United States Supreme Court
During the night of 17 June 1972, a security guard discovered that the offices of the Democratic Party’s
national headquarters, located in the Watergate Building in Washington, D.C., had been burglarized. He
called the police, who arrested an oddly varied group of men. The burglars refused to discuss who they
were and what they had been doing, and the matter drifted until after the election of 1972, in which the
Democratic challenger was soundly defeated by the incumbent, Richard Nixon. Two reporters of the Washington
Post newspaper continued to pursue the matter, however, and soon found disturbing evidence that the
Watergate burglars had been hired by President Nixon’s own Committee to Re-elect the President. The committee
—including some of the president’s close advisers and former high officials—denied any knowledge of the
matter, as did members of the White House staff. Further investigative reporting and evidence surfacing
during the trial of the burglars suggested that the president’s men were not telling the truth and that
the burglars’ defense was being paid for by the Committee to Re-elect the President.
In the spring of 1973, the Senate convened a Democrat-dominated committee to investigate the affair, and
the president responded by ordering the attorney general to appoint an independent special prosecutor
to handle the matter. The Senate committee heard extensive and detailed testimony by a White House aide
that members of the White House staff and the Committee to Re-elect the President had conspired to conceal
the involvement of the White House staff in the break-in, and that they had done so with the knowledge
and encouragement of President Nixon himself. They then learned that all conversations in the president’s
Oval Office were automatically tape-recorded. The special counsel pressed for certain tapes to be turned
over to his investigators, and the president ordered the attorney general to dismiss him. Believing this
action unethical, the attorney general refused and resigned and his deputy attorney general was fired
for refusing. The president finally ordered Solicitor General Bork to fire the special counsel, and Bork
willingly complied. This so-called Saturday Night Massacre caused a massive public outcry, and the president
appointed a new special prosecutor. A grand jury indicted several high-ranking government officials and
applied for a subpoena of the president’s tapes to be used as evidence in their trial.
The president offered a mass of heavily edited transcripts of the tape, but the special prosecutor asked
for the tapes themselves. The president refused to turn them over; the matter was turned over the the
courts and was rushed to the Supreme Court. The court rejected the president’s arguments and ordered the
tapes to be turned over to the Federal District Court. The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives
met to consider impeachment. It soon became clear that the White House staff, with the president’s knowledge
and perhaps direction, had arranged a number of illegal acts, of which the Watergate burglary was one.
The Judiciary Committee voted to present articles of impeachment to the House, and there was little doubt
that the House would vote to accept their recommendations. A group of leading Republican senators went
to the White House and told the president that he lacked any support in the Senate, and he began to make
preparations to resign and receive a presidential pardon from his successor.
Why did the Supreme Court reject the president’s contention that this was a matter between him and a subordinate
in the Executive Branch? What were the bases of President Nixon’s assertion of executive privilege? For
what reasons did the Supreme Court reject his claim of privilege of confidentiality? How was the subpoenaed
material to be handled? |
