Archibald Cox: Conscience Of A Nation - Hardcover

Gormley, Ken

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201407132 ISBN 13: 9780201407136

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 1997

Synopsis

By October 1973 special prosecutor Archibald Cox was tracing the Watergate cover-up to the Oval Office. President Nixon demanded that he stop. In the “Saturday Night Massacre” two heads of the Justice Department quit before Nixon found a subordinate (Robert Bork) willing to fire Cox. Immediately public opinion swung against the president and turned Cox into a hero—seemingly Washington's last honest man.Cox's life was distinguished well before that Saturday night. He had been a clerk for the legendary judge Learned Hand, a distinguished professor at Harvard Law School, and the Solicitor General, arguing many Supreme Court cases. He exemplified what we want lawyers to be. At its core Archibald Cox is the story of a Yankee who went to Washington but refused to leave his principles behind.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Gormley is a professor of law at Duqesne University. Educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Law School, Gormley has practiced law, written for publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The ABA Journal, and served as Executive Director of Pennsylvania's Reapportionment commission. He lives with his wife and children in Pittsburgh. This is his first book.

Reviews

The jurist who gave Richard Nixon fits receives his due in a satisfying biography. Gormley (Law/Duquesne Univ.) approaches Cox as an exponent of a particularly tough, independent-minded, Yankee kind of approach to the law. Born in 1912, Cox came of age in a time when the legal profession was nearly universally respected and when whole lineages devoted themselves to the practice of law (Gormley notes that Cox's great-grandfather William Maxwell Evarts defended Andrew Johnson when impeachment proceedings were undertaken against him in 1868). After clerking for the eminent federal judge Learned Hand, Cox became a government labor lawyer, then a Harvard professor, and then entered politics somewhat reluctantly as a speechwriter for presidential candidate John Kennedy. Despite his solid r‚sum‚, Cox was seemingly unprepared for the scrutiny that would attach to his work as the government's special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation of 1973. Gormley examines Nixon's charge that Cox was a politically motivated hit man who, with his staff, ``bored like termites through the whole executive branch,'' noting that Cox was in fact something of a legal conservative who criticized such rulings as Roe v. Wade and who found the whole business of turning up evidence against a sitting president personally distasteful. Gormley gives a careful account of the events leading up to Cox's dismissal at Nixon's orders; the man who fired him was a federal judge named Robert Bork, whose role as hatchet man would come back to haunt him more than a decade later as a nominee for the Supreme Court. Students of the Watergate years will find a few other gems in Gormley's pages, including an admission from Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig that the president ``could well be guilty.'' Otherwise, this well-written biography will be of most interest to students of law in the public interest. (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Archie and Phyllis waited at home for the phone to ring. "It was a matter of settling down and waiting for the axe to fall." Elliot Richardson called late Saturday afternoon and informed Archie, "Here's what's going to happen. I've been asked to dismiss you and resigned. Bill Ruckelshaus has resigned. And Bob Bork . . . is going to dismiss you."

Cox knew Ruckelshaus was the deputy attorney general and next in command after Elliot. Bork was solicitor general, third in the hierarchy. Cox knew him only as an extremely conservative Yale law professor who "drove the liberal Yale law students up the wall by arguing that everything that happened after January 1, 1937 [the beginning of the Supreme Court's liberal New Deal decisions] was outrageous." Cox had met Bork only once at a meeting with the president's counsel. He had been singularly struck by the "vehemence" in Bork's voice when he accused Cox of going outside his charter, in conducting various aspects of the Watergate investigation.

That Bork would be the one who agreed to carry out Nixon's order came as no great surprise. Bork was an outspoken advocate of the theory advanced by his former colleague and best friend at Yale, Alexander Bickel. Even beyond that, the idea of an independent special prosecutor "was all wrong anyway," from Bork's perspective.

Did Cox feel anger at this moment toward the man who would fire him? "I think probably my dominant sense at the time was one of inevitability," Cox would reconstruct. "Passing judgment on Bork was beside the point."

Before Elliot hung up the phone, he lingered long enough to recite to Archie the words that Learned Hand, the man for whom they had both clerked early in their careers, had once inscribed on a photo for him. The phrase was take from the Iliad, written in Greek. Elliot recited the original text before giving a loose translation:

Now, though numberless fates of death beset us which no mortal can escape or avoid, let us go forward together, and either we shall give honor to one another, or another to us.

Several minutes after Elliot Richardson's call, Archie's oldest daughter, sally, who was visiting from Massachusetts for the weekend, walked to the ringing phone and picked it up. "That was the White House for you, Dad," she reported. "I should have told them that you had left town and I didn't know where you are. " They all smiled. The White House had asked for an address. They were sending over a messenger to deliver a letter. "And so one settle down for it to happen."

Twenty minutes went by. An hour. Archie's younger brother Max called to tell him how proud he was of his performance during the press conference and to offer support. Archie thanked Max, but told him he had to hurry off the line. "The White House is calling and I'm about to be fired," Archie said. Shortly after he hung up, a "bedraggled" young man rapped on the Coxes' door. The young man apologized; he had driven around for a long time, lost. It was dark and there were a lot of trees in this neighborhood of McLean. "I have a letter from the White House," he said.

Archie thanked the messenger graciously. His only comment years later in discussing the manner of his dismissal was, "Couldn't they have sent a chap with a proper necktie?"

Cox picked up the phone and dictated a one-sentence statement to Jim Doyle, who typed it on his manual typewriter. It would be Cox's final statement as Watergate special prosecutor:

"Whether our shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people."

Edition details

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201407132
• ISBN 13: 9780201407136
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608