When Cox refused a direct order from the White House to seek no further tapes or presidential materials, Nixon fired him in an incident that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

[6] Compared to the lawyers on his mother's side, his father (as Archibald Jr. reflected late in his life) did not participate much in public service, although he had "done a few things for Woodrow Wilson … at the time of the peace conference" and was president of the local Board of Education.

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

[17] Phyllis, who graduated Smith the year before, was the granddaughter of James Barr Ames, one time dean of Harvard Law School and noted for popularizing the casebook method of legal study.

In 1953 the young and ambitious John F. Kennedy, new to the Senate, decided that labor relations would be the area that he would specialize in to begin building a policy and legislative resume for use in future political endeavors.

[36] In January 1960, he wrote 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.

A Congressional Quarterly article in April, widely reprinted in local papers, named Cox and the other Cambridge advisors as a key to the kinds of policies Kennedy would advocate.

[46] The description of Cox's academic advisers was designed to recall Roosevelt's "Brain Trusts": "More ideas poured in from Cambridge, Mass., where an astounding galaxy of scholars had made themselves an informal brain-trust for Senator Kennedy."

[61] Cox was regularly involved in meetings over day-to-day Justice Department activities, while at the same time he prepared to argue cases seeking to overturn state court convictions of civil rights protestors (under various statutes dealing with vagrancy, trespass and even parading without a permit.)

Cox and Assistant Attorney General and Head of the Civil Rights Division Burke Marshall, however founded the legislation on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.

[100] [99] 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.

The president's new defense team was made up of one-time Democrat Leonard Garment, University of Texas constitutional law professor Charles Alan Wright, and Nixon true believer J. Fred Buzhardt.

[134] The president's legal team employed an approach that would become familiar: state an overly broad position, equivocate, delay, and then abruptly make partial concessions in the face of perceived popular disapproval.

Within an hour Cox was before the grand jury, explaining the response to them; they voted to request Sirica to issue an order to Nixon to show cause why there should not be prompt compliance with the subpoena.

Haldeman's replacement as White House chief of staff, had been directing Richardson to clamp down on Cox with increasingly more explicit threats until it reached the boiling point just at this moment.

Richardson around 6 p.m. brought it to the White House, where Wright had just returned from Texas (to finalize the appeal papers to the Supreme Court that were due the following day), and although he had just reviewed the "Stennis proposal," he was enthusiastically extolling its reasonableness and holding forth on how the president could convince the American people that it was the solution to the crisis.

To Richardson's surprise, Haig said that it was no longer necessary to fire Cox because the president had gotten bipartisan approval for the deal, there were meetings with the two leading members of the Senate Watergate Committee scheduled, and the plan would be acceptable to both the American people and the courts.

[am] Just six days before Senator George McGovern had told the ACLU, which had just taken out newspaper ads calling for Nixon's impeachment, that there was not yet support for it; in fact, there was not even enough strength in the opposition to override vetoes.

[201] Richardson was on the phone when 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.

[203] Heymann thought he started out nervous, defensively saying that he was "not out to get the president …"[204] Once he got into the details of the history and significance of the dispute over the tapes, which involved a patient explanation of criminal procedure, evidence, administrative and constitutional law, he relaxed.

"He offered a masterful professorial performance, designed to explain the legal and constitutional confrontation in terms that struck at the core of the layman's treasured values essential to the American system.

At a hastily arranged press conference in the library of the building, Ruth and Doyle explained that they had taken copies of major memos to a safe place the night before, but that they were concerned about the vast amount of material still in the office that had not been presented to the grand jury.

Unfrightened, unpretentious, talking from the very depths of his convictions and loyalties to hundreds of millions of individual Americans as one citizen to another, Archie reversed a congressional retreat and found a nation following him along the path of freedom.

On July 24, 1974, only three days after oral argument, United States Supreme Court voted by 8 to 0 to reject Nixon's claims of executive privilege and enforced the subpoena requiring the release of the tapes.

[252] Cox opened his Bakke argument by stating these questions in a 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.

[255] Assistant Attorney General Drew S. Days, III, who watched the argument felt that Cox's presence was crucial as a symbol of the "establishment" assuring the Court (and the conservative Justice Powell) that the position was not "outlandish.

Some anonymous sources claimed that Attorney General Griffin Bell objected to the nomination on the ground that Cox at 67 was too old, noting that the ABA suggested that no one over 64 be named to the job.

While Cox personally deplored the leak, he immediately sent letters to congressional leaders underlining "the urgent necessity of looking into the charges to demonstrate that Congress is concerned about its honor and integrity.

He also supported efforts to increase voter participation by testifying in favor of bilingual ballots[275] After twelve years at the helm, Cox, at 79, chose to retire from the chairmanship of Common Cause as of February 1992.

[289] In 1991 the faculty of Harvard Law School made Cox an honorary member of the Order of the Coif, an historic group that recognizes significant contributions to the legal profession.