Cox, Archibald

(b. 17 May 1912 in Plainfield, New Jersey; d. 29 May 2004 in Brooksville, Maine), legal scholar, former United States Solicitor General, and Watergate special prosecutor known for his trademark bow tie and crew-cut hair, who became a symbol of integrity during a difficult period in American history.

Cox was the oldest of seven children born to Archibald Cox, Sr., a prominent copyright and patent lawyer in New York City, and Frances (Perkins) Cox, a homemaker. The family lived in the affluent town of Plainfield, New Jersey, where Cox was born in May 1912. He inherited a deep reverence for law and public service from both sides of his family. His mother was a direct descendant of Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration of Independence for Connecticut and later signed the Constitution. Cox’s father taught his children to appreciate the privileges and duties associated with the legal profession. From an early age Cox read about the great figures and major events in the history of jurisprudence. There was, he later said, “never a day when I wasn’t going to be a lawyer.”

Cox’s family spent its summers in Windsor, Vermont, occupying the sprawling homestead built by William M. Evarts, Cox’s great-grandfather. In his early years Cox hiked, memorized poetry, and developed a love for literature. He tramped the woods with his uncle, Maxwell Perkins, the famous editor who discovered the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway. Cox’s character had a decided New England cast, which was reinforced by his early education.

Cox was educated at Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, a prestigious college preparatory boarding school that his maternal grandfather had helped to found. After graduating from Saint Paul’s in 1930, Cox entered Harvard College, where his father had earned his undergraduate degree. During Cox’s sophomore year, however, his father died of lung cancer, which was an unexpected blow to the family. Yet Cox persevered in his studies, majoring in American history and economics. He entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1934 and graduated with high honors in 1937. Cox found his niche in law school, earning the Sears Prize for achieving the highest grade in his class. He reveled in the details of legal study, impressing Professor (later Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter so deeply that Frankfurter recommended him for a clerkship with the famed jurist Learned Hand of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City. Hand had been a friend of Cox’s father and had spent summers in Cornish, New Hampshire, across the Connecticut River from Windsor. Cox’s clerkship with Hand was an honor that Cox viewed as unsurpassable.

Cox married Phyllis Ames on 12 June 1937, three days after his final law school examinations. Frankfurter wrote a note of congratulations stating, “My God, what a powerful legal combination!” The bride was the granddaughter of two distinguished jurists: James Barr Ames, a former dean of Harvard Law School, and Nathan Abbott, the founder of Stanford Law School. Husband and wife both loved books, the outdoors, and the quieter pleasures of life, which they shared for sixty-seven years. They had three children.

Cox found that moving to New York City to clerk for Hand was a wondrous experience. A jurist with a powerful intellect who was frequently mentioned as a possible nominee to the Supreme Court, Hand taught “not by precept, but by example,” noted Cox. He instilled in Cox the importance of writing carefully and clearly. He also taught Cox to respect the authority of legal precedents. These lessons would stick with Cox for a lifetime.

After Cox’s clerkship with Hand, he worked in private legal practice from 1938 to 1941 as an associate at the prestigious Boston firm of Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge & Rugg. This position was followed by a series of government jobs in Washington as assistant solicitor general, assistant to the secretary of state, and associate solicitor in the Department of Labor during World War II. When the war ended in 1945, Cox returned to Ropes, Gray expecting to remain with the firm until retirement. Within five weeks, however, he was offered a position as lecturer at the Harvard Law School, beginning in the fall of 1945. Within a year he had been promoted to full professor. At the age of thirty-four, Cox was one of the youngest academics in the history of the university to attain that rank. It was a position he would hold for over fifty years, teaching courses in torts and in constitutional, administrative, and labor law.

Cox soon established himself as a leading scholar of labor law in the United States. In 1952 President Harry S. Truman appointed him to head the Wage Stabilization Board. Cox resigned the position after only six months, believing that the president had undercut a key decision of the board in order to placate the powerful leader of the United Mine Workers of America, John L. Lewis. Cox felt that his conscience forbade him to remain on the board. He quietly returned to Harvard, believing that his excursions into public service had ended.

Over the next decade, however, Cox found himself providing advice about labor law to the junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Cox was a principal drafter of the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act (1959), a landmark piece of labor legislation that was the future president’s singular legislative accomplishment. In 1960 Kennedy named Cox to head the “Brain Trust” of academic experts and analysts that churned out speeches and position papers for the candidate on hundreds of topics during that year’s presidential campaign. After Kennedy moved into the White House, he nominated Cox for the office of United States Solicitor General, a major position in any presidential administration. The solicitor general represents the United States government in cases before the Supreme Court. The position is generally considered one of the highest honors for a practicing lawyer in the United States.

