The weekend that shocked Washington

 Fifty yers ago, all of Washington was obsessed with the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s efforts to wiggle out of it. The Associated Press assembled a team just to cover this history-making event.

 

Though I was not part of that team, I was at the helm of the main Washington news desk on Oct. 20, 1973, when I plunged into this story. Margaret Gentry, the Justice Department reporter, told me: “The Attorney General just left the building. I have a hunch he is going to quit.”

 

Mike Sniffen and I called in staffers on overtime, preparing for a big story. And sure enough, Elliot Richardson and his assistant, William Ruckelshaus resigned, refusing Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was finally given the heave-ho by Solicitor General Robert Bork. The White House correspondenrt dictated the story to us.

 

This “Saturday Night Massacre” could not have happened at a worse time for Nixon. The popular show “All in the Family,” was interrupted by reporters running out of breath on the White House lawn to report this shocker on camera. The firing of Cox was a turning point in Nixon’s downfall.

 

The next day there was going to be so much reaction that the assistant bureau chief, Walter Mears, made me manage the desk again on Sunday, the day my beloved Oakland A’s were playing in the seventh game of the World Series on TV.

 

 To make up for it, Mears sold me his tickets to a Washington Redskins game (a real privilege when tickets were hard to come by). It was a great game, won by Washington, with injured quarterbacks Billy Kilmer and Sonny Jurgensen taking turns hobbling off and on the field to fill in for each other. (The A’s and the Redskins both won!)

 

The Washington news media, even the New York Times, felt blindsided by the Washington Post, which came up with scoop after scoop on the scandal. Almost in retaliation, the media piled on Nixon every chance it could get, even though it may have been merited. 

 

Somehow Watergate seems tame today compared to controversies erupting more recently. There was a complete consensus to get rid of Nixon, even in his own party. That wouldn’t happen now.

 

I still think he could have survived the mess if he had somehow destroyed the White House tapes, which were so incriminating.

 

Footnote: I just looked it up. Nearly three-quarters of the people in this country were not born yet when all of this happened. To them, it is just like me hearing about World War I or the Spanish-American War when I was growing up.

 

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Another October, 29 years later, is still stuck in my mind. That’s when two men, called the “D.C. Sniper,” killed most of their 17 victims in the Washington-Richmond corridor in 2002. Sara’s soccer games were called off, and people were frantic.

 

On a trip from South Boston, we stopped at a Wendy’s in Ashland for dinner one night. When I took the dog to relieve herself in the woods behind the restaurant, I thought it would be a great place for a sniper to hang out. I looked carefully before stepping in.

 

In the restaurant, a server warned, “There has been a sniper attack in Richmond. Be careful out there!” Actually, the snipers fired from a car and killed a patron at the Home Depot far away in Arlington, where we were headed.

 

Several weeks later, the sniper killed someone outside the Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, next door to the Wendy’s where we got the warning. The snipers had hung out in the same woods where I had taken the dog on our previous visit.

 

So scary! The snipers were finally caught at a rest stop in Maryland. One was executed and the other is  still in prison.