Archibald Cox

Archibald Cox
31st United States Solicitor General
In office January 1961 – July 1965
President	John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson
Preceded by	J. Lee Rankin
Succeeded by	Thurgood Marshall
Personal details
Born	Archibald Cox, Jr. May 17, 1912 (1912-05-17) Plainfield, New Jersey, U.S.
Died	May 29, 2004 (2004-05-30) (aged 92) Brooksville, Maine, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Phyllis Ames Cox (June 13, 1937-his death).
Children	Sarah, Archibald, Jr. and Phyllis
Alma mater	Harvard College (B.A., 1934) Harvard Law School (J.D., 1937)

Archibald Cox, Jr. (May 17, 1912 – May 29, 2004) was an American lawyer, legal scholar and professor, whose career alternated between academia and government. As a faculty member at the Harvard Law School, he became one of the early experts in federal labor law. He published the first case book on labor law for use in law schools, a book that was periodically updated and supplemented until 2011. He was a prolific writer, publishing dozens of articles on developments in labor relations. He also became a noted labor arbitrator, even while continuing to teach.

He became a supporter, adviser and speech writer for Senator John F. Kennedy and supported his bid for the presidency. He was rewarded by being appointed in 1961 as Solicitor General, an office he held for four and a half years during which time he briefed and argued some of the most consequential decisions of the Warren Court. On return to Harvard he expanded on his experience in government to write on and teach constitutional law. He dealt with the student disorders at Harvard, and chaired the blue ribbon commission that investigated the causes of the student strikes that closed down Columbia.

Cox became internationally famous when under mounting pressure and charges of corruption, President Richard Nixon was forced to appoint him (on account of his reputation for integrity and his independence from the President) as Special Prosecutor to oversee the federal criminal investigation into the Watergate burglary and other related crimes, corrupt activities and wrongdoings that became popularly known as the Watergate scandal. His investigation led him directly to the President himself, and he had a dramatic confrontation with Nixon when he subpoenaed the tapes the President had secretly recorded of his Oval Office conversations. When Cox refused a direct order to withdraw the subpoena, Nixon fired him in an incident that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Cox's calm, reasonable and impeccably dignified explanations of his positions earned him overwhelming support among the professional bar and a great deal of popularity among the country at large. His firing produced a public relations disaster for Nixon and set in motion impeachment proceedings. In the end, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the President and in favor of the position taken by Cox in an opinion written by Nixon appointee Chief Justice Warren Burger. Rather than face impeachment and trial with the tapes as evidence, Richard Nixon became the only United States President to resign.

Cox returned to teaching, lecturing and writing for the rest of his life, giving his opinions on the role of the court in the development of the law and the role of the lawyer in society. He was appointed to head several public-service, watchdog and good-government organizations, including serving for 12 years as head of Common Cause. In addition he argued two important Supreme Court cases, winning both: one concerning the constitutionality of federal campaign finance restrictions and the other the first case testing affirmative action. The New York Times summarized his career in a 1992 opinion: "Mr. Cox devoted his considerable prestige, energy, and legal skills to advancing the cause of higher government ethics. With public trust in government at a dangerously low ebb, Mr. Cox's message is more powerful than ever."

Early life, education and private practice

Family and ancestors

Cox was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, the son of Archibald and Frances "Fanny" Bruen Perkins Cox, the eldest of seven children. His father Archibald Sr. (Harvard College, 1896; Harvard Law School, 1899) was the son of a Manhattan lawyer who rose to prominence as a patent and trademark lawyer, and who wrote Cox's Manual on Trade Marks. When Rowland Cox died suddenly in 1900 Archibald Sr. inherited his father's solo practice almost right out of law school. He built on that start to become successful in his own right. His most prominent achievement was securing the red cross as the trademark of Johnson & Johnson. Compared to the lawyers on his mother's side, his father (as Archibald Jr. reflected late in his life) did not 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. He also served as a member of the New Jersey Rapid Transit Commission.

Cox's mother Fanny was the granddaughter of two equally eminent (in entirely different fields) men. Charles C. Perkins, the son of a wealthy merchant, never had need to earn money his entire life. So after Harvard, he studied drawing in Rome, established a studio in Paris and studied art history in Leibzig. Back in New England he dabbled in music, composing, presiding over the Handel and Haydn Society and becoming the largest subscriber to Boston Music Hall. Later he lectured and published books on art history and became one of the founders of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. His grandson Maxwell Perkins, Cox's uncle, was the famed editor at the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. In August 1886 Fanny's grandfather Perkins died on being thrown from a carriage while driving with Fanny's other grandfather William M. Evarts near his estate in Windsor, Vermont.

Photograph of the Evarts Estate Runnemede in Windsor, Vt., where Cox spent the summers of his youth.

It was Fanny's grandfather Evarts who was to become the ancestor that loomed largest over Cox's youth. He was a direct descendant of founding father Roger Sherman, a Connecticut signer of the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution. But more importantly Evarts, a much acclaimed New York litigator in the second half of the nineteenth century (who would go on to become United States Attorney General, Secretary of State and Senator from New York), had been involved in a number of the great political litigations of his time, beginning with his defense of President Andrew Johnson in the trial of his impeachment in the Senate. Evarts, a devoted Republican, nevertheless faced down what seemed to be the unstoppable determination of the Republicans to oust the Democrat and accidental President. The acquittal he achieved in the Senate was a point of comparison when Archibald Cox investigated another President a century later. Cox heard early on stories of Evarts's involvement in the famous Lemmon Slave Case and others. Evarts had built six mansions (one for each of his children) on his property in Windsor, where he was a local legend in Cox's time. Cox's grandmother Elizabeth Perkins was given the property later known as Runnemeade Lodge. It was here that Archibald Cox spent each of his summers (beginning when he was less than a month old) until his family's circumstances changed when he was in college. This was where Cox developed his affinity for things New England and absorbed his New England mannerisms. The summer scene in Windsor and nearby Cornish, New Hampshire was the resort for numerous figures of turn of the century culture. It was also where the numerous lawyers (including Fanny's father Edward Clifford Perkins) connected with the Evarts were encountered. Cox summarized these influences in an interview on C-SPAN in 1987: "I grew up in a legal family. My ancestors on both sides were lawyers, and it's hard to think of a time when I wasn't going to be a lawyer."

In Plainfield, where he spent non-summer months, Cox and his family lived in patrician affluence, his home, a Dutch colonial built on a 9-acre plot, featured a tennis court, maids quarters and an apartment above the garage for the chauffeur. As for the family's relations with the staff, Cox later said: "I think that the relations between my family and the 'retainers' were very good. At least that's my picture. But the symbols of status were probably much more important than any ideas of status themselves." Fanny donated her time to community activities, typical of her class; for example, to the local garden club and as member of the Muhlenberg Hospital Women's Auxiliary. In one respect only was the Cox family unlike the upper tier professionals they lived among: the Coxes supported Democrat (and Catholic) candidate Al Smith against Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Preparatory education

The school's library in Cox's time, St. Paul's Sheldon admissions building exhibits the gothic architecture set in the idyllic rural paradise typical of the quintessential elite New England boys school.

Cox Sr. had definite ideas of the educational path Archie would follow; it was the same path the he as well as the Perkins and Evarts had followed. And while Archie did not object to the plan, Cox Sr. sometimes despaired Cox would be accepted at the right institutions. Archie was sent attended the private Wardlaw School in Edison, New Jersey until he was fourteen. When it came time to apply to St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, Cox Sr. chanced to read a school project of Archie's and finding misspellings and other mistakes he exclamed to his wife: "Well, the boy's a moron." To avert disaster he wrote to an administrator of the school on April 1926 to point out how many of Archie's near relatives (grandparents, uncles) were alumni of St. Paul's and how his great-grandfather Perkins was an important trustee. His son was duly admitted. Cox Sr. would repeat the intervention when Archie was applying to Harvard. Cox Sr. prevailed on his friend Judge Learned Hand to write a recommendation (although he did not know the boy). Cox would later tell an interviewer of the fact that kept his career on an upward trajectory: "You've only to look at me to see that I have family connections to Harvard, to the Eastern Establishment."

Cox thrived at St. Paul, situated in rural New England only 60 miles from Windsor and populated by the sons of the "Eastern Establishment." His courses were standard for a top shelf boys school, including Greek, Latin, English and American history, literature and "some science." He also had a regular dosage of Episcopalian religion. The rigorous discipline, spartan conditions and strict schedules seemed to invigorate him and developed in him a sense of camaraderie with his classmates. Most notably he developed as a strong public presenter. In his final year he won Hugh Camp Memorial Cup for public speaking and lead the school's debate team to defeat Groton It was during this period that he read Beveridge's Life of John Marshall, which was an important early ingredient in Cox's progressive view of the law. With a warm recommendation from the head-master (and family connections), Cox was able to enter Harvard College in 1930.

Harvard

College

Cox, Sr. advised Archie of the relative value of the different educations he would receive: "You go to college to grow up. When you go to law school, you’ll have begun your career." So he approached Harvard College with a carefreeness he would not be known for later. He joined of Harvard's Finals Club, the Delphic Club, nicknamed then as the "Gashouse" for the parties, gambling and liquor (during Prohibition). He majored in History, Government and Economics and did slightly better than "gentlemanly Cs."

It was during the second semester of his freshman year that his life changed. In February his father died at 56. His mother was devastated emotionally and financially. In the midst of the Depression she was forced to take in boarders, and write to St. Paul to request financial assistance for her son Robert's tuition. For Archie summers at Windsor would end, and he was forced to take summer work, the first year as a tutor with the family of the doctor who had tended to his dying father (to whom the family's horse was also sold). The tragedy also affected Cox's grades, although allowance for his father's death was noted in the official records. Cox would experience another tragedy in his junior year. He had developed a serious relationship with Radcliffe student named Connie Holmes. He had even introduced her to his family. That fall she suffered an attack and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital outside of Cambridge. On her release, her mother took her to Europe for convalescence. Toward the end of his junior year Cox received word that Connie had committed suicide with sleeping pills in France. The news delivered a shock and loss from which he remembered throughout his life.

During Cox's senior year he was able to give his full attention to academics. For his senior thesis he had proposed analyzing the constitutional differences of the composition of the Senate and House through early American history. His advisor, Paul Buck, told him he didn't "have brains enough" for the project. Cox took up the challenge and completed Senatorial Saucer. As a result of the work Cox was able to graduate with honors in History.

Law School

It was at law school that Cox began to thrive. Withdrawing from most social activities he was initiated into the intricacies of legal thinking and inspired to hard work by legendary professor Roscoe Pound. He ranked first in his class of 593 at the end of his first year. During his first year, Cox also engaged in partisan politics for the first time. He volunteered to go door-to-door in support of the gubernatorial candidacy of Lieutenant Governor Gaspar Bacon against once convicted and many times investigated Boston Mayor James Michael Curley. Bacon's defeat (by a substantial plurality) taught Cox lessons about class and ethnic politics.

Cox's second year was taken up with work on the Harvard Law Review. He also met his future wife Phyllis Ames. Cox proposed to her after only three or four meetings. She initially put him off, but by March 1936 they were engaged. 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. She was also niece of Robert Russell Ames, whose death two years previously in a yacht racing accident, together with the deaths of his two sons attempting to rescue him, was widely reported. On her paternal side Phyllis Ames was granddaughter of legal scholar Nathan Abbott, who among other things, was a founder of Stanford Law School. Professor (and later United States Associate Justice) Felix Frankfurter wrote them a congratulatory note on their betrothal, which exclaimed: "My God, what a powerful legal combination!"

Not long after, Professor Frankfurter gave Cox the first big opportunity of his career. Cox's ambitions were not particularly high in his third year. He had resigned from the Law Review at the end of his second year owing to eye problems, and so he was no longer in the "center of things." In the first semester of his third year he had agreed with Phyllis to take a job in Boston and was considering a corporate law firm. Unlike other "high standers" he had not applied for Frankfurter's highly sought after Federal Jurisdiction course, even though Frankfurter's insider status as confidant to President Roosevelt made him especially important as an entre into the higher reaches of the Executive Branch. But Cox did take Frankfurter's Public Utilities course, in which he was, as a Sears Prize winner, frequently called on by Frankfurter. Even so, he was surprised when Frankfurter called him to his office and offered Cox a clerkship with Judge Learned Hand, then on the Second Circuit. Phyllis agreed that it was a job that could not be rejected, so they planned on moving to New York for the clerkship after Cox graduated.

