96 Facts About Archibald Cox

Archibald Cox became famous when, under mounting pressure and charges of corruption against persons closely associated with Richard Nixon, Attorney General nominee Elliot Richardson appointed him as Special Prosecutor to oversee the federal criminal investigation into the Watergate burglary and other related crimes that became popularly known as the Watergate scandal.

Archibald Cox had a dramatic confrontation with Nixon when he subpoenaed the tapes the president had secretly recorded of his Oval Office conversations.

Archibald Cox's firing produced a public relations disaster for Nixon and set in motion impeachment proceedings which ended with Nixon stepping down from the presidency.

Archibald Cox returned to teaching, lecturing, and writing for the rest of his life, giving his opinions on the role of the Supreme Court in the development of the law and the role of the lawyer in society.

Archibald Cox was appointed to head several public-service, watchdog and good-government organizations, including serving for 12 years as head of Common Cause.

Archibald Cox was elected to the Common Cause National Governing Board in 1976 and 1997.

Archibald Cox built on that start to become successful in his own right.

Archibald Cox served as a member of the New Jersey Rapid Transit Commission.

Archibald Cox attended the private Wardlaw School, then located in Plainfield, New Jersey, until he was fourteen.

Archibald Cox thrived at St Paul and in his final year, he won Hugh Camp Memorial Cup for public speaking and led the school's debate team to defeat Groton.

At Harvard, Archibald Cox joined a final club, the Delphic Club, called the "Gashouse" for its parties, gambling and liquor.

Archibald Cox thrived at law school, ranking first in his class of 593 at the end of his first year.

Archibald Cox proposed to her after only three or four meetings.

Archibald Cox initially put him off, but by March 1936 they were engaged.

Archibald Cox had a staff of eight lawyers in Washington and supervised the department's regional offices, including deciding when a regional attorney could bring suit.

Archibald Cox accepted, despite the substantial cut in salary he would take, but on the condition that he would not have to teach corporations or property.

Landis agreed; his expectation was that Archibald Cox should become a nationally recognized expert in labor law.

Archibald Cox's writing was so prolific that Dean Griswold pointed to Cox when he needed an example of the kind of academic output he was seeking from the faculty.

Archibald Cox wrote to Cox in March 1953 inviting him to testify before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare.

Archibald Cox was one of Kennedy's constituents and a fellow Harvard alumnus.

In January 1960, he wrote Archibald Cox formally asking him to head up his efforts to "tap intellectual talent in the Cambridge area" and then "ride herd over twenty or thirty college professors" in their activities for him.

Archibald Cox brought a number of eminent policy experts in a number of fields into contact with Kennedy.

Archibald Cox decided that if this was true, he would tell the president-elect that he needed time to think the matter over.

Archibald Cox was unaware until much later that his law school colleague, Paul Freund, whom he had recommended for the position, declined and recommended Archibald Cox in turn.

Archibald Cox held the position at a time when the Warren Court was about to involve the Court in issues never before considered appropriate for judicial review, at a time when the country was ready for the Court to decide various questions of social justice and individual rights.

Archibald Cox was aware of the pivotal time the Court and he faced and explained it in an address right before the beginning of the first full Term he would argue in:.

Archibald Cox gave due weight to the recommendation, but he met vigorous objections from his assistant Oscar Davis, who argued that civil rights was the most important legal issue facing the country and that Archibald Cox should signal in his first argued case the new administration's commitment to fight for it.

Archibald Cox did not believe the Court would make so radical a break with eighty-year-old precedent, so in each case he argued on narrow grounds that did not require the Court to overrule the Civil Rights Cases, and each case he won on those grounds, in the process infuriating Jack Greenberg, who was arguing in those very cases for the broader approach.

Archibald Cox took a slightly more advanced position, arguing that where trespass laws were used to prosecute civil rights demonstrators in states such as Maryland, where there was a history of racial segregation by custom and law, then the discrimination was part of the enforcement sufficient to invoke state action.

The issue would be mooted by legislation dealing with "public accommodations", which Archibald Cox helped draft and defended before the Court in 1965.

