Special Prosecutor Fired by Nixon Over Watergate Probe

Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor who demanded that President Nixon turn over his secretly recorded White House tapes, prompting Nixon to order Cox fired and setting in motion a constitutional crisis that led to Nixon’s resignation in the face of impeachment, died Saturday. He was 92.

Cox, a highly respected Harvard law professor who at various times held several high government posts, died at his home in Brooksville, Maine, said his daughter Phyllis Cox. She said the cause of death was old age.

Cox was the second leading figure from the Watergate era to die Saturday. Sam Dash, a counsel in the Watergate hearings, died in Washington, D.C. He was 79.

Cox will be remembered by history as the catalyst of the “Saturday Night Massacre” -- instantly named because two top Justice Department officials resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order to fire Cox when he would not curtail his Watergate probe.

By the time the department’s third in command -- Solicitor General Robert H. Bork -- carried out the order, the country was up in arms and Nixon was facing enormous public outrage.

“Without the unrelenting pressure of [Cox’s] search for the truth, Richard Nixon would not, in the end, have destroyed himself,” the New York Times’ Anthony Lewis wrote in the introduction of James Doyle’s 1977 book on Watergate, “Not Above the Law.”

The historic sequence of events began on June 17, 1972, when a break-in to the Democratic Party offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington was interrupted by police. One of the five men arrested had ties to Nixon’s reelection committee as well as the Republican National Committee.

After nearly a year of mounting concern over possible White House involvement in a cover-up, Atty. Gen. Elliott L. Richardson handpicked Cox to investigate charges that the White House was linked to what Nixon’s press secretary had called a “third-rate burglary.”

Because of the political sensitivity of the task, Richardson assured Cox and the U.S. Senate that the special prosecutor would be independent and that he would not lose his job unless there were “extraordinary improprieties on his part.” Aware of the difficulties he faced, Cox told reporters: “In a way, I’m being asked to play God.”

Barely two months later, a deputy assistant to the president, Alexander Butterfield, revealed to a Senate committee that Nixon had secretly recorded many White House conversations, some of which could shed light on whether the administration was involved in a cover-up.

Cox issued a subpoena for several of the tapes, and the matter went to the courts.

Nixon, claiming executive privilege and the constitutional principle of separation of powers, refused to relinquish the recordings. He suggested a compromise: turning the tapes over to a third party -- U.S. Sen. John C. Stennis, a conservative Mississippi Democrat -- to listen to and determine if there was anything of substance on them regarding Watergate.

Lewis, writing in Doyle’s book, said that immense pressure was put on Cox to accept that arrangement.

“He was operating on his own, without a political base, without advice beyond that of his young staff, and he could not be sure that holding out was the right thing for the country,” Lewis wrote. “But his commitment was to the law, and he rejected the attempt to bypass it.”

After several attempts at a compromise, the matter came to a head on Oct. 19, 1973, when Nixon told Richardson to instruct Cox “that he is to make no further attempts by judicial process to obtain tapes, notes or memoranda of presidential conversations.”

The next day -- Saturday, Oct. 20 -- Cox held a remarkable hourlong news conference at which he explained what was at stake and threatened to ask a federal court to hold Nixon in contempt of court.

“I was brought up with the greatest respect for every president of the United States,” Cox told hastily gathered reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. “But that isn’t what is involved. It is that there is a basic change in the institutional arrangement that was established.”

After the news conference, the White House instructed Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson, saying he could not find Cox guilty of “extraordinary improprieties,” resigned rather than follow the order. His deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed suit.

About 8 p.m. that same day, Cox issued a statement saying that “whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people.” About half an hour later, a White House emissary arrived at Cox’s home to tell him that Solicitor General Bork had fired him.

But, far beyond Cox’s wildest hopes, the day’s events had roused the American citizenry, which fired off 3 million messages to Congress. Congress responded with a dozen resolutions for impeachment of the president.

Richardson later wrote in the foreword to Ken Gormley’s 1997 biography, “Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation,” that “Nixon’s most damaging misjudgment was his underestimate of Cox’s ability to communicate the strength of his integrity.... Indeed, in all the annals of public service there have been few finer examples of grace under pressure.”

Nixon finally released the tapes -- which did prove to be incriminating -- to Cox’s successor, Leon Jaworski. On Aug. 9, 1974, the president resigned rather than face impeachment.

Cox, a tall, trim man with trademark crew cut and bow tie, later served as chairman of Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby, retiring in 1992. But nothing before or after would surpass in drama his five tumultuous months as Watergate special prosecutor.

The oldest of seven children, Archibald Cox Jr. was born on May 17, 1912, in Plainfield, N.J., to a family whose roots in America were deep. His father -- the son of Rowland Cox, a Philadelphia Quaker who became a prominent Manhattan lawyer -- was an expert on trademark, copyright and patent law.

As outlined in Gormley’s biography, Cox’s maternal lineage was even more impressive. His mother’s grandfather, William M. Evarts, had defended President Andrew Johnson in 1878 against impeachment charges; Evarts also served as U.S. attorney general, secretary of State and a senator from New York.

Though raised in New Jersey, Cox was equally a child of New England, spending summers visiting the sprawling Evarts estate in Windsor, Vt.

Cox got his education at a prestigious series of institutions: St. Paul’s School, Harvard College and Harvard Law School. At Harvard, he was forced to downsize his living quarters after the death of his father from lung cancer when Cox was 19.

Cox began his career as a law clerk for legendary New York Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Learned Hand. During the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Cox alternately taught law at Harvard and held a succession of positions with the National Defense Mediation Board, Department of Labor and Justice Department.

For a time during President Truman’s administration, Cox headed the Wage Stabilization Board, but he quit in protest when Truman refused to abide by the board’s decision to restrict a wage increase to miners. “You couldn’t decently pretend you were continuing a wage stabilization program and approve this increase,” Cox later told his biographer, Gormley.

Cox later headed the “Cambridge Group,” a loose confederation of professors that advised then-Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy on the economy, civil rights and other issues. Others in the group included economists John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Rostow and Paul Samuelson.

After Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Cox was tapped to be Kennedy’s solicitor general -- the national government’s chief advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court and, interestingly, the same job that Bork, the man who fired Cox from the Watergate post, later held in the Justice Department. Cox held the post until 1965.

Cox also was special mediator in the 1967 New York City school strike and chairman of the investigation of the 1968 Columbia University riots. He was the author of several books, including “The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government” and “The Court and the Constitution.”

In June 2002, on the 30th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Cox, then 90, said in an interview with the Portland (Maine) Press Herald that the Watergate experience “was one in which the country showed its appreciation of the ancient rule that even the highest executive must be subject to the law.”

Once asked how he could ever have expected to succeed at his task as Watergate special prosecutor, he said, “I thought it was worth a try. I thought it was important. If it could be done, I thought it would help the country; and if I lost, what the hell.”

In addition to his daughter Phyllis, Cox is survived by his wife, Phyllis Ames Cox; a daughter, Sarah; and a son, Alex Jr. Funeral services were pending.