Cox graduated in 1937 magna cum laude, one of nine receiving the highest honor awarded by the law school that year. Two weeks before his commencement, Cox and Phyllis married.

Law clerkship

Then United Stat4es District Court Judge Learned Hand in 1910, when Archibald Cox, Sr. practiced before him.

Cox's clerkship with Hand was more like an apprenticeship. Hand did everything himself; he did not allow his clerks to even write a draft of the facts of the case. Cox sat in the same room, read the same briefs and cases, but only spoke when Hand addressed him. He would allow Cox to copy edit his opinions, but only after Hand would make three or four drafts. And if Cox had no comments on a draft given to him, Hand would tell him, "No pay today, Sonny." Cox had difficulty later in life explaining why Hand such a profound effect on him. He suggested it was the levity that the public never saw. Or his occasional unexpected acts of kindness. His exacting demands for perfection and the hard work he put in to achieve it. But it was more of a view point. Hand instilled in him a profound respect for the legal tradition, but a respect tempered by a progressive's understanding of the role of courts in modern society. Cox later described a major influence of Judge Hand on American law as "both in breaking down the restrictions imposed by the dry literalism of conservative tradition and in showing how to use with sympathetic understanding the information afforded by the legislative and administrative processes." Cox explained what his "great teacher" taught him about the "legitimacy" of law: "The judge must wrap himself in the mantle of an overshadowing path. He must show that he too is bound by law." More personally Cox said: "He was more of a philosopher than most judges. I think he greatly shaped my outlook on life in ways that are very hard to express."

Private practice

A year in New York City proved enough for both Archie and Phyllis, so Cox accepted an associate position with the Boston law firm of Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge and Rugg, now known as Ropes & Gray. In the three years he practiced there he had two important mentors., both of whose practice was in labor law The first was Charlie Rugg, who was the first to show him how briefs should be written and also gave him his first experience in union recognition negotiations (and without supervision, at that). The second was Charlie Wyzanski. Wyzanski was a Hand clerk who also early joined the New Deal, where he garnered early experience with the National Labor Relations Act (NLRB or Wagner Act) in the Labor Department and then moved to the solicitor general's office. It was a time of great ferment in the field, especially as organizational activity notably by the textile workers was returning in New England.

At Ropes, Gray Cox appeared regularly for motion practice in the Superior Court in Boston, tried "one or two" cases before a judge and argued a case before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. It was Wyzanski, however, who would have the biggest influence on his early career.

As the war in Europe became increasingly ominous for the Western democracies, Cox and his family came to believe that American assistance was vital. Cox's younger brother Robert had left Harvard to join the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Shortly after the National Defense Mediation Board ("NDMB") was established in March 1941, President Roosevelt appointed Wyzanski its vice chairman. The Board was designed to mediate labor disputes in industries affected by the defense-related industrial boom. In June Wyzanski asked Cox to become one of the Boards four assistants. Cox accepted and moved to Washington, D.C., with Phyllis and their two children in what would be the first of his many stints of service to the national government.

Government service and early academic career

Wartime government service

National Defense Mediation Board

Although the NDMB had been designed with the hope of preventing work stoppages in labor disputes, it was given only the power to assist in voluntary means of resolving disputes and making public findings of fact. The Board itself took the soon-to-be familiar "tri-partite" composition of representatives of industry and labor (four each) and three "neutral" public appointees. From the start it was criticized for not having the ability to forestall strikes, on the one hand, and of unnecessarily curtailing labor's negotiating ability, on the other. It did not take long before the board"came to grief," as Cox (who rose to the rank of Principal Mediation Officer) put it. United Mine Workers boss John L. Lewis stymied the Board's attempt to intervene in the case of the "captive" coal mines (those owned by steel mills). In that case the union was seeking a closed shop, requiring mine owners to hire only union workers. The board (including the two A.F.L. members) recommended against inclusion of the closed shop clause. Backing Lewis, C.I.O. members withdrew from the Board, and Lewis defied the government's threat to use troops to resolve the strike. At this point the NDMB "ceased to function as a board." Eventually the President brokered binding arbitration, which in the end backed the union's position. With entry into the war imminent, Roosevelt dismantled the NMDB.

Wyzanski had been appointed to the federal bench in Massachusetts at the beginning of December, and Cox, who was unable to work with Board chairman William Hammatt Davis ("we never hit it off"), felt abandoned. But through the intervention of Judge Hand (not disclosed to Cox), Cox was offered a position in the solicitor general's office.

Solicitor general's office

Solicitor General Charles Fahy, for whom Cox worked, "had a very firm backbone, firm character, strong principles, but his manner was very quiet and self-effacing."

At the solicitor general's office Cox was the least senior of the seven or eight assistants who worked for Charles Fahy. It was nevertheless prestigious simply to work there, and the lawyers had much independence. The bulk of Cox's work involved reviewing decisions by various divisions of the Department of Justice (Civil, Tax, Lands, Antitrust and Criminal) as to whether to seek review by the Supreme Court of Circuit Court cases or certioriari of decisions relating to the independent federal agencies (the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), S.E.C., and the I.C.C.). Cox generally submitted his reports to the first assistant. He also was assigned Supreme Court briefs or petitions for the Supreme Court written by attorneys in the Attorney General's office. Cox would edit or re-write the briefs before Fahy or his clerk would review them. Fahy also had Cox argue an NLRB case in the Circuit Court. The most memorable case, he would repeatedly say, was the first case he appeared before the Supreme Court, merely to confess error. The Court however affirmed 4-4, and Cox was able much later to say that he was the only attorney to lose both his first and last case before the Supreme Court by split decisions.

Notwithstanding the challenging work, Cox was restless. He had come to Washington to aid in the war effort, and he felt vague guilt that his brother was serving in North Africa and he was not doing his part. Toward the end of the Court's session in 1943, Fahy "released" Cox when an opportunity arose to work in the Office of Foreign Economic Coordinator (OFEC).

With Finletter at the State Department

Thomas K. Finletter came to Washington as a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and he became director of the OFEC, which dealt with procurement of strategic materials from neutral countries and other matters relating to foreign funds. Most interesting to Cox was that he acted as the head of a Combined Allied. Committee on North Africa. When Robert Cox learned of Cox's transfer he harbored vague hope that Archie would be sent to North Africa where they could meet, but it was not to be as Robert was killed shortly after Cox took the new position.

Th position at the State Department also did not last long. Cox surmised that Finletter "was a little too ambitious." He had hopes that he would become responsible for economic aspects of reoccupied Europe. Instead the incoming cables stopped being routed to him—the way the State Department signals the end of a project. At the end of 1943 Cox received a call from Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins who offered Cox the job of associate solicitor of the Labor Department. Once again the offer was almost certainly owing to the intercession of Judges Hand and Wyzanski.

Solicitor in the Labor Department

As associate solicitor Cox's job in the Labor Department was to supervise enforcement at the District Court level of federal labor statutes. 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. Most of the litigation involved wage and hours issues under the Fair Labor Standards Act. His background in the solicitor general's office also allowed him to handle much of the appellate work. By virtue of his position Cox also occasionally sat as an alternate public member of the Wage Adjustment Board, which a specialized subsidiary of the National War Labor Board which dealt with the construction industry and attempted to maintain labor peace by mediating non-wage disputes and setting prevailing wage rates and increases under the Davis–Bacon Act.

Cox stayed in this position until Perkins left in the summer of 1945. The war in Europe was over, the war in the Pacific was soon to be, and Archie and Phyllis decided to return to Boston. The offer at Ropes, Grey was still open.

Harvard faculty and labor arbitrator

Cox returned to Ropes, Gray with the intention of spending his professional career there. Instead, he lasted five weeks. Dean Landis of the Harvard Law School offered to hire Cox as a probationary teacher in the fall of 1945. 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 Cox should become a nationally recognized expert in labor law. In addition to labor law, Cox started out teaching torts. Later he would also teach unfair competition, agency and administrative law. He was made a permanent professor during the 1946-47 academic year, a time when the law school greatly increased enrollment in the post-war boom. During the 1947-48 Term Cox also volunteered for appointment by the Supreme Court to represent indigent defendants and was appointed in two cases of prisoners from the Eastern Pennsylvania Penitentiary in Philadelphia. In one case he obtained a reversal on the ground that the defendant had been deprived assistance of counsel during sentencing phase, where a lawyer might have prevented a the misreading of the defendants' previous record. In the other case the Court affirmed, over four dissents, the possibly erroneous application of Pennsylvania's habitual offenders statute, even though the defendant was unrepresented at sentencing. He also became a frequent panelist at legal and judicial conferences.

Cox first began writing articles on labor issues for peer reviewed journals in 1947. Over time this writing would become a prolific body of work. The same year he became a member of the National Panel of Arbitrators of the American Arbitration Association and began a long career as a labor arbitrator. The proceedings in which Cox sat ranged "from local level confrontations such as those brought by specific school boards to major interstate cases such as Consolidated Edison Co. of New York and New England Petroleum Corporation." The labor disputes usually involved wage, hiring, promotion, and dismissal grievances. In 1948 he published the first "modern" casebook on labor law, a work of over 1400 pages, which one reviewer found "alarming" but overall concluded "the selection of material is excellent." The casebook was the first to emphasize (almost exclusively) the collective bargaining agreement, which the Wagner Act had put at the center of industrial relations. Before Cox's text such courses mainly dwelt on industrial warfare.

Cox began his association at tis time with John T. Dunlop, a labor economist who had joined the Harvard faculty a year before Cox. Their thinking would influence each other, and the two collaborated on two articles in the 1950s and would be involved in similar arbitrations (particularly in the construction industry). They would later also become involved in similar federal wage mediation efforts. The two (Cox in law and Dunlop in economics) would become the most important influences in the developing legal model for industrial relations, which detractors from the later critical legal studies movement labelled "industrial pluralism"—a model "promoted the polices of free collective bargaining, responsible unionism, limited worker participation in management, and a restricted right to strike. Industrial pluralists regarded the state as a neutral party that treats organized labor fairly if it functions within this framework." Cox's role in developing this view went beyond academic writing, and included his role in various government agencies, his participation in panels and symposia, his work in professional associations, his recommendations and advice to policy-makers and, of course, through his students. Cox would also occasionally draft bills, such as he did for three Massachusetts Republican state legislators who were seeking to broker a compromise between the AFL-CIO anti-injunction bill and the Republicans' refusal to modify the state courts' practice of issuing injunctions, without notice or hearing, in a host of labor disputes as well as recognition and union security cases.

Wage controller and foremost academic expert in labor law

Wage controller

Cox's experience as an arbitrator, his collaboration with Dunlop and others in conceiving a labor policy built around collective solutions, and his own belief in the power of reason and good faith led him to conclude that optimal results for workers and industry could be achieved without coercion by either side. And when there was a government interest involved, he firmly believed in the ability of the New Deal-type tripartite boards to reach the optimal results for the private parties and the public, even despite his own experience at the NDMB. He was so certain of its usefulness he was willing to recommend it even during peacetime.

In 1947 most foreign policy liberals believed that a massive recovery program for European democracies was necessary to prevent their succumbing to Soviet aggression or to subversion by totalitarian ideology. In response to an urgent plea by Columbia scholars, Congress authorized interim relief. But there was fear that the level of assistance needed would put intolerable inflationary pressure on the U.S. economy. It was the Harvard faculty this time that provided the suggestion: an allocation program to moderate demand, restricting credit and if necessary price controls. Wage policy was not specifically enumerated but Cox's name on the list made clear that that would be part of the "aggressive anti-inflationary measures" that might be resorted to. That spring aid relief began under the Marshall Plan but no mechanism to intervene with the economy, especially wages, was introduced to replace the National Wage Stabilization Board, which had expired in 1947.

Within two years, however, full mobilization for war brought the wage machineries back with the War Stabilization Board and its related programs. Harvard Law School had readied itself from the start, sponsoring a program for practicing lawyers on legal aspects of mobilization at which Cox and Dunlop spoke on wage stabilization and industrial dispute resolution. Both were called to sit on boards. From 1951-52 Cox served (without compensation) as co-chairman of the Construction Industry Stabilization Commission, a board that dealt with wages in an industry with special labor issues.