Archibald Cox developed what he later called a "highly complex set of criteria," but in the end when the Court finally erected the one-man-one-vote standard it simply made the general rule subject to all the exceptions that Cox had tried to weave into his proposed standards.

Archibald Cox was reluctant, believing that Warren should refuse the request, because it would have adverse impact on the Court.

Archibald Cox agreed but asked that Katzenbach not have him try to persuade the chief justice.

The mechanism devised by Archibald Cox was to provide for a presumption of illegality of a list of practices including literacy tests and similar devices if the state had a history of low minority voter turn-out as shown by voter statistics.

Archibald Cox argued the narrow ground that the government had such power.

Pearson's column stated that Archibald Cox had cost the civil rights movement two years in litigation, and for that he point blank suggested that Johnson replace Archibald Cox as solicitor general.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 mooted that case, and Archibald Cox would go on to defend the legislation successfully before the Court, but he did so as a private attorney.

Chief Justice Warren was "non-plussed and made unhappy by the news" that Archibald Cox was not reappointed.

In 1965, Archibald Cox returned to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor, teaching a course in current constitutional law and a section in criminal law.

Archibald Cox was at Berkeley on May 16,1973, when Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson, President Nixon's nominee for attorney general, called him to ask if he would consider taking the position of Special Prosecutor in the Watergate affair.

Archibald Cox appealed to their sense of professionalism without comment on how the case was handled.

Archibald Cox concluded that a top priority was to hire a pre-eminent criminal trial attorney to supervise the prosecutors until the office was up and running and then try the cases after indictment.

Archibald Cox persuaded James F Neal, the US attorney who obtained the conviction of Jimmy Hoffa in 1964 for jury tampering, now in private practice, to come aboard for several weeks to stabilize the ship.

Archibald Cox made three requests: the Petersen document concerning his meeting with Nixon; Petersen's memorandum to Haldeman summarizing the same meeting; and the tape of the conversation between Nixon and Dean mentioned by Petersen from the same meeting.

Shortly after their meeting, Archibald Cox announced a sudden press conference.

Buzhardt, thinking that Archibald Cox planned to go public with the dispute over the documents, called Vorenberg.

Archibald Cox believed he could maximize his chance for a favorable ruling by limiting the scope of his initial request to material arguably important to the criminal proceedings.

That evening Archibald Cox had a grand jury subpoena demanding the eight tapes and three other items served on Buzhardt who accepted on behalf of the president.

Archibald Cox relayed Nixon's feelings on national security, saying that Nixon told him that one tape had "national security information so highly sensitive that he did not feel free to hint to me what the nature of it is" despite Wright's full national security clearance.

Archibald Cox said that the White House had made information available, waiving the privilege, but tapes constituted "the raw material of life," something essentially privileged.

Archibald Cox announced almost immediately that he was willing to discuss the matter with the White House lawyers.

Nixon had lost patience with Archibald Cox and was in no mood to negotiate.

Archibald Cox then drafted a 6-page counter-proposal providing for transcriptions of the actual conversations together with a third-party certification that the rest of the tape was irrelevant.

At the last meeting, when Nixon's lawyers showed willingness to have a third party certify transcripts, Archibald Cox gave them his proposal and then left to give them a chance to consider it.

Inasmuch as Archibald Cox had to recuse himself from this case, he assigned it to McBride and authorized Ruth to make all decisions but asked for a prompt and diligent investigation.

The break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office was still claimed by the White House to involve national security matters, and Richardson and Archibald Cox had an agreement that Archibald Cox would notify the attorney general before any indictment in that matter was filed.

Archibald Cox, surprised, explained that the agreement did not involve perjury indictments.

Archibald Cox was to be given access to the material in any instance when the Court was in doubt of the relevance to the criminal proceedings.

Archibald Cox thought this meeting would be a continuation of the "Byzantine" conversation from the previous Friday, but instead Richardson appeared now to be the point man on negotiations over the tapes.

Archibald Cox was able to infer that Richardson had gotten orders from the White House and was concerned that if a compromise was not reached one or both would be fired.

Richardson could not explain why there was a deadline and instead wanted to go over the points they had agreed upon, then discuss other issues; but Archibald Cox insisted that it was an inefficient way to proceed and gave him his earlier 6-page proposal; and Richardson agreed to write a counter-proposal.

