Archibald Cox
Few "new" kids (Millennial) I think they call them these days may remember this guy, he was fired by President Richard Nixon during the Watergate Scandal. He was part of the Saturday Night Blood bath, as I recall, Nixon fired a whole bunch of his people over the "Nixon Watergate tapes" he had in his office. Cox was one of the lawyers high up in his own administration who ruled against him, said they had to go public, Nixon said NO, and he fired him.
I met Cox in a lecture in a church in Tucson about thirty years ago. He was massive, tall thin, a kind of Lincolneque guy with a wild white mange hair uncontrollable. He sat on the dais in the Universalist church on 22nd street and thundered out over the crowd, not with any sort of indignation, he was nearly deaf.
A really pleasant sort of fellow, as he bellowed out, he smiled, thundered, grinned, explained his legal position, his contorted meetings with Nixon and the president's irate and oft times irrational arguments from what Cox supposed was an extra-legal view point.
He wasn't anything like Liddy, polarizing, he was jovial, almost apologetic about his deafness, and continued on about his friendship with Elliot Richardson, another victim of the firing. " I suppose we'll all get over this crisis as time passes," he proposed, " we have a Constitution, and it is great, and using that as a rudder, we all should survive well, " I remember him saying. It kind of scared me when he said it, because I thought, maybe in his mind, we came closer to the edge of insanity than I had supposed.
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I met Cox in a lecture in a church in Tucson about thirty years ago. He was massive, tall thin, a kind of Lincolneque guy with a wild white mange hair uncontrollable. He sat on the dais in the Universalist church on 22nd street and thundered out over the crowd, not with any sort of indignation, he was nearly deaf.
A really pleasant sort of fellow, as he bellowed out, he smiled, thundered, grinned, explained his legal position, his contorted meetings with Nixon and the president's irate and oft times irrational arguments from what Cox supposed was an extra-legal view point.
He wasn't anything like Liddy, polarizing, he was jovial, almost apologetic about his deafness, and continued on about his friendship with Elliot Richardson, another victim of the firing. " I suppose we'll all get over this crisis as time passes," he proposed, " we have a Constitution, and it is great, and using that as a rudder, we all should survive well, " I remember him saying. It kind of scared me when he said it, because I thought, maybe in his mind, we came closer to the edge of insanity than I had supposed.
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Watergate, Archibald Cox, G. Gordon & co
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