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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Elliot L. Richardson
Elliot Richardson, center, is sworn in as Secretary of Defense in February of 1973. President Richard Nixon, left, looks on as Richardson's wife, Anne, holds the Bible and Chief Justice Warren Burger swears him in at the White House.
(1920-1999)
 Elliot Lee Richardson was born on July 20, 1920, in Boston. He came from a long line of physicians--three generations on his father’s side and five on his mother’s. Both families, descended from early New England settlers, had long traditions of Unitarianism, stressing religious freedom, tolerance, and reason and rejecting rigid ideologies.
Elliot’s father, Edward, was a surgeon and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The family lived in Brookline, a small town outside of Boston. The family’s social and professional prominence probably contributed to the drive and self-assurance for which Elliot became known. A boyhood friend, who later became the editor of a foreign policy journal, observed that Elliot "carries into whatever he does the doctor’s feeling that he’s going to do the right thing".
The family’s wealth and prestige did not protect it from misfortune, however. Elliot’s mother, Clara, died giving birth to Elliot’s brother George when Elliot was two years old and his brother Peirson was four. When Elliot was 11, his father suffered a disabling stroke. Although left in middle age virtually unable to speak and with the use of only one hand, Dr. Richardson refused to give in to despair, and taught himself to paint and to fish.
Dr. Richardson taught his sons the importance of modesty and the inner standards of achievement. The family attended the First Unitarian Church in Brookline; Elliot would later recall that the central teaching at the church was respect for the individual.
Marguerite Brown, a social worker (and a Unitarian) hired by the family as a governess, helped to raise the boys. The household managed to maintain a "happy calm," one friend remembers, but Miss Brown (as the boys called her) also challenged them to high achievement both in school and in life. Intellectual success was not enough, she said; it was important to amount to something in life. She was a disciplinarian, but she was also notable for her open-mindedness. She was "an extraordinary woman," Elliot recalled years later, "whose strongest criticisms of other people were reserved for those whom she regarded as lacking in imagination. ‘They travel around the world in a bushel basket,’ she would say. And I took that to mean that they could not see beyond the confines of this basket".
Henry Lee Shattuck (Uncle Harry) was another important formative influence on Elliot. An influential politician who served on the Boston City Council and in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, he taught Elliot that public roles were opportunities for service, not for pursuit of power. Elliot later explained that he patterned himself on his Uncle Harry. Shattuck taught the Richardson boys the art of politics and racial and ethnic tolerance. Uncle Harry endowed a chair in Irish studies at Harvard College during a period when many people scorned Irish immigrants. "He had no side," Elliot would say. "You don’t hear that term anymore, but it conveyed a disinclination to distinguish among people on the basis of background, rank, or wealth".
While his brothers pursued medicine, Elliot became interested in politics. At the age of eight he was elected president of the Herbert Hoover Club at the Park School in Boston. He also developed a lifelong interest in painting and drawing.
When he was in the sixth and seventh grades, Elliot was introduced to bird-watching by Roger Tory Peterson. Peterson, a young art and natural history teacher at the Rivers School in Brookline, was then working on his first field guide to birds. Peterson taught Elliot and his classmates how to draw and paint, "imparting to us his own enthusiasms for birds and other wild creatures," Elliot later recalled. "Roger Peterson was the only real teacher of drawing and painting I ever had. Starting me off with charcoal still lifes, he led me through the early stages of painting in oils to the year’s climactic effort-a painting of a hooded merganser sitting on a dead limb in a forest pool. My model was a stuffed bird donated to the school by some unknown benefactor, and I wish I could say that the painting itself was as handsome as the bird". Peterson also tutored Elliot and his brother George when he visited the Richardsons’ summer home on Cape Cod. As a young teenager, Elliot’s ability to identify and draw birds was unmatched among his fellow students; he remained an expert on birds for the rest of his life.
After retiring, Richardson wrote a tribute to Peterson in Yankee , a magazine featuring outstanding New Englanders. "Not only did he love the subjects he taught and take a personal interest in my schoolmates and me," Richardson wrote, "but he also rejoiced in enlarging our knowledge and arousing our curiosity". Elliot wrote about Peterson’s impact on his life in the foreword to the biography The World of Roger Tory Peterson : "I shall always be indebted to Roger for skills of eye, ear, and hand. Indeed, it may well be that through encouraging me to develop these skills he also gave me an even more precious asset: the ability to endure pressure and adapt to changes of circumstance. What could more quickly restore a sense of proportion than a few minutes spent watching a self-absorbed Carolina wren build a nest? What could more completely eclipse large concerns than the constraining effort to make hand and brush obey eye and brain?" (p. xii). Of Peterson’s impact on society and the reach of his bird guides, Elliot wrote: "If we were to single out his most important contribution, would it be these remarkable books? His brilliantly lifelike portraits of birds? His extraordinary effectiveness as a spokesperson for conservation and the environment? His greatest contribution, I believe, is the sum of these-our enlarged awareness".
In 1933, Elliot entered Milton Academy, a private prep school located outside Boston, which gave a larger scope to his growing fascination with politics and public affairs. America was assuming its new role as an international leader, a role that had begun 30 years earlier, under President Theodore Roosevelt. As a boy, Elliot knew more about the diplomatic players in the League of Nations than about the baseball players in the National League. "By the time I got to high school," he later reflected, "I had come to regard the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations as a tragic mistake. In my eyes, Henry Cabot Lodge, the [Republican] Massachusetts senator who masterminded the delaying tactics that led to this result, was a man without vision".
Elliot’s busy years at Milton would forecast his activities as an adult. He was involved with the science club, the student council, the bird club, the glee club, the student paper, and the debating society. He appeared in several theater productions, and played on a variety of Milton’s athletic teams, including wrestling, football, and track. Academically, he earned an honorable mention and later a prize in Latin competitions. He belonged to the Cum Laude Society and received a Harvard prize scholarship during his senior year.
In 1937, Elliot entered Harvard College, joining his older brother, Peirson (George followed two years later). Elliot lived at Winthrop House and was active in many campus activities, including the social service committee, the undergraduate athletic council, the nominating committee (of which he was chairman), the Hasty Pudding-Institute of 1770, the Signet Society (of which he was president), and the class day committee. His athletic activities now included crew, wrestling, and boxing. He drew cartoons for the HarvardLampoon . He and a friend spent Wednesday afternoons at a senior citizens’ home learning card games from the Old Men’s Club, a group of elderly gentlemen who met once a week. Elliot enjoyed hearing them reminisce about their lives. "Although we felt we gave them very little, they were touchingly grateful for the mere fact that we were there," he recalled later.
He graduated magna cum laude in 1941 with a B.A. in philosophy. In response to the yearbook’s question about career ambitions, Elliot answered with one word: politics. "There, I was sure, lay the best possible avenue toward being of service in the cause of things I believed in," Elliot later wrote. One way to prepare for a career in politics was with a law degree. That autumn, he entered Harvard Law School, where he also joined the boxing team. That year, the six-foot-tall, 165-pound student won the all-Harvard boxing title. He later called this "my greatest athletic achievement".
Elliot’s law studies were interrupted when the United States entered World War II. His poor vision threatened his plans to volunteer for the army, but he memorized the eye chart-just as Harry Truman had done to enter the army during World War I-and did well enough to enlist as a medic. He went through basic training at Camp Pickett, Virginia, in the summer of 1942, and was nicknamed the "Harvard Man" by his tentmates. His favorite Louis Armstrong recording was "Bye and Bye," which he sang to fellow trainees on request.
He was promoted to first lieutenant during the war and was placed in charge of a litter-bearer platoon. He and his men, wearing red crosses on their helmets, had the job of getting wounded soldiers to medical care as quickly as possible. Assigned to the 12th Regimental Combat Team of the 4th Infantry, known as the "Fighting Fourth," Elliot’s unit trained in southern England to support the D-Day landing at Normandy, on the northern coast of France. On June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, launched the largest amphibious assault the world had ever seen, the beginning of the Allied invasion to liberate France-and eventually the rest of Europe-from German occupation. A total of 150,000 troops and 1,500 tanks were ferried across the English Channel in thousands of ships while 12,000 planes supported Allied forces from the skies. Meanwhile, ships shelled the German defenses along the shoreline.
Eisenhower’s troops landed at various beaches, with the "Fighting Fourth" taking Utah beach. Elliot and the rest of his medic detachment landed with the fourth wave. His baptism by fire came when his unit found a wounded soldier lying in a patch of barbed wire in a minefield. Acting quickly, Lieutenant Richardson stepped over the barbed wire, picked up the wounded man and carefully retraced his steps out of the minefield. His medic unit saw intense combat throughout 1944 and early 1945. Elliot was wounded twice during the war and received the Purple Heart. He also won the Bronze Star for heroism. His fellow soldiers nicknamed him "Lucky" because he survived daring exploits. His unit was among the first American outfits to enter Paris when it was liberated from Nazi forces.
Throughout the war, Elliot carried a copy of The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes , a compilation of the writings of the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (another native of Massachusetts). Elliot found Holmes’s expressions of faith "deeply moving and even consoling," because he "spoke from the depths of his own Civil War experience". Like many people who have lived through combat, Elliot’s experiences in World War II significantly influenced his life. He recalled later that those were "the most intense experiences of my life. I suppose the most powerful attitude it burned into me was a disposition to take one thing at a time and push aside fear. I thought I was going to be killed. The casualties were so heavy, it was just a given. I learned to take each day, each mission, as it came. That’s an attitude I’ve carried into my professional life. I take each case, each job, as it comes".
Returning from the war, Elliot resumed his law studies in 1945 at Harvard Law School still convinced that it was the best preparation for a career in public service. During his first year, he made the "exciting discovery that thinking like a lawyer requires the ability to move quickly from the concrete to the abstract, from facts to principles, and back again without grinding gears. . . . Though every legal task demands this skill, it is especially important in the effort to frame public policy in a way that is properly responsive to human needs and predicaments. The question is always: How will the general rule work in practice?"
One of his professors was Archibald Cox, who would later play a critical role during the Watergate scandal. "I well remember the impression he made," Elliot recalled later, "pacing up and down the platform with long deliberate strides, he looked like a great blue heron about to spear an unsuspecting minnow." Elliot was struck by Cox’s fairness, "one of the most conspicuous of many outstanding qualities".
Elliot was tremendously impressed by the intellectual integrity of his professors. "Not that they preached," he recalled later. "The rigor of their analysis, rather, left no room for the false, the meretricious, or the self-serving. It framed the premises of their teaching: justice as fairness, the law’s regard for human dignity, and the primacy of the public interest. In a long career, I have never felt the need for other precepts".
