Come back to the Five and Dime, John Dean, John Dean…

I was 24 years old and well into my third year as a newspaper reporter when Richard M. Nixon resigned as president of the United States. To a young journalist, Watergate was almost orgasmic. It was the most exciting thing that could have happened politically in this country and confirmation that I and my young colleagues had chosen the right profession.

Never mind that the pay sucked badly (about $125 a week). If the news media could bring down a president, we really were going to save the world.

So it is that I remember Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, the 18-minute gap, the Saturday Night Massacre and the subsequent Watergate hearings that led Nixon to resign before he could be impeached. Here’s what happened, for those too young (or too old) to remember:

In 1972, an inquiry was launched into a break-in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in which five Nixon operatives were caught trying to bug the national Democratic headquarters. Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor and former U.S. solicitor general, was chosen as special counsel to investigate the incident. He soon clashed with the White House over Nixon’s refusal to release over 10 hours of secret Oval Office recordings, some of which implicated the president in the break-in.

On Saturday, October 20, 1973, in an unprecedented show of executive power, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson, a Republican, to fire Special Prosecutor Cox, but Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Richardson’s deputy William Ruckelshaus, also a Republican, to fire Cox, but Ruckelshaus also resigned in protest. The role of attorney general then fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, who reluctantly complied with Nixon’s request and dismissed Cox.

Less than a half hour later, the White House dispatched FBI agents to close off the offices of the special prosecutor, attorney general and deputy attorney general, putting the exclamation point on what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”

Nixon’s attack on his own Justice Department did not turn out well for him, as we all know. According to various internet sources, more than 50,000 concerned citizens sent telegrams to Washington and 21 members of Congress introduced resolutions calling for Nixon’s impeachment.

I can still hear Senator Sam Ervin chairing the Watergate hearings that followed and see John Dean, Nixon’s lawyer, testifying about the cover-up orchestrated by Nixon and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman. Nixon had sent Dean to Camp David to assemble a report detailing everything Dean knew about the Watergate scandal, but Dean was one of the cover-up's chief participants, so he soon realized he was being fitted for scapegoat horns.

Dean never completed the report, but instead hired an attorney and began spilling the beans to the Watergate Commission. Nixon, meanwhile, reluctantly appointed Leon Jaworski as the new Watergate prosecutor, and after Jaworski eventually secured the release of the Oval Office recordings, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 8, 1974.

Fast-forward to 2017. Donald J. Trump is in the White House and he, members of his cabinet and his top advisers are suspected of collusion with the Russian government to manipulate the results of the 2016 presidential election.

The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has recused himself because of his role in the Trump campaign. A deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, delivers vital information about the Russia probe to the White House lawyers but when she disobeys an illegal order from the president, she is fired. Trump also fires former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was overseeing an investigation into stock trades made by a member of the president’s cabinet.

Is any of this sounding like déjà vu all over again?

And now, FBI Director James Comey has been fired for reasons that don’t make any sense, given the timing of the decision. It’s no coincidence that back in March, Comey testified publicly that the FBI was “investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”

Bingo! The FBI wants to know if there was collusion between Trump and the Russians – a story line that Trump claims is “a total hoax.” Must. Fire. Comey.

I’ll admit that at this stage of the investigation, without a special prosecutor, Comey, Bharara and Yates do not translate exactly into Richardson, Ruckelshaus and Cox, but you get the idea. The alternative president gets himself embroiled in a scandal, investigations are launched, facts are uncovered and when investigators start getting close they are fired. As the pundits have already said, there’s a decidedly Nixonian ring to all of this.

Keep in mind, too, that the White House has refused to submit documents to the various legislative committees investigating RussiaGate. (See Archibald Cox above.)

So here’s my take: If you were staging a re-enactment of the Watergate scandal, most of the players are already in place. Even though there is no special counsel on the case, everything else is following the script almost to the letter.

All we need now is someone to be Sam Ervin and convene a legitimate Senate hearing, a John Dean substitute to step up to the plate and tell the whole tale and, of course, 21 members of Congress to introduce impeachment resolutions. Trump will never allow himself to be impeached, so if that happens, he’ll Nixon himself right out of office.

So who’s going to step up and save our democracy? Anyone? Surely someone in this whole mess can put their country first, right? So who’s it going to be?