Wage Stabilization Board Director Roger Putnam and Chairman Archibald Cox

The wage control scheme came apart with the steel strike in 1952. Anxious to maintain production, Truman seized the steel industry without Congressional authority. When the move was struck down by the Supreme Court, Congress replaced the board with one in which, because it was stripped of power to set wages, both the C.I.O. and A.F.L. agreed to participate. Truman, using recess appointment powers, appointed Cox to chair the new board. Cox claimed that despite its limitations he was "determined to 'make it work.'"

The trend of cases piling up to be resolved, however, disturbed Cox. He told a meeting of the American Bar Association's Labor Relations Section in San Francisco: "Every morning my breakfast is spoiled by reading bout another wage settlement calling for an increase whose approvability is doubtful under present stabilization policies." But in the first case he sat on, one involving a 10¢ per hour increase for 25,000 employees of North American Aviation, a major producer of military aircraft, even though the raise was 50% above the amount permissible under the previous boards policy. After the decision the industry members met with Cox to tender their resignation. He pleaded with them not to dash the board, telling them that proposing a new higher wage rate, but one consistently held to, would best keep wages stabilized. They agreed to stay on.

The case that would be the board's undoing involved the United Mine Workers, just like the case the brought down the NDMB. Shortly after Cox's speech to the ABA, the coal industry agreed with soft coal miners to a wage increase of $1.90 a day plus an increase in benefits.

Time's caricature of Lewis in 1946 depicting him as dangerous and unpredictable.

It became clear that John L. Lewis, once again, had his members ready to defend every bit of their gain. When one company refused to include the increase in miners' pay until the stabilization board had approved the agreement, 700 miners walked out of the mine in Harrisburg, Illinois, and there was fear that a "silent strike" would spread among the 375,000 soft coal miners in the U.S. Although Cox promised prompt review of the wage increase, a week later, when the strike had spread to 117,500 miners, Cox planned to announce a one-week postponement of the vote at the suggestion of the board's director Roger L. Putnam, but the labor representatives refused and Cox cancelled the announcement. On the last day to decide, October 18, 1952, the Board disallowed anything above a $1.50 a day increase. Announcing the decision Cox said: "A wage stabilization program under which an excuse was found for approving every increase requested by a powerful group would be a fraud." The coal miners walked off their jobs, while Lewis assailed the board: "Four agents of the National Association of Manufacturers, aided by a professor from the Harvard Law School and his timid trio of dilettante associates, form a cabal to steal 40 cents a day from each mineworker." The President first intervened to resolve the walkout, and then after Putnam affirmed the board's decision, on December 3, reversed it and reinstated the pay raise. Despite the advice of Dunlop and another friend, Cox resigned the next day. Some colleagues saw this as an unnecessary act of "grandstanding" and a disservice to the President, particularly as he made it a very public show of "principle" instead of quietly resigning and also because it set off a chain reaction with industry members resigning, the Chamber of Commerce refusing to replace them and finally the resignation in frustration of Putnam himself.

The few months he spent in Washington would tarnish his reputation for many years with conservatives constantly recalling that he was a "wage-price controller" and liberals who saw him as "vain, easily offended and highly principled." Cox returned to Harvard thinking he would never participate in national government again.

The 1950s at Harvard

On his return to Cambridge there were rumors that Cox might succeed James Bryant Conant as President of Harvard University. The position in stead going to Nathan Pusey, Cox went back to a career consisting of three parts: teaching, professional associations and arbitrations, and scholarly writing.

As a teacher Cox was considered expert in his fields but as a teacher humorless, distant, rigid and eccentric Despite his reputation for aloofness, he volunteered time to help revise student law review notes, judge moot court and appellate advocacy competitions and provide career advice. He also taught labor regulations to selected labor leaders as part of Harvard's "Trade Union Program."

To make time for professional activities, Cox scheduled his classes for the beginning of the week. Out-of-town lectures, bar committee meetings, arbitrations and related work could be done at the end of the week. Cox was elected chairman of the State Legislation committee of the ABA's Labor Relations Law Section (1948–49) and then secretary of Section (1954–58). He drafted legislation for state legislatures on a non-partisan basis. In 1958 he was made a member of the advisory committee of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. He continued sitting on arbitration and other panels. One novel panel was one established in Philadelphia by the Upholsterers' International Union providing for an outside group to police union discipline. Cox was named chairman of the panel. Among the major arbitrations Cox sat on were the two major railroad arbitrations involving the engineers in 1954 and 1960, in which he and Princeton economist Richard A. Lester were the two neutral members. In New England he arbitrated disputes between unions and management in the textile and machine tools industries.

It was with his academic writing and bar association work, however, that Cox became immensely influential in the labor field. His writing was so prolific that Dean Groswold pointed to Cox when he needed an exampe of the kind of academic output he was seeking from the faculty. Given that the peak of his academic career also coincided with the enactment of the statutes that defined industrial relations, his work, usually the first on any new topic, shaped the Court's thinking. His one-time student and later colleague Derek Bok described this influence:

In the 1950s, the National Labor Relations Act was still relatively new, and the Taft-Hartley Act was in its infancy. Over the decade, the Supreme Court had a series of opportunities to clarify the meaning on, the legal status of arbitration, and other important issues of policy left open by Congress. In case after case, when the majority reached the critical point of decision, the justices would rely on one of Archie’s articles.

In addition to his direct effect on Supreme Court decisions, Cox's scholarly writing influenced other academics and practitioners who widely cited him. The Journal of Legal Studies lists Cox as one of the most-cited legal scholars of the twentieth century. The framework he developed, first in the two articles with Dunlop in 1950-51, then elaborated on his own, became the standard view of the Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts. It assumed roughly equal bargaining power between union and management and interpreted the labor laws (often contrary to the language of the statutes themselves) to limit individual employee rights unless pursued by his bargaining agent, to restrict the subjects on which management is required to bargain about based on past practices, to permit unions to waive rights the statutes otherwise gave to employees and in general to advocate the notion that labor statutes should be interpreted to promote industrial peace over enhancing the economic power of labor. The framework remained the dominant view of federal labor relations until the late 1950s when concerns over member participation began to shape policy. It would be Cox and his work with Senator Kennedy on the bill that became the Landrum-Griffin Act that would begin the new framework.

Advisor to Senator Kennedy and Role in the Kennedy Administration

Kennedy advisor, then partisan

Kennedy's labor expert

When John F. Kennedy first began serving in the U.S. Senate, he had political ambitions and knew that he needed to build his political resume to fulfill them. He decided that labor issues would be one area where he would specialize. So he wrote to Cox in March 1953 inviting him to testify before the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Cox was a natural ally to seek out. He was one of Kennedy's constituents and a fellow Harvard alumnus. More importantly he was a nationally-recognized academic expert on labor law and a liberal Democrat with a predisposition towards labor. Kennedy testified on April 30 on various possible amendments to the Taft-Hartley Act relating to state-federal jurisdiction and secondary boycotts. The two had lunch afterwards and nothing came of the bills.

Four years later Kennedy became a member of the McClellan Committee whose hearings on labor corruption began revealing unsavory practices. The volatile televised hearings provided a high risk (in terms of labor support), high reward (in terms of public exposure) that required political finesse based on substantive knowledge. What shown the spotlight more intently on Kennedy was that his brother was the chief counsel of the committee and his wrestling matches with Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa during his examination were riveting. Kennedy himself had become chairman of the Subcommittee on Labor, and so he wrote Cox in April 1957 requesting that he put together an informal group of academic experts to advise him on specific labor reforms. The group of labor academics selected by Cox, which was restricted to considering issues of internal union management and addressing abuses uncovered by the McClellan Committee, met through the fall and winter of 1957 and delivered in December to Kennedy a written report to Kennedy dealing with trusteeships, union memberships, expulsions and union elections. The efforts of the group proved useful to Kennedy aside from legislation; Kennedy was able to milk good publicity from his "brain trust" with only vague hints at what he proposed to do. As for legislation, Kennedy asked Cox to draft the bill. Cox did so himself and sent it in January 1958. Against the advice of Cox (who knew Kennedy was unprepared from the brusk style of labor heads), Kennedy decided to show the proposed bill to labor leaders (whom Cox referred to with the somewhat derogatory term "labor skates" ) including George Meany and A.J. Hayes. As Cox put it they "gave him a very rough time." At the committee hearings Meany gave "very hostile, very hard-nosed" testimony. When Kennedy tried to assure him that the legislation was produced by academics who were friends of labor, Meany replied: "God save us from our friends."

Stewart McClure, clerk of the committee, said that the Republicans hated Cox. His coaching of Kennedy had allowed Kennedy to parry all questions and treat difficult points with "the precision of a trained surgeon."

Senators Ives and Kennedy respond to the defeat of their labor reform bill in the House of Representatives. Kennedy: "Those who defeated this bill will bear a heavy burden for the racketeering that will continue to go on unchecked."

With Republican co-sponsor Irving Ives, whose consent to lend his support was finessed, the bill became known as the Kennedy-Ives bill. Cox spent much time in Washington in the first half of 1958 advising Kennedy, dealing with union representatives and second-chairing Kennedy at private meetings with legislators. When the bill reached the floor of the Senate, it passed 88-1. The editorial board of the New York Times called the bill "a triumph of moderation and a powerful blend of principle and political savvy." In particular it praised the policy approach of the Committee Report (largely designed by Cox), which sought to ensure against corruption while at the same time showing care "neither to undermine self-government within the labor nor to weaken unions in in their role as bargaining representatives of employe[e]s." But, as the Times had warned, the bill was sent to its political graveyard in the House when the Eisenhower Administration, thinking that tougher measures on unions were needed, cobbled together a coalition which included Southern Democrats and defeated it.

Kennedy reintroduced his bill (this time with Senator Ervin as co-sponsor) in the 1959 session. This time labor over-played its hand, and believing that the November 1958 elections had given them a favorable vote in the House, they demanded "sweeteners" in the way of amendments to the Taft-Hartley Act. Cox urged that the issue of union anti-corruption measured be kept separate from question of permitted labor practices, and on this Kennedy was sympathetic. But the union leaders wanted a "price" for their support. Kennedy responded by obtaining approval for a Blue Ribbon commission to study the issues; Cox was named chairman and the commission included Arthur Goldberg, David L. Cole, Guy Farmer and W. Willard Wirtz. In the end, Kennedy accepted labor's "sweeteners," and Ervin took his name off the bill. At the same time, Senator McClellan proposed a labor "Bill of Rights" which would have expanded drastically federal intervention into internal union affairs. Kennedy and Cox were able to draft a substitute which watered down the more anti-union provisions. Cox took the new version to McClellan's counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, who, much to Cox's surprise objected to them. Cox concluded that Robert Kennedy lacked sympathy with and even an understanding of organized labor. It was the beginning of the strain between Cox and Robert Kennedy. Senator Kennedy simply ignored his brother's objections. Having worked diligently to accommodate all positions, Kennedy sent the revised bill (without McClellan's "Bill of Rights") to the Senate floor where it passed in April 1958, by a vote of 90-1.

In the meantime, the Eisenhower Administration and business lobbyists were using the lurid details uncovered in the McClellan Hearings to pressure conservative, Southern Democrats and Republicans to come up with bills not only regulating union internal affairs but also cutting back on permitted union activities and bargaining power. The bill the House passed was the one sponsored by Georgia Democrat Phillip Landrum and Michigan Republican Robert Griffin. In addition to imposing more extensive regulation of internal union affairs, it provided for amendments to the Wagner Act prohibiting certain union activities, such as certain secondary boycotts and certain picketing in connection with organizing activities, eliminated "hot cargo" agreements (in which prohibited employers from dealing with companies with labor disputes) and gave over to the states jurisdiction over matters, on which the NLRB declined to exercise its jurisdiction. The bill passed by a vote of 303-125, stunning labor officials because it was substantially more anti-union than anything the Senate contemplated, including Kennedy's bill from 1957 and because they badly misjudged the results of the 1958 election. Their only hope was in Kennedy's ability to salvage what he could in the meeting between the chambers to reconcile the two bills. Kennedy chaired that meeting and brought along Cox as his chief aide.