Elliot served as editor of the Harvard Law Review , a top distinction, and he graduated with high honors in 1947. The new lawyer spent the next three years clerking for two of the country’s most revered jurists: Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter. Elliot moved to New York City to work for Judge Hand at the U.S. Court of Appeals during 1947 and the first half of 1948. The young clerk considered Judge Hand the closest thing to a great man he had yet encountered. "He immediately disarmed whatever uneasiness one might have had in dealing with this towering figure in the law by being down-to-earth, friendly, and funny," Elliot recalled. As Hand’s law clerk, Elliot’s job was to be prepared to respond to any questions the judge might have about the cases he had heard. "The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments".
In July 1948, Elliot moved to Washington, D.C., to clerk Justice Felix Frankfurter at the U.S. Supreme Court. Frankfurter’s other clerk at the time, William T. Coleman Jr., would later serve alongside Richardson in President Gerald Ford’s Cabinet.
Justice Frankfurter gave Elliot advice that he would follow his entire life in managing his ever-changing occupational challenges. "I don’t think you ought to develop career goals," Frankfurter told his young clerk. "I’ve known quite a few men who did this, and then they did everything in their power to fulfill this ambition. They were constantly calculating how to take advantage of some opportunity or connection that would move them along toward their goal. Yet, most of them awaken in their fifties to the realization that they are never going to achieve their great ambition. On top of that disappointment, they realize that they undercut the satisfaction of what they were doing by trying to use it for the sake of something else".
In 1949, having completed his clerkships, Elliot was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar and then received a wonderful opportunity. He was offered the position of special assistant to the new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, in Washington. "I greatly admired Acheson and I felt torn between this tempting opportunity and the aim of learning the lawyer’s trade," he said later. "The idea of being in the State Department was exciting. On the other hand, I always had in the back of my mind going into politics. If I stayed in Washington, I might end up a government hack".
While wrestling with this decision, Elliot visited Harvard and happened to run into Cox. Knowing that Cox had worked in government, the young man put his dilemma to his former professor and asked for advice. Cox replied, "Well, Elliot, when I was in Washington, I always thought it important to come from somewhere," meaning that it was important to arrive in Washington, D.C., with practical working experience and a solid reputation back home before tackling a bigger arena. Elliot decided to act on Cox’s advice; he took a job working as a lawyer at Ropes and Gray, a reputable old Boston law firm. Elliot later looked back on Cox’s advice "with special gratitude," since gaining experience in a law practice in his home town "made a profound difference to my whole future." He commented, "I can’t imagine what a different life I would have had, if I had stayed in Washington".
A year later he became involved in politics at the grassroots level: He became a town meeting member of precinct 10 in Brookline, serving as secretary of the committee dealing with the structure of town government.
In 1951, Elliot wrote a 54-page article titled "Freedom of Expression and the Function of the Courts" for the Harvard Law Review , the first of many important pieces he published during his career. The article discussed issues in free-speech cases at every level of government. "The great battles for free expression will be won, if they are won," he wrote, "not in the courts but in committee rooms and protest-meetings, by editorials and letters to Congress, and through the courage of citizens everywhere".
In 1952, Elliot accepted a post as a lecturer at Harvard Law School and married Anne Francis Hazard, a native of Providence, R.I., upon her graduation from Radcliffe College. They had met at a dance, where Elliot made a pest of himself by constantly cutting in, she later recalled. She put up with it because he was a superb dancer. Anne took a job as a teacher in Brookline, a prelude to her future work on the importance of reading.
Ropes and Gray was an excellent place for a young lawyer to begin. Elliot and other associates enjoyed working on important cases and solving clients’ problems. At Ropes and Gray, practicing law was considered a calling, not just a job. But something was missing in Elliot’s life. He felt that working in the private sector could not match the satisfaction of doing "a good job for the public".
So Elliot moved to Washington in 1953 to became a legislative assistant to Senator Leverett Saltonstall, Republican from Massachusetts. He wrote speeches and press releases for Saltonstall. He met Richard M. Nixon at this time, and was impressed by the young vice president from California, who seemed to be a rising star of the Republican Party. Elliot worked for Saltonstall through the senator’s 1954 re-election and then returned to Ropes and Gray in Boston.
Back in Boston, he remained active in Republican politics. In 1956, he wrote the speech nominating Richard Nixon for his second term as vice president, delivered by Massachusetts governor Christian Herter during the Republican national convention.
Meanwhile, Elliot was settling into life as a family man. The Richardsons’ first child, Henry, was born in 1956, followed by Nancy in 1958 and Michael in 1961.
By the mid-1950s, with the proper education, wartime experience, prestigious clerkships, and a few years of experience in law and politics under his belt, Elliot was ready for the first of many high-level government jobs.
For someone who listed “politics” in his college yearbook as a career goal, things were moving forward well. In 1957, at the beginning of President Dwight Eisenhower’s second term, Richardson was appointed as an assistant secretary of the relatively new federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). He was responsible for drafting bills for submission to Congress.
Although Richardson was a Republican, his passion for public service transcended political parties. He admired the Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt and disliked simplistic labels. Like many others who joined the Eisenhower administration in 1957, Richardson came to Washington with high hopes of building a new political consensus based on the belief that government was responsible for protecting the individual against the harshest consequences of economic or financial misfortune. “We were embarking on an important joint venture whose goal was nothing less than the creation of an exciting new blend of conservatism and compassion,” Richardson later wrote. “Our philosophy began and, some people thought, ended with an utterance by Abraham Lincoln which we quoted at every opportunity: ‘The purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do at all or do so well for themselves’ ”.
When HEW secretary Marion B. Folsom was away from Washington, Richardson sometimes attended President Eisenhower’s Cabinet meetings in his place. In 1958, Richardson served as acting secretary of the department for four months during Folsom’s absence. Richardson admired his boss’s leadership and described Folsom as an unassuming man who never raised his voice, always listened carefully to all sides, and always made sure that he had all the facts.
Elliot’s job involved work on a variety of issues. An economic downturn brought a rise in unemployment, with many people exhausting their unemployment compensation benefits. Richardson was asked to draft legislation to provide federally funded benefits for unemployed families. His plan was accepted without debate by the conservative Republican leadership, but the economy recovered before his bill could be submitted for congressional approval.
Richardson believed that “the only remaining issues with respect to government responsibility toward general welfare were issues of how, not whether, to deal with a visible need.” Accordingly, he played a major role in drafting the National Defense Education Act, a response to the Soviets’ successful launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957, which fed Americans’ fears that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in scientific research and technology. This legislation, enacted in 1958, made funds available to upgrade educational programs in science, math, and foreign languages; encouraged students, through improved guidance and testing services, to continue their education; trained graduate students for work in higher education; and designated funds to develop innovative graduate programs in international studies.
During his three years at HEW, Richardson also helped to develop legislation on social security, public health, juvenile delinquency, and a children’s bureau. Other issues requiring his attention included medical education and research, health insurance, hospital construction, and preventive care. He spent much of his time defending HEW programs against budget planners from the White House and Congress who wanted to redirect some of the department’s $2.5 billion budget.
At HEW, Richardson also handled tricky political issues with ethical implications. During his stint as acting secretary, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needed additional office space in Atlanta, Georgia. The lowest bid made to the General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees acquisition of office space for federal agencies, came from a building owner who happened to be a Republican state representative in Georgia and the chairman of the state Republican organization. Because the building failed to meet the FDA’s sanitation requirements, the GSA began looking elsewhere for competitive bids. Richardson, who as acting secretary of HEW was responsible for the FDA, immediately began receiving phone calls from senior administration officials and Georgia Republicans pressuring him to approve the questionable bid.
“It was also apparent that the career civil servants in HEW were watching closely, to see which way I moved--and why,” Richardson later recalled. He decided to support the GSA and resist political pressure to compromise the FDA’s standards.
During a reception at HEW for some Russian visitors, Richardson found himself speaking with the Soviet embassy’s cultural attaché. The guest said, “You know, we in the Soviet Union believe that the people exist to serve the state, while you in the United States believe that the state exists to serve the people. But aren’t these, after all, merely different ways of saying the same thing?” Although Richardson guessed that the gentleman was just trying to make polite conversation, he could not allow the comment to go unanswered. “I’m afraid I can’t agree,” Richardson told the Russian diplomat. “For you, the state is an entity with purposes of its own that the people can be required to serve. For us the word is only a label for the arrangements by which we the people delegate to some among us responsibility for things that concern us in common”.
Having made his mark at HEW, in 1959 Richardson was offered a new job by President Eisenhower, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, and the family moved back to Boston. There he served as the top criminal law enforcement official in Massachusetts, representing the federal government. During his first few weeks in the new position, political “friends” called to lobby him concerning pending cases. He told them that he would not entertain requests based on political patronage rather than legal merit; the number of calls declined as word spread that the new U.S. attorney would not compromise himself or his office. Richardson took pride in the fact that, during his tenure as U.S. attorney, every tax evader prosecuted by his office was convicted and sent to jail.
The following year, Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election. The new president appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), as the new attorney general. The position of U.S. attorney for Massachusetts was a political appointment, serving at the will of the current attorney general, and RFK appointed a Democrat to replace Richardson. But RFK kept Richardson on as special assistant to the attorney general to continue work on an important case in Washington, D.C.
Richardson was disappointed by the Republican loss of the White House in 1960. He thought that a little more “modern Republicanism” could have spelled the difference between defeat and victory in the race between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. The election had been decided by less than one vote per voting precinct. Richardson believed that the Republicans could have used the four years of Eisenhower’s second term “to show that individualism could be both compassionate and creative”. He believed that Nixon’s defeat cleared the field for a less progressive brand of individualism, which would hurt the Republican party.
Richardson returned to Boston and resumed his legal work as a partner at Ropes and Gray from 1961 to 1964. During this time he unsuccessfully ran for state attorney general in the 1962 Massachusetts Republican primary. In 1964, a few weeks before the Republican state convention, John Volpe, a candidate for governor, asked Richardson to be his running mate. At first, Richardson was not interested because the traditional duties of lieutenant governor were largely ceremonial. He did not see the point in taking the job just to improve his chances for a higher position later. “But then it occurred to me that I might be able to make use of my experience in HEW,” he later recalled. He told Volpe that he would run, but only if he were given responsibility for coordinating the state’s health, education, and welfare programs. Volpe agreed. The two men were victorious in the fall election.
Richardson’s new duties in the Massachusetts statehouse included meeting regularly with the heads of the human resources agencies--public welfare, public health, mental health, vocational rehabilitation, education, corrections, and youth services. Although he and his department heads identified duplicated or missing services, these problems were difficult to solve. The system at the federal level was encouraging fragmentation among state agencies instead of unifying them. Agencies would subdivide a person’s situation and a number of agencies would attempt to help, each addressing only a small part of the total problem. “Not only are the agencies devoted to helping people too numerous, too limited in function, and too isolated from each other,” Richardson wrote, “but they can be fiercely jealous in protecting their own turf. No wonder that government is so often perceived as impersonal and indifferent.” Richardson decided that these state agencies needed to engage in joint planning and needed to be granted power to make the necessary changes.
