Bork: A Professor Caught in the Storm

Nominated last January by President Nixon to become Solicitor General in June, Robert Bork grew more and more impatient to get to Washington. He had taught at Yale Law School for more than a decade, and Washington, he told friends, was "going to be pure pleasure." It would offer "a lot of intellectual fascination." Last week was indeed a fascinating one for Bork. Having been catapulted into the position of Acting Attorney General as a result of the Cox affair, the professor who came to Washington to gain firsthand knowledge of the Supreme Court found himself at the center of a political storm. It was Bork who fired Cox on Nixon's orders, and it was Bork who was given the all but impossible job of finding a successor satisfactory to the President, the Congress and the public.

The Acting Attorney General is no stranger to controversy. In an institution dominated by liberals, Bork was proud to be known as the most conservative member of the law-school faculty. An admirer of Nixon's "remarkably organized mind," he supported the President in both the 1968 and 1972 elections and helped prepare the constitutional case for Nixon's antibusing proposals in 1972. As the Government's chief advocate in cases before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Bork promised to follow existing policy.

Bork says that he agreed to fire Cox, after Elliot Richardson and his former deputy William Ruckelshaus refused, because "I believe a President has the right to discharge any member of the Executive branch." At first he thought that he should tender his own resignation after carrying out the order, as proof that he was not merely clearing his own way to a better job. Richardson urged Bork to stay on "to keep the department running," but Bork has made it plain that he has no desire to make his arrangement permanent. The post no longer looks inviting "after the last several days," he said at a press conference last week, his sporty red beard dripping with perspiration. To underscore that feeling, Bork has remained in his Solicitor General's office and declined both the Attorney General's more sumptuous quarters and his official limousine. The professor from New Haven continues to drive himself to work in his 1968 Volvo.

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