Who was Archibald Cox?
What had equipped him for this pivotal moment in American history? In a satisfying and revealing biography titled Archibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation, Ken Gormley paints a colorful portrait of Cox’s public and private lives. Conducting more than 140 interviews with such key figures as Cox, Richardson, Ruckelshaus, Bork, John Dean, Gerald Ford, Edward Kennedy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Theodore Sorensen, Ramsey Clark, Warren Christopher, and four Supreme Court justices, and using scores of public and private sources, Gormley traces the important events in Cox’s life with charming, telling, and revealing anecdotes and candid observations. Cox was born in 1912 in Plainfield, New Jersey, the son of a successful copyright and trademark lawyer. Remembering that there was “never a day when I wasn’t going to be a lawyer,” Cox believed that the history of the legal profession was made up of “great cases and great lawyers in great circumstances.” Thus, as if preordained, Cox graduated from Harva
