Archibald Cox is remembered for a single night, the night a president tried to make him stop and he refused. But the refusal was not a stunt. It was the natural act of a man who had spent his whole career on one idea, that the law binds everyone, including the most powerful person in the country, and that a lawyer's job is to hold that line even when holding it costs him everything.
He was a New Englander, Harvard through and through, who graduated near the top of his law class and became one of the most respected legal scholars of his generation. He taught at Harvard Law for the better part of fifty years, he argued the government's cases before the Supreme Court as Solicitor General under President Kennedy, and he was, by every account, a lawyer's lawyer: careful, principled, and almost old-fashioned in his sense of duty.
In 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal, he was appointed the first special prosecutor to investigate the break-in and the cover-up that reached into the White House. It was an almost impossible assignment, to investigate the administration that, through the Justice Department, technically employed him. Cox took it on the understanding that he would follow the evidence wherever it went, and he meant it, even when it led toward the Oval Office.
When he learned the President had secretly recorded his own conversations, Cox subpoenaed the tapes. The President offered a compromise, a written summary instead of the recordings, and ordered him to accept it and stop pushing. Cox refused. On the night of October 20, 1973, the President ordered him fired, and rather than carry out the order, the Attorney General and his deputy resigned instead. It came to be called the Saturday Night Massacre, and it is one of the sharpest constitutional confrontations in American history. Cox lost his job that night. The principle he was fired for is what won.
What makes Cox a master is not that he turned out to be right. It is how he behaved when the pressure was total. He did not grandstand and he did not fold. He stated his position plainly, that a special prosecutor cannot take orders from the person he is investigating, and he let the cost fall where it fell. His public words that day were almost understated: whether the country would remain a government of laws and not of men was now, he said, for Congress and ultimately the American people to decide. Then he went home. The tapes came out anyway. The presidency did not survive them.
For a lawyer, Cox is the case study in the hardest kind of courage, the kind that is quiet. Most of the pressure a lawyer feels is not dramatic. It is the steady pull to go along, to take the convenient compromise, to avoid making trouble for a powerful client or a powerful office. Cox is the reminder that there are lines a lawyer does not cross no matter who is asking, and that you hold a line under pressure not by raising your voice but by stating the principle clearly and refusing to move off it. He kept his dignity and his position at the same time, and gave up the job rather than surrender either one.
He went back to teaching, argued more cases, and lived a long life as one of the most admired lawyers in the country, precisely because of the night he was fired. Archibald Cox proved that the law is only as strong as the people willing to enforce it against their own side and their own bosses, and that sometimes the most important thing a lawyer ever does is say no and accept the consequences. That is a standard worth keeping in view, in cases large and small, long after the names in the headlines are forgotten.
Archibald Cox (1912 to 2004), the Harvard Law professor and United States Solicitor General under President Kennedy who served as the first Watergate special prosecutor and was dismissed in the Saturday Night Massacre of October 1973 after subpoenaing the President’s tapes and refusing to stand down. Considered here for the craft, and for the discipline of holding a principle under pressure. This is general information, not legal advice.