Archibald Cox did not hear from Richardson the rest of Tuesday or Wednesday.

Archibald Cox was worried that rejecting a deal would risk obtaining anything from the White House.

Doyle had the opposite concern: if Archibald Cox accepted less than the tapes, which the court ordered turned over, he might be seen as part of the cover-up.

Pressure on Archibald Cox to seek the material increased, while the White House was left with only one avenue to block it and so had added incentive to pressure Richardson to get Archibald Cox either to compromise or resign.

Archibald Cox assured Richardson that he was "not unamenable" to a solution in which he had no direct access to the tapes.

Archibald Cox commented on the method for determining what portions would be transcribed and suggested that the tapes be subject to analysis for tampering.

Archibald Cox asked that Wright send the points to him in writing so that he could consider them the next day and assured him that he was not rejecting the points outright.

Haig quickly learned of the letter, told Richardson that Archibald Cox "rejected" the deal, and summoned him to the White House.

Archibald Cox now realized that he and Richardson had been allowed to negotiate even though the president had no intention to go beyond the inadequate first proposal.

Archibald Cox was well aware that he had no institutional support, and the apparent defection of Sam Ervin of the Senate Watergate Committee profoundly troubled him.

Richardson was on the phone when Archibald Cox arrived and read to him the text of a letter he had sent to the president that day in which he said that Nixon's instructions gave him "serious difficulties" and outlined several steps that still might save the compromise.

Archibald Cox then sat down at the table and began his impromptu remarks.

Archibald Cox did not resign, nor was he cowed by the president's directive.

Archibald Cox was thinking of a $25,000 to $50,000 a day fine until the president complied.

Archibald Cox spoke to the American people about the primacy of the rule of law even during a near-confrontation with the Soviet Union over the Yom Kippur war.

Nixon and his men never understood it; they assumed that Archibald Cox must be a conspirator, like them, when he was so straight as to approach naivete.

Archibald Cox spent the academic year from September 1974 to Spring 1975 at the University of Cambridge as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions.

Archibald Cox lectured to packed houses, including at Oxford where he delivered the Chichele Lectures at All Souls College.

Archibald Cox's interests were now almost exclusively constitutional law, but he occasionally would teach a course in labor law.

Archibald Cox was appointed to a Massachusetts Bar committee to study the problem.

Just as his public support for Udall was uncharacteristic, after Watergate Archibald Cox was more open to represent groups not a part of traditional institutions.

Common Cause had intervened as a party in the lower court and therefore had time a right to argue before the Court, but its counsel Lloyd Cutler disagreed with the position taken by the organization and Archibald Cox was asked to argue on its behalf.

Archibald Cox argued that such conduct should be subject to a lesser standard of court review than the strict scrutiny of restrictions on pure political speech.

The second significant case Archibald Cox participated in dealt with affirmative action.

Archibald Cox opened his Bakke argument by stating these questions in an elegant way that put the case at its most forceful; namely, that unless the Court permitted universities to take race into account to promote minority participation in learned professions, they would be excluded except for a very small number.

Archibald Cox was highly doubtful that Carter would appoint him in light of his prominent support of Udall three years earlier, but nevertheless filled out the application and submitted to background checks.

In 1980 Archibald Cox was elected chairman of Common Cause, the 230,000 member citizens' lobby, as John Gardner's successor.

Right to work groups used the occasion to criticize Archibald Cox for attacking voluntary independent expenditures while ignoring union efforts on behalf of candidates.

Archibald Cox responded in an address on September 6,1980: It was not reforms that were the problem, but rather incomplete implementation of them.

Archibald Cox continued his campaign against large campaign contributions, but he was largely unsuccessful in effecting any further change.

Archibald Cox supported efforts to increase voter participation by testifying in favor of bilingual ballots.

Archibald Cox died at his home in Brooksville, Maine, of natural causes on May 29,2004.

Archibald Cox was elected member to or granted recognition by the following societies:.

In 1935 Archibald Cox won the Sears Prize for his performance during first year in law school.

Archibald Cox was the recipient of the Thomas "Tip" O'Neill Citizenship Award.