Judiciary Committee votes 27 to 11: Nixon obstructed justice
Three days earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered Nixon to surrender his Oval Office tapes, rejecting his claim of executive privilege. On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee met in a room crowded with television cameras and voted 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment against him, obstruction of justice. Six Republicans crossed over to join every Democrat on the panel. Two more articles, abuse of power and contempt of Congress, followed within the week.
This was the first time since Andrew Johnson that a House committee had recommended impeaching a sitting president, and the bipartisan margin, with six Republicans breaking with their own party's president, gave the vote a legitimacy no single-party count could have carried. It became the standard later impeachments were measured against: whether the vote crossed party lines.
QWhich two Republicans on the committee broke ranks to vote for the obstruction article?
Lawrence Hogan of Maryland and Tom Railsback of Illinois were among six Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who crossed over to vote with the Democratic majority on July 27, 1974. Hogan, a former FBI agent, had been among the first members of either party to say publicly that Nixon should be impeached. Railsback was part of a bipartisan coalition of moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats that helped craft the wording of the impeachment articles, working to secure broad support for the obstruction charge. Their votes were what turned a Democratic majority's finding into something closer to a national verdict.
QWhat specific event did Nixon invoke on tape to justify shutting down the FBI investigation?
On the June 23, 1972 tape, Nixon told Haldeman to have the CIA warn the FBI that pursuing the Watergate break-in too far would reopen "the whole Bay of Pigs thing." It was a deliberately vague threat: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion had nothing directly to do with Watergate, but invoking it let Nixon suggest national security stakes without specifying any. The instruction told aides not to lie outright but to call the break-in "a comedy of errors" and press the FBI to drop the case, exactly the maneuver the committee's obstruction article accused him of, roughly two years before the tape ever surfaced publicly.
QWho resigned alongside Archibald Cox during the Saturday Night Massacre?
When Nixon ordered Cox fired on October 20, 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order, and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus was fired after he also refused. The task of dismissing Cox eventually fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, third in line at the Justice Department that night. Leon Jaworski was named the new special prosecutor weeks later and was the one who ultimately fought Nixon to the Supreme Court over the tapes.