Cox was "surprised" at the rough and tumble of the conference committee. Senator Dirksen tried to bar him altogether as "having no business here." Then on at least two occasions Cox was personally insulted in a way that was wholly outside his experience. Conservative North Carolina congressman Graham Arthur Barden Complained that he was tired of "these intellectuals nitpicking … ." Landrum in a fit of pique pointed at Cox and called him a "Communist." In both cases Kennedy struck back, telling Barden that he was "sick and tired of sitting here and having to defend my aide time and time again …" and as to Landrum, his "Irish temper" (as Cox called it) was so in display and the dressing down he administered to Landrum was so severe that the meeting had to be adjourned to let the sides cool down. In the end, after extended grueling negotiations, a bill was finally agreed to, and it became the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. It was substantially more anti-union than the Senate bill, but Kennedy’s less onerous provisions governing internal union affairs prevailed. The prohibitions on union activity from the Landrum-Griffin bill remained, but Kennedy saved the Taft-Hartley "sweeteners." All in all, years later Cox concluded that "there were things that would have been better, but it came out not too bad." For his part, Kennedy did not try to have his name put on the result, and it became known as the Landrum-Griffin Act. Nevertheless, it showed that Kennedy could maneuver a complex piece of legislation from beginning to end, an important part of his resume for the quest for the nomination next year. Cox later noted: "this was his one big thing legislatively." The worry was that despite the effort, it might lose him labor support. And while this bill remained his one legislative achievement, Cox would later find out that he really did not have "any interest in labor at all. I don’t think it aroused his interest." For his part Cox left with unpleasant conclusions about the process: "After living most of one's life in a relatively rational community, watching the House of Representatives at work is one of the most disheartening sights in the world."

Head of the Kennedy campaign's "Brain Trust"

In the fall of 1959, after the work on the Landrum-Griffin Act had wound up, Kennedy confided to Cox the open secret that he was running for president. 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. Cox brought a number of eminent policy experts in a number of fields into contact with Kennedy. Although many were skeptical of his candidacy (and some had been loyal to or inclined towards either Adlai Stevenson or Hubert Humphrey, Kennedy won them over at a meeting in Boston's Harvard Club on January 24. In the period leading up to the Democratic Convention in July Cox acted mainly as a "stimulator" to prod various academics to send memoranda to Kennedy or to find academics to supply Kennedy with policy positions on specific topics. While before the Convention Cox had not recruited extensively beyond the Boston area, he had at least one recruit from the University of Colorado and he got academics at Stanford. Even though the number was not large before the nomination, no other Democratic contender, not even Stevenson had made an effort to recruit intellectual partisans.

Archibald Cox in April 1960

As with the case of Cox's informal group of labor advisors, Kennedy was anxious to use Cox's contacts not only for their expertise but also for the éclat they gave his campaign. 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. "Of John F. Kennedy's political talents none has been more helpful to him than his ability to attract capable men to his cause," the Times said in the middle of the Convention. 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 and informal brain-trust for Senator Kennedy."

After the Los Angeles Convention Kennedy, now the nominee, asked Cox to move to Washington to have an expanded role, hiring speechwriters and coordinate academic talent. Cox accepted, and then Kennedy point blank asked Cox if he thought he could get along with Ted Sorensen and explained "Sorensen’s fear that somebody was going to elbow his way in between him and Kennedy." Cox assumed he could. Cox had been unaware that Sorensen had already been at work, back in February, trying to compartmentalize and minimize Cox's groups' efforts. He told Joseph Loftus of the Times that the Cambridge group was "something 'much more talked about than fact.'" Cox would soon discover, however, that Sorensen always "was terribly worried about being cut out" and protected Kennedy from independent advice including Cox's.

Cox set up office in Washington, D.C., hired other speech writers and solicited research from academics. Cox soon found that the speeches his group wrote were not used in campaign events. Cox much later recognized that his manner of speech-writing was "even in 1960, old-fashioned," filled as they were with statistics and Roosevelt-style detailed explanations of policy. Cox wrote to Sorensen (who travelled with Kennedy) seeking a delineation of roles, but was never satisfied. Cox tried to force a showdown by flying to meet Sorensen and Kennedy in Minneapolis on October 1. In the campaign plane Sorensen loudly dressed down Cox, telling him his written speeches were inadequate for campaign events. On October 11, Kennedy told Schlesinger that he was aware of and regretted the tension between Sorensen and Cox, but said that Sorensen was "indispensable" to him. In view of Sorensen's posssessiveness he even suggested that Schlesinger avoid Sorensen and communicate with him through Jackie. Cox spent the last month of the campaign in Washington in low spirits. Before he left Washington, just before election day, Kennedy suggested that Cox might be helpful during the transition (if Kennedy won). Cox replied in a non-committal "sour" way, summing up his disappointment with his role in the campaign.

Despite Cox's disappointment, the work of the speech-writing unit proved vital to Sorensen and Dick Goodwin by providing them with much of the content, factual support and occasional turn of phrase of their stump speeches on the campaign trail. Cox's group, together with Robert Kennedy and Myer Feldman, who headed Kennedy's opposition research, also issued nearly daily statements to the press, independent of the canddate who was on th eroad. Moreover, research that flowed through Cox to the campaign provided the beginnings of opinion sampling that informed the candidate's approach to audiences. Nevertheless, Cox's response to Kennedy ended any chance he would participate in the transition.

Solicitor General of the United States

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Solicitor General Archibald Cox in Rose Garden on May 7, 1963.

Despite publicly denying that he was considered for public office, Cox worried he would be offered a seat on the NLRB or a second echelon position in the Department of Labor. Neither position offered new challenges for him, but he worried about the propriety of refusing. Before leaving for his family Christmas celebration in Windsor, he was tipped by Anthony Lewis of the Times that he had been chosen for Solicitor General. He decided that if he were offered the post, he would tell the president-elect that he would think the matter over. But when Kennedy called, interrupting a Christmas lunch, he accepted on the phone. Cox was unaware until much later that his law school colleague, Paul Freund, whom he had recommended for the job, declined and recommended Cox in turn. Next month arriving for confirmation hearings, Cox's reputation on the Hill was such the hearing took only 10 minutes; even minority leader Dirksen, who knew Cox from Landrum-Griffin days, said he "had been quite impressed with his legal abilities … ."

In the nearly century that the office had existed before Cox occupied it, the solicitor general, as the government's lawyer before the Supreme Court, was immensely influential. 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. 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:

[A]n extraordinarily large proportion of the most fundamental issues of our times ultimately go before the Supreme Court for judicial determination. They are the issues upon which the community, consciously or unconsciously, is most deeply divided. They arouse the deepest emotions. Their resolution—one way or the other often writes our future history. … Perhaps it is an exaggeration to suggest that in the United States we have developed an extraordinary facility for casting social, economic, philosophical and political questions in the form of actions at law and suits in equity, and then turning around and having the courts decide them upon social, economic, and philosophical grounds. It is plainly true that we put upon the Supreme Court the burden of deciding cases which would never come before the judicial branch in any other country.

Cox began his Supreme Court advocacy by choosing a case that would announce the new emphasis to be placed on civil rights.

Civil rights and sit-in cases

During the customary introduction of the Solicitor General to the members of the Court, Justice Frankfurter had an extended talk with his former student. The justice advised Cox that the first case to argue should be something involving criminal law. 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 Cox should signal the new administration's commitment to fight for it in his first case. Cox agreed and selected Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority. The case, brought by an African-American who was barred from a private restaurant renting from a building owned by the state of Delaware, confronted the Court squarely with the limitations on Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" erected by the so-called Civil Rights Cases of 1883 which held that the constitutional guarantee only applied against "state action." Cox persuaded the Court that the fact that the business was a state lessee as well as franchisee, was located in a parking complex developed by the state to promote business, and, a piece of "evidence" asserted by Cox from his own visit to the scene, that the complex flew a Delaware flag in front of the building all rendered the state a "joint participant" with the restaurant, sufficient to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was at the beginning of the Court's dilution of the "state action" requirement in racial discrimination cases.

The Supreme Court as it was composed from October 13, 1958 to March 26, 1962. Top (l-r): Charles E. Whittaker, John M. Harlan, William J. Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart. Bottom (l-r): William O. Douglas, Hugo L. Black, Earl Warren, Felix Frankfurter, Tom C. Clark.

By May 1961, the civil rights movement, led by James Farmer of CORE initiated what would become a wave of non-violent confrontations against discrimination in public transit and other accommodations. The Attorney General's Office under the active supervision of Robert Kennedy took active measures to protect the protestors in the face of local political and police indifference or active complicity with violent resisters. Cox was regularly involved meetings over day-to-day Justice Department activities in addition to preparing to overturn state court convictions of civil rights protestors (under various vagrancy, trespass and even parading without permit statutes). Cox came into close contact with Robert Kennedy, and while the two had widely different styles (Kennedy was impulsive and somewhat cavalier of legal principles; Cox was cautious against making missteps that would set the movement back or commit the Court to a position which might lose it legitimacy), Cox grew to admire Kennedy. Impatient of a piecemeal approach, Robert Kennedy, but more importantly the civil rights community, particularly Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, sought near elimination of the "state action" doctrine, arguing that restaurants were like "common carriers" subject to the Fourteen Amendment or that the act of enforcing a trespass law used to further private discrimination was itself sufficient "state action." Cox did not believe the Court would make so radical a break with eighty-year-old precedent. So each case he argued on narrow grounds which 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. The cautious approach, however, garnered Cox much credibility with the Court, which came to realize that he was not going to lead them into areas with uncertain future consequences. After a number of these cases, however, even the Court requested briefing on the "state action" doctrine in Bell v. Maryland in 1962. 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. Although even this position disappointed civil rights activists and the Justice Department, it prevailed, but in the face of three dissents (including that of Justice Black), suggesting that a broader rule might have been rejected by a majority.

Reapportionment cases

The cases that troubled Cox the most during his tenure, and the area where he differed widest from Robert Kennedy involved malapportionment of voting districts. Pver the years failure to re-allocate voting districts particularly in state legislatures, produced wildly disproportionate districts, with rural areas having many fewer voters than urban districts as a result of the urbanization of America. The result was dilution of the urban vote with policy resulting accordingly; rectification would benefit Democrats politically. The problem was that Justice Frankfurter had held in a plurality decision in 1946 that such issues amounted to a political question—a matter not appropriate for the Court to resolve. But a case surfaced from Tennessee which seemed ideal to test that ruling. Tennessee had not reapportioned its legislature since 1910 and, as a result, there were urban districts that had eleven times the citizens of rural districts. Cox decided to submit an amicus curiae brief supporting the plaintiffs in Baker v. Carr. The case was argued once in April 1961 and re-argued in October. In between, Cox was subjected to an unpleasant onslaught by Frankfurter at a public dinner and relentless questions in the October argument. When the decision was announced, however, Frankfurter was joined by only Harlan, the result was 6-2. The first case proved far easier than he expected. The holding was relatively narrow, simply providing federal court jurisdiction, and followed the points in Cox's brief. But Cox had much more difficulty with the follow up cases, because he could not persuade himself that history or legal theory would demand a one-man-one-vote standard in all cases. He 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. As Chief Justice Warren's clerk later told him "all the Chief did was take your brief and turn it upside down and write exceptions to the one-person one-vote that covered all the cases that you had attempted to exclude by this complicated formula."

Politics, justice and law

In 1962 the Court would change when two vacancies occurred, involving the seats of tow conservative judges, both evidently victims of Baker v. Carr. Shortly after learning the result of that case in March 1962, Cox was advised that Justice Charles Evans Whittaker announced his resignation. Cox wrote a letter of regret. The judge promptly phoned Cox, invited him to his chambers and advised him that the agony of deciding the first reapportionment case "just about killed me." The next month Justice Frankfurter had a stroke. When Cox visited him, after his retirement in August, Frankfurter "murmured—he couldn’t speak altogether clearly, but he had murmured something that seemed to say it was the government’s position, my argument in Baker and Carr, that brought on his first stroke and led to his forced retirement." Whatever the cause, the President had two vacancies to fill, and Cox was at least a logical candidate. Cox's name was on the short list for the first vacancy, but Kennedy wanted to get ahead of the momentum for a conservative pick that Southern Democrats mounted and promptly selected Deputy Attorney General Byron White, largely on the ground that he was not a narrow Harvard academic, which Kennedy felt had characterized too many of his recent appointments. As for the later choice, the President initially proposed Freund to replace Frankfurter, but Robert Kennedy argued that Freund had refused the appointment that Cox took and since Cox "had done a fine job" he deserved the appointment more than Freund. In the end the President felt constrained to appoint a Jew to the "Brandeis-Frankfurter" seat, and appointed Arthur Goldberg. As for Freund and Cox, the President told Schlesinger: "I think we'll have time for everybody." Shortly after White had been appointed, Cox attended a dinner at which retired Justice Stanley Reed told Phyllis: "Too bad Archie will never become a justice, … It’s like a pendulum; it swings back and forth. If it swings out and hits you when it swings in your direction, then you are named to the Court. If it swings in your direction, but doesn’t get there, it never swings further on a later occasion, so you never get it." Cox said taking this to heart saved him much "hoping and anguishing."

