Kinda creepy coincidence

[agrumer]

I was reading this mediocre essay by Jonathan Chait on Robert Bork, and I was struck with an impulse to read up on the Watergate scandal. What’s the link? Bork had been Solicitor General at the time Nixon tried to quash the investigation, and had wound up in charge of the Justice Department after the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General had

Comments

[barking_iguana]

IIRC, Richardson resigned and Ruckelshaus was fired for refusing to carry out the order. Or possibly the other way around.

Bork's defenders like to point out that it was all choreographed ahead of time, with everyone doing what they felt they had to do, including leaving somebody around to actually run the department. But Bork could have chosen not to be that somebody, had he felt that firing Cox was not a conscionable act of executive power.

[agrumer]

The Wikipedia entry claims that “Bork considered resigning as well, but was persuaded by Richardson that this would leave the Department in chaos.” But it doesn’t cite any references to back this up. If the author’s drawing on something Bork wrote well after the scandal, I don’t know if I’d trust it.

Ah, the Talk page for that entry mentions a July 3, 1987 editorial in the Boston Globe.

[barking_iguana]

I'd love to hear that version of Peter Gunn some day. The theme became one of my favorites when I spent a lot of time playing Spy Hunter.