Richardson helped to obtain a grant from HEW to improve coordination between volunteer and public state agencies. Richardson and his legislative assistant drafted federal legislation called the Community Services Act of 1966 to provide incentives for state agencies that cooperated with one another. Richardson traveled to Washington, D.C., and found senators who agreed to sponsor the bill. Meanwhile, he mailed copies of the bill with a letter to human services agency heads in all 50 states. Many gave him their support.
During his term as lieutenant governor, Richardson ran a successful statewide campaign to win passage of a sales tax to help the poorest cities in the state. He also headed the task force that initiated the state’s Mental Health Act.
In 1966, Richardson again ran for the post of attorney general of Massachusetts. His campaign focused on government responsiveness to citizens. He promised to create two new programs: a citizens’ aid bureau and a consumer protection division. He won the election and, upon taking office in 1967, he immediately created a commission to conduct a complete assessment of law enforcement in the state. To strengthen the fight against organized crime, he prompted the state legislature to authorize court-ordered wiretapping by law enforcement agencies. He also worked for passage of a witness immunity bill, which passed in the House but failed in the Senate. In other areas he pushed through consumer protection laws and prosecuted consumer fraud and unfair trade practices cases.
Richardson addressed issues outside the state as well. As a member of the executive committee of the National Association of Attorneys General, he worked for improvements in how money was distributed to the states by the U.S. Department of Justice. Richardson rounded up support for the change from governors, lieutenant governors, and his fellow state attorneys general. The reform was approved by Congress, giving states more flexibility and more control of monies coming from Washington. As a result of his efforts, allotted funds went to criminal justice planning commissions in each state, which determined how to allocate the funds, rather than going directly to specific projects.
Richardson also testified before a congressional committee in favor of court-ordered wiretaps of individuals suspected of serious crimes. Ultimately, the Safe Streets Act was adopted, which “has since proved to be a valuable weapon against organized crime”.
By the age of 48, Richardson had added to his experience as an attorney and presidential appointee two highly visible statewide elected offices. He was about to return to Washington, where he could apply his intellect and administrative abilities at a higher level.
Richard Nixon’s victory in the 1968 presidential election was good news for Richardson. It provided new opportunities for Republicans to move into key Washington posts.
President-elect Nixon chose William P. Rogers as his secretary of state. Rogers knew Richardson from the Eisenhower administration, in which Rogers had served as attorney general and Richardson had served under him as U.S. attorney for Massachusetts. They had worked well together and had remained friends.
A front-page story in the New York Times on December 31, 1968, carried the headline “Rogers Picks Bostonian to Be His Chief Deputy.” The job offered to Richardson was under secretary of state, the number two position--comparable to deputy secretary today--at the State Department (which is nicknamed Foggy Bottom because the State Department’s headquarters building is located in a neighborhood built on marshland during the city’s early days).
The following week, Nixon and Rogers held a press conference at which they announced Richardson’s acceptance of the appointment, along with acceptances by other senior appointees. Nixon said that Richardson’s record “has demonstrated an immense capability as an administrator.” As second-in-command at the State Department, Richardson would be responsible for administering the department, but his duties would also include policy matters. Rogers told reporters that Richardson would serve as his “alter ego.” News accounts of the press conference, again making front pages as the Nixon administration took shape, described Richardson as an impressive public servant with a “zest for life.”
Although the president appoints Cabinet officers and other key appointees, the Constitution requires that the U.S. Senate approve those nominations. Within two weeks Richardson was testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. His résumé was impressive: Beyond his jobs in government and his law practice, Richardson was on the board of directors of the Massachusetts Bay United Fund, was a member of the board of overseers of Harvard University, and was vice chairman of the visiting committee of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He also served on the boards of trustees of the Brookline Public Library, the Cambridge Drama Festival, Radcliff College, and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Senator Edward Brooke, Republican from Massachusetts, introduced the nominee. “Elliot Richardson is an avid and understanding student of foreign affairs,” he told the committee. “He brings to his new duties an inquiring mind, good judgment and, perhaps most important of all, fresh perspectives and a receptivity to new solutions for old and vexing problems” (Nomination of Elliot L. Richardson to be Under Secretary of State, Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, January 15, 1969, p. 2). Richardson’s former boss Leverett Saltonstall, by then retired from the Senate, submitted a letter to the committee assuring them that they would find the nominee “intelligent, articulate, and of sound judgment in the many difficult situations which he will face”.
Addressing the committee, Richardson explained his qualifications. He discussed how he had benefited throughout his career from the men under whom he had worked. “I think it can fairly be said in each of these roles I have been a loyal lieutenant,” he said. The Senate approved the appointment and Richardson was sworn into office on January 24, 1969, joining the State Department twenty years after he had turned down an opportunity to work there under Dean Acheson.
He quickly demonstrated his great appetite for work and his ability to master complex subjects. “He is the rare senior official who, presented with a 1,000 page report on one day, will return it the next, with underlining and commentary,” wrote Christopher Lydon. He worked from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. six days a week, reviewing piles of material in his dark-paneled office. The topics he followed included strategic weapons, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. His ability to rapidly absorb details, his administrative skills, and his ability to listen and respond to the department’s professionals made him popular. Career diplomats and staff at Foggy Bottom appreciated a newcomer who could articulate their issues and champion their department.
Richardson became the link between the State Department and the White House. Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser, was President Nixon’s top foreign policy consultant. Richardson and Kissinger usually met at least once a week over lunch to discuss international issues. Richardson attended meetings of the National Security Council, a group composed of the president’s top foreign policy and defense advisers. He also served as chairman of the Under Secretaries Committee, which included people like himself who held second-in-command positions in Cabinet departments.
Within a month of assuming his duties, Richardson flew to Paris to represent the United States at a meeting with nineteen nations discussing economic cooperation and trade. In the fall of 1969, he delivered an important foreign policy speech for the Nixon administration in New York City. His message focused on the United States’ use of military force to protect American allies around the world, and the administration’s wish to prevent future entanglements such as Vietnam. The under secretary worked on developing Nixon’s new China policy, which involved the lifting of trade and travel restrictions. He was active in negotiating limits for strategic weapons. He worked on European security issues and on increased efforts by the State Department to fight illegal drug trafficking. He encouraged the Organization of American States to intervene to resolve tensions between Honduras and El Salvador. He dealt with the seizure of U.S. tuna boats in international waters by countries attempting to extend their territorial limits. He coordinated delivery of food to starving people in Biafra, a province of Nigeria. He worked with Arab and Israeli ambassadors and realized then--ahead of many others--that there would never be peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians were involved in the negotiations on equal footing.
Meanwhile, the war in Vietnam raged on and the administration agonized over how to bring it successfully to a close. The U.S. strategy at the time--Vietnamization--was to increase South Vietnam’s ability to fight against North Vietnam itself, allowing for the withdrawal of American troops. The Nixon team was also developing a “get tough” policy toward North Vietnam to try to force it to negotiate. Richardson publicly articulated this policy in a speech at the American Political Science Association’s 1969 convention in New York City. “The large powers have found it increasingly difficult to determine the appropriate response to small-power provocation,” he stated. “The strategic concept of a graduated response has been undermined by the Vietnam experience. If the large power voluntarily abstains from using its full power or feels the strategic situation to be such that it cannot do so, it in effect loses the advantage of being a big power.”
In May 1970, American troops invaded Cambodia, which bordered South Vietnam, to attack staging areas set up by North Vietnam. The administration argued that as long as U.S. soldiers were stationed in South Vietnam, the existence of these safe havens (safe because the United States was not at war with Cambodia) posed significant threats to American troops. Although the two-month expedition was a military success, public reaction in the United States was extremely negative. A delegation of fifteen of Richardson’s friends and former Harvard classmates traveled to his office in Washington asking him to denounce the invasion of Cambodia. Because Richardson had often been associated with the liberal or “Eastern Establishment” wing of the Republican Party, this group hoped that he would oppose the invasion. The under secretary, however, believed that the maneuver made military sense and would shorten the war. He offered no apology to his visitors.
Within the department, Richardson worked on improving the organization of the U.S. Foreign Service, including unifying various branches of the service such as the United States Information Agency, the Agency for International Development, and the Peace Corps.
After a year and a half as under secretary of state, Richardson was described by one journalist as a “tough-minded realist, immune to the Administration’s own propaganda, and probably the most effective administrator at Foggy Bottom in the last decade.” According to the reporter, Richardson “has dazzled older hands with his ability to master not simply the conceptual problems of foreign affairs but the snarled lines of the State Department’s internal management.”
When Richardson was appointed, some skeptics had doubted his ability to handle the job, citing his lack of foreign affairs experience. His performance as the State Department’s top administrator for a year and a half allayed any reservations about his abilities. Meanwhile, rumors were circulating about an upcoming change in the Cabinet.
Richard Nixon told his top staffers in May 1970 that Richardson would make a great head of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It needed a great head because one-third of the federal budget went to HEW programs--and the department, which had not even existed twenty years earlier, had become a huge, overblown, unwieldy bureaucracy. The president intended to move the current HEW secretary, Robert Finch, over to the White House to serve as counselor to the president. Richardson was a natural choice to take over HEW both because of his previous experience working in HEW during the Eisenhower administration and because of his reputation for being able to manage difficult bureaucracies.
In June, Richardson found himself testifying at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. One senator told the nominee that he doubted that anyone could ever know everything that was going on in HEW, much less run it efficiently. Richardson responded by characterizing himself as a man "who measures his satisfaction by the scale of the possible". He won confirmation for the post easily.
The department at which Richardson now took the helm was not the same as the one where he had worked in the 1950s. HEW had become sprawling and unwieldy. The number of programs administered by the department had tripled since the Eisenhower days, with funds going to forty thousand institutions and agencies throughout the country. "When someone asked me what it was like to come back to my old department after nearly twelve years in other jobs," Richardson recalled later, "I said it was like seeing an old friend who, since we last met, had grown very fat". Richardson found that fifty-four programs overlapped with other programs, either in HEW or in other federal departments, costing taxpayers almost $19 billion for duplicate programs.
Richardson seemed to be the right man to put in charge of organizing, managing, and slimming down his "fat friend." An article in the New York Times quoted Adelberg Ames, a Boston physician and a friend of Richardson’s, on the new secretary’s approach: "He really believes that problems are amenable to analysis, and it doesn’t really matter what the problem is as long as you have the technique for analyzing it". Richardson said, "I soon learned that the problem was not that HEW was unmanageable. Having served there before and having also spent two years dealing with health, education, and welfare problems in Massachusetts, I did not find it impossibly difficult to get on top of the day-to-day administration of the department. But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done--this was something else again."
