Special Prosecutor Fired by Nixon Over Watergate Probe

Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor who demanded that President Nixon turn over his secretly recorded White House tapes, prompting Nixon to order Cox fired and setting in motion a constitutional crisis that led to Nixon's resignation in the face of impeachment, died Saturday. He was 92.

Cox, a highly respected Harvard law professor who at various times held several high government posts, died at his home in Brooksville, Maine, said his daughter Phyllis Cox. She said the cause of death was old age.

Cox was the second leading figure from the Watergate era to die Saturday. Sam Dash, a counsel in the Watergate hearings, died in Washington, D.C. He was 79.

Cox will be remembered by history as the catalyst of the "Saturday Night Massacre" -- instantly named because two top Justice Department officials resigned rather than carry out Nixon's order to fire Cox when he would not curtail his Watergate probe.

By the time the department's third in command -- Solicitor General Robert H. Bork -- carried out the order, the country was up in arms and Nixon was facing enormous public outrage.

"Without the unrelenting pressure of [Cox's] search for the truth, Richard Nixon would not, in the end, have destroyed himself," the New York Times' Anthony Lewis wrote in the introduction of James Doyle's 1977 book on Watergate, "Not Above the Law."

The historic sequence of events began on June 17, 1972, when a break-in to the Democratic Party offices at the Watergate Hotel in Washington was interrupted by police. One of the five men arrested had ties to Nixon's reelection committee as well as the Republican National Committee.

After nearly a year of mounting concern over possible White House involvement in a cover-up, Atty. Gen. Elliott L. Richardson handpicked Cox to investigate charges that the White House was linked to what Nixon's press secretary had called a "third-rate burglary."

Because of the political sensitivity of the task, Richardson assured Cox and the U.S. Senate that the special prosecutor would be independent and that he would not lose his job unless there were "extraordinary improprieties on his part." Aware of the difficulties he faced, Cox told reporters: "In a way, I'm being asked to play God."

Barely two months later, a deputy assistant to the president, Alexander Butterfield, revealed to a Senate committee that Nixon had secretly recorded many White House conversations, some of which could shed light on whether the administration was involved in a cover-up.