Working alongside Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with whom he developed a warm relationship, Cox became one of the most eminent solicitors general since the office was instituted in 1870 under President Ulysses S. Grant. Cox argued many of the landmark civil rights cases of the 1960s, including Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority (1961), which ruled that a private business renting space inside a public building could not refuse service to a customer on racial grounds; Baker v. Carr (1962), which dealt with the reap-portionment of voting districts; and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), which established the principle of “one person, one vote” for the defining of legislative districts. After Kennedy’s death, Cox remained in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration long enough to win two additional significant cases: Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States and Katzenbach v. McClung (both 1964), both of which upheld key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also assisted Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach in drafting the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Cox left the office of solicitor general in 1966 to return to teaching at Harvard.

Soon after his return to the university, however, Cox found himself thrown into the turmoil of student uprisings during the Vietnam War. He first chaired a commission to study the campus disturbances at Columbia University in 1968, then served as the de facto president of Harvard as student riots swept his own campus in the spring of 1969.

The day before his sixty-first birthday, Cox received a call from his former student, Elliot Richardson, whom President Richard M. Nixon had selected as his new attorney general amidst the growing crisis of the Watergate scandal. Richardson asked Cox if he would serve as the special prosecutor of the Watergate affair, investigating allegations that Nixon himself had been involved in covering up the June 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Cox discussed Richardson’s request with Phyllis and concluded that the special prosecutor’s task was thankless, but “maybe there’s no one better to do it than a sixty-year-old tenured law professor who isn’t going anywhere (in public life) anyway.”

After the existence of a White House taping system was revealed, Cox subpoenaed nine key tape recordings that would prove or disprove the president’s involvement in the cover-up. When Nixon refused to turn over the tapes after being ordered to do so by District Judge John J. Sirica, whose order was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Cox did not back down. In a dramatic national press conference on the afternoon of 20 October 1973, Cox explained to the American public why no citizen of the United States, not even the president, is above the law. Cox was dismissed as special prosecutor within hours of the press conference, when President Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused and resigned, as did his deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus. Finally, Nixon’s solicitor general, Robert Bork, carried out the president’s order, firing Cox; the episode became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Cox’s dismissal triggered a firestorm of public protest that led to the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski; a Supreme Court decision ordering the president to turn over dozens of incriminating tapes; and the eventual collapse of the Nixon presidency. Cox, having stuck to his principles, became an American hero.

In the years after Watergate, Cox argued more cases before the Supreme Court, including the famous Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case (1978), which upheld affirmative action programs in higher education. He served as chair of the citizens’ advocacy group Common Cause from 1980 to 1992. In 1985 Cox was honored with the Paul Douglas Ethics in Government Award. He continued writing and teaching at Harvard Law School and Boston University Law School until the age of eighty-five, when he retired with Phyllis to their small family farm in Brooksville, Maine. They continued to ride horses, read, chop wood, and tend to a sprawling vegetable garden until Cox died of natural causes at the age of ninety-two in May 2004. He is buried in Brooksville.

Much like his great-grandfather, William M. Evarts, Archibald Cox “did not seek office, but let it seek him.” He was the rare public servant who, when faced with difficult decisions, was guided not by the prospect of career advancement but rather by the dictates of his own conscience. When the searchlight of history shone upon him during the Watergate crisis, he rose to the challenge and left a lasting, shining mark on American history.

Cox’s papers are held in the Harvard Law School Library Special Collections, which includes much material on the Kennedy administration and the Watergate crisis. The John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library at Columbia Point in Boston, Massachusetts, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon collection in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, contain useful material relating to Cox’s public service. Cox’s own book, The Court and the Constitution (1987), contains a brief autobiographical account of his appointment as the special prosecutor of the Watergate scandal. The only full-length biography of Cox as of the early 2000s is Ken Gormley, Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation (1997). The best study of Cox’s role as special prosecutor is James Doyle, Not Above the Law: The Battles of Watergate Prosecutors Cox and Jaworski: A Behind-the-Scenes Account (1977). Numerous memorial tributes to Cox were published in the Harvard Law Review 118, no. 1 (Nov. 2004): 1–24. Obituaries are in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (both 30 May 2004); the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune (both 31 May 2004); and the Times (London) (1 June 2004).

Ken Gormley