Richardson distributed a memo to his managers titled "Performance Priorities," in which he wrote, "My most important task must be an attempt to bring the monster under democratic direction and control." His priorities would be welfare reform, development of a multifaceted health care program, and the operational integration of human services.
According to the December 11, 1972, Newsweek , Richardson mastered HEW’s programs "in short order" and instilled a new sense of purpose in its more than 100,000 employees. The National Journal reported that he had developed a reputation on Capitol Hill as "a masterful witness, who could speak with authority on a wide range of subjects regardless of their complexity".
In July 1970, Richardson spoke in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the National Association of Counties. He said that he and his staff were filled with a sense of "excitement, urgency, and mission" in their determination to tackle the areas entrusted to HEW’s care. Although he counted himself among the "chronic hopers of the world," he and his team realized their limitations. He knew it was easy to fall prey to the "Washington syndrome" of trying to solve social problems by simply throwing tax dollars at them and writing new legislation. He spoke of the need for reforms at the federal, state, and local levels.
Richardson dramatically improved the situation at HEW. He instituted a simpler grant procedure, consolidated programs, and promoted decentralization, in keeping with Nixon’s "New Federalism," which made federal funding available at the state and local level to allow more flexibility for local priorities.
In 1972, Richardson inaugurated a national hypertension control program to lower death rates from stroke and kidney and heart diseases, for which he received the 1978 Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation award for public service.
But Richardson also had many disappointments at HEW. He was more supportive of busing to desegregate schools than Nixon was. The president insisted that HEW hold federally imposed busing to the bare minimum required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The president vetoed a child care bill that Richardson had worked hard with Congress to enact. The secretary negotiated a welfare compromise with Democratic senators, only to have the president reject it. Richardson’s plan for health maintenance organizations also died because of lack of support from the White House.
Despite the lack of support from the White House, Richardson "fought hard for the department’s position," observed one reporter who analyzed Richardson’s record at HEW. "Especially on busing and the cause of racial integration, on which he has a long and forthright history, he went back and back to the White House, trying to reverse the staff and finally the president". Richardson stuck to his principles even when he lost the fight.
He also lost the battle on passage of the Family Assistance Plan, which he later called "the most far-reaching welfare reform program ever put forward". The program would have offered work incentives with extended benefits to low-income families. The House of Representatives passed this piece of legislation, but the Senate never brought it to a vote. It was later learned that Nixon opposed the bill because of what he thought it would cost.
Richardson’s frustrations did not come exclusively from the administration. He knew that even a man with his managerial abilities could not succeed without significant reform of the department’s structure. The National Journal reported that he told his staff that without Congressional approval for reorganization he could never rationally manage the existing structure. In 1972, he put forth a proposal for a "radical simplification of HEW’s programs" . His proposal, a 200-page report titled "Comprehensive HEW Simplification and Reform," called for a reduction in the department’s programs from more than 300 to about 90. The plan divided the remaining programs into three groups: financial assistance to individuals, financial assistance to state and local governments, and building the capacity of human services agencies. He always regretted that he left HEW before he could see the plan implemented. But fate and history would call him to a task even larger than reforming HEW.
In 1972, at the Republican national convention in Miami, Richardson stood in for Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to discuss the party’s platform at a press conference. At the press conference, he was asked about the Watergate break-in of a month earlier. He answered the Watergate questions confidently, certain that neither the White House nor the committee to re-elect President Nixon could possibly be involved. "Quite apart from being both immoral and illegal, it was blatantly bush league," he later commented. Over the next year and a half, he would discover that his confidence in the White House and the re-election committee had been utterly misplaced.
In the 1972 election, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern, despite emerging evidence that the Nixon administration might have been involved in the Watergate crimes. As presidents often do when beginning a second term, Nixon re-evaluated his Cabinet and announced several key changes. Among these was Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird’s return to private life. Richardson, who had now been at HEW for two and a half years, was the president’s choice to head the Defense Department. This meant that the secretary would move from the department with the largest budget to the department with the largest number of employees.
The president summoned his Cabinet members to the presidential retreat at Camp David to break the news of the changes he had in mind. “On the helicopter ride up to Camp David, I had no idea what Nixon had in store for me,” recalled Richardson. “At the outset of the meeting, I urged him to leave me at HEW because I felt that the work I was doing was important”. Nixon refused, and Richardson felt that he had no choice but to accept the position at the Defense Department.
Richardson’s new post was announced in November 1972 and the news was well received by Washington observers. The day after Nixon nominated Richardson for the position, November 29, 1972, David Broder reported in the Washington Post : “If the new defense chief seemed relaxed and soberly eager about his new responsibilities, it may have been because his whole career has been marked by frequent shifts of direction and a succession of diverse assignments--in each of which his performance has dazzled the professionals in that field.”
Richardson again faced a Senate confirmation hearing, this time before the Armed Services Committee. Many of the committee’s questions concerned the continuing war in Vietnam. When he began his first term, Nixon had promised to end the war. Now, four years later, Congress was under pressure to bring American soldiers home from a war that had become increasingly unpopular as it dragged on.
When the committee asked about the controversial so-called Christmas Bombing, an air operation over North Vietnam that took place while Richardson was still HEW secretary, the nominee said that this decision by the president was surely an “agonizing” one. He argued that the commander-in-chief had to do whatever he believed would reduce the loss of life over time. Asked if he favored the bombing, Richardson answered, “I think it would be more accurate to say I support it.” Richardson told the committee that he believed this show of force was justified as a means of demonstrating to North Vietnam that the United States was serious about forcing a resumption of peace talks at that time.
During the lengthy hearing, Richardson also answered questions about the defense budget, which many Congressmen thought should be slashed, since the war was winding down. “Significant cuts in the defense budget now would seriously weaken the U.S. position in international negotiations,” Richardson said, “in which U.S. military capabilities in both real and symbolic terms, are an important factor” (ibid.).
At the end of the three days of hearings, Texas senator John G. Tower said that he had never seen anyone come before Senate confirmation hearings “better prepared to testify about the nature and responsibilities of a job that he has never held.” Senator Tower told fellow committee members that he believed Richardson “is going to be one of the best, if not the best, Secretary of Defense we have ever had”. The Senate confirmed Richardson’s nomination on January 29, 1973, and he took office the following day.
During Richardson’s confirmation process, America’s position in Vietnam changed. On January 15, Nixon announced a halt of all U.S. offensive action against North Vietnam as a prelude to a peace agreement that was signed in Paris on January 27. These actions also signaled the end of the military draft, which, like the war, had become increasingly unpopular.
Once again, Secretary Richardson found himself wrapping up loose ends in one department to take the helm of another. Helping him in this task was Jonathan Moore, whom Richardson appointed to orchestrate his transition to the Pentagon. As a young man, Moore had been an aide first at the Defense Department and then at the State Department during the Kennedy and Johnson years. He then became a foreign policy advisor for Republican presidential nominees George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller. Moore first worked for Richardson at the State Department and then moved with Richardson to HEW, where he became Richardson’s chief of staff. He now served in the same capacity at the Pentagon.
As secretary of defense, Richardson’s “greatest hope and firmest resolve” was to create a collaborative process that would fully engage the uniformed services in thinking through interrelated issues. These issues included the nation’s responsibilities for maintaining a “stable structure” of international peace, the resulting demands on U.S. military capacity, and the various missions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Once these issues were resolved, he reasoned, other details such as levels of forces, training, and weapons requirements would fall into place.
With American participation in the Vietnam War at an end, there was Congressional pressure to make significant cuts in the defense budget. Much of Richardson’s time was spent reviewing and defending the $79 billion budget that he would officially present to Congress in April. He announced 40 military base closings, including one in his own backyard, the Boston naval shipyard.
On April 10, Richardson presented the annual Defense Department report to the House Armed Services Committee. “Now for the first time in nearly a decade,” he reported, “there is a realistic prospect that the United States may be freed from the travail of direct military engagement in Southeast Asia.” After reading his 28-page report summary, he concluded, “I am aware of the impact of the Vietnam War on public opinion and of the changes taking place in American society--events which have caused some people to depreciate the military establishment and to decry the need for a strong defense. I strongly believe that these people are mistaken”.
Years later, Richardson, along with other leaders, was asked to provide comments for the book What Should We Tell Our Children about Vietnam? Richardson emphasized that future students should understand that the United States “should never undertake a military action that cannot, whether for military or political reasons, be successfully carried out.” Also, “because there are many situations like Vietnam and Nicaragua where decisive U.S. military action is not appropriate or feasible, the United States needs to exert effective leadership in pursuing alternative means of protecting its security interests through cooperative multilateral means”.
Although Richardson was serving in a high-level Cabinet position, Nixon conspicuously failed to reach out to him or to other Cabinet officers. Richardson attempted to initiate regular meetings with the president in order to get a “direct grasp of the president’s thinking and add his own reflection to that thinking,” according to the historian Theodore White. The two had one such meeting, which was cordial but not productive. The defense secretary wanted to discuss broad issues that shaped defense, but Nixon was not comfortable with such deliberation and responded merely with specific assignments for Richardson. From then on the two met only for specific and immediate purposes.
Richardson recalled later that at first Pentagon officials were “a little wary” when he took over. But over time they warmed up and began trusting him. “I listened. I understood what they were saying. I had a sense of what they had in mind,” he recalled. “It was the same kind of approach that had served me well with the Foreign Service, at State, and at HEW.” According to General Bruce Palmer Jr., who worked with him, Richardson had once again done a masterful job, accomplishing the most difficult task in supervising a new agency: The staff accepted him as a man of good faith and purposes common with theirs. “I liked especially his open-minded approach to the job and his willingness to try something different. Given the opportunity, he would have become one of our better Secretaries of Defense”.
As Richardson labored to master the workings of the Pentagon, the Watergate crisis continued to escalate almost a year after the break-in. John N. Mitchell, the attorney general during Nixon’s first term, was now accused of having authorized hush-money payments. There were media reports that the money had come from White House funds held by H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, the chief of staff. Richardson had been too busy at HEW and now at Defense, however, to pay much attention to the scandal.
Secretary Richardson took the morning off on April 28, 1973, to attend an event at the school his 15-year-old daughter, Nancy, attended. His visit was interrupted by an urgent phone call from his friend and former boss, Secretary of State Rogers. “Are you sitting down?” Rogers asked. He was calling on behalf of the president, he said. Would Richardson be willing to leave his new post at the Pentagon and take over the Department of Justice?
