■ I was in Chicago visiting my brother, a printer, when we heard the news that Nixon had fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. My brother thought of his colleagues working the weekend shift to get out the latest issue of Time. He shook his head. “Stop the presses,” he sighed, and I thought, They really say that.
But, Mr. Nixon, you shouldn’t have done it. As Terry Eastland writes in his illuminating Ethics, Politics, and the Independent Counsel (National Legal Center for the Public Interest, 206 pp., $10.95), “More than any other event, Nixon’s firing of . . . Cox created [the] perception [that the executive branch could not investigate itself] and led to the introduction of legislative proposals that were the earliest forerunners of Title VI, the special-prosecutor law enacted in 1978 as part of the “Ethics in Government Act.”
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