Archibald Cox

Archibald Cox enters the Watergate account as the special prosecutor whose pursuit of presidential recordings helped precipitate his dismissal. His brief but consequential role links a dispute over investigating the President to the struggle over whether the White House would surrender evidence.

Appointment and the dispute over investigating Nixon

Cox was appointed special prosecutor in May 1973. By then, the investigation had raised the constitutional question of how the President could be investigated. When The Washington Post reported that federal prosecutors believed questioning Nixon could be justified, the White House denounced the story and argued that requiring the President to testify would violate the separation of powers.

The White House also asked Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Cox to find the sources for the report. The account says that, if an investigation into the leak was opened, its sources were never found. Cox’s appearance in this episode therefore places him between two competing demands: the administration’s effort to identify who had spoken to the press and the prosecutors’ examination of presidential conduct.

Subpoenaing the tapes

Two weeks before Cox’s dismissal, he subpoenaed nine presidential tape recordings. The tapes mattered because they could provide evidence from within the President’s own conversations, rather than relying only on accounts from aides and other witnesses. The account does not describe Cox’s reasoning in detail, but establishes that the subpoena preceded the White House crisis surrounding his removal.

After Nixon fired Cox, public pressure and a court order led the President to surrender seven of the tapes. His lawyers said that two of the nine recordings had never existed. The sequence left the investigation facing both a change in its prosecutor and unresolved questions about the completeness of the recorded evidence.

Dismissal and significance

Cox’s dismissal formed part of a broader upheaval: Attorney General Richardson and his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, resigned, while Nixon’s aides said the President had acted because he feared Cox would prosecute him. The account presents those statements as the aides’ explanation, not as a finding about Nixon’s motive.

Cox’s narrative role is defined less by personal background than by the institutional conflict attached to his office. His subpoena brought the investigation into direct confrontation with the President over access to evidence; his firing, the resignations that accompanied it, and the subsequent surrender of only seven tapes made that confrontation a public crisis.