Richard Kleindienst had replaced John Mitchell as attorney general when Mitchell became chairman of Nixon’s re-election committee. Although not directly accused of Watergate crimes, Kleindienst was close to too many of those being investigated and was publicly blamed for allowing massive leaks from the Department of Justice. Mitchell himself was under investigation for his involvement in authorizing the Watergate break-in. The president had decided that Kleindienst should step down because it would be difficult for him to oversee the prosecution of colleagues. Meanwhile, the president had decided that he would ask his top two aides to resign also. Chief of Staff Haldeman and Domestic Policy Advisor John Ehrlichman, both long-time Nixon friends, had been implicated in the scandal and their continued presence on the White House staff threatened to undermine the administration further.
A new attorney general had to be appointed as soon as possible to restore public confidence, Rogers explained. He and the president had discussed candidates for the job, and both had agreed that Richardson was the man. Richardson, only three months into his position as defense secretary, was not anxious to make a move. He told Rogers that he would discuss the offer with his wife and get back to him with an answer.
“The prospect of having to take over the Watergate investigation was not pleasant,” Richardson later recalled. He and his wife felt that he should avoid the assignment; at the same time, they realized that it would be difficult to refuse if the president insisted. Richardson phoned some old friends. They agreed that it would be better for the new attorney general to be a fresh face in the administration. Richardson would be better off staying at the Department of Defense. But they also understood why the president would want to announce a replacement for Kleindienst immediately. The search for an outsider willing to join the administration at this point in the scandal could take a long time. Richardson should push for someone else and see how the White House reacted.
Richardson called Rogers back and recommended that an outsider be considered. Rogers spoke with Nixon and called Richardson back within an hour. Richardson was still their choice. In fact, the president wanted to meet Richardson face-to-face at the presidential retreat at Camp David the following day, Sunday. Early Sunday morning, Richardson wrote notes to himself in preparation for his meeting with Nixon. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that he did not want the job. The attitude of the White House staff--treating this scandal with “arrogance, contempt, and a lack of real understanding”--worried him even more than the crime itself. He ended his notes with two unanswered questions: “What if the president did know about the cover-up?” and “Do you have the stomach for it?”
Nixon started the meeting by telling Richardson that it was more important for him to join the Justice Department right now than to remain at Defense. The president told him that as attorney general he would have full control of the Watergate investigation.
“Anybody who is guilty,” said the president, “must be prosecuted, no matter who it hurts.” The new attorney general would decide whether to appoint a special prosecutor. And Richardson would remain a member of the president’s National Security Council. Nixon then leaned forward and, looking Richardson straight in the eye, said that he had not known anything about White House involvement in Watergate until March, when he began his own investigation. “Above all, protect the presidency--not the president if he’s done anything wrong,” said Nixon. He even told Richardson not to take the post if he did not believe that Nixon was innocent.
These were the assurances Richardson needed to seriously consider the offer. He offered the president some advice.
“I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit,” he said, repeating a plea that he had made before, to no avail. Richardson now concluded, “Mr. President, I believe your real problem is that you have somehow been unable to realize that you have won, not only won, but been re-elected by a tremendous margin. You are the president of all the people of the United States. There is no ‘they’ out there; nobody trying to destroy you. Even the people who didn’t vote for you want you to succeed”. The president listened but did not respond.
Richardson was now convinced of the president’s sincerity in seeking the truth about Watergate. He was sure that Nixon had not been involved in the criminal wrongdoing. Although Anne still had reservations, Richardson decided to accept the post, concluding that he could be of real service to his president in this crisis. There really was not time to find an outsider. He would take the job for the sake of preserving and safeguarding the system.
Following this decision, Richardson now wrestled with the need for a special prosecutor. Although he believed that he could meet the requirements of leading an independent investigation, he was concerned about public perception and public confidence in justice being served. He would be serving in his fourth key post in this administration. He was also aware of his own reputation for loyalty. “The struggle to preserve my independence would be painful,” as he later put it.
At a press conference on May 7, 1973, a week after the announcement of his nomination to become attorney general, Richardson told reporters that he would appoint a special prosecutor if he was confirmed. Two days later, he faced the Senate Judiciary Committee. The hearings got off to a light-hearted beginning when the committee chairman asked: “Did you ever hear of the Watergate affair?” After the laughter subsided, the seriousness of the proceedings quickly took hold. The chairman asked, “All right. Now, if you are attorney general, what are you going to do about it?” The hearings dragged on for three weeks.
As the hearings got underway, Richardson began collecting names of potential candidates to serve as special prosecutor. From an initial list of some 250, he narrowed it down to seven. Several turned him down. Finding qualified individuals--prosecutors or trial lawyers of stature--willing to take on this untested post was proving more difficult than he had expected. One of his aides recalled Richardson saying, “It often seemed like we had become a nation where the only heroes were rock singers and ball players and that there were no large men of probity who could be called upon for the task”.
On May 16, 1973, Richardson placed a call to his old law professor Archibald Cox. Although Cox did not fit the criterion of being either a prosecutor or trial lawyer, Richardson knew him to be totally above reproach and someone he could trust. He began the conversation by wishing Cox a happy birthday--he would turn 61 the next day. Although the two were by no means close friends, they had worked together as overseers at Harvard, and Richardson respected Cox’s reputation as an individual of “unshakable integrity.” Cox had served under presidents Kennedy and Johnson as solicitor general of the United States, responsible for representing the federal government in cases before the Supreme Court. He was widely regarded as one of the finest solicitors general in history. Although Cox was a Democrat, Richardson did not see this as a problem for the administration. In fact, it would help to appoint someone without any clear Republican ties, and it would smooth Richardson’s own Senate confirmation.
Over the next two days the two men traded phone calls, attempting to work out the details of the post of special prosecutor. Finally, on May 18, Cox accepted the position, subject to the approval of the Senate. Cox would report to Richardson and would be independent of the White House--only Richardson could fire him. According to the guidelines developed by Cox and Richardson, the special prosecutor could only be fired for “extraordinary improprieties.” Although the president publicly supported Richardson’s selection of Cox, privately he began to worry that Cox and many others in Washington were out to get him.
Cox’s biographer, Ken Gormley, noted that although Richardson and Cox led “parallel lives on opposite sides of the political fence,” they moved in similar professional circles. Both were New Englanders who had had successful careers in both government and law--in fact, both had clerked for Learned Hand, where they learned a quasi-religious reverence for the law. Gormley wrote that both men shared precision of thought and expression, and both frowned upon all forms of exaggeration. “Trust in another person’s word, even with no tangible assurance in writing, was mandatory,” Gormley observed (ibid., p. 298). That trust would be vital as the Watergate case became increasingly difficult. A newspaper report at the time stated: “The two men are very alike, self-confident, impatient of stupidity, exacting, publicly severe, perhaps snooty”.
According to Gormley, both men also shared a common vision of government, having first come to Washington when government was smaller and “basic codes of decency were assumed”. During their early years of public service, government officials of high principle filled Cabinet posts and positions of importance in Washington.
On the second to last day of the Judiciary Committee hearings, Senator Robert Byrd announced that he would vote to recommend Richardson for the post to the full Senate--but reluctantly, because the committee had not been given a chance to hold confirmation hearings on an outsider. “The Attorney General designate has been patient and cooperative, and he has conscientiously sought to allay every concern and every doubt harbored by Judiciary Committee members,” Byrd said. He acknowledged that Richardson had selected an outside special prosecutor and had “revised, reworded, and refined” the guidelines governing that prosecutor in response to committee members’ concerns.
Richardson was endorsed by the committee and approved by the Senate. Cox had Richardson’s promise, and the support of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to obtain full and unquestioned authority to call any witness, review any documents, see any evidence, investigate any suspect, and prosecute anyone involved in the Watergate case. Although Richardson believed and hoped that the Watergate matter would be swiftly and fairly resolved, the months ahead would prove to be the most difficult of his career.
1. The Case against the Vice President
Richardson was sworn in as attorney general on May 26, 1973, in the East Room of the White House. Chief Justice Warren Burger administered the oath of office as the president, the Cabinet, and 300 guests looked on. Richardson told the gathering, “This is a time when the institutions of our government are under stress . . . not because their structure is not sound. If there are flaws they are in ourselves, and our task therefore must be one not of redesign but of renewal and reaffirmation, especially of the standards in which all of us believe.” Richardson told the gathering that the process of government had been infected with a kind of sleaziness that, as attorney general, he would try to eliminate.
Richardson convinced key opinion makers that he was the right man for the job. Time magazine, for instance, wrote that “few men were better qualified by temperament and experience to serve as the country's chief legal officer”. Indeed, he was the first attorney general to have been both a U.S. attorney and a state attorney general.
The new attorney general established the goal of strengthening public confidence in government in general and in the administration of justice in particular. To do this, he needed to bolster the department’s morale. In the Great Hall at the Justice Department, Richardson addressed department employees, reminding them of their department’s objectives. “When I took the oath of office as attorney general,” he stated, “I said the first concern of the administration of justice must, of course, be the individual. The second concern is the truth. The first of these demands fairness, the second demands fearlessness. I shall do my utmost to be
faithful to both.”
Richardson conveyed the same message outside the department. Speaking in New Orleans at a meeting of the National Institute on Crime and Delinquency, he criticized the tendency of some people to view government as “them” instead of “us.” He read the dedication from the book McSoreley's Wonderful Saloon by Joseph Mitchell: “This book is dedicated to the people who are sometimes called the Little People. Well, I want you to know they're just as big as you are, whoever you are.” Richardson often quoted this dedication, he told the group, “because it expresses, better than anything else I know, my general attitude toward the responsibility of government.” Justice in America must represent all the people, he argued, no matter who they are. (See speech delivered June 17, 1973, on file at the Department of Justice library.)
Richardson felt that federal leadership, through the Justice Department, could improve the administration of criminal justice at the state and local levels. One of the first things he did was to ask his staff to research the prison system and investigate how to reduce the rate of repeat offences. He felt encouraged, he later recalled, when he learned that the recidivism rate dropped when job opportunities were made available. He was looking forward to making this a top priority for the Justice Department. Richardson planned to link business leaders, community organizations, and the Bureau of Prisons to address the problem.
Richardson brought with him three trusted aides: Jonathan Moore, J. T. Smith, and Richard Darman. Moore, who handled the transition from the Department of Defense, was Richardson’s personal troubleshooter and associate attorney general. Smith, Richardson’s executive assistant, managed the attorney general’s schedule and helped him write speeches. Smith had been special assistant to the comptroller at HEW under Richardson, and before that served in the Central Intelligence Agency as a programs analyst in planning, programming, and budgeting. Like Richardson, Smith was a man of precise speech and thought. According to one Washington reporter, this made him an ideal first lieutenant. Richard Darman had served as deputy assistant secretary at HEW, where he managed Richardson’s staff. A Harvard graduate like Richardson, Darman had served as Richardson’s special assistant at the Defense Department and had the same title now, coordinating top-level policy planning, management, and analysis.
