The Three Men of High Principle

Short profiles of the three men who stood on principle, defied the President and lost their jobs:

ARCHIBALD COX. A registered Democrat, Cox, 61, has worked for five Administrations--as a lawyer in the Departments of Justice and Labor (1943), head of the Wage Stabilization Board (1952), Solicitor General (1961-65) and special Watergate prosecutor. His reputation as a brilliant, almost arrogantly self-confident legal scholar was acquired during his 22 years on the faculty of Harvard Law School, where he took his law degree in 1937. In 1968 he headed a panel that investigated the causes of student riots at Columbia University. A year later he advised school officials during similar disturbances at Harvard.

An expert in labor law, he has pursued a career, both in and out of academe, that has been distinguished by an inflexible dedication to principle. Once, as U.S. Solicitor General, he refused to argue before the Supreme Court a case involving the right of Government officials to search automobiles brought to police headquarters because he believed there was no justification for the Government's position (the Government lost the case). Accepting the post of special Watergate prosecutor just after ending a speech at Berkeley on the importance of faith in Government, he pledged to do all he could to help "restore a sense of integrity and honor throughout our Government."

ELLIOT L. RICHARDSON. A lifelong Republican, Richardson, 53, was born into a Boston Brahmin family and educated at Harvard (LL.B., '47), where he was a student of Cox's. As U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, he prosecuted Boston Industrialist Bernard Goldfine, who provided Sherman Adams' famous vicuna coat. After serving as Lieutenant Governor and attorney general, he joined the Nixon Administration in 1969 and became its most versatile handyman. In five years, he served successively as Under Secretary of State; Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare; Secretary of Defense and, finally, Attorney General. He had been working hard to restore the morale and image of the Justice Department, both badly mauled by the Watergate scandals.

Although Richardson was regarded as an Administration loyalist, his chief allegiance throughout his career has been to law. "Law is the indispensable attribute of an ordered society," he once observed. As Attorney General, he said his goal was a "clearing of the air to ensure that there is fairness, one system of justice for the rich and the poor, the white and the black."

WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS. A third-generation Republican politician, Ruckelshaus, 41, also took his law degree at Harvard (1960) and served for five years in the Indiana attorney general's office. Elected to the state house of representatives, he was soon chosen majority leader. In 1969 he joined the Justice Department as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the civil division, and became the Administration's unofficial emissary to radical young people. He negotiated with student leaders on logistics for the massive 1970 antiwar demonstration in Washington, quietly calmed a potentially explosive confrontation over a trial of Black Panthers in New Haven in 1971, and frequently spoke on college campuses to improve the Administration's image.

President Nixon named him the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970, and Ruckelshaus won a wide reputation as tough, fair and unusually independent of the White House. For three years he walked the narrow line--without a serious misstep--between suspicious environmentalists and hostile businessmen. He compromised in his most publicized struggle, giving automobile manufacturers a one-year extension of a 1975 deadline for the installation of antipollution devices on cars while slapping on tough interim standards. Nonetheless, his tenacious fight and his insistence that presidential aides stay out of it enhanced his prestige. Last April Nixon named him acting director of the FBI, whose morale had been shattered by L. Patrick Gray's controversial tenure as acting director. Finally, Ruckelshaus was persuaded to become Richardson's top assistant last month. When asked about the Watergate scandal last spring, he told an interviewer: "There are a lot of people who understand private morality who have no understanding at all of public morality."

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