Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday had so many resonances with Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on October 20, 1973.  At the heart of the similarities is a President under investigation removing the chief investigator.  The differences are important, too, the biggest being that back then, Nixon's own Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus both refused to carry out the order to fire Cox.  I cannot imagine Jeff Sessions insisting on an impartial investigation.

But I will allow other people to explore all that.  In October of 1973 my political circle had been following the Watergate investigations -- by the press, by the special prosecutor, by House and Senate committees -- very closely.  We saw the extrajudicial robberies and "dirty tricks" of the Nixon White House against the Democratic National Committee as part of something larger: secret, massive aerial bombing of neutral countries; illegal campaigns against Black, Latino and Native American movements; enemies' lists of journalists; as well as cultural phenomena of the time such as the vigilante fantasies of "Dirty Harry," "Death Wish," and "Joe."  All of these looked to us like the beginning of a protofascist moment.

In our studies, this interest in fascism led us to read the works of the Bulgarian Marxist, Georgi Dimitrov, on the United Front Against Fascism of the 1930's.  In our mass practice, this interest led us to organize a city-wide conference to see how community-based organizations were dealing with the public concern about street crime.  In our literature, we published short broadsides looking at the latest developments in the Watergate investigation from (we hoped) a working-class perspective.

When Nixon fired Cox, everything switched into a different gear.  Nixon's Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig actually had the offices of Cox, Richardson and Ruckelshaus sealed!  The Chief Judge of the US District Court described it as a coup.  The London Times smelled "the whiff of fascism."  At Columbia University a group of law students reserved an auditorium so they could discuss a legal response, but somebody announced it on WBAI radio and they were swamped with members of the public who wanted a mass response.  And we were there.

There was general agreement on the need for a large march on demonstration, calling for impeachment.  A continuations committee was selected to plan that, with the provision that meetings continue to be open.  There were, of course, members of other circles at those meetings.  I remember the Workers World Party in particular.  After the first meeting, people requested that I chair those meetings, because of my insistence that all voices be heard and because I was able to cut through a lot of confusion and clearly identify the different viewpoints so that people could make informed choices and not get lost in a fog.  At the time, I ascribed my willingness to do this to our views about a united front.  Over the course of the last forty-four years I have come to realize that these are my personal skills and preferences.  We were able to make a plan, do publicity, secure the necessary permits and PA's and the march and demonstration took place  

I dearly wish I could find our list of speakers and performers for the demonstration.  I remember Congresswoman Bella Abzug and longtime pacifist Dave Dellinger.  The only news article I have been able to find now is from the Columbia Daily Spectator.  The author quotes Abzug as saying "we don't want a President who has made the Justice Department a private office for large corporations" which fit our view that this impeachment should not be a legalistic response to a President who had attempted to cover up what he called a "third-rate burglary" but a larger political movement for democracy.  That article quotes Dellinger reminding people that injustices are built into the system and that "shifting people around" wouldn't solve much.  Again, this was the view that we espoused, too.

We had lots of participants who disagreed with using the word "impeach" at all, arguing that it endorsed the authority of the larger system.  Friends of ours in the Attica Brigade put up a counter-slogan: "Throw the Bum Out, Organize to Fight."  This had the benefit of sounding (at least the first part) like something somebody would yell at Ebbets Field in the late forties, i.e. workerish.  Their rivals in the October League said, instead, "Dump Nixon, Stem the Fascist Tide."  So they shared our concern with incipient fascism but also shared the Attica Brigade's unwillingness to even mention a Constitutional remedy for a felonious President.

After all these years it is hard for me to take sides on this, even with my younger self.  All of these slogans worked because nobody was confused by what they meant.  Making these slogans a point of division, on the other hand, still strikes me as bizarre.  All of us wanted Nixon out.  We all wanted to participate in the popular surge against Nixon and we all wanted to raise our concerns about war, imperialism, racism and attacks on the people's movements.

What does any of this have to do with the current outrage over Trump firing Comey?  Lots of things, I think.  First, Comey may have been independent of both parties and tried to investigate both Trump and Clinton during the election, but he was FBI director and nobody's idea of the people's red hero.  Second, the Senators and Representatives of today, both Democrat and Republican, are staking out their ever-shifting positions primarily in order to save themselves and their parties... just like in 1973. Sorry, but that accounts for every bit of difference between a Democratic Congress then and a Republican Congress, now.  All the Facebook "petitions" and "surveys" posted by these people are for fundraising purposes.  These Democrats are not part of any resistance.

Trump is outrageous.  He has no fixed positions on any question of principle.  He is unprepared to hold elected office.  He doesn't even have a nodding acquaintance with the truth.  I would rather have spent these four years fighting with Hillary Clinton's repellent neoliberalism.  But we have Trump.  He is clearly attempting to squash an investigation of criminal conspiracy with a foreign adversary.  That is on top of his xenophobia, racism and misogyny.  Obstruction of justice is a felony in this country, and hate is not.  I am capable of holding more than one thought in my mind at a time.  I think we can demand that our Congress and Justice Department do their job without giving Republicans or Democrats a pass on their other attacks on us.