The new team was barely in place when crisis struck. On June 12, George Beall, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, visited Richardson to inform him about an investigation concerning possible corruption in Baltimore County, Maryland. Richardson smoked a pipe and doodled with a blue felt-tip pen while occasionally taking notes. But then Beall mentioned something that made Richardson pay special attention: Beall's office had been working on an investigation that could implicate the vice president, Spiro T. Agnew. It was secondhand information, cautioned Beall, but he thought that the new attorney general should be aware of it. Federal prosecutors had discovered that bribes and kickbacks may have been paid to state contractors during Agnew's years as a county executive and later as the governor of Maryland. Richardson asked to be kept posted on Beall's findings.
On July 3, Richardson met again with Beall and three assistant U.S. attorneys from Baltimore, who laid out additional details of their case. The investigation had turned up incriminating evidence against Agnew. Richardson had two initial concerns. First, how would these accusations, if proven, affect the administration's ability to govern? Second, in light of the deepening Watergate crisis and its ramifications for the president--including the possibility that the president might resign--would it be possible for Agnew to assume the presidency while under investigation?
The attorney general asked his visitors for their opinions. What should the next step be? Should he confront the vice president with this information? Should he inform President Nixon? By the end of the three-hour meeting they had agreed that it was still too early to discuss the case with the president and vice president. With all the pressures facing Nixon because of Watergate, Richardson did not wish to needlessly worry the president.
Although the officials from Baltimore were impressed with the attorney general's coolness in receiving such troubling news, Richardson was shaken by the revelations. From the very beginning, Richardson's solution to the case--if the charges were true--was for Agnew to resign.
Richardson was in an awkward situation with respect to the vice president, however. Both men were considered likely Republican candidates for president in 1976. There might be a perception, he worried, that personal motives fueled his interest in seeing Agnew step down. That evening he told Anne that “a bad scene was developing” involving the vice president. “It was a deeply disturbing picture,” Richardson later admitted. “I felt sick, almost. It was as bleak a day as I'd ever had”.
Throughout the summer the investigations of the president and of the vice president continued. Both investigations were ultimately Richardson’s responsibility. The Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was overstepping his powers, the president complained to his new White House chief of staff, Alexander Haig. Haig, a former Army general, often discussed the matter with Richardson. Meanwhile, Agnew charged that he was being unfairly investigated, that he was innocent, and that he was being hounded by out-of-control young prosecutors in Baltimore.
By July 11, Beall’s office had gathered enough evidence against the vice president to warrant another meeting with the attorney general. Richardson spoke at length on what they could expect from Agnew's lawyers, with whom Beall's staff had already been in contact. Richardson thought that Agnew would voluntarily resign if confronted with the evidence; the Maryland prosecutors disagreed.
One lingering issue was Richardson’s possible conflict of interest with respect to the Agnew case. Should the attorney general pass off the Agnew case to Cox, to add to his Watergate duties, so there would be no question of conflict of interest? Beall’s team strongly opposed turning over the investigation to anyone else. Richardson felt that he could remain objective. Beall argued that since the attorney general wanted to restore public confidence in the Justice Department, having Richardson in charge of the case would be a plus for the department. Richardson finally agreed.
By July 23, the Maryland prosecutors had evidence that Agnew had also accepted payoffs after becoming vice president. At a third meeting, on July 27, Beall’s team reported to Richardson that although most of their case focused on payoffs to Agnew while he was governor of Maryland, not vice president, accepting bribes was a serious enough crime to warrant removal of the vice president. They suspected that Agnew had probably told the president about his situation; it was likely that the news media was on the verge of breaking the story. Richardson decided that it was time to officially notify the president and vice president of the charges. He authorized the team to prepare a formal letter to Agnew advising him that he was under investigation for possible violation of federal criminal statutes.
This step could not be taken lightly. Once Agnew was formally notified, the vice president's reputation would be at stake and the burden of proof was on the Department of Justice. Richardson called Haig to request an appointment with the president. Richardson told the chief of staff, “They say, up in Baltimore, that they have enough evidence to charge the vice president with 40 felony counts for violation of federal statutes on bribery, tax evasion and corruption.” Agnew had discussed his problems with Haig and had insisted on his innocence. Haig didn't realize that the charges were this serious. “There's no mistake about this?” Haig asked. “There's no mistake,” answered Richardson. “They've got him--credible witnesses, documents, heaven knows what else. In all my years as a prosecutor I have never seen such an open-and-shut case”.
Haig knew that, coming from Richardson, who had been both a U.S. attorney and a state attorney general, this was a sobering statement. “How soon before this goes public?” the general asked. Richardson said that it was difficult to tell, since justice moved at its own deliberate pace. But the investigation was almost complete. The next step would be to convene a grand jury. Hearing evidence and handing down indictments could take a month to six weeks. “At that point,” Richardson noted wryly, “matters usually become quite noticeably public.”
Richardson also explained his own predicament to Haig. “Richardson told me that he had subjected himself to a lot of soul-searching with regard to the Watergate scandal,” Haig later recalled. Richardson told Haig: “I am trying to behave in a manner that when looked at six months to a year from now, will be good for the president.” Haig said that he would arrange a meeting with the president.
Richardson spent the weekend at his family’s summer house at Eastham on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. On Sunday, Jonathan Moore stopped by to help Richardson plan his upcoming meeting with the president. Knowing that Haig always shared his information with Nixon and that five days had passed since the meeting with Haig, Richardson released a formal letter to the vice president's attorney on August 1, spelling out the charges. The letter mentioned extortion, conspiracy, bribery, and tax evasion. With this letter in hand, Agnew's lawyer officially notified his client that he was the first vice president in American history to be formally placed under criminal investigation.
Richardson finally saw the president on August 6. The attorney general summarized the evidence gathered by the U.S. attorney in Maryland. Richardson recalled later that Nixon seemed to receive the information in an objective manner. He appeared “disturbed and concerned with the correctness of any action or anything he did or did not do” on the Agnew case as president. Nixon said that he wanted another opinion on the case and asked that Henry Petersen, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, review the evidence. Petersen had worked his way up from a clerk at the FBI to a career lawyer with the Justice Department, becoming the first career staffer to hold the senior presidential appointment to head up the criminal division. Petersen had supervised the Watergate investigation prior to the appointment of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor. The Nixon White House had a high degree of confidence in Petersen, even though he was a registered Democrat.
That same afternoon, at the president’s urging (conveyed through Haig), Richardson went to the vice president’s office at the Old Executive Office Building. Reading from notes, Richardson summarized the status of the investigation for Agnew and his legal team. The attorney general's summary included evidence that Agnew had received bribes while serving as vice president, most recently in December 1972. The vice president interrupted Richardson. It was all a pack of lies, he charged. He didn't trust Beall’s office and he certainly didn't believe the statements of the witnesses who were cooperating with the prosecutors, since many of them were also under investigation. Agnew wanted someone he could trust, and, like Nixon, he suggested that Petersen head the investigation. Agnew's attorneys said that if ever there was a case for a special prosecutor, this was it. Richardson responded that although he had full confidence in Beall's office, Petersen could also take a look at the case.
Events now moved rapidly. The August 7Wall Street Journal broke the story about the vice president. The next day, Agnew held a press conference to declare his innocence. One week later, on August 15, Haig reported to the president Henry Petersen's assessment: Agnew appeared to be guilty of the charges.
The president, consumed with the growing seriousness of his own crisis, wanted his vice president to resign. With Agnew's departure only a matter of time, the president thought of his friend John Connally of Texas. “Stand by,” Haig told the former treasury secretary. “You may be the next vice president.”
By the second week of September, Beall’s team had informed Richardson that they believed there was proof that as much as $172,000 in improper payments had passed into Agnew's hands. At this point it appeared that there was enough evidence to send Agnew to prison if the case went to trial. In an effort to avoid this unsightly blemish on the office of the vice president, the Justice Department and Agnew's defense team negotiated. Richardson was ready to authorize Beall and his staff to present evidence to a federal grand jury if negotiations failed. The vice president obviously wanted to avoid a jail sentence. Beall and Agnew's attorneys struggled with a plan to resolve the showdown and avoid a criminal trial.
The attorney general personally wrestled with the dilemma of how to bring Agnew to justice. Any disposition short of a prison sentence would bring criticism that the vice president was benefiting from his position. Richardson later recalled, “The vice president had a bargaining asset, however, that no ordinary person has: He was next in line to the presidency. I saw no chance that he would resign first, then take his chances on trial, conviction, and jail”. Therefore, Richardson kept looking for a solution. Haig later recalled that Richardson “wrestled with this question almost to the point of spiritual exhaustion; he kept telling me how tired he was as a result of his attempts to find a just solution.” Agnew had committed serious crimes, Richardson told the White House chief of staff. “In the case of a governor, we would recommend jail” (Haig, Inner Circles , p. 366).
Richardson contacted Haig on October 9. He could recommend that the vice president not be tried or sent to jail if he resigned and acknowledged the evidence against him. Of course, there was no guarantee, explained the attorney general, that the presiding judge would agree. Others at Justice were not anxious for Agnew to avoid serving time. “I must say it is kind of an uncomfortable position,” Richardson told Haig. “I am going to make clear to my own people that this is the result of my own prayerful consideration.” Richardson was concerned that everyone understand that he had arrived at this decision independently and that it was good law. “There is no question of that here,” Haig reassured him. “There never has been”.
Vice President Agnew resigned on October 10, simultaneously pleading no contest to a single charge of income-tax evasion before Judge Walter E. Hoffman in federal court in Baltimore. In return, the United States dropped all other charges and recommended leniency. Richardson appeared personally, representing the government. Considering the “historic magnitude of the penalties inherent in the vice president's resignation from his high office and his acceptance of a judgment of conviction of a felony,” Richardson recommended against any prison time. The judge declared from the bench that he would have sent Agnew to prison had Richardson not personally argued that leniency was justified. Hoffman sentenced Agnew to three years’ unsupervised probation and fined him $10,000, reminding the vice president that his plea was the “full equivalent of a plea of guilty.”
A front-page article in the October 12, 1973, Wall Street Journal credited the attorney general with resolving this governmental crisis. “Richardson is becoming one of the few major figures in either party who can command respect from broad segments of the public,” wrote the reporter, Wayne Green. He reported that the serene and self-assured attorney general had restored staff morale and public confidence in the Watergate-tarnished Justice Department in just six months’ time. Green added that under Richardson’s leadership the Justice Department was assuming a unique position of power and independence within the Nixon administration. Richardson was succeeding in his primary goal of convincing the public that the criminal justice system can effectively expose the shoddy side of government and the political process, Green wrote. With Richardson at Justice, politics was no longer a controlling force in the handling of major prosecutions and issues--a charge leveled at Richardson’s two predecessors. One career lawyer at the Justice Department told the Wall Street Journal , “With Richardson at the helm, we've got a real attorney general now--not some political hack.”
