Spiro Agnew resigns on October 10, 1973, the Arab Forces go on another offensive on October 11, 1973 all the while the Special Prosecutor's continue to push forward trying to get their hands on the Presidential recordings. Tom Brokaw of NBC News is right to describe the situation as "Richard Nixon was a President under siege." He seemed to be facing historic level crisis everywhere he looked.
Nixon went right to work to insure the Israeli government would have everything they needed to defend themselves and he was given some hope by his Attorney General that finally a deal could be struck not to hand over the tapes. He was determined not to give in to the mounting pressure of allowing the prosecutor's free run over the Nixon White House. That hope would turn out to be false.
Attorney General Elliot Richardson would waffle around on a proposal for third party verification of the tapes, in a compromise originally proposed by Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox himself. But when it was originally proposed Richard Nixon had turned the idea down and pursued his options in court. The court would rule against him 5 -2 but add that they wanted the party's to find a deal themselves. So Richardson took the initiative to re propose the compromise that had been earlier rejected. It is a little murky as to what exactly happened or if it was all a misunderstanding but an idea was proposed that a prominent, well respected Senator, John Stennis, a Democrat from Mississippi would listen to the tapes and verify what he heard on them.
Stennis was a man of unquestioned character, (though he was a southerner and a segregationist) , he was also elderly, hard of hearing, and a huge supporter of the Republican President. The Prosecutors wanted no part of this deal and I actually can understand the reasoning on this point. However, it was Archibald Cox's idea, and though he now had a court decision saying he should get the tapes he had asked for, it could reasonably be argued that in good faith he should have honored his original proposal. But either way he chose to hold a press conference and face down the President of the United States while the President was dealing with an enormous crisis in Israel and for that a showdown became inevitable.
This episode takes you right up to that moment just before the most famous of showdowns happened and it includes Archibald Cox's press conference.
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