This case occurred during the Watergate scandal and involved the issue of executive privilege and congressional power.
During the investigations of the Watergate scandal, information came to light that President Richard M. Nixon had secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office that possibly were relevant to the investigation. In March 1974 a federal grand jury indicted White House officials H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Robert Mardian, Charles Colson, Gordon Strachan, and Kenneth W. Parkinson for participating in a cover-up of the Watergate burglary. President Nixon was named as an unindicted coconspirator.
Following Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, Jr., in April 1974 a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, subpoenaed 64 tapes needed for the trials resulting from the indictments. Nixon refused to comply with the subpoena, offering instead edited transcripts in place of the actual tapes. The 1,254 pages of transcripts contained embarrassing material, including a large number of presidential deleted expletives, and they were also inaccurate and incomplete. The inaccuracies were exposed when the House Judiciary Committee released its version of the tapes.
U. S. District Court judge John Sirica, who had issued the original subpoena, rejected the transcripts as unacceptable and reissued an order for the original tapes. James St. Clair, the head of Nixon’s Watergate defense team, appealed Sirica’s ruling to the Court of Appeals. Jawor-ski, wishing to expedite the process, appealed directly to the Supreme Court. The Court agreed to hear the case on July 8, 1974.
Nixon’s case rested on two issues. First, the administration questioned the judiciary’s jurisdiction in subpoenaing the tapes, citing separation of powers. Second, the administration cited executive privilege, the need for the protection of communication between high government officials and their advisers. The Court unanimously rejected both claims in a ruling on July 24, 1974. On the first point, the court cited Marbury v. Madison (1803), which affirmed the power of judicial review. As for the second point, Chief Justice Warren Burger argued that neither separation of powers nor the need for confidential communication allowed for presidential privilege of absolute immunity from the judicial process.
On August 5, 1974, the transcripts were released, including one particularly damaging to Nixon, in which he discussed using the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation of the Watergate break-in. Facing a congressional vote on impeachment, Nixon announced his resignation on the evening of August 8, 1974.
—John Korasick
Updike, John (1932-2009) novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist
Novelist and short story writer John Updike, born March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pennsylvania, gained literary fame for capturing the changing culture of the United States in the post-World War II period.
After graduation from Harvard University in 1954, Updike joined the New Yorker as a regular contributor. In 1959 his collection of short stories, The Same Door, won critical acclaim. In 1960 he wrote a nonfiction story for the New Yorker, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” about baseball star Ted Williams’s last game. The work is regarded as sportswriting at its best. His novels often explored the interrelationships of sex, faith, and death. The first of his Rabbit novels, Rabbit, Run, appeared in 1960. In the series, the changing social, political, and economic history of post-World War II United States is the background to the life story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Updike occasionally used the story to comment on that history, as he followed the life and relationships of Angstrom from his early marriage through maturity to the end of Angstrom’s life. Updike’s writing typically focused on relationships, and that is especially true of the Rabbit series. Updike produced another series of comic short-story cycles, centered on the fictional life of a moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist, Henry Bech, beginning with Bech: A Book in 1970 and followed by Bech Is Back in 1981 and Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel in 1998.
Updike also wrote a play, Buchanan Dying (1974); a number of works of poetry, including The Carpentered Hen (1958), Telephone Poles (1963), Midpoint (1969), Tossing and Turning (1977), Facing Nature (1985), Collected Poems 1953-1993 (1993), Americana: and Other Poems (2001), and A & P (2006); a series of children’s books, The Magic Flute (1962), The Ring (1964), A Child’s Calendar (1965), Bottom’s Dream (1969), and A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996); and a collection of essays on art, Still Looking (2005). Updike was also known as a literary critic, often provoking a war of words with his acerbic criticism. Other novels include The Poorhouse Fair (1959), The Centaur (1963), which won the 1964 National Book Award, Of the Farm (1965), Couples (1968), A Month of Sundays (1975), Marry Me (A Romance) (1977), The Coup (1978), The Witches of East-wick (1984)—his best known novel outside of the Rabbit series, which was adapted into a film—Roger’s Version (1986), S (1988), Brazil (1994)—also adapted into a film—In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), Toward the End of Time (1997), Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Seek My Face (2002), Villages (2004), and Terrorist (2006). Updike died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009.
Further reading: Stacey Olster, The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
—Stephen E. Randoll
World History