2. The Watergate Crisis
The summer of 1973 was a very long one for Richardson. He was caught in the middle of constant battles between his friend, Archibald Cox, and his boss, Richard Nixon, over the authority delegated to the special prosecutor. Although the duties of attorney general include acting as chief prosecutor for the government and serving as the president's legal advisor, Richardson could fill neither of these roles regarding Watergate-related issues. The attorney general considered himself “attorney for the situation,” meaning that all he could do was to cope as best he could with each problem as it arose.
The president constantly complained about Cox's handling of the investigation. Nixon later wrote in his memoirs that Richardson could not have made a worse choice for special prosecutor (Nixon, Memoirs , vol. 2, p. 461). But even those closest to Richardson in the attorney general's office--most of whom were Republicans--dismissed Nixon’s complaints as White House paranoia. Richardson repeatedly assured the president that the special prosecutor was not out to get him. “Archie would rather cut off his right arm,” the attorney general told the president, “than take any action inconsistent with his duties.” Yet shortly after Agnew resigned, the president said to Richardson, “Now that we have disposed of that matter [Agnew], we can go ahead and get rid of Cox.” Richardson later concluded that President Nixon had two goals regarding the special prosecutor. First, he wanted either to induce Cox to quit or to fire him; and second, he wanted his attorney general to assist in that plan.
Richardson lost favor with the White House over the summer because of the administration's perception that Cox had overstepped his mandate. Cox had subpoenaed eight tapes of Oval Office conversations that the White House had refused to surrender. More than once Richardson told Nixon that “he ought to invite Archie Cox to bring a truck over to Pennsylvania Avenue and haul away everything, including the tapes.” If Cox found something, Richardson thought the president should just say, “Ah, shucks, I apologize, it must have been under the stress of work,” and the matter would be settled (Gormley, Archibald Cox , p. 299).
On October 12, a federal Court of Appeals upheld a lower court order that the president must turn over the tapes to Cox. Richardson was now walking a tightrope between the survival concerns of the White House and the enforcement demands of the criminal justice system. According to the Watergate historian Stanley Kutler, the attorney general realized the importance of finding a practical way of reconciling the competing interests of the president’s desire for confidentiality and the special prosecutor’s charter to uncover criminal evidence. “In fact,” Kutler wrote, “that was the nature of Richardson's role in the three remaining months of his tenure” (Kutler, Wars of Watergate , p. 391).
Richardson was proud of his reputation as a team player. He wished to avoid a confrontation with the president. On October 15, Richardson met with Haig and White House counsel J. Fred Buzhardt at the White House. They informed Richardson that the president was willing to release an “authenticated” version of the subpoenaed tapes, but would fire Cox. The firing of the special prosecutor was unacceptable to Richardson. He would resign if the president fired Cox. During the day-long negotiations, a compromise called the Stennis plan evolved. The White House proposed that a third party, trusted by all concerned, verify the accuracy of the transcripts. The White House said that Senator John C. Stennis would fill the bill. A veteran of 26 years in the Senate and a former judge, this Mississippi Democrat would make a credible arbitrator. Richardson thought that this plan might break the deadlock, and he agreed to lay it out for Cox.
By October 18, however, Cox reluctantly informed the attorney general that he could not agree to the Stennis plan. The special prosecutor could not live with one single person--selected by the White House--reviewing the tapes and comparing them to edited transcripts. Not only would this be a daunting job for any individual, but summaries of the tapes would not even be admissible as evidence in a court of law. On top of this, the White House was insisting that Cox could subpoena no further documents. Richardson agreed that such future restrictions on Cox were unacceptable. “Slowly, but surely,” noted Kutler, “events put Richardson in an untenable position” (Wars of Watergate , p. 402).
Friday, October 19, Richardson went to work prepared to resign if necessary. “I called Haig and asked to see the president, knowing what I had to do.” Instead, he met with the chief of staff. Haig, speaking for the president, tried to sell the attorney general on agreeing to submit transcripts that had been verified by Stennis. The court would be told that this was as far as the White House would go, argued Haig, so Cox would not have to be fired.
Richardson was not convinced and was still at work in his office at 7:00 p.m. when Haig called to say that a letter from the president was on its way to the Justice Department. “I was angry and upset,” recalled Richardson (Creative Balance , p. 42). Twenty minutes later he received the letter, in which the president apologized for his “limited” intrusion on his attorney general's independence but made it clear that Cox’s future as special prosecutor depended on his accepting the Stennis plan and making no further attempts to subpoena presidential materials. The attorney general called Cox to inform him of the letter. Richardson went home that evening and discussed this development with Anne. “It was clear that I could not carry out the instructions,” he recalled. His predicament reminded Richardson of his experience as a medic at Normandy, making his way through the minefield carrying a wounded soldier (Creative Balance , p. 38).
The headlines in the October 20 New York Times read: “Nixon to Keep Tapes Despite Ruling; Will Give Own Summary; Cox Defiant.” Cox called a press conference for 1:00 p.m. at the National Press Club in Washington.
That Saturday morning, Richardson worked on summarizing his notes of the night before under the title “Summary of Reasons Why I Must Resign.” He would use this as the basis for a letter to the president. Richardson then made the drive one last time as attorney general from his home to the Justice Department to meet with his staff.
Richardson's letter to the president repeated the importance of the special prosecutor's independence, but offered several new compromises that would allow Cox to carry out his duties. Richardson's letter was delivered to the White House just moments before Cox went on television.
The special prosecutor said that he would not accept the Stennis plan and firmly stated that he would not resign. Later, in the foreword to the 1997 biographyArchibald Cox: Conscience of a Nation , Richardson wrote, “In the end, Nixon's most damaging misjudgment was his underestimation of Cox's ability to communicate the strength of his integrity. Nixon, himself, like everyone else who watched Cox's press conference on the afternoon of October 20, 1973, must have felt that force. Indeed, in all the annals of public service there have been few finer examples of grace under pressure” (p. xii). During the question and answer period after he read his prepared statement, Cox was asked about Richardson’s handling of the case thus far. Cox replied that Richardson had acted honorably throughout the affair.
The attorney general and his top advisers watched the press conference from Richardson’s sitting room at the Justice Department. “I did not have to wait long for Haig's call telling me that the president wanted me to fire Cox,” Richardson later recounted. “Al, when can I see the president?” the attorney general asked. There was no doubt in Richardson’s mind now; it was a clearcut decision. According to his own ground rules established during his Senate confirmation hearing, he could fire Cox only for impropriety. There was no impropriety of any sort here. Haig invited Richardson to come over to the White House, where they spoke about Richardson’s future in the administration (Creative Balance , p. 44, and Gormley, Archibald Cox , p. 355).
The two men stood together uncomfortably at a constitutional crossroads, according to Gormley. “He talked about how highly the president regarded me,” recalled Richardson. Haig even mentioned the prospect of a spot on the national ticket for Richardson after Nixon’s current term expired. “Al, there’s no way I can move forward with firing Cox,” Richardson replied. Haig had another proposal: Richardson could resign if he felt he had to, but not make it public for a week. Richardson dismissed the proposal and told Haig that it was time to see the president (Gormley, Archibald Cox , p. 355).
At 4:00 p.m., Richardson entered the Oval Office and noticed that Nixon “seemed under more strain than I had seen him in previous years” (ibid.). Nixon started talking about the current crisis in the Middle East. The Watergate case was hurting the U.S. position on an international level, the president argued. Richardson had considered this during his deliberations the night before. “If it is that important, then don’t push to fire Cox,” Richardson later recalled thinking. Nixon then mentioned the same idea proposed in the meeting Richardson had just had with Haig. Go ahead and resign, if you must, Nixon suggested, but sit on it for a while.
Richardson shook his head, reminding the president that he could fire Cox only for extraordinary impropriety. Nixon said, “I'm sorry, Elliot, that you choose to put your purely personal obligations ahead of the national interest.” In the account of the conversation given in Gormley’s book, the attorney general responded, “Mr. President, I can only say that I believe my resignation is in the public interest” (Gormley, Archibald Cox , p. 356). Richardson elsewhere recalled using these words: “Mr. President, it would seem we have differing views of the national interest” (Creative Balance , p. 44). The historic meeting came to an end.
Back in his office at the Justice Department, Richardson wrote a letter of resignation addressed to President Nixon that read, in part:
At the time you appointed me, you gave me the authority to name a special prosecutor if I should consider it appropriate. A few days before my confirmation hearing began, I announced that I would, if confirmed, “appoint a special prosecutor and give him all the independence, authority, and staff support needed to carry out the tasks entrusted to him.” I added, “Although he will be in the Department of Justice and report to me--and only to me--he will be aware that his ultimate accountability is to the American people.”
. . . While the special prosecutor can be removed from office for “extraordinary improprieties,” I also pledged that “the attorney general will not countermand or interfere with the special prosecutor's decisions or actions.”
While I fully respect the reasons that have led you to conclude that the special prosecutor must be discharged, I trust that you understand that I could not in the light of these firm and repeated commitments carry out your direction that this be done. In the circumstances, therefore, I feel that I have no choice but to resign.
After accepting Richardson’s resignation, the president ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and also resigned, although the White House dismissed him before his letter of resignation was received. The next in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, planned to fire Cox and then resign. Richardson and Ruckelhaus convinced Bork to remain to “mind the store” and ensure continuity at the Justice Department. Although some historians believe that if Bork had also resigned rather than carrying out the presidential order, it might have hastened the end of the Watergate scandal, Richardson and Ruckelshaus were convinced that it would do less damage to the Justice Department if Bork carried out Nixon’s order and remained than if the Department went leaderless for an extended period until Nixon could find someone else to carry it out. Bork, who supported the president’s position that Cox had overstepped his mandate, signed a hastily drafted letter dismissing him as special prosecutor. This chain of events came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
Before the day was done, Richardson called Cox, letting him know the sequence of events regarding his dismissal. At the end of the conversation, Richardson recited a passage from Homer’s Iliad , which Learned Hand had inscribed on a photo that he had presented to Richardson: “Now, though numberless fates of death beset us which no mortal can escape or avoid, let us go forward together, and either we shall give honor to one another or another to us” (Gormley, Archibald Cox , p. 357).
The October 21 headline in the New York Times spanned the top of the page: “Nixon Discharges Cox for Defiance; Abolishes Watergate Task Force; Richardson and Ruckelshaus Out.” The nation responded with shock and outrage. The resignation of Richardson and his deputy, along with Nixon's order to abolish the office of the special prosecutor, resulted in a firestorm of public talk of impeachment of the president. Letters and telegrams expressing outrage at the president’s actions flooded Washington. The New York Times editorial on October 21 referred to Richardson's resignation in protest as “courageous.” The next day, the Times editorial lamented, “This espousal of absolute rule has thrown the country into a governmental crisis of fearful dimensions.” The October 23 editorial in the Times declared that “Mr. Nixon has brought the nation to its most severe crisis since the Reconstruction era, when one president stood trial for impeachment and another took office after the disputed election of 1876.”
