The White House argued that the president’s conversations in the Oval Office were protected by executive privilege, and that they could not be pried into by a meddling prosecutor. To virtually anyone whose common sense had not been supplanted by a Harvard Law degree, this might have seemed obvious. Yet Cox would not relent.
The administration conceived a compromise. White House staff would produce transcripts of the eight tapes in question. The tapes themselves would then be turned over in full to Senator John Stennis, a widely respected Mississippi Democrat who had been elected to the upper chamber in 1947, the same year Nixon arrived in the House of Representatives. Stennis would then confirm the accuracy and completeness of the summaries to Cox and other investigators, while softening turns of phrase that might embarrass the administration. The terms of the proposal suggest that Nixon’s principal concern was not the content of the tapes so much as the fallout of his foul language in private becoming a matter of public record. Attorney General Richardson agreed that the White House proposal was a sound one.
Archibald Cox was not so magnanimous. He knew that the Stennis compromise would deny him Nixon’s scalp. Within hours, he had rejected the president’s proposal. This left Nixon with no choice but to remove the special prosecutor. He had encouraged the creation of the office, but he knew from the moment Richardson made his pick that it might end this way. Years later, he would recall in his memoirs, “If Richardson searched specifically for the man whom I least trusted, he could hardly have done better.”
Richardson had agreed at the outset not to fire Cox except in case of actual misconduct. The refusal for political reasons of a sensible compromise offered by the president of the United States plainly crossed that threshold; but, asked to carry out his duty, the attorney general balked. He resigned rather than remove the rogue prosecutor, as did his second-in-command, William Ruckelshaus. This left Solicitor General Robert Bork as acting attorney general, with the unenviable task of terminating Cox.