Robert H. Bork (1927 - )

Robert Bork was enjoying his job as President Nixon’s solicitor general. New to Washington, D. C., the University of Chicago Law School graduate and Yale professor had only recently been appointed to his post. On Saturday, October 20, 1973, Bork was to receive his baptism into the no-holds-barred ring of Washington politics. That evening word was passed that Nixon was angry. Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox had rejected the president’s order to rescind the subpoena for White House tape recordings. Soon an order arrived from the president. Attorney General Elliot Richardson was to fire Cox. Troubled by what he saw as interference in an ongoing investigation that the president had promised to leave unfettered, Richardson refused the order and resigned. His subordinate, William Ruckelshaus, followed suit and quit rather than fire Cox. Bork, with no one behind him to whom the office could fall, assumed the role of acting Attorney General and obeyed the president’s order to fire Cox. He did so with the president’s assurance that the investigation would continue. “It is my expectation that the Department of Justice will continue with full vigor the investigations and prosecutions that had been entrusted to the Watergate special prosecution force,” Nixon wrote in his instructions to Bork. The deluge of anger that poured forth from lawmakers and the public over the event, dubbed the “Saturday Night Massacre”, underscored their lack of confidence in that assurance. Soon, another special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was named, the investigation proceeded, and Nixon turned over the tapes. Bork continued to serve as solicitor general until 1977.