Word: coxes
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...Executive executes the law. Would the Presidency move against the President? In the fall of 1973, Nixon faced a court order to surrender his tapes. Instead that day he fired his prosecutor, announced he was abolishing the Special Prosecutor's post, and sent F.B.I. agents to seal off Cox's office. "I'm going home to read about the Reichstag fire," cracked a bitter Cox aide...
...Cox remembers: "I wasn't sure what would happen. It was far from clear whether the people would see what the issue was." But public outery was immediate and intense--letters and telegrams poured in: horns honked through the night in front of the White House, reportedly waking Nixon up. Nixon's staff called it the "firestorm". "The only power that could have compelled him would have been the political and moral power of the people," Cox says, adding "What ought to be celebrated about the Saturday Night Macssere is the people's responses." Within days Nixon appointed...
...years ago this week we can see that the ultimate check on his transgressions came not from the justice system but rather from an extra-legal eruption of public opinion. The system worked, but only because the public was mobilized. It was left to the people, Cox says, to "rise up morally and politically and force a President to comply...
Americans have stopped a President from a flagrant and clumsy attempt to obstruct an investigation against himself. "A President cannot command," Cox comments. "He can only persuade," But when opinion is the bound of his powers, he can still deceive. When another President contends our troops in Lebanon are at peace, so he can avoid the restraints of the War Powers Act; when he alludes to vague security threats in Grenada, but bars reporters and obstructs the public's critical vision of threat; when he distorts details and invents rationalizations for his policies, what effect can a firestorm have...
Reform is cyclical, Cox says; public interest advances then abandons it. Without public interest--or without public knowledge-- "The standards have a way of sagging." That Saturday night in 1973, Richard Nixon feared a chain of resignations in his Justice Department before somebody in the succession would fire Cox. Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to do it; today, Yale Law School Professor Bork is widely named as Ronald Reagan's top choice for the next opening on the Supreme Court. What does Cox think about that...