Archibald Cox was the only person in the Justice Department who had a personal relationship with the President (other than his brother the Attorney General). Kennedy occasionally used the relationship to engage Cox directly on legal issues of interest to him. Among such issues were legal issues in legislation providing for low interest loans for construction of religious schools, wage and price controls during the steel price increase in 1962, research in connection with the interference of government officials with the admission of James Meredith into University of Mississippi and resolution of the "mudlumps" issue between the federal government and Mississippi. Robert Kennedy frequently told the story of the time the President called to ask for a legal opinion. The Attorney General said he would get right on it, but the President replied: "I said I wanted a legal opinion … Get Archie Cox on it."

The relationship between Cox and Robert Kennedy grew close over time. Cox, like many others, believed that Robert, who graduated in the middle of his class at Virginia Law School and had never practiced at all, had insufficient qualifications for the office. Cox's qualms went further back, to the time of his support for the McClellan "bill of rights" for union members. But with time he grew to trust and admire Robert. Robert for his part always remained respectful and deferential to Cox on matters of law. He never ordered Cox to take a position before the Supreme Court, but often would subtly "lobby" him. By calling repeated meetings where Justice staff could air their opinions, he pushed Cox towards the one-man-one-vote position in the reapportionment cases, for example. Kennedy never convinced Cox to ask the Court to overrule the Civil Rights Cases and the doctrine of state action, but circumstances moved the President and Attorney General to seek a legislative solution.

1963 was a time of increasing violence in the South against African-Americans, as segregationists mounted ever more dogged resistance. The Administration decided to turn from its policy of relying on individual voting rights and desegregation lawsuits accompanied by executive orders and appointments to a push for civil rights legislation. On February 28, Kennedy proposed his first civil rights bill which included "timid measures" to secure voting rights. Southern Democrats filibustered the bill in the Senate. After Governor Wallace's attempt to prevent integration of the University of Alabama by standing in the schoolhouse door on June 11, Kennedy made civil rights a moral crusade and had legislation ready to introduce in the House by June 19. A central provision was public accommodations. The President and the Attorney General closely managed the bill. Cox had no role in drafting the legislation, but supported it publicly. On November 20, Cox attended the Justice Department birthday party for Robert Kennedy. During the celebration the Attorney General made a long self-deprecating speech about all the problems he had "solved." Cox told Ramsey Clark that he thought it signaled Kennedy's decision to leave the department (from exhaustion and disillusionment) and predicted he would be gone by the next month. Two days later the President was assassinated in Dallas.

Under the new President

Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach took over for the grief-stricken Attorney General. The first request of the acting Attorney General was that Cox accompany him to see the Chief Justice and request him to head a commission to investigate the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Cox was reluctant, believing that Warren should refuse the request, because it would have adverse impact on the Court. He agreed but asked that Katzenbach not have him try to persuade the Chief Jusitce. In the end Warren declined the request, and the two Justice employees left. Within an hour the President called and requested him to meet. Warren capitulated. He said in 1969 that because of it, it became "the unhappiest year of my life."

The civil rights legislation which Kennedy was unable to see pass during his lifetime received the needed momentum from his death and the legislative skill of President Johnson. In 1964 the public accommodations bill passed as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The obvious constitutional attack on the legislation was its constitutionality under the Fourteenth Amendment because it sought to regulate conduct which was not "state action." 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. Although both John and Robert Kennedy questioned the optics of using the Commerce Clause, they did not object. Cox had no difficulty having the Court uphold the statute on that basis when he argued the cases in October.

After a landslide election victory, Johnson used his State of the Union address in January 1965 to, among other things, promise a voting rights act. It was Cox who developed the first draft. The mechanism devised by 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. In such cases the burden was shifted to the state to prove nondiscriminatory intent. This mechanism remained the heart of the legislation throughout the legislative process. Both Ramsey Clark and Nicholas Katzenbach admired the mechanism for its legal craftsmanship and statecraft (because it avoided the need to prove intent to discriminate). Before the bill was submitted to Congress Cox answered a question in Court which was used by nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson to embarrass Cox before the new President. On January 28, Cox urged the Supreme Court to reverse a lower court decision which held that the federal government had no power to sue a state alleging violation of the Fifteenth Amend by discriminatory devices aimed at African-Americans. Cox argued the narrow ground that the government had such power. When the Court expressly asked Cox whether he was asking the Court to strike down the statutes, Cox answered that he was not, only that the case be remanded to the three-court panel. The Court's opinion, delivered on March 8, highlighted this exchange in such a way that some inferred that Cox passed up a golden opportunity. Pearson's column stated that Cox had cost the civil rights movement two years in litigation, and for that he point blank suggested that Johnson replace Cox as solicitor general.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 mooted that case, and Cox would go on to defend the legislation successfully before the Court, but he did so as a private attorney. In the summer after Johnson's victory Cox offered his resignation in order that Johnson might pick his own Solicitor General if he chose. Although Cox dearly loved the job, he overrode Katzenbach's strong objections. Johnson accepted the resignation on June 25, 1965.

Return to Harvard

In 1965, Cox returned to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor, teaching a course in current constitutional law and a section in criminal law. He was soon named the first recipient of the Samuel Williston chair. Although he would occasionally write on labor law, his interest now seemed constitutional law and the role of law in society. Many on the left, however, saw his approach to the Constitution as narrowly legalistic, temOprizing and seen from the vantage of the privileged few. A paper he presented to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1965 was published in 1967 in a book with papers by Mark DeWolfe Howe and J.R. Wiggins called Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts, consisting of papers delivered to the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1965 and published in book form in 1967. Cox's contribution, "Direct Action, Civil Disobedience and the Constitution," argued that "direct action" in violation of a "plainly valid" law (as opposed to a plainly unconstitutional law) are impermissible. In the midst of anti-war, anti-Establishment, militant civil rights and other upheavals of the last 1960s Cox's proposition seemed naive, gradualist and out-of-touch. One reviewer called it "an anachronism even before its publication." Consisting only of "pious wishes," said another. The conception of Cox as the ivory tower liberal. more concerned with the sanctity of the law than the concerns those oppressed was crystallized by Victor Navasky's 1971 Kennedy Justice, which was largely based on unnamed Justice Department lawyers and two institutional civil rights attorneys of a tentative, unsympathetic Cox requiring the constant nudging of Kennedy to make "grudging" and "inch-by-inch" movements away from his initially conservative positions in civil rights and reapportionment cases.

Neither a politician nor a bureaucratic infighter, Cox never responded to public criticism. He confined himself to teaching and hi outside, mostly pro bono activities. Shortly after leaving the government, he represented the plaintiff in Shapiro v. Thompson, in which he persuaded the Court to strike down a Connecticut waiting period of one year before new residents could receive AFDC benefits as an undue burden on the "right to travel." He consulted with Robert Kennedy, now Senator from New York, on labor issues, particularly the New York transit strike of 1966. Cox had been proposed by Mayor John Lindsay as a member of a panel to mediate the dispute but the transit union objected to him (and nine others) on the ground that he had no experience in transit matters. At the beginning of 1966 Cox was a member of an panel to mediate a dispute etween the NCAA and the AAU over control of amateur athletics in the United sStates. Lindsay appointed Cox the head of a three-man fact-finding panel to investigate the background of the New York City teachers' demands. The panel's work came to nothing" the teachers struck in violation of the Taylor Law, and Cox was stuck paying $1,000 to rent the hall which the city failed to reimburse.

When it came to politics, Cox did not always side with Democrats. In 1966 he arranged a reception for Republican Lieutenant Governor Elliot Richardson at the Harvard Faculty Cub which resulted in a number of other prominent Kennedy aides from Harvard supporting his bid for state attorney general. When it came to Robert Kennedy's bid for the Democratic nomination for President in 1968, however, Cox was an early and prominent supporter.

Cox did not participate in Kennedy's primary campaign. Instead he found himself examining a real life instance of direct action against valid laws—the Columbia student uprising in April of 1968. Two and a half weeks after the students of Columbia occupied the buildings which housed the college administration and the office of the President (April 23) and a week and a half after the violent police response which ousted them (April 30), Cox was called by Columbia labor law professor Michael Sovern, a member of a self-selected ad hoc committee of faculty who, filling the vacuum created by the absence of president Grayson Kirk, intervened to calm the situation, requesting Cox to head a panel to investigate the causes of the upheaval.

A month into the panel's work Cox learned that Senator Kennedy had been assassinated. He would travel to Washington to speak of his grief in front of his former colleagues at the Justice Department: "We walk down the corridors and nothing has changed, but inside our hearts there is an aching emptiness. Our leader is gone and nothing is the same," he said.

After taking evidence, Cox worked all summer and even up to the panel's deadline drafting what would become the 222-page report, published on October 5. While the student conduct was criticized, the report treated illegal or violent actions as attributable to a small minority. Instead, the greater part of the blame was laid at the feet of the authorities. The administration acted in an "authoritarian manner," and the faculty, cut out of administration, was characterized by "aloofness." As for the school's priorities, the administration "all too regularly put the students' problems at the bottom." Columbia's relations with its poor and largely minority neighbors was characterized by "indifference" and bordered on callous with findings that it harassed tenants to drive them out. The report criticizing the administration's lack of a plan to deal with the disturbances, relying instead on "evasive improvisation." The panel in general praised the ad hoc committee of faculty but concluded it had waited too long to call the police to retake one building. The "group brutality'" of the police "caused violence on a harrowing scale." Cox wrote that even though students had initiated violence or committed crimes did "not excuse or even mitigate the blame resting on the police."

Back in Cambridge, Cox assured the faculty that owing to the facts that Harvard was not located in a densely packed urban environment and that Harvard had institutionalized practices that encouraged student-faculty communication he did not believe that such an uprising would occur at Harvard. The following Spring, however, brought student unrest which would plague Harvard for the next three years. On April 9, 1969, students protesting the presence of ROTC on campus took over University Hall. That night Harvard president Nathan Pusey determined to use the police to dislodge the occupants. The next day 400 state and local police in riot gear (some having removed their badges), forcibly removed the students, beating and kicking them, injuring 41 (including the education editor of Life magazine) and arresting 191 (including a Washington Post reporter). A meeting of 1,500 students and faculty that day called for a boycott of classes. The rumor spread on campus that Cox advised the use of police, because it appeared similar to the criticism of the ad hoc committee's failure to do so in the Cox panel report. Cox avoided public statements.

Although a substantial number of the faculty organized in opposition to President Pusey's actions, Cox found himself aligned with the administration and assigned various tasks to enforce order including becoming the university's prosecutor against students before the disciplinary body called the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities. In the fall of 1969 student protests began to revolve around the Center for International Affairs for its connection to American defense interests and its co-founder (with Henry Kissinger) Robert Bowie (for whom Cox's daughter Sally worked). Pusey asked Cox to head a committee (made up of faculty with military or law enforcement backgrounds) to deal with student disturbances. Through this committee Cox became the university's troubleshooter on student unrest. Cox was thus forced to make improvised decisions on when to evacuate buildings as a result of bomb threats, how to handle students mobs and when to use the police. During the period through 1972 when disturbances gradually ceased, Cox saw one commencement interrupted by protests, one bombing of the Center for International Affairs (injuring no one), one old building burned (in which a fireman was uninjured, for which Cox and the university were sued). Cox received national attention for his role in one incident. On March 26, 1971 a "counter teach-in" was organized by conservative students to feature pro-war speaker. Anti-war demonstrators arrived to drown out the speeches. Cox took the microphone to appeal for tolerance and to note the virtues of free speech, but at the end left with the speakers through an underground passage after telling the demonstrators of the "disciplinary action that will surely follow." When he testified at the hearing he admitted that it was "self-deception" to think he could quiet the crowd. He nevertheless was lauded for the attempt by conservatives. John P. Roche's nationally syndicated column, comparing the demonstrators to Nazis, called his attempt "noble." Chief Justice Warren E. Burger also told Cox's biographer that was one of the most memorable defenses of freedom of speech in "modern times."

