Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Some of the historical events we cover on Retropod are moments that have been lost to time,

forgotten both in details and in importance.

And then there are the events that stick with us as constant reminders of what history can teach us.

This is one of those.

This is the story of the Saturday Night Massacre.

In 1972, five members of a committee to re-elect President Richard Nixon had been caught

breaking into the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate Hotel.

The next year, a man named Archibald Cox was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate

the incident and determine whether the president

had been involved. In July, Cox issued a subpoena for secret recordings the president had made

of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon refused. He invoked executive privilege to keep the

tapes private until finally, months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Nixon had to comply.

By then, the rift between Nixon and the Justice Department had grown, and it was clear the president wanted Cox gone, and Nixon still didn't want to turn over the tapes.

Why? Because they implicated him in a vast cover-up. A few days after the ruling, Nixon tried to

broker a deal. He said he would not turn over all the tapes,

but instead would submit a summary of what was in the parts of the tapes related to Watergate.

A Democratic senator would then listen to the tapes verifying Nixon's account.

Cox's answer? Nope. In a statement published in newspapers on October 19,

1973, Nixon blamed Cox for not accepting his proposal. He called it a reasonable compromise

and ordered Cox to make no further attempts to obtain information on his conversations.

In response, Cox vowed to continue pursuing the tape recordings. But Nixon had another more drastic plan to stop Cox

...