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One bill granting authority to Sirica to appoint a prosecutor has 53 cosponsors. Edward Kennedy's staff discovered a fascinating precedent for such authority. A bill was introduced in 1951 to allow judges to appoint "special counsel and investigators" to assist grand juries; although it died in committee, its sponsor was Senator Richard Nixon.
At the same time, the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled public hearings on the Cox dismissal. A demand by some Democratic Senators to begin them immediately was barely averted; they are to start this week, with Cox as the first scheduled witness.
The 10,000-member Association of the Bar of the City of New York called the Cox firing "disgraceful and cynical" and urged Congress to give the appointment power to the courts, declaring: "No man can be the servant of this Administration and at the same time prosecute it for flouting the country's laws."
The White House announced that Nixon would not deliver a speech after all, explaining that he was too involved in the Middle East events to take the time to prepare a text. He would hold a news conference instead, and it would be scheduled for Thursday night. The President seemed to be having difficulty framing a persuasive explanation of his Justice Department revolt and tapes turnabout.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25
Then suddenly the critical attention directed at the President was diverted to the alarming developments in the Middle East. Overnight, the President ordered all U.S. military units throughout the world on a stand-by alert—a move not undertaken since the Korean War. The action was taken in response to notes from Soviet leaders and "ambiguous" movements of Russian military units, all of which seemed to raise the possibility of a unilateral introduction of Soviet troops into the Middle East.
However genuine the emergency, it also provided dismaying evidence of how vast the suspicions of the President's actions have become. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger held a televised press conference to emphasize that the U.S. action was purely a precautionary move against what the Soviet Union might do rather than anything it had done, at least three newsmen felt obliged to ask in effect whether the alert was contrived to ease Nixon's Watergate and impeachment problems at home. Barely concealing his sense of outrage and insult, Kissinger coldly replied: "There has to be a minimum of confidence that the senior officials of the American Government are not playing with the lives of the American people." Kissinger was also forced to answer a question about Nixon's personal stability in making his decision to call an alert. Kissinger's defense was that the National Security Council had unanimously recommended the action that the President took.
The unseemly debate flared widely, particularly after the Soviet Union promptly joined the U.S. to help pass a U.N. resolution sending an international peace-keeping force into the war zone. Pending release of the diplomatic exchanges between Nixon and Communist Boss Leonid Brezhnev, there seemed