should not be obligated to comply with the subpoena. The case was appealed to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

On October 12, the court of appeals upheld the subpoena, effectively ordering Nixon to hand over the tapes. Nixon responded by offering Cox a compromise: John Stennis, a conservative Democratic senator from Mississippi, could listen to the tapes and verify they matched transcripts of them released by the White House. But Stennis was notoriously hard of hearing, and Cox would not agree to the deal.

After the failure of the Stennis Compromise, Nixon ordered Richardson to dismiss Cox. Richardson refused and resigned, as did his deputy, Ruckelshaus. Bork ultimately was the one to fire Cox.

The reaction to the events was furious. “It was a terrifying night,” Elizabeth Drew, a veteran reporter who covered Watergate at the time, told me in a 2014 interview. “It felt like we were in a banana republic.”

It was a major turning point in the scandal, and helped make impeachment feel like a real possibility.

“The television networks offered hour-long specials,” Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein write in their book The Final Days. They continue:

The newspapers carried banner headlines. Within two days, 150,000 telegrams had arrived in the capital, the largest concentrated volume in the history of Western Union. Deans of the most prestigious law schools in the country demanded that Congress commence an impeachment inquiry. By the following Tuesday, forty-four separate Watergate-related bills had been introduced in the House. Twenty-two called for an impeachment investigation.

Nixon wanted the investigation kicked to Henry Petersen, the assistant attorney general for the criminal division. But pressure for a new special prosecutor was immense, and Bork and White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig recommended that Nixon pick the Texas Democratic lawyer Leon Jaworski. Jaworski only agreed to accept if Nixon would agree that he and the White House could be sued for evidence if they came to an impasse in the investigation.

The White House announced Jaworski’s selection on November 1. “Within ten days of the Cox firing and after the high political price I had had to pay for ridding myself of him,” Nixon writes in his memoirs, “I was back in the same trap of having to accept a Watergate Special Prosecutor.”

Jaworski eventually had to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court, but in a unanimous ruling on July 24, 1974, the Court mandated the White House release the subpoenaed tapes. The White House finally complied, and on August 5 they released what became known as the “smoking gun” recording, in which Haldeman and Nixon, days after the break-in, discuss using the CIA to hamper the FBI’s investigative efforts.

The tapes also famously included an 18½-minute gap on June 20, 1972. The minutes are believed to include a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman about the Watergate arrests. Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, claimed that she accidentally erased the portion, but due to how the taping system worked, it would have been almost physically impossible to do so. Most plausible, according to Drew, is Ehrlichman’s allegation that Nixon personally erased the tapes, presumably because they contained yet more discussion of a cover-up.

Three days after the tapes’ existence became known to the public, Nixon resigned from the presidency.