In 1972 student unrest all but disappeared, and Cox was able to devote his outside professional attention to an investigation on behalf of a select committee of the state legislature concerning appropriate discipline of a state judge. Beyond the findings in the specific case, Cox recommended the development of a written judicial code of ethics.

Watergate special prosecutor

Watergate scandal
Watergate complex
Events
List Timeline Nixon White House tapes Operation Sandwedge Operation Gemstone 1972 U.S. presidential election Presidency of Richard Nixon "Saturday Night Massacre" "White House horrors" United States v. Nixon Resignation speech Inauguration of Gerald Ford
People
Watergate burglars Bernard Barker Virgilio Gonzalez Eugenio Martínez James W. McCord, Jr. Frank Sturgis
Groups Master list of Nixon's political opponents Nixon's Enemies List Watergate Babies Watergate Seven White House Plumbers
CRP Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP) Fred LaRue Jeb Stuart Magruder Robert Mardian John N. Mitchell Kenneth Parkinson Hugh W. Sloan, Jr. Maurice Stans
White House President Richard Nixon Alexander Butterfield Charles Colson John Dean John Ehrlichman Gerald Ford H. R. Haldeman E. Howard Hunt Egil Krogh G. Gordon Liddy Gordon C. Strachan Rose Mary Woods
Judiciary Archibald Cox Leon Jaworski John Sirica
Journalists Carl Bernstein Bob Woodward The Washington Post
Intelligence community Mark Felt aka "Deep Throat" L. Patrick Gray Richard Helms James R. Schlesinger
Congress Howard Baker Sam Ervin Peter W. Rodino U.S. Senate Watergate Committee

Main article: Watergate scandal

Terms of engagement

Cox was at Berkeley on May 16, 1973, when Secretary of Defense Elliott 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. Cox had woken up that morning, the day before his 61st birthday, without hearing in his right ear (a condition his doctor would tell him a few days later was permanent), which tempered his enthusiasm for the job and perhaps made Richardson willing to make more concessions to obtain his consent. Richardson, for his part, was getting "desperate" according to his aide John T. Smith. It was clear that the Senate would make the appointment of a Special Prosecutor a condition of Richardson's confirmation. Richardson's staff had prepared a list of 100 candidates. Richardson did not recall how many he had contacted before Cox. Given their mutual respect over two days of phone conversations Richardson was able to satisfy Cox's concern over independence, and Richardson reduced it to writing.

The resulting "compact" was extraordinary even under the circumstances. The scope was "all offenses arising out of the 1972 election …involving the President, the White House staff or presidential appointments." It was thus not limited to "Watergate." The assumption of responsibility was left to the discretion of the Special Prosecutor, who also had sole discretion to decide "whether and to what extent he will inform or consult with the attorney general" on any matter being investigated. The Wite House thus lost its access to the investigation. And the Special Prosecutor was granted the right to discuss his findings and progress with the press at his discretion. And Cox could be dismissed only by Richardson and only for "extraordinary improprieties"—a standard virtually impossible to meet. The importance of the selection to Richardson's nomination was highlighted by the fact that he brought Cox along to his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democratic Whip Senator Robert Byrd asked Cox if he needed broader authority. Cox replied that he already had "the whip hand." Cox said that the only restraint the President or the Justice Department had over him was to fire him. He also vowed that he would follow the evidence even if it led "to the oval office." Richardson was confirmed.

The reaction

The President was publicly welcomed the selection and, consistent with his new public relations offensive, commended Richardson's "determination" to get to the bottom of the affair. Privately, Nixon seethed with anger. In his memoir he said: "If Richardson searched specifically for the man whom I least trusted, he could hardly have done better." Richardson, however, thought he had the best man for the job, because once Cox cleared the president there would be no hint that he colluded with Nixon or even that he was sympathetic. Richardson had perhaps been misled about what his assignment was when the President instructed him the night Kleindienst was dismissed to "get to the bottom of it" "no matter who it hurts." Richardson was to "stand firm" only on two issues: Presidential conversations were to remain privileged and national security matters were not to be investigates. Otherwise "I don't give a Goddam what it is—Mitchell, Stans—anybody." If there were any doubt, the President insisted to Richardson: "You've got to believe I didn't know anything."

Official Washington, however, was skeptical; Cox, they thought, would be ineffective; he was "too soft—not nasty enough." James Doyle, a Washington Star reporter who would later become the chief press advisor for Cox's group, described his own first reaction to meeting Cox: "Prosecutors re supposed to have the instincts of a shark; this one semed more like a dolphin." That he was insufficiently attuned to the politics of his situation was on show when he invited to his swearing in Senator Ted Kennedy, the one Democrat that Nixon loathed and feared. as well as Robert Kennedy's widow, had it take place in his old solicitor general's office and had his old boss, President Roosevelt's Solicitor General Charles Fahy administer the oath. It convinced Nixon that Cox saw his job as to bring down the President. Nixon now regarded him as a 'partisan viper." Not long afterwards, Cox offended Senate Democrats by revealing at a press conference a letter requesting Senator Sam Ervin to cancel or at least postpone the Senate Watergate hearings so that he could familiarize himself with the proceedings. Ervin told the press: "Professor Cox's request is extraordinarily arrogant."

Staffing up

After he was sworn in on May 25, 1973, Cox returned to Cambridge where he recruited two professors, James Vorenberg and Philip Heymann, to join his staff. The three arrived in Washington on May 29. Cox was faced with reports that the team of federal prosecutors under Earl J. Silbert were about to resign unless given a vote of confidence. Cox appealed to their sense of professionalism without comment on how the case was handled. A bigger problem was Silbert's boss, Henry E. Petersen, a career FBI/Justice Department employee appointed Assistant Attorney General by Nixon, who had regular meetings with Nixon, but would only provide vague descriptions to Cox and point blank refused to turn over his memorandum of one such a meeting, claiming executive privilege on behalf of Nixon.

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 trial cases after indictments. He persuaded James F. Neal, the U.S. 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. Neal would stay to the end, at the end of each promised period promising only a few more weeks, and he became Cox's number two man, picked to be the chief trial attorney. Vorenberg became the number three and spent much of the early period recruiting lawyers. Vorenberg divded the mission into five task forces: The first to sign on was Thomas F. McBride who would head up the task force on campaign contributions and would obtain the conviction of George Steinbrenner William Merril would head up the Plumbers task force. Richard J. Davis would handle the task force investigating "dirty tricks." Joseph J. Connolly headed up the force investigating the ITT antitrust settlement. James Neal headed the largest group, the Watergate task force, which dealt with the cover up and included Geroge Frampton, Richard Ben-Veniste and Jill Wine Volner. Henry S. Ruth became Cox's deputy and Phil Lacovara became Cox's counsel. With a view toward establishing better relations with the press, Cox designated James Doyle his spokesman.

Joining issue

The Special Prosecutor's office not only had to catch up with the federal prosecutors. The Senate Watergate committee was in competition for Dean's testimony and leaks suggested they were about to get it. On June 3, published reports said that Dean would testify that he had spoken to the President about Watergate 35 times. On The next day the Deputy White House spokesman admitted that the two spoke frequently, but insisted that the discussions were in furtherance of the President's new determination to get to the bottom of the scandal. The spokesman admitted there were logs of all such conversations, but that they would not be turned over on the ground that they were covered by "executive privilege." Before Cox could litigate the issue of executive privilege and his entitlement ot the documents, he had to fashion a reasonably specific subpoena that might be enforced in court. But he had no idea how the White House files were organized, so he scheduled a meeting with the President's counsel on June 6 to discuss his documents requests.

The President's new defense team, made up of one-time Democrat Leonard Garment, University of Texas constitutinal law professor Charles Alan Wright and Nixon true believer J. Fred Buzhardt. 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. Vorenberg added a request for all longs between the President and keey aides from June 1972 to May 1973. Buzhardt said that only the President could determine what he would produce. Garment and Write argued about executive privilege, which Write said appolied not only to Presidential documents but those of his aides such as Haldeman and Ehrlichman. As for the tape of the April 15 Dean meeting Buzhardt suggested it was not a tape of the meeting but rather the Prsidnt's later tape about the meeting that was referred to. No resolution was arrived at, but the President's laweyers did not reject the requests outright.

That summer, Cox learned with the rest of America about the secret taping system installed in the White House on orders from President Richard M. Nixon. During the next few months, Cox, the United States Senate Watergate Committee, and U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica struggled with the Nixon Administration over whether Nixon could be compelled to yield those tapes in response to a grand jury subpoena.

When Sirica ordered Nixon to comply with the committee's and Cox's demands, the President offered Cox a compromise: instead of producing the tapes, he would allow the Senator John Stennis (a Democrat from Mississippi) to listen to the tapes, with the help of a transcript prepared for him by the White House, and Stennis would then prepare summaries of the tapes' contents. Cox rejected this compromise on Friday, October 19, 1973. On Saturday, October 20, 1973, Cox held a press conference to explain his decision.

That evening, in an event dubbed the Saturday Night Massacre by journalists, President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to dismiss Cox. Rather than comply with this order, Attorney General Richardson resigned, leaving his second-in-command, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus in charge of the Justice Department. Ruckelshaus likewise refused to dismiss Cox, and he, too, resigned. These resignations left Solicitor General Robert Bork as the highest-ranking member of the Justice Department; insisting that he believed the decision unwise but also that somebody had to obey the President's orders, Bork dismissed Cox. Bork also considered submitting his resignation, but Richardson and Ruckelshaus dissuaded him from resigning, arguing that Bork had to remain in office to ensure continuity of the administration of the Justice Department. Upon being dismissed, Cox stated, "whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people to decide." His successor as special prosecutor was Leon Jaworski, named by Bork.

Front page of the New York Times, October 21, 1973, announcing the Saturday Night Massacre amid mounting tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union over possible armed conflict in the Middle East.

After his firing Cox took his case, founded on his deep belief in the rule of law and how a constitutional republic should work, directly to the American people. Speaking with gravity and humility, Cox resembled a kindly grandfather speaking of one's duty. Cox's colleague and friend Philip Heymann described the address:

President Nixon asked the country to understand his firing an honest prosecutor so that he could get on with national security business. 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. 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. The people and the Congress rallied to the cause of a professor who, without a hint of anger, spoke mildly about our history and principles, and who made clear that what would happen to him was not an issue. After that the executive was again bound by the laws that make men free, and Archie became a national symbol of the triumph of law.

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. Fifteen days later Nixon announced his decision to resign as President effective the next day. August 8, 1974. Many legal experts outside of the United States were shocked at how legal process, particularly one issued at the request of a subordinate official, could require the head of state to do anything. Cox wrote of one scholar who said: "It is unthinkable that the courts of any country should issue an order to its Chief of State." Cox spent much of the rest of his career writing on the place of the Court in the American system of government.

The whole affair suggested to Congress the need for a law providing for the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate crimes, where the Executive had a conflict of interest or the appearance of one. Ultimately, Congress enacted a law to provide for a procedure appointing independent counsels, a statute that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 1986. This statute, which had an expiration date inserted on its original enactment, expired without renewal.

Post-Watergate career

Cox also returned to Harvard Law School, where he taught constitutional law and a seminar on the First Amendment for many years. Before he had gone to Washington in 1973, he had a reputation as a tough and sometimes harsh teacher, but after his return, he had a reputation as a humorous, considerate, and gentle teacher who won the admiration and affectionate regard of his students. After he retired from Harvard, he received a special appointment to the faculty of Boston University School of Law. In 1974 he spent a year at the University of Cambridge as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions.

Cox also continued his career as an expert appellate advocate. In 1976, Cox argued Buckley v. Valeo before the Supreme Court; at issue in this case was the constitutionality of post-Watergate legislation establishing public financing for presidential election campaigns. The Court upheld most of the provisions of the campaign finance law, giving Cox a significant victory. During 1977 and 1978, Cox also argued the case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke before the Court, defending the University of California at Davis medical school's affirmative action system of admissions against constitutional challenge. The Justices divided, with four voting to end the system as invalid under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 without any need to reference the constitutional issue, and four voting to uphold affirmative action as constitutional; Justice Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote, referencing the constitutional issue and holding that in some cases race could be deemed a valid factor in admissions to institutions of higher education.

