Word: coxes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...subpoenas and presidential refusals arced across Washington like shellfire. Watergate, for so long a kind of inchoate guerrilla war, had developed clear and momentous battle lines. Richard Nixon took his stand behind a barricade of Executive privilege. Neither Sam Ervin's Senate committee nor Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox would get the key White House tapes and documents they were demanding for their investigations of Watergate. At issue, the President declared, is "the independence of the three branches of our Government ... the very heart of our constitutional system." Sam Ervin had a different definition of the question: "Whether the President...
...same time, Cox requested the tapes of one telephone conversation and seven meetings. Eventually, the White House did supply Cox with a White House memo that dealt with Hunt's shift from the White House to the Re-Election Committee's payroll, and another written by former White House Aide Gordon Strachan, under the principles enunciated by White House Attorney Charles Wright (see box). He said that the President would not withhold material dealing with his role as head of the Republican Party or extensively testified about by other witnesses and already made more or less public. Cox...
...motion to quash the subpoenas, a step that would put the burden of proof on the President's attorneys. Instead, Nixon's men elected to ignore all the subpoenas, simply issuing a letter of refusal and leaving the burden of legal initiative on the committee and on Cox. Immediately, the committee, voting by hand on camera in the hearing room, moved to sue the President for the tapes and documents...
...Cox simultaneously petitioned the U.S. District Court to compel the President to "show cause" why he should not comply with his subpoena. "Our view," said Cox, "is that the argument [based on the separation of powers] is not legally sound." Executive Branch employees have long been subject to subpoena by grand juries, he noted, adding that ever since Marbury v. Madison* the Executive has been accountable to the courts, "and this is merely a specific application of that principle." With appropriate irony, Cox's petition was heard by Judge John Sirica, who tried the original Watergate Seven last winter...
Some experts believe that Nixon should have followed the Jefferson example, and in the end, of course, he may yet do so along the way to the Supreme Court. But in a letter to Judge Sirica, in which he declined to produce his tapes for Cox, the President argued: "I follow the example of a long line of my predecessors who have consistently adhered to the position that the President is not subject to compulsory process from the courts." He quoted an 1865 statement of then U.S. Attorney General James Speed: "The President of the United States, the heads...