Saturday Night Massacre
- The Saturday Night Massacre took place on October 20, 1973.
- The "Saturday Night Massacre" was the term given by political commentators to President Richard Nixon's executive dismissal of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, and the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus during the Watergate scandal
- Nixon compelled the resignations of Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, in a search for someone in the Justice Department who was willing to fire Cox.
- Public reaction was immediate and intense
- Protesters stood along the sidewalks outside the White House holding signs saying "HONK TO IMPEACH," in which hundreds of cars driving by, honked their horns.
- Accusations of wrongdoing prompted Nixon famously to state "I am not a crook" in front of 400 Associated Press managing editors on November 17, 1973.
- The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, continued the investigation.
- Nixon continued to refuse to turn over actual tapes, while he did agree to release edited transcripts of a large number of them. Nixon cited the fact that any sensitive national-security information could be edited out of the tapes.
- On January 28, 1974, Nixon's campaign aid Herbert Porter pleaded guilty in lying to the FBI during the early stages of the Watergate investigation.
- On February 25, 1974, Nixon's personal lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach, pleaded guilty to two charges of illegal election-campaign activities (other charges were dropped in return for Kalmbach's cooperation in the forthcoming Watergate trials).
- On March 1, 1974, former aides of the President, known as the Watergate Seven
(Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson) were prosecuted for conspiring to delay the Watergate investigation. - The issue of access to the tapes went to the Supreme Court.
- On July 24, 1974, in the United States v. Nixon case, the Court ruled that claims of executive privilege over the tapes were void
- They further ordered Nixon to surrender the tapes to Jaworski.