In 1979, when a vacancy opened on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (which includes Cox's home state of Massachusetts), Senator Edward M. Kennedy proposed Cox for the vacancy. This proposal from the senior senator of the state most affected by the choice of judge ordinarily would have won Cox the appointment, but the administration of President Jimmy Carter resisted the choice since Cox had not supported Carter for President, and ultimately Cox was not appointed to the vacancy.

In 1980 Cox was elected chairman of Common Cause, the 230,000 member citizens' lobby, as successor to John W. Gardner. Cox wrote that "[t]challenge was to reshape the machinery of self-government … so that every citizen knows that he or she can participate and that his or her participation counts … ." a major public-interest organization advocating . That same year he also became the founding chairman of the Health Effects Institute, a partnership between the Environmental Protection Agency and private automobile and truck manufacturers to study the effects of emissions from motor vehicles. Cox said that the organization was designed to take the testing and scientific research concerning the health effects of this type of pollution "out of the adversarial context."

In 1980 Cox participated in a BBC program entitled Partners in Law: Lord Scarman and Archibald Cox in Conversation in which Cox and Law Lord Leslie Scarman discussed issues of individual liberties and government limitations.

After teaching for two years past Harvard's mandatory retirement age, Cox was forced to retire from the Harvard Law faculty at the end of the 1983-84 school year. Cox wry said: "I won't be allowed to teach anymore. I'm presumed to be senile." He then accepted a teaching position at Boston University School of Law.

Family life and death

Cox's life with Phyllis and his children was almost entirely separate from his professional career. Phyllis herself had been a promising student at Smith, having spent her junior year in Paris, she planned on teaching French. She was to attend graduate school at the University of Vermont, but in 1935, her parents' divorce and the publicized death of her brother in the yachting accident left her mother distraught, and Phyllis promised to postpone school to live with her mother on their farm in Weyland, Massachusetts. After their marriage Phyllis accommodated her life to Cox's career and their children, Sarah ("Sally") (b. 1939), Archibald, Jr. (b. 1940) and Phyllis (b. 1945). But the storied background of her ancestors on both sides in legal academics helped Cox at crucial points in his career. When they lived in Virginia during the war, they were neighbors to Phyllis's Smith classmate, who she knew there as Jane Dahlman. Through her, Cox was able to commute to and from Washington with her husband Harold Ickes, who gave Cox an insiders' view of federal politics and gave him the practical advice that he should develop his own network rather than remain in Washington to become a career bureaucrat.

When the Coxes returned to Massachusetts, they were able to live on the family farm in Wayland, Phyllis's mother having remarried and moved to California and her father having provided her ownership of the farm. This gave Cox the freedom to choose to teach without so much worry for money. The Wayland farm played a part in Cox's offer from Harvard Law School. Professor Austin Scott had been a long time friend of the Ames family and had lunch on Sundays with them in Wayland. Cox got to know him through Phyllis. After they returned from Washington, Scott continued having Sunday lunch there, and it was there that Scott first brought up the idea to Cox of teaching at Harvard. Cox himself also suspected that the fact that Phyllis's grandfather was famous law school dean James Barr Ames had something to do with the offer.

After he became a faculty member, Cox kept his professional life and family life separate. Cox often seemed unapproachable to colleagues, never had particularly close friends on the faculty and he never entertained, even later when he was Solicitor General or Special Prosecutor. The Wayland farm was a real working farm under Phyllis's guidance, and even Cox himself had chores including pitching hay or digging squash. They would buy a summer farm in Maine where Phyllis would take the children and Archie would spend weekends during the summer.

Cox would took an interest local Wayland affairs. In 1950 he was elected to the Wayland Board of Assessors. In 1958 Cox was elected to the Wayland Board of Selectmen. Having lost the previous election, this one was largely the result of Kennedy's warm welcome to Cox during a Senate campaign stop in Wayland. Cox outpolled his incumbent opponent nearly 3-1.

Cox spent much time away lecturing, at arbitrations and various government tasks. Often Archie and Phyllis would be apart, so that the children would not be uprooted, and they came to accept it. But Cox's letters throughout his life always showed a deep affection for his wife.

Cox died at his home in Brooksville, Maine, of natural causes. (By a quirk of fate, Sam Dash, chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices during the Watergate scandal, died the same day.) Phyllis and Archie had been married for 67 years. At the time of his death his daughter Sarah (in business management) lived in Brooksville, Archibald, Jr. (who broke with family tradition and entered finance rather than law) in Markleville, Indiana and Phyllis (who became a lawyer) in Denver. At the time he had several grandchildren and great grandchildren. Phyllis died on February 6, 2007.

Honors

Chaired and University Professorships

During his career at Harvard, Professor Cox was honored with the following chaired or university professorships:

• 1958-1961, Royall Professor, Harvard Law School
• 1965-1976, Williston Professor, Harvard Law School
• 1976-1984, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard University
• 1984-his death, Carl M. Loeb University, Professor, Emeritus, Harvard University

Honorary Degrees

Throughout his life Cox was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, including: M.A.: Sidney Sussex College, University Cambridge, England 1974; L.H.D.: Hahnemann Medical College, Philadelphia, 1980; LL.D: Loyola University Chicago, 1964, University of Cincinnati, 1967, University of Denver, 1974, Amherst College, 1974, Rutgers, 1974, Harvard University, 1975, Michigan State, 1976, Wheaton College, 1977, Northeastern University, 1978, Clark, 1980, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1981, University of Notre Dame, 1983, University of Illinois, 1985, Claremont Graduate School, 1987, Colby College, 1988.

Honorary Societies

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

• Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955.
• Delivered the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration during the literary exercises before commencement in June 1974
• Elected member of the American Philosophical Society in 1980. Member of the Committee on Phillips Prize 1982–88.
• Awarded Outstanding Scholar Award by the American Bar Foundation in 1993.

Other Honors

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

After he resigned his faculty position at Harvard and until he returned in 1965, Cox served as a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers.

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.

In 1995 the Institute of Government and Public Affairs awarded Cox its Ethics in Government Award. Cox was also the recipient of the Thomas "Tip" O'Neill Citizenship Award.

On January 8, 2001, Cox was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Bill Clinton, saying: "Archibald Cox, every American, whether he or she knows your name or not, owes you a profound debt of thanks for a lifetime of your service to your country and its Constitution."

Select Publications

Books

• Cases on Labor Law. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Foundation Press. 1948. LCCN 48004767.  (This casebook was periodically updated by Foundation Press. The latest edition is the 15th in 2011, which also has as authors: Derek Curtis Bok, Robert A. Gorman, Matthew W. Finkin.)
• Law and the National Labor Policy. Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California. 1960. LCCN 60063285. 
• The Warren Court: Constitutional Decision as an Instrument of Reform. Cambridge, Massachutts: Harvard University Press. 1968. LCCN 68021971.  (Lectures originally given in shorter form at a summer school conducted in Honolulu in 1967.)
• Cox, Archibald; Howe, Mark DeWolfe; Wiggins, J.R. (1967). Civil Rights, the Constitution, and the Courts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. LCCN 67020874. 
• Bar Association of India Lectures. New Delhi: Bar Association of India. 1981. 
• 'The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government. London, New York: Oxford Universityi Press. 1977. ISBN 0198274114. 
• 'The Court and the Constitution. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin. 1987. ISBN 0395379334. 
• Norman Dorsen, ed. (1989). The Evolving Constitution: Essays on the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Supreme Court. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.  (Forward by Cox.)

Journal Articles

• "Some Aspects of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947". Harvard Law Review 61 (1): 1–49. November 1947.  61 (2): 274-315. January 1947.
• "Judge Learned Hand and the Interpretation of Statutes". Harvard Law Review 60 (3): 370–93. February 1947. 
• "The Influence of Mr. Justice Murphy on Labor Law". Michigan Law Review 48 (6): 767–810. April 1950. 
• Cox, Archibald; Dunlop, John T. (January 1950). "Regulation of Collective Bargaining by the National Labor Relations Board". Harvard Law Review 63 (3): 389–432. 
• Cox, Archibald; Dunlop, John T. (May 1950). "The Duty to Bargain Collectively During the Term of an Existing Agreement". Harvard Law Review 63 (7): 1097–1133. 
• Cox, Archibald; Seidman, Marshall J. (December 1950). "Federalism and Labor Relations". Harvard Law Review 64 (2): 211–45. 
• "The Right to Engage in Concerted Activities". Indiana Law Journal 28 (3): 319–48. Spring 1951. 
• "Strikes, Picketing and the Constitution". Vanderbilt Law Review 4 (3): 574–602. April 1951. 
• "Legal Aspects of Labor Arbitration in New England". Arbitration Journal 8 (1): 5–20. 1953. 
• "Government Regulation of the Negotiation and Terms of Collective Agreement: An address". University of Pennsylvania Law Review 101 (8): 1137–1153. June 1953. 
• "Revision of the Taft-Hartley Act". West Virginia Law Review 55 (2): 91–109. June 1953. 
• "The New Wage Stabilization Board". Proceedings of the Labor Relations Section, San Francisco, September 16–17, 1953 (Chicago: American Bar Association): 20–41. 1953. 
• "The Role of Law in Labor Disputes". Cornell Law Quarterly 39 (4): 592–610. Summer 1954. 
• "Grievance Arbitration in the Federal Courts". Harvard Law Review 67 (4): 591–607. February 1954. 
• "Federal Preemption of the Law of Labor Relations". The Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference on Labor, New York University (Albany: Matthew Bender and Co., New York University): 1–27. 1955. 
• "Labor and Antitrust Laws: A Preliminary Analysis". University of Pennsylvania Law Review 104 (2): 252–84. November 1955. 
• "Some Lawyers' Problems in Grievance Arbitrations". Minnesota Law Review 40 (1): 41–59. December 1955. 
• "Rights Under a Labor Agreement". Harvard Law Review 69 (4): 601–57. February 1956. 
• "Law and the Future: Labor Management Relations". Northwestern University Law Review 51 (2): 240–57. May 1956. 
• "The Legal Nature of Collective Bargaining Agreements". Temple Law Quarterly 30 (1): 1–36. Fall 1956. 
• "Labor-Management Relations Law in the Supreme Court October Term, 1955". Proceedings of the Section of Labor Relations Law, Dallas, August 27–28, 1956 (Chicago: American Bar Center): 5–29. 1956. 
• "Labor Law and the American Constitution". University of Queensland Law Journal 3 (1): 5–22. December 1956. 
• "The Duty of Fair Representation". Villanova Law Review 2 (2): 151–77. January 1957. 
• "Current Problems in the Law of Grievance Arbitration". Rocky Mountain Law Review 30 (3): 247–66. April 1958. 
• "The Duty to Bargain in Good Faith". Harvard Law Review 71 (8): 1401–42. June 1958. 
• "The Labor Decisions of the Supreme Court at the October Term 1957". Proceedings of the Section of Labor Relations Law, Los Angeles, August 25–26, 1958 (Chicago: American Bar Center): 12–44. 1958. 
• "The Labor Decisions of the Supreme Court at the October Term, 1957". Virginia Law Review 44 (7): 1057–92. 1958. 
• "Labor Unions and the Public Interest". Marquette Law Review 42 (1): 2–6, 28–35. Summer 1958. 
• "Review of Labor Union Monopoly by Donald R. Richberg". Minnesota Law Review 42 (3): 516–26. January 1958. 
• "The Landrum-Griffin Amendments to the National Labor Relations Act.". Minnesota Law Review 44 (2): 257–74. January 1959. 
• "Uses and Abuses of Union Power". Notre Dame Lawyer 35 (5): 624–39. January 1959. 
• "The Role of Law in Preserving Union Democracy". Harvard Law Review 72 (4): 609–44. February 1959. 
• "Reflections Upon Labor Arbitration". Harvard Law Review 72 (8): 1482–1518. June 1959. 
• "Labor Arbitration in New Jersey". Rutgers Law Review 14 (1): 143–84. Fall 1959. 
• "The Major Labor Decisions of the Supreme Court October Term 1958". Proceedings of the Section of Labor Relations Law, Bal Harbour-Miami Beach, August 24–25, 1959 (Chicago: American Bar Center): 23–37. 1959. 
• "Reflections Upon Labor Arbitration in Light of the Lincoln Mills Case". Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting, National Academy of Arbitrators (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs). 1959. 
• "Internal Affairs of Labor Unions under the Labor Reform Act of 1959". Michigan Law Review 58 (6): 819–854. April 1960. 
• "Nature of Supreme Court Litigation". Journal of the American Judicature Society 45 (5): 93–96. October 1961. 
• "Current Constitutional Issues: Reapportionment". Tennessee Law Review 30 (1): 28–35. Fall 1962. 
• "The Supreme Court and the Federal System". California Law Review 50 (5): 800–20. January 1962. 
• "The Supreme Court and the Federal System". New York State Bar Journal 35 (2): 108–24. April 1963. 
• "Poverty and the Legal Profession". Illinois Bar Journal 54 (1): 12–21. September 1965. 
• "The Constitutionality of the Proposed Voting Rights Act of 1965". Houston Law Review 3 (1): 1–10. Spring 1965. 
• "Foreword: Constitutional Adjudication and the Promotion of Human Rights". Harvard Law Review 80 (1): 91–122. November 1966. 
• "Labor and the Antitrust Laws: Pennington and Jewel Tea". Boston University Law Review 46: 317–42. Summer 1966. 
• "Direct Action, Civil Disobedience, and the Constitution". Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 78: 105–19. January 1966. 
• "Chief Justice Earl Warren". Harvard Law Review 83 (1): 1–5. November 1969. 
• "The Role of Congress in Constitutional Determinations". University of Cincinnati Law Review 40 (2): 199–216. Summer 1971. 
• "Labor Law Preemption Revisited". Harvard Law Review 85 (7): 1337–77. May 1972. 
• "More Learned Than Witty [Review of Learned Hand's Court by Marvin Schick]". Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 7 (2): 501–08. March 1972. 
• "Some Reflections on Possible Abuses of Governmental Power". The Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York 28 (9): 811–827. December 1973. 
• "Executive Privilege". University of Pennsylvania Law Review 122 (6): 1383–1438. June 1974. 
• "The Lawyer's Public Responsibilities". Human Rights 4 (1): 1–12. October 1974. 
• "Watergate and the U.S. Constitution". British Journal of Law and Society 2 (1): 1–13. Summer 1975. 
• "The New Dimensions of Constitutional Adjudication". Washington Law Review, 51 (4): 791–829. October 1976. 
• "The Supreme Court and Abortion". The Human Life Review 2 (4): 15–19. Fall 1976. 
• "Federalism and Individual Rights under the Burger Court". Northwestern University Law Review 73 (1): 1–25. March 1978. 
• "The Lawyer's Independent Calling". Kentucky Law Journal 67 (1): 5–26. 1978. 
• "The Effect of the Search for Equality upon Judicial Institutions". Washington University Law Quarterly 1979 (3): 795–816. Summer 1979. 
• "Recent Developments in Federal Labor Law Preemption". Ohio State Law Journal 41 (2): 277–300. 1980. 
• "Foreword: Freedom of Expression in the Burger Court". Harvard Law Review 94 (1): 1–73. November 1980. 
• "Review of Democracy and Distrust, a Theory of Judicial Review, by John Hart Ely". Harvard Law Review 94 (3): 700–16. January 1981. 
• "Constitutional Issues in the Regulation of the Financing of Election Campaigns". Cleveland State Law Review 31 (395): 395–418. 1982. 
• "Congress v. The Supreme Court". Mercer Law Review 33 (3): 707–722. Spring 1982. 
• "Freedom of the Press". University of Illinois Law Review 1983 (1): 3–21. 
• "The Role of the Supreme Court: Judicial Activism or Self-Restraint?". Maryland Law Review 47 (1): 118–38. Fall 1987. 
• "Lawyer Independence". New York State Bar Journal 62 (4): 10–15. May 1990. 
• "Lawyers and the Public Interest". Boston University Public Interest Law Journal 1 (1): 5–14. Winter 1991. 
• "Ethics in Government: The Cornerstone of Public Trust". West Virginia Law Review 94 (2): 281–300. Winter 1991. 
• "Recent Developments in Civil Rights Law". St. Mary's Law Journal 22 (4): 815–27. 1991.  (Presented at the Common Cause 20th Anniversary Celebration at St. Mary's School of Law, San Antonio, Texas, on November 3, 1990.)
• "The Independence of the Judiciary: History and Purposes". University of Dayton Law Review 21 (3): 565–84. Spring 1996. 

