John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life.From his Q&A with The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner:
Was there ever a moment in the Watergate scandal akin to this one, in terms of where Democrats were substantively and politically?--Marshal Zeringue
Yeah, I would say probably in the fall of 1973, before the Saturday Night Massacre set everything aflame. The Democrat-led Watergate Committee had spent all summer calling all of Nixon’s henchmen up to the Hill, and had unearthed and dug up a lot of stuff, particularly John Dean’s testimony, which said, “Yes, the President obstructed justice.” But the country was waiting for a smoking gun, and they had just reëlected Nixon by a huge landslide, a historic landslide, and they were suspicious, probably rightly so, that Democrats were seeking to settle old grievances, to settle in Congress what they couldn’t settle at the ballot box. And so you had this period in September and October of 1973 when lots of stuff was happening. Spiro Agnew was resigning. The Arabs and Israelis went to war. But the public-opinion polls showed there was still great hesitancy about Watergate and that a vast majority of people were much more concerned about the economy.
Did events then change, or did the Democrats do something that changed things?
No, I think primarily events changed things, primarily the Saturday Night Massacre. People knew there were tapes in 1973, because that had come out during the Watergate Committee hearings. And they were sort of widely saying, “Well, the tapes are going to show who is telling the truth, John Dean or Nixon, and we will wait for them to come out. And when it went to the courts, it was seen as the process working. And then, all of a sudden, Nixon took this radical step of firing [the special prosecutor Archibald] Cox, and forcing [Attorney General] Elliot Richardson and [Deputy Attorney General] William Ruckelshaus to resign, and all of a sudden people said, “Wait a minute, he is not waiting for the courts to act and for the tapes to come out so we know what the truth is; he is covering up.”
That pretty much solidified mainstream liberal Democrats behind impeachment. You had Tip O’Neill going on the House floor and...[read on]