Monday afternoon, October 22, Richardson met with Nixon for half an hour. The president wanted to know how Richardson was going to handle his public statements about the resignation. Richardson reassured Nixon that there would be no personal attacks. This was the last time the two men met.
Richardson gave a public explanation of his actions the next day. With the permission of Acting Attorney General Bork, Richardson held a live, televised press conference in front of hundreds of department employees at the Great Hall of the Justice Department. The journalist Elizabeth Drew reported on the scene: “As Richardson and his wife, together with Ruckelshaus, step through the blue velvet curtain, the Justice Department workers burst into prolonged applause. It is the sort of emotional applause that, once started, feeds on itself--the applauder's way of making a statement. The ovation also expresses the Justice Department workers' desire for a hero--a moral standard to which they can repair. An Associated Press reporter estimated that the applause continued for nearly two minutes” (Drew, Washington Journal )
Drew observed that the ex-attorney general looked different than he had on previous occasions: “He is tired; his eyes are bleary. His voice is tremulous. His delivery lacks the customary crispness. He is apparently struggling for control of his emotions; it seems to be the fatigue--a reaction to the ovation the Justice Department workers have given him and to what he has been through.”
In a prepared statement, Richardson told his former coworkers and the television audience: “At stake, in the final analysis, is the very integrity of the governmental processes I came to the Department of Justice to help restore.” He did not dispute the president's authority to change the rules of the game, but he explained why he could not abide by that change.
Although he praised the Nixon administration's general goals and priorities, Richardson said, “I have been compelled to conclude that I could better serve my country by resigning my public office than by continuing in it.” In response to White House plans to continue the Watergate investigations from within the Justice Department, Richardson and Ruckelshaus stated that a new special prosecutor, independent of the Nixon administration, was necessary to properly pursue the investigation.
An opinion piece titled “The Constitutional Crisis,” by the president of the American Bar Association, Chesterfield H. Smith, ran in the October 23 edition of the New York Times . It applauded the actions of Richardson, Ruckelshaus, and Cox. Smith wrote that the three “have emphasized to the nation that they are lawyers who honor the tradition of the legal profession and that they are lawyers who properly and without hesitation put ethics and professional honor above public office.”
The cover of the October 29, 1973, Time magazine showed pictures of Richard Nixon and Archibald Cox with a split between them. The cover story, titled “Richard Nixon Stumbles to the Brink,” included the sidebar “The Three Men of High Principle,” about Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus. Although Richardson was regarded as an administration loyalist, “his chief allegiance throughout his career has been to law,” stated the article. It quoted Richardson as once saying, “Law is the indispensable attribute of an ordered society.”
The legacy of the Watergate scandal will not soon be forgotten. In a 1990 poll, historians rated Watergate the greatest abuse of power in U.S. history by a wide margin. The immediate result was that Congress passed a series of reforms, including a provision for the creation of special prosecutors, so that the Saturday Night Massacre would not occur again.
Richardson appeared on June 17, 1997, at a press conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of Watergate, hosted by Common Cause, an advocacy group for campaign finance reform and ethics laws. Richardson said, “This anniversary serves to help remind the American people that, in the wake of one of the greatest political scandals and misuse of power in our history as a nation, scandal produced important reforms that served this nation well for two decades.”
In his speech at the Common Cause press conference, Richardson explained that the lessons of Watergate continue to be important because of the current lack of public trust in government and politics. “People have moved beyond apathy, beyond skepticism into deep cynicism,” he said. Citing the decline in voter participation--the 1996 elections saw the lowest turnout in more than 70 years--Richardson worried that people “are convinced that nothing can be done to make their voices heard in Washington.” He noted that some $250 million in private contributions had fueled the campaigns in 1996.
Richardson said that the reform in presidential campaign financing enacted into law in 1974 “worked very well for a long time and had strong bipartisan support. . . . But now it clearly needs to be reformed again. This is true, of course, for almost any legislation: It will work well for a time and then need to be revised. The Watergate reforms did work well for many years, and if improved and broadened, these reforms can have real and major impact on the system today. Making those improvements will again require the bipartisan approach used two decades ago.”
In an oral history for the Ford Presidential Library, Richardson reflected that someday he would have to write about the contrast between Nixon the committed public servant and the Nixon who was divisive, cynical, and vindictive. The contrast is wider than people think, Richardson commented. When Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins paid a visit to the retired Elliot Richardson for their movie about Nixon, Richardson recalled, he “tried to get across to them the classic dimensions of the Nixon tragedy,” which you can't communicate unless you also understand the scale of the positive capabilities, ideas, and strategic capacity of Richard Nixon (interview by Richard L. Holzhausen, April 25, 1997, pp. 7–8).
Following Richardson’s death, Ruckelshaus wrote in the January 5, 2000, Washington Post that as attorney general, Richardson had been “subjected to the most intense political pressure imaginable” and that “the choices he made in a time of national crisis are a tribute to him and the enduring values of America.”
Secret Service agents had been guarding Carl Albert, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, since the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew. Albert was the next in line for the presidency in the absence of a sitting vice president. Agnew resigned in October; it took until December to swear in a new vice president.
The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, never before used, allowed the president to appoint a new vice president in the event of death or resignation. When Agnew left office, Richard Nixon had five candidates in mind: Elliot Richardson, former treasury secretary John Connally, former California governor Ronald Reagan, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Michigan congressman and House minority leader Gerald R. Ford. Because of his role in Agnew’s prosecution, Richardson asked the president to take his name off the list.
On October 12, two days after Agnew left office, Nixon asked Ford to take the vice presidency. Because the president wanted Connally to run for the presidency at the end of Nixon’s second term, he secured Ford’s agreement to support Connally in 1976. Ford, a 25-year veteran of Congress, was already planning to retire in 1977. He was confirmed by both houses of Congress, and in December, he was sworn in as Nixon’s vice president.
Meanwhile, Richardson had adapted to life in the private sector. He was now studying state and local government as a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C., a part of the Smithsonian Institution. He started work on his first book and went on nationwide speaking tours. The Watergate scandal continued to grow, and Richardson’s principled resignation earned him national folk hero status. He was considered a likely presidential candidate for 1976.
Richardson made 260 speeches during his tenure at the Wilson Center, mostly to college audiences, civic groups, and Republican gatherings. He also lectured at the Lyndon Johnson School of Politics at the University of Texas, held a Chubb Fellowship at Yale and was a part of the Godkin lectures at Harvard.
One of his addresses, “Vulnerability and Vigilance,” was included in a series of great speeches, Representative American Speeches . These remarks were made at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation dinner in New York City on December 11, 1973 at the Hotel Pierre. Introduced by Rockefeller, one of the individuals being honored that evening, Richardson spoke before a crowd of 500 diplomats, politicians, and religious leaders. They gathered to support the foundation’s efforts on behalf of religious freedom throughout the world. In his speech, later praised as remarkable for its restraint, Richardson called for protection against invasion of privacy, prevention of campaign abuses, erection of barriers against improper use of political influence, and enactment of provisions for stricter accountability in the exercise of power.
A front-page story in the February 22, 1974, Wall Street Journal noted that Richardson’s speeches made the classic Republican argument for limiting the increasingly pervasive and--some thought--intrusive federal government. He also argued that whatever had been wrong in Watergate was not chargeable to the Republican Party; tarring the party with the brush of Watergate would be a flagrant case of guilt by association. Richardson was “coolly judicious” in discussing Nixon, the Wall Street Journal reported. He advised audiences to suspend judgment on the impeachment issue until the investigations were complete. Richardson said that he opposed demands for Nixon’s resignation because resignation would leave a “residue of bitterness” with the American people. The former attorney general did, however, criticize the president’s continuing refusal to disclose all Watergate-related tape recordings and documents. The newspaper reported that he believed that Nixon had to shoulder the blame for the combative attitudes within the White House that had led to the Watergate abuses. He would not have supported Nixon for re-election in 1972 had he known then what he now knew, he concluded (Miller, “Elliot Richardson”).
On April 28, 1974, Richardson appeared on Meet the Press and answered numerous questions about his views of the continuing Watergate crisis. Based on his travels throughout the country, he was asked if he thought that most Americans perceived the political system as corrupt and politicians as crooks. “I certainly do, yes.” Richardson responded, “In fact I think that the most critical danger we face right now is the danger that cynicism will bite so deeply that we can’t effectively have a system of free representative self-government any more, and that is why I see the need now for a greater degree of emphasis on openness and candor in government than ever before in our history.”
As always, Richardson was asked about his own interest in the presidency. When asked what he would most like to accomplish if he became president, Richardson said, “The key problems, at least as I see them today, involve, in the first instance, the further pursuit of a more stable world order. They involve problems of the domestic economy--inflation, energy--and they involve the kinds of things I am writing about, which have to do with the relationship of the citizen to government and the very possibility, given the complexity of our society, of preserving a system of free self-government. I think that, in turn, means that we can and should move in a direction that emphasizes the rebuilding of community and greater reliance on governmental units that are subject to the voice of the individual and to effective control by community people.”
Meanwhile, the Watergate scandal had escalated to become a constitutional crisis. Secretary of State Kissinger advised Nixon to resign; even the ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of impeachment and condemned Nixon’s conduct during the Watergate cover-up. Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush wrote to the president to urge him to resign. Senate leaders meeting with Nixon told him that his support in the Senate had vanished. With charges leading directly to President Nixon himself, and with impeachment nearly a certainty, Nixon resigned his office on August 9, 1974, the only president in American history to do so.
Ten years later, reflecting on these events for a volume about the Nixon years, Richardson stated that Watergate had demonstrated the “strength and resilience” of the American constitutional structure. “The checks and balances worked in an absolutely textbook fashion in that situation,” he reflected (“The Paradox,” p. 64). Later, in the foreword to a book on Watergate, Richardson referred to Archibald Cox’s press conference the day he was fired as special prosecutor. Cox had said, “Whether ours shall continue a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress to decide and, ultimately, the American people.” Richardson wrote in his foreword, “Professor Cox was right, with a difference. It was the American people who decided, and the Congress which concurred, that ours would continue a government of laws and not of men. The American people could not have made plainer their determination to maintain a government of laws,” he concluded, citing the national public protest following the Saturday Night Massacre (foreword to Feinberg, Watergate , p. 13).
Ford was sworn into office as president. His first important task was to use his powers under the 25th Amendment to appoint a vice president. He solicited names of candidates from his staff and Republican leaders. Richardson was on the short list of candidates along with George Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.
On August 11, preside | | |
Medal History