Magazine pieces and addresses

• "After Taft-Hartley". Fortune 39 (1): 65. January 1949. 
• "The Role of Law in Labor Disputes". Monthly Labor Review 77 (10): 1113–17. October 1955.  (Excerpted from article in Summer 1954 issue of Cornell Law Quarterly.)
• "Strikes and the Public Interest: A Proposal for New Legislation". Atlantic 205: 48–51. February 1960. 
• "Reflections on a Firestorm". Saturday Review/World: 12–14, 56. March 9, 1974. 
• "The University and Public Life". The New Leader 57 (14): 9–12. July 8, 1974.  (The annual Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Oration, delivered in June 1974.) The speech was reprinted in the Congressional Record at the request of Congressman Richard Bolling of Missouri: "The University and Public Life". Congressional Record 14 (17): 23042–23044. July 11, 1974 – via Google Books. 
• "Government, Politics and the Spirit of America: The Attacks upon Reform Legislation". Vital Speeches of the Day 47 (3): 71. November 15, 1980. 
• "Iranian Arms and Contra Aid: Some Underlying Questions". Vital Speeches of the Day 53 (17): 531. June 15, 1987. 
• "As Legal Scholars See It; Court, Congress, and the Human Life Statute". Christian Science Monitor. June 17, 1981. 
• "First Amendment". Society 24 (1): 8–15. November 1986. 

Sources and further reading

Books

• Clayton, Cornell W. (1992). The Politics of Justice: The Attorney General and the Making of Legal Policy. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe Inc. ISBN 1563240181. 
• Doyle, James (1977). Not Above the Law: The Battles of Watergate Prosecutors Cox and Jaworski. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-03192-7. 
• Emery, Fred (1994). Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Times Books. ISBN 0812923839. 
• Gormley, Ken (1997). Archibald Cox: The Conscience of a Nation. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0201407132. 
• Kutler, Stanley I. (1990). The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0394562348. 
• McAdams, Alan K. (1964). Power and Politics in Labor Legislation. New York: Columbia University Press. LCCN 64011813. 
• Navasky, Victor S. (1971). Kennedy Justice. New York: Atheneum. LCCN 77145633. 
• O'Brien, Michael (2005). John F. Kennedy: A Biography. New York: Thomas Dunne Books (an impression of St. Martin's Press). 
• Pierpaoli, Paul G., Jr. (1999). Truman and Korea: The Political Culture of the Early Cold War. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. p. 214. ISBN 0826212069. 
• Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1978). Robert Kennedy and his Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. LCCN 78008469.  (Two volumes, consecutively paginated.)
• Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1965). A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. LCCN 65020218. 
• Sorensen, Theodore C. (1965). Kennedy. New York: Harper & Row. LCCN 65014660. 

Articles

• Bok, Derek (September 2006). "Archibald Cox" (PDF). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. pp. 461–65. Retrieved March 15, 2016. 
• Cox, Archibald (October 1961). "The Nature of Supreme Court Litigation". Journal of the American Judicature Society 45 (5): 93–96. Retrieved March 28, 2016 – via Heinonline.org.  (Subscription required.)
• Daley, Robert (February 4, 1974). "The Remarkable Jaworski Team". New York Magazine 7 (5): 30–34. Retrieved April 22, 2016. 
• Lake, Anthony (October 19, 1969). "A Talk With Warren On Crime, the Court, the Country". New York Times Magazine: SM34. Retrieved April 17, 2016.  (Subscription required.)
• Spragens, William C. (Winter 1984). "Kennedy Era Speechwriting, Public Relations and Public Opinion". Presidential Studies Quarterly 14 (1): 78–86. 

Oral Histories and interviews

Of Cox

• Collins, Bruce (June 25, 1987). "Career of Archibald Cox". C-SPAN Broadcast. Retrieved March 15, 2016. 
• Hilbink, Thomas (2000). "Interview of Archibald Cox". New York: Columbia University Oral History Research Office. Retrieved March 1, 2016.  Session 1 took place on June 19 and Session 2 the next day. The interviews may be heard using RealPlayer or VCL Media Player. Page citations are to the transcript (PDF).
• Lester, Richard A. (November 25, 1964). "Archibald Cox Oral History Interview" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved March 1, 2016. 

Of others

• Biemiller, Andrew John (March 11, 1965). "Andrew Biemiller, Oral History Interview – JFK#1" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Bolling, Richard W. (November 1, 1965). "Richard W. Bolling, Oral History Interview" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Chayes, Abram (May 18, 1964). "Abram Chayes, Oral History Interview—JFK#1" (PDF). Washington, Doc.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Dash, Sam (November 22, 2002). "Oral History of Samuel Dash (Fourth Interview)" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. Retrieved April 22, 2016. 
• Douglas, John W. (June 11, 1970). "John W. Douglas Oral History Interview – RFK #4" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Edelman, Peter B. (February 13, 1973). "Peter B. Edelman Oral History Interview – RFK #7" (PDF). Newton, Massachusetts: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Enarson, Harold L. (August 5, 1996). "Oral History Interview with Harold L. Enarson". Independence, Missouri: Transcript at Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Mo. Retrieved April 16, 2016. 
• Frankfurter, Felix (June 19, 1964). "Felix Frankfurter Oral History Interview- JFK #2" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Gwirtzman, Milton S. (January 19, 1966). "Milton S. Gwirtzman Oral History Interview – JFK#1" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Heller, Walter, et. al. (August 1, 1964). "Council of Economic Advisers Oral History Interview –JFK#1 (Walter Heller, Kermit Gordon, James Tobin, Gardner Ackley, Paul Samuelson)" (PDF). Fort Ritchie, Maryland: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Lester, Richard A. (December 24, 1970). "Richard A. Lester Oral History Interview—JFK#1" (PDF). Princeton, N.J.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Lester, Richard A. (March 22, 1974). "Richard A. Lester Oral History Interview—JFK#2" (PDF). Princeton, New Jersey: publisher=Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016.  CS1 maint: Missing pipe (link)
• McClure, Stewart E. (March 1, 1983). "Life on the Senate Staff (Interview #5)" (PDF). Oral History Interviews, Senate Historical Office. Washington, D.C.: Senate Historical Office Oral History Project. p. 168. Retrieved April 1, 2016. .
• Marshall, Burke (January 19, 1970). "Burke Marshall Oral History Interview – RFK" (PDF). Bedford, New York: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Sheridan, Walter (June 12, 1970). "Walter Sheridan Oral History Interview—RFK#6" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 
• Silbert, Earl J. (February 29, 1992). "The Honorable Earl J. Silbert Interviewed by William F. Causey" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. Retrieved April 22, 2016. 
• Udall, Stewart L. (January 12, 1970). "Stewart L. Udall Oral History Interview – JFK #1" (PDF). n.p.: Transcript at John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Retrieved April 11, 2016. 

Unsigned Pieces

• Memoir (December 1886). "Charles Callahan Perkins". Proceedings of the American Society of Arts and Sciences. pp. 534–39. Retrieved March 18, 2016. 
• "Richard Nixon Stumbles to the Brink". Time. October 29, 1973. Retrieved March 16, 2016.  (Subscription required.)
• "The Three Men of High Principle". Time. October 29, 1973. Retrieved March 16, 2016.  (Subscription required.)

External links

• "Archibald Cox". American National Biography Online. February 2000. Retrieved March 11, 2016. 
• "Archibald Cox". Encyclopedia of World Biography. Gale Group. June 1, 1998. Retrieved March 31, 2016. 
• "Solicitor General:Archibald Cox". United States Department of Justice. October 31, 2014. Retrieved March 31, 2016. 
• "Profile: Archibald Cox". History Commons. Retrieved March 31, 2016. 
• "Watergate Exhibit Evidence". Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. n.d. Retrieved March 31, 2016. 
• Sherman, Thomas Townsend (1920). Sherman Genealogy Including Families of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, England. New York: Tobias A. Wright. Retrieved March 31, 2016.  (Genealogy of Elizabeth Hoar Evarts.)

Legal offices
Preceded by J. Lee Rankin	Solicitor General 1961–1965	Succeeded by Thurgood Marshall